Subjects, page 2
It had been bad enough in the car.
‘Why do we go back on a Thursday?’
‘What’s “it?” in French, Mum?’
‘Where exactly does Europe finish, Mum? I mean technically which bits of Russia are out and which are in? Why is it no one actually tells you that at primary school? It says here—’
‘Can I go to Ben’s house tonight?’
‘So is it elle or il or est?’
‘Tomorrow then?’
‘Do we have to get the shopping now?’
‘What’s that button with the ribbons coming out of the car wheels?’
‘Why can’t Miss Roberts actually teach us the topic before she sets a revision question?’
‘What happens if you press it?’
‘Can I have this? It was under the seat. It’s fine. It’s still wrapped.’
‘Is it like a turbo switch?’
‘Am I allowed one? Isaac’s had one. Can I?’
‘Hey, is that the real moon? How come we can see it in the day?’
The questions had closed in on her, accusing, reproaching. But there would be no steering away from the current conversation. Was that really what she’d done to hide her shame? They’d suffocated her. Jabbed at her. Quantified her ignorance. But she had almost killed them. She’d almost killed them all.
*
‘Mrs Gardner?’ The tiny bent figure clopped into the empty waiting room as far as the first chair. Sofia started, grateful to be parted from the thoughts inside her head. ‘Would you like to come through now, please?’
Sofia wavered.
‘I think they’ll be all right.’ Dr Merridew eyed the two boys as they darted between chairs, dotting one another’s noses with antibacterial foam. Florence was flicking through an A4 file of notes. ‘But if you like, we can give them a quick check over later as it’s very quiet this morning.’
In the consulting room, Sofia sank back onto the blue paper.
‘So, what’s brought you here today, Mrs Gardner?’ said Dr Merridew, turning from her computer, a smile already crinkled in the lines upon her face.
Sofia struggled with the meaning. What had brought her here today? What had brought her here today? Was Dr Merridew suggesting she’d been here before, with other ailments, other “whats” she could not now remember? She couldn’t recall a previous visit to this place. Was the focus then on what had brought her here, perhaps the manner of their transportation? How had they all arrived at the city hospital’s Minor Injuries Unit? She didn’t know exactly. She felt so removed and unconnected that for all she knew, they might well have been teleported in. But travel arrangements could hardly be Dr Merridew’s concern. So perhaps the question was about something different altogether.
She tried shifting the emphasis again. Why was she, Sofia, here today of all days, considering all the other days on which she might have come? Why had she waited until this moment, this time? The cause of her odd behaviour this morning might be traced back a long way. What had brought her here? Ultimately? Originally? The birth of Tim? What had made the madness manifest, today of all those days?
‘Mrs Gardner?’ Sofia started and dragged her eyes to where she knew she ought to look. ‘What seems to be the problem today?’
‘Oh,’ said Sofia lightly. ‘It’s the children. We had a crash. The children banged their heads.’
‘The policeman who brought you in did say you’d had a little bump. We wouldn’t normally worry about such a low-impact collision, but he said you were nauseous and a bit disorientated. How are you feeling now, Mrs Gardner?’
If she knew just what had happened, why, then, did she ask? Sofia felt irritable, irrationally betrayed.
‘Do you have any pain or discomfort at all?’
‘I’m fine, but the chil—’
‘We’ll give them a quick going-over, Mrs Gardner, but I can assure you I see absolutely no cause for concern.’
Medically, there certainly wasn’t. Isaac had now made himself a pair of snow shoes out of Vogue and Cosmopolitan and was sliding along, rucking the glossy pages against the spine. Tim was folding Family Planning Service leaflets into paper aeroplanes. A fat woman entered, shuffled herself in front of a seat and launched herself backwards into it with a determined glance behind.
‘I don’t feel anything,’ Sofia reflected. She thought harder for a moment.
‘Except my neck’s a little sore. Level 4 or 5, I would say. Moderate, I think. Edging towards distracting.’
