Starting Over. Tony Parsons
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closed my eyes and my dad kept holding my hand. I felt the sleep of the heavily drugged come sliding in, and still he held my hand.
Then Lara and my mum came into the room with tea and coffee and I opened my eyes.
‘There he is,’ my mum said, as if I might have slipped out for a spot of bungee jumping while she was at the vending machine.
And that was when I felt him let go of my hand.
They wanted me to exercise. The doctors. The nurses. They wanted me up and about. They could see that I was becoming quite comfortable in that overheated bubble of my little room, regular food and affection being delivered to my bed as if I was a newborn. And that is not a million miles from what it felt like. The sheer fact of being here at all made me feel like laughing out loud.
Because I should have been dead by now.
But I was getting too attuned to the delights of daytime television. The recipes and rolling news and screaming family feuds. The hospital soaps and celebrity gossip. The fabricated drama of sport.
Time to snap out of it. Time to start thinking about my rehabilitation programme and physiotherapy schedule.
Time to take my first steps.
And after a few practice shuffles around my room, I was pretty much given the freedom of the hospital. They didn’t have the time or the inclination to supervise me. They had sick people to worry about. They just got me out of bed and got my blood pumping. Then they let me get on with it.
And that was how I discovered the roof.
I walked down the hospital corridor, refastening the belt of my dressing gown, making it tighter, anxious not to expose myself in my stripy M&S pyjamas. I went past the nurses’ station to the far end of the corridor and caught the service lift to the top floor. Porters with big rubbish bags and little English went about their business in this lift, and greeted my presence with polite indifference. When I got to the top floor, and said goodbye to whichever porter was lugging his bin bags around, I took a few steep steps up to a door that was never locked in case of fire. And when I walked through the door there was the roof, there was the city, there was the world.
Silence and the city’s eternal hum. Fresh air and car fumes. Solitude and all those lives that I would never know.
The metal railing encircling the roof was so low that it made my breath catch, my head spin, my carpet slippers take a step back. Six floors below, the Marylebone Road flowed like a mighty river. I inhaled, smiled, and felt someone behind me.
‘Dad?’
It was Rufus. I looked up at him. His eyes were red and his shoulders sagged. If it wasn’t for my dressing gown and stripy pyjamas, you might have thought that I was visiting him.
‘Looking on Google,’ he said, and his voice caught. He closed his eyes and composed himself. The sob settled somewhere deep down inside him. ‘Me and Ruby. Reading about – you know. What happened to you.’ He closed his eyes. Controlled his breathing. And looked at his father. ‘Half of transplant patients are dead after ten years.’
I smiled at him.
‘So that means half of us are alive.’
His body twisted with discomfort. ‘Yeah, but…’
‘Don’t be one of those guys,’ I said, and it came out harsher than I wanted it to. ‘One of those glass-half-empty kind of guys.’
We stood there awkwardly for a bit, the city flowing far below. Then he said that he might go back inside and I told him that was a good idea. I would be down in a while. All this without a second of eye contact.
I watched him go, wishing that I had the words to make him feel better, to make him understand that you don’t whine and quibble and go on Google in the face of a miracle.
How could I explain it to him? I was feeling stronger. Feeling good. Feeling happy. Feeling young again.
Feeling – what’s the word?
Alive.
‘Uncle Keith,’ Ruby said, and she got up to hug him as he came into the room.
I was glad that she still called him Uncle Keith, even though he wasn’t her real uncle or any kind of blood relation. I was glad that she wasn’t too cool or grown-up for that.
‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he said. ‘How’s the patient?’
The pair of them smiled at me sitting up in bed. ‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you two alone.’ A flurry of anxiety crossed her lovely face. ‘I’ll just be in the café,’ she told me.
I nodded. It was fine. I didn’t want her to worry so much, even though I knew that was asking a lot. When Ruby had gone, Keith pulled a chair up to my bed and began eating the grapes he was carrying.
‘Not dead yet then?’ he said.
I looked at my watch. ‘It’s still early.’
He smiled. ‘We need to get our story straight,’ he said.
‘Our story?’ I said.
Keith nodded his enormous head. ‘Why you were on that roof. Why a canteen cowboy was out chasing naughty people. Why you were in the car instead of my twelve-year-old partner.’
I thought about it. ‘We were going to lunch and we saw uniformed officers in need of assistance.’
He leaned back in the hospital chair. It creaked in protest, not really designed for the likes of Keith. ‘Yeah, that might work,’ he yawned. He popped a fistful of grapes in his cakehole, and ran his weary eyes over me.
‘Nice grapes?’ I said.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Sorry, mate – you want one?’
‘No, you’re all right.’
And then he got this sly grin, and pulled out the unwrapped packet of Low Tars.
‘For emergencies,’ he said, and I nodded my appreciation as I slipped them deep inside the pocket of my dressing gown. He held out the grapes.
‘So – how are you feeling?’
I chewed a grape and it tasted of nothing because of the drugs. Under my stripy pyjamas I could feel the scar on my chest pulsing. It was not the heart that I felt. You would think it would be the heart. But it was the scar.
‘Never better,’ I said.
Keith laughed, shook his head. ‘Hard, aren’t you?’
I smiled. ‘Harder than you,’ I said.
He snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’ He was cutting me some slack. Apart from eating my grapes, he had a lovely bedside manner. I appreciated him coming. I knew it wasn’t just about getting our story straight. But I was a bit sick of people feeling sorry for me. I rolled up the pyjama sleeve on my right arm. Keith narrowed his eyes.
‘Don’t provoke me, shiny-arse,’ he said.
I laughed and started to roll down my sleeve. ‘More chicken than Colonel Sanders…’
He was on his feet, rolling his sleeve right up to his shoulder. I had said the ‘c’ word. There was a tattoo of barbed wire around his biceps that had blurred with the years. We pulled the table that sat across my bed between us. As we placed our elbows on it, we could feel it sagging. It wasn’t really built for arm wrestling.
‘Bit springy,’ Keith said.
‘Stop moaning,’ I said. ‘Best out of three?’
He was on the verge of beating me for the second time when Lara walked into the room, carrying flowers and a portable DVD player. Her smile faded as she watched Keith force my arm down on to the little hospital table with a triumphant roar from him and a yelp of pain