I remember the glass of water. In an emergency, there’s always some poor sap who fetches a glass of water, isn’t there? In my case, no one knew his name. He was just out for a quiet Tuesday pint, one of those lonely drinkers; most pubs have one. I was one of them for a while. He probably felt like he needed to do something, wanted to help. So he went behind the bar and poured a pint of water from the tap – no ice, no lemon – and plonked it down in front of my nose where I rested, surrounded by broken glass on the cool, slightly sticky stone floor. Some of the water slip-sloshed over the edge.
Could’ve got me a pint, mate.
I looked through the glass. The pub was softer this way. It had a magical, dream-like quality. Even Ange who was cradling my head in her lap and screaming louder than ever on the phone.
‘How the hell do I know if it’s a stroke?!’, her fingers pressed hard into my neck – had a celestial quality to her. I wanted to ask if I gave up booze, seriously this time, would she take me back? That I need her help. Things are worse, way worse, without her … without Luce. But my voice came out in strange little barks like an annoying yapping dog. I didn’t want to piss her off any more so I gave up trying.
It started about an hour before Ange and I met in the Green Man. At first, I thought the pain was heartache because we were meeting to sign the divorce papers. I hadn’t gone to detox like I promised I would and I’d failed Ange’s ultimatum ‘booze or us’ for a third and final time. Every time I told her I chose ‘us’ I’d feel the creature limber up, protract its claws to test their sharpness, and lick its incisors. Honestly, I didn’t stand a chance. Before I even got to the Green Man the pain was electric, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing just behind my eyeballs, deep in my head, like I was clenching a block of ice between my teeth.
My second thought was that this pain was just a new flavour of hangover. So I decided to go to the Green Man early. I had plenty of time to down a few pints before she told me I failed, our marriage coffin arrived and we lowered the last twenty-three years into the ground.
A small group of teenagers, younger than Lucy, clutching sparklers, on their way to a Bonfire Party, smirked and giggled as they walked past me on the street. I knew how I must look to them – a scruffy, saggy-eyed man walking in rigid zombie steps towards the pub – but I was too close to care. Small mercies.
I tried to move my right arm to open the pub door, but it had grown distant, as if amputated from the rest of me. So I just threw my body against the door and almost fell into the comfort of the dark, damp-smelling pub.
This is one bastard of a hangover.
As I raised the pint glass to my mouth, I realised my hands had frozen rigid, like dinosaur claws. I had to use both of them to pick up the glass. The liquid streamed over my cheeks as I tipped my head back too far. It made my jumper wet.
Wherever I’d been, there must have been whisky, and lots of it. I’m only like this when there’s whisky in me.
I finished the first pint, then had another. I felt every one of the billions of cells in my body, as it chimed against its neighbour like fine crystal glass, and I thought that was probably a good sign, the booze doing its job. So I ordered a third pint, skilfully avoiding eye contact with the barman, when Ange arrived. It had been four months since I last saw her. Four months since she’d got the phone call from the police. I’d been gone a week, and had ended up under Waterloo Bridge apparently, trying to find a building site I thought I was managing. I’d been redundant for a year. Without a word she drove me to a cheap hotel in Worthing, a few miles from home. She’d already dumped my clothes inside.
In the Green Man, Ange’s blonde hair was longer than I remembered. I wanted to tell her she looked pretty but she curled her lip when she saw me, as if I smelt bad, and she didn’t look pretty any more. My claw-hands clung to the lip of the bar like a bat’s thumb as I stood to hug her, but I misjudged it. Ange outstretched her arms to try and catch me, but I was too heavy. My pint smashed first, the liquid rebounding off the floor in a gorgeous amber wave. I remember thinking how much it’s going to hurt when I land on that glass but then immediately I stopped worrying because I was on the floor already, and the glass must have slid quietly through my skin and into my body but I didn’t feel it. Instead, every cell in my body melted with the cells from the stone floor, the boundary between my body and the floor no longer existed and I just wanted to stay, enjoy the feeling of my body evaporating, the creature curled and purring on the floor by my side. Even as Ange shouted down at me, that all-too-familiar look of shame and anger on her face giving away to horror as she started screaming for an ambulance, and despite all the heartache I’ve caused, all the embarrassment, and anguish, I let it all go, easy as exhaling cigarette smoke.
Pooff!
And it was the most tremendous relief.
That was the last time I remember seeing her. Alice tells me she came in quite regularly in the beginning, but patience never was one of Ange’s virtues. For a while I liked to think she found it too hard seeing me like this, but Ange was always a pragmatic, practical type. She’s right to move on with her life; she’s spent too much time waiting for me to sort mine out.
Happily, Jack disturbs my wallowing. He’s playing music from his phone connected to a little speaker for Cassie this morning. ‘Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”,’ he tells her (us). It’s only just started when his phone starts ringing through the speaker; he rejects the call. It rings immediately again. He frowns, irritated, and presses some buttons on his phone, presumably to stop it ringing a third time before he starts the music again from the beginning, holding the small speaker onto Cassie’s stomach, like they tell you to do in the baby books. It muffles the sound quality but I can still hear. The strings soar. I imagine the tiny baby turning somersaults, wriggling inside Cassie. I’m glad Jack’s here, with her. It must be a comfort for Cassie that the night visitor won’t come if Jack’s around.
I’ve decided it was him, Jonny. He was desperate enough to run onto the ward before, after all. As I watch the baby grow, I keep thinking of his eyes and how panicked they were when he tried to get on the ward that first day, the life behind them like a fighting dog, who will either bite or lick if you put your hand too close.
There’s only one reason he’d come to the ward, only one I can think of, and it makes all the hairs on my body rise and my organs clutch just thinking about it: the horror of him raising a pillow, or inserting something into Cassie’s drip. He wants to finish the job and I’ll be here, forced to watch.