56

In the wrap of greyness pushing through the long windows of the Geriatric Ward, Jessie holds Emmett’s hand and digs out faeces, hardened and trapped like fossils, from beneath his nails. God, she thinks, who would ever have thought it?

Emmett doesn’t move. He’s not aware of anything but pain. He’s resting between bouts of the clamping cramps that seize him. His liver is dying and his brain is almost gone. He will be aware when spasms take him and hold him. And then he will be helpless, will fix faces with the look of a child in agony. Help does not come.

The doctors avoid him, to them it’s just waiting. The nurses tolerate him; some are sensitive and some are not. One, a tall woman with zany purple glasses named Sue, remarks on the beauty of his eyes while changing his adult nappy. ‘When you were a young man, it’s Emmett isn’t it? With eyes so blue you could have had all the girls,’ she says, chatting to Anne as much as to herself to ease the time it takes to tend to an incontinent, rigid old man.

Jessie and Anne remain standing like sentinels beside the unravelling bed watching the performance. Anne, in a jumper the colour of stones, smiles her weary smile and says, ‘He did all right,’ and in that insect second Jessie wonders again about the life between her parents.

‘Strange isn’t it ,’ the nurse continues as if anyone cares, ‘how things turn out. Once a handsome young man and now poor old fellow, eh Emmett?’ Long pause before she blathers on. ‘I like that name. Is it American?’ And she turns to the shell of the wasted man none too gently and pats his translucent stick of a thigh. And Jessie wants to kill her for one rough gesture.

Anne tells her it was his father’s name and it comes from the Bible, Old Testament. And Jessie adds, wildly over-the-top, ‘Then it must be American!’ Her fizzing anger is lost on everyone and disintegrates into the stale stillness of the hospital. She turns to the window and feels even more wretched and realises she doesn’t get it. She’d always thought the death of Emmett would be something to celebrate, so why does she feel bad? Emmett clenches again with the pain and Anne touches his hair.

The clenching lasts and he begins to sweat. He moans and mutters, ‘Get away get away get away,’ and ‘piss off’. He clutches the sheet up under his chin and it’s not possible to ignore his suffering.

The nurse moves across to Edith in the bed across the aisle. Edith is a whale of a woman with a voice that penetrates skulls like a flat violin. She’s watching The Bold and the Beautiful with genuine enthusiasm. A forgotten plastic jug of urine that looks oddly like orange cordial stands on her bedside table. Jessie considers tipping it all over the floor or maybe even over Edith, just for some kind of release.

In the milky light of the hospital at dusk, the big window by Emmett’s bed frames the west of the city. Clouds are pushed together like smoke and the idea of rain is raised again.

Seeing Emmett in this state stirs something in Jessie. The illness makes him look dismantled and watching him in such devastation makes her want to cry. The bile the thought of him brings up is at odds with this particular poor old bloke. And why, she asks herself, does she now think of the good things?

She wills herself to remember the bad bits. The pushing of her mother, the beltings, the slaps, the lewd language. The fights. It isn’t hard. She looks into those moody clouds and thinks of one of the nights at tea, of the terrifying presence of Emmett Brown throwing his plate or the teapot at the wall or at them, or mocking them for their pathetic pronunciations of hate. How he laughed when they said they hated him and he mocked them with : You ate me do you? Well now, that would be something to see, and roared laughing as a child fled, sobbing with a mouthful of cold mashed spud dropping, dropping. The taste of tears and cold potato were complimentary but it wasn’t one he would ever know. He’d down the beer in one gulp and against the stripe of light on the ceiling and through the glass, the amber liquid illuminated the giant man.

And so Jessie has him back. Has him all locked away again, all square. Emmett the bastard, not Emmett the poor old bugger.