They had opened him up and looked around inside for over an hour. His skin was tent-pegged open. Afterwards the surgeon had told Pat and Anne that they had stapled him back together—thirteen aluminium staples—without touching a thing inside. He was sent back to the world like a wrong delivery. They were going to try other methods, the surgeon said.
Anne hated seeing him treated the same as everyone else. When the elderly woman volunteer with the too-even teeth came cackling round with her bread trolley, Anne thought that Pat would be getting steaming, soft rolls from a local bakery. Instead the woman took a slice of brown from a plastic bag and wrapped it in a paper napkin for him. He’s a millionaire! Anne wanted to shout. He doesn’t want your rotten bread.
What had Anne brought him? Flowers once or twice, then the horrible mistake, the first time she visited, of unloading a bagful of sweets on his bed: Rolos, Polos, Curly-Wurlies. They’d been stashed away in a drawer because he couldn’t eat them and he pulled them out for his other, hungry visitors. She’d even brought him an early Christmas Selection Box.
Maybe, she thought, I can pop by Tesco Metro tonight, if I get out early enough. Get a few essentials. She thought of buying Chinese cook-in sauces and spring rolls, giving the kids a treat, so they could eat like they did when Pat was home.
After a while she felt out of place in the café. Her tatty yellow coat was attracting attention from the staff, as was the bag of sharp green cuttings the named-nurse had pruned expertly from the flowers Anne had brought, insisting that they be taken home and planted, to come up good as new next year.
Everyone else in the café was young, good-looking, affluent. Anne felt like an old sheep sat there in her good winter coat. She went back to the Infirmary, determined to ask someone in charge how long before he could come home to wait for their so-called other methods.
“He’s had a mishap,” the nurse, Sandra, told Anne when she returned to the ward. There was no sign of Pat, but she could see the tell-tale snail-trail that went from the side ward to the patient toilet. She had dodged it on the way in and she came hoping that it wasn’t Pat’s. The shit was runny and dark and it smelled like old people’s shit, like something held too long in the body. Years ago Anne had worked in an old people’s Home, just menial business, and this brought it all flooding back.
Very clearly the thought came to her, as she watched the nurse set to work cleaning up the mess, that she was going to lose Pat all over again.
Because she kept thinking this, and because he, scrubbed and wearing crisp new pyjamas, felt abashed after his accident, they took a while finding things to say to each other in this session.
At last she said, “Colin seems to have found some new friends. We don’t see a lot of him in the flat.”
“Good,” said Pat. “He’ll need new friends.”
“Wendy hasn’t seen that boy again. She’s moping about a lot. That Belinda woman depressed her. She depresses me. But Wendy won’t tell her to keep away.”
“Belinda’s heart is in the right place.”
“Did you hear that she thinks the aliens are after her?”
Pat said tiredly, “I heard something like that. It’s good she’s got an interest.”
Aunty Anne rolled her eyes. “That brother of hers is always on about outer space as well. They’re both cracked.”
Pat smiled. “Simon told me that his sister is convinced that he isn’t himself. She’s accused him a couple of times of being a replacement for the old Captain Simon.”
“See? I wouldn’t want to live alone with her.”
“She’s harmless,” Pat grimaced, wanting to slide a little further down the bed. His wife flapped around him as he eased himself painfully into place. “God, that hurts when I move. I asked Simon if Belinda could be right. Do you know what he said?”
Anne shook her head.
“He said, ‘Pat, bugger knows if I’ve been replaced. You’d think I’d be the first to know, wouldn’t you? But Belinda reckons she’s right. She thinks I’m trying so hard to be the real me that I’ve convinced even myself.’ That’s what he said.”
Anne shuddered. “That kind of talk gives me the creeps, I must say.”
“It fits, though, doesn’t it? Do you feel like the same person you’ve always been? I’m not sure I do. I think I’ve got a memory of always being the same, but it takes very little thinking to put doubts into my head.”
“That’s just change. That’s growing old.” She was impatient suddenly. “And anyway, there’s more changes happen to a woman in a woman’s life than happen in a man’s. Captain Simon should shut his trap. He knows nothing.”
Pat said thoughtfully, “Changes go on inside all of us.”
When their time was up she found that it was raining, at first softly, soothingly, then with increasing violence. The plastic bag full of cuttings rattled at her side all the way to Tesco Metro. In an impulse she threw it in the bin outside the shop, neatly turning on her heel and ignoring the Big Issue man by the automatic doors.
She had worked nights, mostly, in that old people’s Home. It made her feel much more vital than she usually was, bustling around the old dears, fetching round the trolley, doling out their greens and their gravy. The night Pat had spent on the High Dependency Ward, following his operation, she had sat with him for hours, and the air of urgent efficiency, the sudden bursts of activity amongst the nurses, the smells and the groans, brought it all back to her. You saw everything, were spared nothing. You saw what