Dr Merridew glanced at the pain chart, which Sofia could not have seen, tucked behind the curtain. ‘That’s a very precise description, Mrs Gardner. Most people don’t capture it in quite such accurate terms.’
‘Oh, I have a bit of background,’ Sofia apologised vaguely. ‘Psychology degree. I did a unit, a module – The Psychobiology of Pain.’
‘Really?’ said Dr Merridew. ‘That sounds most interesting.’
‘And memory.’ Sofia sat up for the first time. ‘I wrote a paper once. The Effect of Caffeine on Short-Term Memory. For my master’s. They wouldn’t publish it though. And I never got to do my PhD.’ She flopped back down on the examining couch.
‘And does it help or hinder?’
Sofia looked bewildered.
‘Does it help or hinder?’
Sofia was still perplexed.
‘The caffeine. Does it work?’
‘Oh.’ A little nervous smile twitched for a moment in her face. ‘Inconclusive,’ she said, ‘as is so often the case.’
‘So, I’m safe with my Machu Picchu,’ Dr Merridew laughed, nodding towards her coffee machine.
‘A nine, I would say,’ said Sofia, frowning. ‘Severity: marginal; probability: remote.’
Dr Merridew laughed delightedly at Sofia’s risk analysis. ‘And what do you do now, Mrs Gardner?’
‘Oh. I’m a… I was… I just… I look after the children. Tim and Isaac. And Florence sometimes. That’s what I do now.’
‘It looks as if that might be quite a full-time job.’
It wasn’t, thought Sofia, and she hated the cliché.
‘And in your free time? What do you do to relax?’
Sofia sought deeply through the pockets of her mind. She’d had free time once: hobbies and pursuits. She’d written things, she thought, and walked perhaps, and definitely camped and climbed. Not slept and waked and slept and waked and slept and waked and slept. But the details eluded her. They were too far away.
‘I don’t,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t relax,’ she said.
‘It can be difficult, Mrs Gardner, with so much else going on. Now, if it’s all right with you, I’m just going to get you to make a few movements, to check for any physical damage.’ Dr Merridew opened the sequence by inviting her to press her palms against hers, and for a minute, they were locked in an imitative ballet. Sofia raised her arms and turned her head with dull obedience.
‘And does the pain travel anywhere else, Mrs Gardner?’
‘No,’ Sofia said. It didn’t travel, she thought. Not towards all the other pain.
‘Then I’d just like to round off with a few memory questions, to make sure everything’s in order.’
Sofia named the day, the date and the season; the city, the county, the country; a pen, a watch and a table. She counted backwards in sevens from a hundred and spelled “world” in reverse. There were no questions on the prime minister. Or Israel. Or niobium. And she could fold a piece of paper and put it in her lap.
‘Well, I think actually everything looks fine, Mrs Gardner,’ said Dr Merridew at last.
Sofia stared deadpan at the paper on her knee.
‘So that’s it for today, Mrs Gardner, I think. Unless you’d like the nurse to check over the children? I can assure you they’re showing no worrying signs at all.’
The boys had squished themselves impossibly into a single chair, cowed at last by glances from the newest outpatient, and were fighting with silent hysteria over a plastic water cup. Even Sofia could see the process might be deemed superfluous.
‘Now, is there anything else concerning you? Anything else you’d like to say?’
She didn’t speak.
The nurse was at the window, reminding Dr Merridew of the obese patient. Dr Merridew glanced at the clock and waved her away towards the children instead. Then she trundled her chair over to the bed and put her hand on Sofia’s arm. Dropping any residue of briskness, she looked right inside the blackness of her eyes, turning her head as if steering an invisible ophthalmoscope.
‘How are you in yourself, Mrs Gardner?’ she said finally, with kind and searching curiosity.
‘I’m fine,’ said Sofia. But the truth was, she wasn’t even in herself. Not quite Cotard’s syndrome, but not far off the walking dead.
‘I haven’t been in myself,’ said Sofia with careful self-revelation. ‘I haven’t been in myself since Tim. Since the middle one.’
