Mother: Forgive all men their sins.
Brother
Skunk replaces the dead telephone, and with a single finger, skins the straw
from out its wrapper glued to the little carton of apple juice. This is his
welcoming gesture for the return of normalcy to normalcy itself. He sucks at the weak dilution (his swallow
bubbling a drain of air back through the thin fluid), and lets his finger run
across the telephone’s cradle. The plastic is puckered and blistered from burnt-down
cigarettes; he traces the wave of meniscus after brown-fringed meniscus, and
this same finger now pulled across the grain of his unshaven throat. Here are
the new details to the morning, bursting upon him bright and clear,
unprecedented, actual death functioning as some structured corrective lens.
Having
grown accustomed through the night, his hearing still acknowledges the periodic
click and grind of the morphine drivers feeding into each of her arms, the
soundtrack of a climb down from life, played out somewhere between the shifting
breath of the inflated orthopaedic mattress, and the steady, wet, awful
phlegmatic surrender of her departing ghost.
Juice.
Mother: Forgive all men their sins.
Was this actual conscious thought, her last actual conscious thought, or merely an expression of long-processed emotion, some former feeling randomly caught, held, and thrown out again in its own words, on her voice, thrown out as nonsense?
Mother: Forgive all men their sins.
Was this actual conscious thought, her last actual conscious thought, or merely an expression of long-processed emotion, some former feeling randomly caught, held, and thrown out again in its own words, on her voice, thrown out as nonsense?
Juice.
The
hospital’s main doors, automatic, permit entry the season’s cold, and he could
use his coat, the Levi’s denim jacket with blanket-lining left, a dummy son
witness to the draining, cleaning and arranging of his mother’s unspirited body
in a room filled with sunshine and pre-inhaled air.
The
carton responds with a queer raspy gargle.
Empty,
and trash.
It’s
9.12 am, and there’s not a clock in sight to determine the accuracy of his
watch, temperamental of late at the end of its battery.
Across
the foyer a man and two young children, the smaller beneath a bad haircut,
surround a squat and boxy little coin-spinner charity collection thing of a
height with both kids, an object for which Skunk can contrive no noun: a blue
plastic bin of sorts, domed with clear perspex. When their money runs out, both
children repeatedly pat this dome like a dog, and follow off after the man
Brother Skunk supposes to be the father, returning to the wards.
Skunk is
already making his way over when the smaller child runs back and pats the dome
a second time
cog:
B’bye. B’bye
before
sprinting back down the long corridor after the others.
When
this same child makes to come back again
he sees Skunk now standing at the spinner, and the pair make eye contact; the
little boy begins and abandons in one gesture the effort of waving, and is
gone.
Skunks
runs the flat of his palm across the curved perspex’ deep scorings, before
hauling a fistful of coin up from his pocket and picking out those of smallest
value.
The
outside of the dome is edged with sloping run-in grooves against one of which
he holds a penny.
It rolls
dead into the centre hole, drops solid.
The next
circles and recircles the banked and spiral-painted inner wall, a centrifugal
whirl that descends with the coin held damn near horizontal, dragging a buzzy
echo from out the rolling friction gyrodrone. Lowering round and around the
narrowing conical neck, until at last spinning so fast and tight as to appear
supported by a rough burr above the empty centre, so that the actual
possibility of the coin dropping seems indefinitely postponed, and then the
coin spinning off, the skinny clink of one small copper disc landing upon
perhaps a heaped inch or more of itself.
He
will have no comprehension of the actual time (or indeed, money) spent here,
lost in the mix of this morning. Coin follows coin follows coin, round and down
and flicked away into the collected mass of other donations, their colour
changing up brown to silver, even rattling in an heptagonal fifty pence piece
and finally two thick gold pound coins, until the sound of this rolling becomes
his ears’ default. He remembers, and makes his way back to the ward.
There
is a sick and dulling warmth to the main corridor, heating up under the glass
of its enormous windows. Brother Skunk’s
body makes known its lack of sleep, his mind everything but.
Climbing
the steps up to her room, he is stopped at the mezzanine by a doctor he has not
seen before, who ushers him into an empty room, flowers and magazines. There’s
some chitchat to which Skunk hears himself respond in kind, and then
cog:
Skunk this is um, um... I I, I understand for you the way things are, the, but
at the same time it’s, obviously... One of the nurses retrieved these... These were found, um, these were
found in your mother’s vagina
the
two thin cylinders lying sideside in the tissue he extends, rolling together
now in Skunk’s palm, each crudely scratched with the same date, and different
names.
