An Evening at Joe's (24 page)

Dedicated to my wife, Noriko, without whose encouragement and patience I would never have taken the top off the pen.

They had been anticipating this moment all day with a sort of impending dread. Dark, grey clouds hung around listlessly like celestial undertakers tired of waiting. The normally boisterous city traffic was sullen and hushed. People sat behind half-misted cafe windows and stared out, ruminating upon existence while others, seemingly anxious to avoid an end that might be nigh, scuttled bad-temperedly about clutching their inadequate umbrellas and silently loathed their fellow man. As the hidden sun finally sank below the horizon it was as if the city breathed a sigh of relief that the day had finally been put out of its misery. And somewhere a clock sounded four o'clock, perhaps out of respect for the deceased.

"So, Mr. Morris, how can I help you?"

The question took him by surprise. "I rather had the impression, doctor, that I was paying you to tell me that."

She smiled, indulgently. "First of all, Mr. Morris, I'm not a doctor. Secondly, this is a consultation to assess if I can help you... there is no charge." She was not French, that much he could tell, but the accent was quite definite, Polish perhaps or Czech? "I have already talked to your specialist but I would like to hear from you why you think Dr. Gueritoimeme has referred you."

"Passing the buck, perhaps?" He shifted in his seat... mildly irritated by the directness of her approach... she expected answers from him and he had only brought an overnight case packed so full of preconceptions and skepticism that little room was left for objectivity.

"I have absolutely no idea... you'd have to ask him that."

He could feel a surge of his old irascibility mounting in his chest. "Look, doctor... I'm sorry, Mrs...." He looked up at her impatiently, waving his hand generally in her direction. "Mrs.... ?"

She smiled, "Kolyatowski, Miss. I'm not married."

"All right, Miss Kolyatowski. Look, I'm sorry to be rude but this..." He searched the air for the correct phrase but without success. "...THIS! It's just not me. Do you understand? This whole alternative, aromatherapy, sniff your way to a healthy life thing! Hm? I mean, contemplating your navel while breathing deeply and thinking nice thoughts is no doubt fine for some people but I don't happen to be one of them. I have a tumour the size of a small grape-fruit and it is malignant. That's a fact! Can't alter that fact, caught it a little late, that's all. The bloody treatment isn't working and I've got six or seven months to live. Maybe a little more if I give up cigarettes! For God's sake, can you believe he said that to me? Can you believe it!" He was very agitated by now, breathing heavily, tripping over himself as he searched his thesaurus of invective. "I'm going to die. I am going to die! Why don't we just cut all the bollocks... pardon my French!... and just admit it? I don't believe in God, Father Christmas, or the innate goodness of Mankind. It's too late to become a Buddhist and I can't stand spinach. Is the picture becoming clearer...?"

"Helena... my name is Helena...." She walked over to her desk and reached down into a drawer. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

"There are two ways of looking at your predicament, Mr. Morris. Your interpretation is that you are dying and there is nothing anyone can do. Dr. Gueritoimeme sees things slightly differently and hence his suggestion that we meet. Basically he feels that all things being equal you have a fighting chance of responding well to your treatment. But all things are not equal, are they, Mr. Morris?" She looked at him very pointedly as she stubbed out her cigarette. "That wasn't a rhetorical question."

It was like a game of chess and he sensed she had spotted his weakness very early on. "What do you mean?"

Her next move was direct and decisive. "Dr. Gueritoimeme believes that the obstacle to your successful treatment lies not within the invasive nature of your tumour and his ability to treat it but rather inside your own head."

His contemptuous "Pah!" was a tad too theatrical to be truly convincing and he knew it.... "That is typical... just... I mean... I mean... oh, God!!" The vehicle of his indignation had just run out of gas and he was having to get out and push.

