A Year Less a Day. James Hawkins
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it takes,” you said.
“Jordan, there has to be something they can do,” she says, finally bringing herself to lay a hand over his in an attempt to thaw him out.
“Chemotherapy and radiotherapy, they said. They gave me some booklets.”
“So—they can cure it?”
Jordan shakes his head almost imperceptibly, but doesn’t take his eyes off the road in front of him.
“I want to talk to them,” insists Ruth. “They’ll listen to me. They’ve got to do something. This isn’t fair.”
“They’ll do their best.”
“Raven,” muses Ruth angrily. “Blasted witch. What does she know?”
Jordan looks at her, confused. “What?”
“Raven said you’d be OK.”
Jordan snorts his derision, then says, “Dave—you know, the beer breath, triple-espresso, telephone engineer?”
“Cindy says he grabs her ass,” says Ruth, momentarily distracted.
“She oughta be grateful,” sneers Jordan. “Anyway, Dave thought his wife was seeing another guy. Then Raven says, ‘Dave—stop worrying, she isn’t.’”
“What happened?”
“He gets home and finds her in bed with a plumber.”
“Raven’s always bloody wrong.”
“No. She was right. It wasn’t a guy. The plumber was a dyke.”
Their laughter is real, but fleeting, as the depress-ingly lonely road of widowhood quickly re-appears in Ruth’s future. Where now? What to do with the information—hide it in a Cadbury’s chocolate bar or a litre of Häagen-Dazs Rocky Road?
“I’m scared,” she says.
“We’d better go in,” suggests Jordan, trying to keep the conversation light. “It’s poetry night—the girls’ll be busy.”
Ruth slumps back. “Oh, no. I don’t think I can handle poetry night—they’re such a depressing bunch. Why can’t we just drive away and keep going forever? Maybe we can outrun it.”
“We’ve got to carry on,” says Jordan.
Ruth tries hard to keep her face up, but it crumples again. “I don’t think I can.”
Why bother? says someone inside. Why not just go in there, fire the staff, fling out the customers, shut the doors, and open the fridge. You’ve eaten your way out of bad situations before.
And look where it got me.
“Come on, Dear,” says Jordan, easing her out. “We’ve got to be strong. We mustn’t upset the customers.”
“Customers!” explodes Ruth, “I don’t give a ...” She pauses quizzically. “It’s not contagious, is it?”
“No, of course not. Not directly. But if word gets out, it might as well be.”
“I don’t ...”
“Listen. I spoke to a counsellor ... people will avoid us—well, me, once they know. They don’t want misery, Ruth. It’s a coffee house. People come here to escape misery. We can’t tell anyone, Ruth. Do you understand? We can’t tell anyone at all.”
“But they’re our friends.”
“Ruth, don’t kid yourself. They’re lonely, sad; holed up in one-room apartments, or holed up in a mansion with someone they can’t stand. They’re our friends because we’re the only people they can rely on. They don’t come for coffee—they can make coffee at home for peanuts. The coffee’s just an excuse. They’re escaping.”
“I want to escape. Why can’t I escape, Jordan? This is ridiculous. I don’t give a shit about their sad little lives. This isn’t happening to them, this is happening to us. Jordan, please tell me this isn’t happening.”
“We’ve got to face it ...”
“Why are you so calm? I want to scream. I want to kick something. It’s a nightmare, right? Tell me I’ll wake up.” Wake up somewhere else, as someone else—not trapped here in this horrible body with a husband who’s going to leave me penniless. “Jordan—tell me it’s a nightmare.”
The coffee house has taken on a new mantle by the time Ruth and Jordan are finally forced out of the car by the September evening’s chill. The harsh fluorescents and muzak of the day have been extinguished, but it will take more than vanilla-scented candles and a mock-log fire to warm them. The stage is set with a single swivel chair in the soft glow of a pink spotlight. An eccentric collection of poets clusters around a table trying out their latest works on each other before braving the stage, while a cuddly bear of a man sneaks a chance to upstage his peers by slipping in a quickie while testing the microphone.
“Ask not for whom trouble comes a-knocking,” begins Michel, a soft-voiced giant with the calloused grimy hands of a charcoal-maker. “It comes for thee.”
Michel stops at the sight of the owners entering from the street. “Hi Jordan, Ruth,” he calls, and all heads turn.
Jordan attempts a greeting smile, but Ruth’s falls flat as the early poets acknowledge them. “Oh, God. The silly hat brigade,” mutters Ruth with a contemptuous edge and she gets a nudge from Jordan.
“Shh ... They’ll hear.”
“Well, it’s like a bloody religious uniform,” whispers Ruth, and Michel reinforces her point by donning his wide-brimmed, aging fedora to signify that he is now starting in earnest.
“It’s my latest poem, ‘Trouble,’” continues the big man into the microphone, then he drops his voice an octave and takes on a poet’s serious mien.
Ask not for whom trouble comes a-knocking.
It comes for thee.
Don’t answer the door
Let misfortune meet you in the street
At least you have a chance to run.
Ruth bursts into implacable sobs and dashes for the stairs to the apartment.
“Very touching, Michel,” says Jordan, taking off after his wife, and the poet beams with pride.
“Thanks, Jordan.”
As the voices drone in the café below, Jordan and Ruth run out of words and sink into the silence of over-bearing grief, their minds focussed so deeply on the hurt that they have no spirit for outward expression. Ruth cleans her glasses for the thousandth time and wishes she could smoke. There is a dried-out part-pack of Marlboros in her underwear drawer, a reminder of the day, a year earlier, that she smoked five in succession in a desperate effort to lose weight. It had worked—marginally and briefly—she’d vomited until the bile burned her throat. She hasn’t smoked since, but now she desperately wants something to occupy her pudgy fingers. She knows they should be caressing and soothing Jordan, but something holds her back. She watches him, slumped pathetically into his favourite chair with his eyes boring into the carpet, and already sees a shadow.
“We could sell everything and live it up in Maui or Mexico for a few months,” suggests Ruth, with more humour than sincerity as she attempts to bring life to the atmosphere, but Jordan harshly stomps on the idea. Their assets wouldn’t cover half of what they owe his mother, assuming they could find a buyer, and, with his condition diagnosed, he’d never get medical insurance—ever again.
I could eat, she thinks, I could always eat. But the insensitiveness of eating in front of Jordan while the malignancy develops in his intestines keeps her fastened to her chair. “If there’s anything you want ...” she tries, and Jordan replies poignantly, “To live,