LITMIR.BIZ

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were chairs in the hospital, and there was light. Hard plastic chairs and harsh shadeless light, but beggars can’t be … Once inside they could attend to their feet. Their feet were of great concern to them. They cosseted them. They swaddled them in cloth. They went into the washrooms and anointed them with warm water and disinfectant gel. Some of them had big trainers, shiny white shoes made for athletes, but here nobody sprang, nobody leapt.

      He went among them, another suppliant. He passed softly through the dim entrance hall. The floor was hard, so that to walk on it was to make noise. The low ceiling was insulated with white stuff that swallowed the noise up. Sound. Smother. A closed system. He nodded to the gatekeeper, a woman who glanced at him briefly and saw that he was admissible, and let him go by. He was, as he always was, neat, and he stepped carefully over the slick grey ground.

He went upstairs to where they had said she was, to the bed where her abandoned body had lain, but there was nothing there. Not an empty bed even. Nothing. On other beds women slept, pale, their hipbones and feet making ridges and peaks in the thin cellular blankets. They snored or muttered and tiny sharp lights blinked.

      ‘You’re looking for your wife.’ A nurse. Male. African. Very large.

      ‘She was here.’ He no longer felt certain he had come to the right place.

      Amidst the dimness the nurse sat in a cone of light.

      ‘There were concerns. She’s under observation. She’ll be going to imaging shortly.’

      ‘Can I see her?’

      ‘Best to wait here, sir. She’ll come back here.’

      All that day he sat in the ward, by the window. The nurse gave him his chair again and brought him a plastic pot of yoghurt. The sun rose showily, unfurling streamers of lurid orange cloud while the sky faded. No sound from the outer world passed through the sealed glass. Visitors arrived. A Frenchman, with clever eyes and pendulous doggy jowls, came and sat beside his thin wife, and the two of them worked together on a crossword. A woman whose soft arms and shoulders billowed around her apologised and apologised. Sorry for the trouble. Sorry for the moans she couldn’t help but make. Sorry for the retching that from time to time possessed her. The nurses tended to her, unshaken alike by her pain and the pointlessness of her sorry sorry sorry.

Milla found him. ‘We were frantic. We didn’t know where you’d got to.’ As though he might have been anywhere else but here. Here, waiting for Eurydice. Here, watching by the crack down which she had been dragged into the underworld. Milla bustled about and asked questions, and went on a long excursion into another part of the hospital and returned to tell him what he already knew. Concerns. Imaging. Wait here.

      Milla was really very good. He’d always liked being taken charge of by bossy people. When Eurydice seized his hand long ago and said, ‘You. You’ll dance with me, won’t you?’ and looked in his face so that he knew at once that she could see him, all of him, and found parts of what she saw absurd and other parts precious, he had said ‘Yes’, said it with every fibre of his being, every droplet of his being, every inter-molecular current and electro-magnetic charge and neural pulse of his being, with all the ardour that was in him, with his whole heart.

      Milla was walking towards him, with two people he didn’t know, both in uniform. She squatted down beside his chair, rocking awkwardly on her high heels. Why on earth did women wear those things? Eurydice never did.

      Milla said something. Her mascara had smeared all around her eyes. What she said was incomprehensible.

      The floor gaped open and down he flew.

God almighty, what a racket.

      He’d had a scan once. He’d taken off his proper clothes and, dressed in a penitent’s thin smock, had been borne away into the white enamelled throat of a machine. The noises it made were rhythmic and various. It roared and chugged and emitted long dragging sounds that had no trace of voice in them, because a voice can belong only to a being, and this thing was devoid of intention, devoid of life. He hadn’t been afraid then, just very lonely because Eurydice hadn’t come with him, and he’d been collected enough to think, You could do something with this. This is interesting. Why hasn’t a composer picked up on this? Perhaps someone has. This is imaging. This is the sound of a thing which looks at you without passion or compassion or even dispassion and – oddly enough – it’s musical.

      Now, as he descended into the rocky innards of the earth in search of his Eurydice, he heard that music amplified a thousandfold. He heard matter grinding itself as it shifted. Ancient masses cooling, heating, expanding, collapsing. The fearsome noise of the inanimate on the move. He sang into it. His eyes were open on absolute darkness. He felt speed but could measure it only by the pressure of air against his chest, and by the void he sensed opening behind him like unfurled wings. Into the darkness he fired his voice. The uproar of rock and magma gave him his baseline. His song arced over it, flashing.

From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, and all that time he saw no one, and breathed air that smelt of coal, and there was no dew, only clamminess, and then he was in a room, or a cavern – a finite space at least with black walls, and shaded lights that set the blackness glittering – and there was Eurydice, not the limp and pitiful residue that had lain in the hospital bed, but Eurydice herself, smiling at him with her slightly crooked mouth.

      ‘This is a bit drastic,’ she said. She disliked theatrical gestures.

      ‘I had to come,’ he said. ‘I’m no good without you.’

      ‘Hey ho,’ she said, and he could see her bracing herself to resume the business of being loved.

      There were other people there, two of them. Doctors presumably. When Orpheus stepped forward to take Eurydice’s hands something prevented him, an obstruction in the air. The man said, ‘This isn’t really possible you know.’

      The other one, the woman, came and took him by the arm. Her face looked red and blotched, cross, but when she touched him he felt that her hands were kind. It was something he had discovered in his dealings with the medical profession, the efficacy of the laying-on of hands. ‘The thing is,’ she said, in a reasonable voice, ‘you’re actually still alive. It’s most unusual.’

      Eurydice watched and smiled but she didn’t move towards him. There was something vague about her, or maybe it was only that his eyes had been so exhausted by darkness that what they saw was half blotted out. The woman led him over to where the man was and they all three sat, and Eurydice was there with them – there, but not entirely there.

      ‘I can’t do without her,’ said Orpheus.

      ‘A lot of people in your situation feel that way,’ said the man.

‘We’re not denying the existence of grief,’ said the woman. ‘We know how challenging it can be, especially to those who are of a certain age.’

      ‘My life is founded on her love,’ said Orpheus. ‘On loving her.’

      The woman stroked his hand.

      ‘You have friends,’ said the man. ‘You have intellectually stimulating work. You have an adequate level of financial security. I know these things may seem paltry in the light of what has happened, but our experience tells us that you will gradually recover your enthusiasm for them.’

      They both talked like that. They offered counselling. They spoke at length about the importance of maintaining social contacts, about taking walks on a regular basis and eating sensibly. All the time he was looking at Eurydice and she was looking at him. She seemed amused. Often at parties they would catch each other’s eyes like this – he signalling ‘Time to go?’ and she signalling back ‘Come on, you old spoilsport. Give it a bit longer.’ She was clearer now, fully in focus, but he could see the blackness of the rock-face through her insubstantial frame.

      ‘You’ll find a regular sleep-pattern is vitally important,’ said the man. ‘We can help you there. Hypnotics are really very effective nowadays and the adverse side-effects are negligible.’

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