Читать книгу The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal - Sean Dixon - Страница 13

The Royal Victoria Hospital was, as always, Runner’s destination of choice, despite or, we suppose, because of the stories of mould in the walls of the surgery rooms that got into the bodies of patients and killed them. Runner loved the Royal Vic because it was flagrantly, royally Scottish, designed in the Scottish Baronial style, which reminded her that she was herself Scottish, or at least part Scottish, that her surname came from a Scottish word for a Danish word for someone who wore hoods regularly, a practice she was planning to take up very soon. Perhaps, she thought, she would take up the wearing of hoods, when the day came that her eyes got too big for her head, perhaps in this very hospital.

Runner loved the Royal Vic because it was nestled into the side of the mountain, perched in solitude on the slopes. The main building, she would explain to you, had been conceived and constructed as a fortress for the sick and injured among the city’s poor, and so she loved too the fact that, since no one dared to use the main building for the low purpose of privately treating the wealthy, the Ross Pavilion had had to be built up and behind, shamefully sequestered. If the private patients wanted a building, she imagined some nineteenth-century hospital president saying, they could go and chip it out of solid rock.

There were, she felt, no new political arguments under the sun.

She loved the fact that nurses used to live in the attics. She wished she could have lived there with them, dressing up in their uniforms and shrieking with delight after hours, scaring the patients in the upper wards. She loved the fact that Emergency was located in the back of the building, up the hill, and required a running start. And she loved that in winter some of the emergency exits led out into twenty-foot snowbanks on the side of the mountain. She wondered whether anyone had ever been buried in an avalanche because some jittery kitchen worker had pulled the fire alarm.

She liked the balconies a lot. She used to go out onto the balconies and wait for Neil, who liked the cafeteria on the third floor. And she would count the entrances and exits (seven main, plus a hundred and five extra) while he played with his food and looked at the people and wrote in his notebook.

She had spent a lot of time here. And so had Neil, to keep her company. Neil had taken up the writing of notebooks in this very hospital. He had purchased his very first notebook here in the gift shop. The only family he had ever known was his big sisters Runner and Ruby. And now there was only Runner.

And now, on 18 March 2003, 10.14 p. m., he sat by the door to Runner’s hospital room and ignored Runner’s condition as best he could, filling his notebook, as he did most of the time, with disparate, irrelevant thoughts.

He wrote: I like to do my homework in the dark with a head¬ lamp behind the couch.

Well, who wouldn’t?

He wrote: I like to roll change with a headlamp in the dark too.

He wrote: I’ve been making wallets and change purses out of duct tape.

He wrote: I’ve been studying origami.

He wrote with an absorbed concentration that he knew could be shattered in a moment by Runner’s voice, speaking up eventually from her bed when the parade of girls had passed and they were finally alone.

‘So, Neil, we got them.’

‘Yes.’

‘We got them on our side. We get to read all ten tablets. Isn’t that great?’

Neil put away his pen and nodded vigorously.

‘It’s a special, unique book,’ she said, sighing happily and lying back into the pillow that was big for her head if not her eyes. ‘We just have to do it in our special, unique way.’

Neil was full of ideas for how the Lacuna Cabal could do the book in a unique way, but before they could be expressed they were interrupted by the entrance of the new girl, Anna, bearing a glass of water.

Runner, he could tell, was thrilled that Anna had stuck around. Romy had wept and Priya, arriving late19, had been spooked by the look of the place. Missy would have stayed but she said she had to go home and water her plants. Missy’s father had purchased for her a greenhouse and filled it up with bonsai as something they could cultivate together. But really, she explained, it takes only one person to cultivate a greenhouse full of bonsai. It had seemed like an unnecessarily elaborate explanation. And then she had said how sorry she was about the broken leg and left.

Anna had hung back. Some spidey sense had prompted her to stay. She handed over the glass.

Runner said, ‘You’re left-handed.’

Anna said, ‘Yes I am,’ and blushed.

‘How very interesting.’

‘Why, um?’

‘Some people say that all left-handed people are one of a pair of twins.’

‘Oh, I’m not a –’

‘They mean at the beginning, before you were born. So you might not know.’

‘Oh.’

19 She had stayed behind at the Lighter Building for a few minutes to practise a song she was working on in front of her imaginary audience. Like many people, Priya habitually saw herself as the star of her own movie, and often wondered if this had replaced the idea of God in governing her behaviour, causing her to put her best face forward and leading her to wonder further whether she shouldn’t start writing better songs.