"How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb, Mr. Morris?... Do you understand my point? Your doctor can do very little to help you beat your cancer if you have not yet resolved the question of whether you really want to live or not. And yet, given all you have said, I can't help wondering why you are here." She let that hang in the air for a few moments and then, very softly, said, "I'm a hypnotherapist, Mr. Morris. I try to help people in your position to tap the enormous potential of the brain to find its own solutions when all artificial means appear to be failing. But you have to want to live... otherwise we'd both be wasting our time, wouldn't we?"

He was in a wheelchair, and spinning the wheels as fast as his blistered hands would allow. He daren't look over his shoulder and what good would it do anyway? He knew it was behind him and gaining on him with every hour that passed. The landscape was tarmac as far as the eye could see, with here and there the rusting frame of a supermarket trolley. There was light but seemingly no source and he cast no shadow as he careered along. To call it a road would be misleading because nothing existed either side of it and "it" didn't appear to lead anywhere but he had an instinct that this was all. The road was all, leading everywhere and yet nowhere. Choose a direction and the road would accommodate you with its effortless tarmacadam glide. There were no trees, no weeds, no streetlights, no pedestrians, no lines on the road because there was no traffic and no need to distinguish one side from the other. There was nothing on the horizon in any direction to look forward to or to aim for. The smooth, dark grey mass undulated to a never-ending perspective fade-out. Stranger still was the lack of breeze.... The speedometer on his chair was needling ninety m.p.h. which seemed a trifle fast for an invalid carriage and yet he was more concerned about the lack of atmospheric resistance. There was no wind! In fact there appeared to be no climate at all. Where was he? It was no world he had ever encountered and yet it seemed to him to be familiar. The sky was there because it was above the land, such as it was, but it wasn't blue, or grey, or any colour... and yet there it hung above his head, a flat, colourless, empty space seemingly without dimension or content.

Suddenly he heard a sound behind him which started quietly at first but steadily built until he recognised it to be laughter, deep, mocking, goading laughter. It seemed to echo inside his skull and the noise level grew and grew until he thought he could stand it no longer. He covered his ears with his bloodied hands and shut his eyes tight as if he could negate the sound but it was impossible. The laughter in his head had built to such a level that he thought his skull would split and it was only the fact that his hands were clasping his head so tightly that prevented this from happening. Eventually he could stand it no longer and as he felt the warm trickle of blood trickling from his ears and down his neck he let out a desperate scream and...

...he fell off the couch in a heap on the sitting room floor. He decided to stay still. "Better not make any rash decisions at this juncture," he thought. He had a fair idea what was awaiting him and, in truth, he was putting off the inevitable. In his experience, and recently his research in this area had been extensive, any position approximating to the horizontal was pretty safe. The side of his head reclined on the rather worn Afghan carpet, the left cheek puffed and squashed out like that of a lop-sided Botticelli cherub. He'd never liked the pattern and had made a fuss about it at the time but his ex-wife had bullied him into buying it. How she would enjoy his present predicament, his mouth half-full of medium pile Afghan shag, arse in the air, his nose being forced to sniff the accumulated dust of a failed and bitter marriage. "Should have thrown it out together with her bloody Barry Manilow albums," he thought.

His mouth was as dry as..."Try again."... his mouth was as dry as... no, it was no good... he knew all too well that metaphors and hangovers made very uncomfortable bedfellows. His tongue had per- formed its customary night time trick and appeared to have doubled in size and welded itself to the roof of his mouth. Talking articulately wasn't to be top of his "things to do today" list and neither, for that matter, was any strenuous form of physical activity due to the, by now, usual pains in his joints. On the other hand, he knew he couldn't stay like this all day. For one thing his neck was starting to hurt and for another his bladder was asking to be taken for a walk. After a great deal of thought he opened one rather bloodshot eye and as it swiveled in its socket his complaining retina registered the debris of the night before. The two empty wine bottles and the glass on its side with its red, crystallised residue and the chip in the rim, the ashtray overflowing with passports to international smoking pleasure, the small, portable black and white television in the corner showing Loony Tune Cartoons rendered even more insane by Gallic translation, the underpants hanging limply from the dormant radiator and the congealed remains of his "sad bastard" meal for one which had borne as much resemblance to coq au vin as... as... "oh, sod it!" he sighed... "oh, sod it!"