‘I sometimes wonder what happened to all those years too,’ smiled Dr Merridew, looking towards her desk at a photo of three teenaged children, backlit by a foreign sunset, laughing in a luminous embrace. She broke away and clapped her papery hands onto her lap. ‘I’m still waiting to secure my immortality through publication too, Mrs Gardner. Look at all those research notes, gathering dust on that top shelf: waiting for someone to show an interest once I’ve tidied them all up.’
‘It’s hard to get the timing right.’ Sofia was suddenly talkative. ‘My husband, he gets published all the time. But he’s in the thick of it. He knows people. He’s always at conferences and things. That’s where I went wrong, I think. The timing wasn’t there…’
‘I live in faith,’ said Dr Merridew, ‘we all get there in the end.’
‘What-what did you look into?’ Sofia was curious despite herself.
‘Sleep,’ laughed Dr Merridew. ‘Sleep and patient well-being. Perhaps a little general for the current journal readership but vitally important all the same.’
Sofia was an expert in the sanctuary of repose. Practically, now, and theoretically before. ‘Did you look at Tarnow? And Czeisler? What about Jie Zhang?’
‘Goodness!’ said Dr Merridew. ‘Do you know, I haven’t a clue who I put in my literature review now. You seem fantastically knowledgeable, Mrs Gardner.’
‘I was,’ said Sofia simply. ‘I knew a lot back then. But it’s all… dissipated.’ She looked at Dr Merridew and her voice was tinged with panic. ‘I can’t get to it. I can’t get it back.’
‘Oh, it’s in there,’ said Dr Merridew, starting to scrutinise Sofia’s eyes again. ‘It’s in there all right.’ She shook herself and gave Sofia’s hand a final pat. ‘But I mustn’t keep you any longer. My next patient’s waiting, I’m afraid.’ She looked out of her window to the other consulting room, then checked some information on her screen. ‘Nurse Berry’s seen the children and they’re all as right as rain. Nothing to be worried about in any way at all.’
Sofia slipped down off the couch. As she bent to put her shoes on, her hair sprang forward, screening her face with an unwashed cascade of tousled auburn curls.
‘If you can, Mrs Gardner, do try to find a little time to genuinely relax. And don’t forget George Eliot – it is her, isn’t it? It’s never too late. It really isn’t. It’s never too late.’
Sofia restrained a twist of hair behind her right ear, unusually conscious of the ends as they flicked up against her neck, and stood up. Then she clicked Dr Merridew’s door shut behind her. The children scuffled to attention on either side of Florence, wondering how much their mother had seen, assessing her mood.
‘Gorgeous kids you’ve got there, Mum,’ said Nurse Berry. ‘They’ve been really good.’
The compliment made her guilty. They were gorgeous, but she’d needed someone else to tell her that. They’d behaved themselves but only once removed from the public forum she’d been there to supervise.
‘Did you pass the test, Mum?’ Isaac asked anxiously.
Sofia looked at him for the first time that day. ‘I think so,’ she smiled wearily, ‘I think I did,’ she said.
She couldn’t take their hands. Florence had those. So she squeezed Tim across the shoulders and ruffled Isaac’s hair, then walked behind them down the stairwell to the hospital’s grand foyer.
It wasn’t too late.
They reached the final door of the ground-floor corridor, one of nine exits in the three-story atrium, discharging people at different heights like a human marble run. She overtook the children, heading for the light.
It wasn’t too late.
And it was waiting for her, pouring warmly through the glass wall ahead, from the apex twenty metres up, through forty polished panes of safety glass, and down to the five revolving doors churning at the bottom, splashing flecks of brightness from outside onto the floor.
She wanted more of it.
She stumbled past the inbound patients over a giant doily of flickering petals fed by a sun tube high above, which snatched a caress of her face and feet as she passed by. Then she burst through the central swing door, impatient at its resistance, and felt the real sun, cooler but purer, as it shone through the unbounded air outside.
It wasn’t too late.
The door brushed quietly to a halt behind.