Runner said, ‘So maybe you pine for a long-lost sister,’ flirting. ‘Other signs are crooked teeth and funny birthmarks.’

Anna’s hand went instinctively up to her mouth, even as she smiled a little. ‘I do have crooked teeth.’

Runner smiled back, sharing the secret, delighted. ‘Yes, I know.’

Anna covered her whole mouth now. ‘My parents wouldn’t let me get braces.’

‘Oh no, don’t worry,’ said Runner. ‘It’s like a mole on the cheek: the flaw that accentuates beauty.’

Anna tried to think what else to say and then she said she had to go. She did like this girl, though. This girl was a crazy chick, but she was smart. She was smart with an open heart, and that made her do stupid things. Anna never did stupid things. Not deliberately, anyway. She was too careful for that.

‘Will we see you tomorrow?’ asked Runner, hopeful, failing always to keep her cards close to her chest. She meant for the book club, Anna had to remind herself. It wasn’t her habit to hang around so much with women, preferring the company of men, but maybe now she’d take it up, maybe it would be good for her; like eating beets.

‘Yeah, sure, yeah. It’s fun,’ she said, and realised it was true.

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Nice to meet you too.’

Anna hesitated. She didn’t know how you were supposed to address injured people. She ventured, ‘I hope you feel better.’

Runner beamed. Anna backed out of the room, nearly tripping over Neil, and then was gone.

In a moment, Runner was sulking, taking pills she hated. Moments she enjoyed went by far too fleetingly, she thought, wishing she could find some way to stop time, instead of gulping pills like she was doing now.

Neil sat quietly for a while, distracting himself by folding a sheet of paper. Finally he spoke up. ‘You scared her.’

‘No I didn’t,’ said Runner, who felt like maybe she had, but it was okay. ‘Not really.’

‘You want her to be a twin too. Why?’

‘No I don’t, Neil! We were just talking.’

Neil crumpled up the half-formed origami. He was in a bad mood now. And jealous. ‘How did you get osteoporosis and, and accident-proneness all of a sudden, anyway? You were the healthy one.’

That was true. Though Ruby had been plagued all her life by brittle bones and an overactive thyroid, Runner was athletic. It was often said that she chose the solo pursuit of track and field in order to spare Ruby the sight of her on the field as part of a close-knit scrum of girls. Later, the Lacuna Cabal was a team they could join together.

And Runner loved to swim, even as Ruby hated to put one single toe in the water. Runner had a swimmer’s milky complexion – both healthy and ethereal – whereas Ruby’s was merely ethereal. Of course, to say ‘merely ethereal’ is akin to saying ‘merely angelic’ or ‘merely brilliant’. It is ‘merely’ the condition one aspires to before all others. That’s what Runner must have believed. She must have idealised her sister’s condition. Not ‘healthy body/healthy mind’, but ‘brittle body/aerial mind’.

It had been impressed upon Runner from an early age that, for her, a healthy lifestyle and diet would easily keep bone brittleness and other thyroid-related problems at bay. The only way she could ever develop such problems as plagued her twin would be by becoming full-blown self-destructive.

Which brings us back to Neil’s persistent questioning.

‘How come you fell through that floor?’

‘You’ll have to take that up with the floor.’

Neil paused to consider the option of becoming a structural engineer, rejecting it. He wasn’t about to spend the rest of his life trying to protect Runner from harming herself. He might as well go in for mass-producing throw pillows; he might as well start telling jokes.

‘We shouldn’t call you Runner any more – we should call you Hobbler or Limper or something.’

‘Don’t make fun of a cripple.’

‘A fake cripple.’

To which her response was disappointingly mild. ‘How dare you.’

‘You were the healthy one.’ Pleading a little.

Runner closed her eyes, which was, for Neil, the worst. Like a city blacking out. Like a fin whale heading for the beach. But he had to bear it. As she spoke, a familiar-sounding fatigue crept into her voice. But hadn’t she slept for ten hours last night? This was not fair.

‘Don’t worry, Neil, it’s nothing. It’s just hard for twins to be separated, that’s all.’

Here he was concerned for her very survival and she was bringing up the ineffable.

‘I know,’ a cappella. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ And then, after a brief pause: ‘I know.’

‘But don’t worry. We’re doing the book now. It’s going to be fun and it has a happy ending.’

‘But it’s just a book.’

The desired effect. Runner’s eyes snapped open. The room filled again with light, though Neil was going to have to pay a whopping bill.