Two hours later and he was lying on his bed, his face a contorted mask as he did battle with his pain. The pills he'd taken were just starting to do their numbing work but it would be difficult to move for a little while. At no other time in his life had he ever felt as alone as he did on these occasions.

He'd got into the habit of taking his mind off the discomfort by giving his brain the task of compiling lists. The subject could be arbitrary but the theme was always the surreality of human existence. "Ambition, vanity, possessions, sex... aaagh! Breathe, breathe! In, out, in, out, ohhhhl... you bastard!" He stopped doing anything but hurting until the spasm passed and after a few more deep breaths he was ready to continue.

"Tupperware parties, fashion, sock suspenders, heated toilet seats, machines for trimming nasal hair, garden gnomes, the colour beige, devices for attaching plantpots to drainpipes," which he knew were crap because he'd been daft enough to buy several. "Home electrolysis kits, kits in general, the patent do-it-yourself jacuzzi, the solar-powered cat-flap. Life, death, and the detritus of detail in between. We're born, we clutter the world with the worthless garbage we call a life and then we peg it." People who collected stamps, for example. Why? He'd read in the newspaper the other day about a couple in England whose hobby was, wait for it... collecting paper bags from all over the world.... What was that all about? And, then of course, we come to the totally incomprehensible pastime of. . . trainspotting! When he used to teach in London he'd see them at London Bridge station, huddled at the end of a platform with their l973-style Youth-Hostel Association anoraks and their notebooks, cheap biros poised, waiting for the 9.53 from West Croydon and as it trundled in, late, of course, and filthy, they'd all jump up and down in their Rohan outdoor trousers and their Clarkes all-weather shoes and all because the third carriage from the front was being carried on the old 728 Bogey with its specially streamlined grommets! Grown men, for God's sake! Not children. Grey, boring introverts who hid behind their glasses and their beards and looked for any distraction at all from their sad and lonely lives.

Not unlike himself, he suddenly realised. Not unlike himself.

Here lies Charles Morris, Principal Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the Sorbonne who died of loneliness and cynicism at the age of fifty three. The funeral was attended by the gravedigger!

Somewhere in the building a young man played the Spanish guitar... a reflective, melancholy piece. His eyes wandered about the untidy room... the half-full wardrobe still permeated by the ghost of Chanel, the little oil-lamp whose light had softly illuminated their kisses and the rest from fifteen years before, the now redundant dressing table with its dusty mirrors and empty drawers. As he lay on his side his eyes came to rest on the empty photo frame next to his bed... memory spoke gently to him of once happy days and here, alone with his thoughts, he wept.

He had no idea how long he'd been asleep but dusk had descended outside, suffusing his room with a pale half-light. The tattered remnants of a late winter sunset streaked across the horizon and some- where in the city a bell announced the half-hour. He closed his eyes for a few moments and dozed. A faint noise of traffic and the more present cooing of the pigeons, their claws scratching the lead covering of his bedroom window roof, created an atmosphere of peace... he felt rested, he was pain-free.

A faint tapping noise drew itself to his attention. Three taps and then a muffled voice. He lay there, not wanting to disturb this rare moment of peace. But then it came again, the same tapping, slightly more urgent, and the voice.

"Monsieur, monsieur Morris, vous êtes la?"

Slowly he got up and, rubbing his face to wake himself up, he opened the door.

"Monsieur Morris, excusez-moi, je vous ai derangé. Je reviendrai plus tard."

"That's o.k., madame Klarsehen, I was already awake. What can I do for you?"

"I've come to ask your advice, monsieur. I know you don't like to be disturbed, but I didn't know who else to ask. I don't really know the other tenants in the building very well."

He'd been living there for the last twenty years and can't have exchanged more than a dozen "bonjours" in all that time with this rather eccentric old lady but, as other tenants came and went over the years the fact that they were a familiar fixture on the landscape established a curious bond between them. They were neighbours.