Her body stopped to feed itself on solar energy, but her resurrected mind was active, planning its regeneration. It was all in there, Dr Merridew had said. She could still be who she might have been. But she must be more than she might have been. Her specialism did not fit her for the world she lived in now. She needed common knowledge, polymathic expertise, to battle child interrogation, pub quiz tiebreaks, spousal feats.
This would be her last night and day of deep meaningless sleep. Now she was awake. She would rebuild herself, retrain her mind, reconstruct her own cognition, using the blocks of what she knew as her foundation stones. Knowing everything about something had left her weak. Now she would strive to know something about everything: the Russian border, pop musicians, capitals and parts of speech. That was the key, the panacea. That was the good way out.
The insides of her eyelids danced with a kaleidoscope of sparkles. She opened them, feeling the press of humankind behind her, trying to break free.
But she didn’t look back.
Florence pulled Tim and Isaac away from the vending machine inside.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I think Mum’s on the up again.’
*
‘Hullo?’
‘Flo? Is that you, Flo?’
‘Dad!’ Florence was more delighted than she would ever show.
‘How are you, pumpkin? I was worried you might all be in bed.’
‘We are – I mean the boys are. What time is it with you?’
‘Just after five. Landed at four. Got to the hotel ten minutes ago.’
‘Up to your high standards, Dad?’
‘Well, the foyer’s pretty sparkly but no chocolates on the pillow.’
‘Shame on them, Dad. Didn’t you tell them an eminent scientist was coming?’
‘I did my best, but I’m not sure they fully appreciated my abstract on “the complex treatment of agricultural wastes for the production of organic acids”.’
‘Maybe you should have stuck with the title I suggested, Dad: “What to do with cow poo”.’
‘You might be right, my darling – sweet and to the point. Anyway, what’s my favourite eldest female child been up to today? Revising hard, I guess?’
‘Trying to,’ said Florence ruefully. ‘Got some French done, and my maths, but the thing Miss Roberts set is kind of impossible to start.’
‘The perils of precociousness. Just think, next year when you’ve got these three under your belt, you’ll be able to sit back and be unutterably smug.’
‘If I pass, Dad. There’s plenty of other people doing their GCSEs early. It’s not like I’m the only Year 10 sitting mocks this term.’
‘The only one of any importance, Flo. You’ll ace them. No contest. Anyway, I can’t talk for too long, I’m meeting the others at half-five. Is Mum there?’
Florence hesitated. ‘She’s… she’s asleep as well.’
‘Asleep?’
‘Dad… we’re all absolutely OK, and I don’t want you to worry, but you should probably know… um… we bumped the car today.’
‘OK.’ He didn’t ask what happened.
‘I think Mum might have clipped the kerb or something,’ Florence said carefully.
Hugo carried on listening.
‘Anyway, we ended up parked embarrassingly in the middle of a roundabout…’
He laughed. ‘But everyone’s all right?’
‘Yes, everyone’s OK. They took us to the hospital, and there’s nothing to worry about – just Mum’s going back for a check-up in a couple of weeks.’
Hugo asked no more questions. If Florence said that things were fine, he took it that they were. He didn’t ask about the car: it wasn’t in his nature to fuss about that sort of thing.
‘But Mum’s asleep, you said?’
‘I think she’s just really tired,’ said Florence, ‘the shock and everything.’ Or perhaps, she reflected, the exhaustion of living another day. Dad was away so much, he wouldn’t know how often she was in bed before them all. ‘Shall I get her? I can wake her up.’
‘No, no it’s fine,’ said Hugo. ‘Just tell her I got here OK. Oh, and tell her Mark is here, as a beer production specialist. That’ll make her laugh. She’ll remember all our exploits from university.’
‘Will do, Dad.’
‘And give the boys a good kicking from me.’
‘Dad!’
‘Well, I’m sure they’ll have deserved it by the end of the week. On the other hand, you could just kiss them goodnight from me now and tickle them relentlessly in the morning.’
Florence giggled. ‘I’ll tell them you called. And get them to phone you after school when you’re at lunch.’