‘It is not just a book and you know it. How can you even say that? Anyway, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, don’t you think maybe it’s time to drop the bookish-kid act?’

‘What?’

‘The act. It’s limiting for you. I mean, you know, Harry Potter is just a boy in a book. You’re a real person. You should be Neil Coghill the Real McCoghill.’

He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. If she wasn’t aware that he had repudiated the entire genre of nine-to-twelve literature, then he wasn’t about to tell her now. He’d let her figure it out on her own.

‘Who gives a shit about Harry Potter?’

There was a brief pause.

‘Well, why do you wear those empty frames?’

Oh. The empty frames. Did Harry Potter wear empty frames? Surely Harry Potter didn’t have the imagination for that. Surely Harry Potter’s glasses would be regular prescription glasses. But Runner suddenly lacked the discernment to credit such a distinction. Oh, she was sick all right.

‘I’ve been wearing these since before Harry Potter.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ As witheringly as could be conveyed in a single syllable.

‘Oh.’

Runner abruptly changed the subject. She decided to affect putting on makeup, something that annoyed Neil. Digging around inside the chaos of her shapeless purse: ‘Well, anyway, we can talk about it tomorrow. You should get home.’

‘I want to stay here.’ This despite everything, despite the inevitability of Runner’s closed eyes, despite the necessity for him to hide and sleep underneath her bed in order to escape the notice of the night nurses. But Runner would know it was cold under that bed without a blanket, since she desperately needed hers. And she would have thought that lying on hard floors under hospital beds for hours on end, even if he’d already done it hundreds of times before, would cause him to develop the weaknesses that had so disappointed Ruby (and her) as they grew. This could not happen to Neil. So she pulled out the next tools of alienation: mascara, blush.

‘You can’t stay here, it’s a hospital; you should go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

(It’s true, the mascara was difficult to endure, but ‘Go home because it’s a hospital’? How lame.)

What she really needed, if she was going to make up like she meant it, was a hand mirror. She dove into her purse again.

‘No, you can’t stay here. Really. You should go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

She found the hand mirror.

‘No, you’ve got to go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

She looked into the hand mirror.

‘You’ve got to go home, Neil.’

And then she saw Ruby. Her face. In the hand mirror. So close to her own. Pale. Lonely. Like she was at the bottom of a crevice, or in a bungalow on the other side of the city, forever. Like she had been left in a room somewhere hanging from a nail, where nobody would ever find her, her mouth open, dry, cracked. Ruby. She looked very weak. And her pupils moved strangely, like flies crawling on the surface of the mirror. How Runner had longed to see her again and now here she was and it was scary. Runner wondered what might be below the edge of the mirror’s frame, whether Ruby was holding a book, whether she was opening it and closing it, endlessly, displaying pages of words to Runner that Runner could not read.

And Runner spoke too. Although she didn’t know it, she said, ‘That isn’t really you,’ and Neil had written that line in his notebook without any further comment. Now he was looking at his sister with two parts fear and one part accusation.

‘What’s with you?’

‘Nothing, it’s a –’

‘A twin thing.’

‘Yeah.’

Runner looked into Neil’s living eyes and saw that he too was scared. She realised, not for the first time, why repressed people were heroic. Because they sought to spare such deadly emotions in others as wracked their own trembling frames. They shut down the bad feelings before they could spread, even if it cost them. She wished she had learned. But there had been no way of knowing, as one of a pair of twins, together the fifth and sixth of nine children, of which Neil was ninth and youngest, that she would come to be his sole guardian, looking at him like this from a hospital bed and trying to shut down her fear. There’d been no early training for her in the withholding of emotion. She had always considered it a virtue to let rip, and it was too late to stop now. The effort would kill her. There had to be some other way.

‘Actually, Neil, you know what?’

‘What?’

‘I think I want to go home too.’

She was ready with a reason – she wanted to go over her notes for the next bit of the first tablet – but Neil didn’t need a reason. He needed no excuse to transform a horror story into the story of a great adventure. Because he had sized up the task ahead and he knew they weren’t just going to walk out of that hospital like normal people. Oh no. Runner was supposed to be sequestered for the night. Snug in. Battened down. No, they were going to make an escape. And if Neil could only get his hands on a wheelchair and a porter’s uniform, then he would be the master of their escape. He would be the operator. The bus driver. The taxi man. The angel of endless stairwells. A crazy carpet over the cold reflecting ice sheet of death. The living saviour. Life itself.