Excerpts From "Rolandson Radio" (Pt 5)
Dec 14 '07
The Bottom Line Another excerpt.
V
Upon his arrival at St. Augustine’s Hospital, Theresa had been doped with four Bolivian palliatives and fastened to her bed with seven belts and forty centimetres of elasticated nylon rope. Nigel scuttled through the corridors, searching in panic for his children who he found in a melancholy stupor beside a urine-filled sandpit in the crèche area. He could smell Mr. Winchester’s cardigan on their skin, a composite whiff of digestive biscuits, eardrops and cod-liver oil, then asked them to be strong while revelling in images of red-hot pokers through his eyes and dogs chewing off his knackers. He dashed back upstairs to his wife, her head cocked to one side and her eyes half-open, and sat by her side in a breathless muddle.
“I couldn’t find Him, honey,” she muttered.
“Therese! You’re awake! You couldn’t find who, sweetness?” Nigel asked, hesitant.
“The Lord. I looked everywhere…”
“What do you mean, honey?”
“ I mean God. The reason we all…” she added, trailing off into sleep.
He clasped her hand and parted her fringe, daubing some of the sweat atop her brow. The contrasting coldness in her cheeks startled him for a moment and the chill passed through him until he retracted his touch, leaning over in disgust and dread. The only explanation he could muster up was that he was responsible for this, and it was his neglect and stubbornness that had resulted in such a grievous mental breakdown. He thought of how callous he had been during mass on Sunday after he refused Jennifer permission to accompany her friends to the beach, and gave Theresa the cold shoulder all week after their argument. Scanning his eyes across the bland, patterned curtains around the screen, he redirected his gaze to Theresa and spotted a small leak underneath her bedclothes. He flung back the cover and lifted up her gown, whereupon he noticed a viscous brown liquid gurgling in rhythmic spurts from her navel. A nurse swished back the curtains and pounced upon Nigel immediately.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Um… is that normal?” he panicked.
“Oh, no. I’d better go and get the doctor,” she said. Nigel prodded the stomach with greater force and the liquid oozed out in runnier ribbons onto the bed sheets where it audibly singed. From her belly, the same gentle whir could be heard as that he encountered in the house and he aligned his ear towards her navel for a closer listen.
“Inside… inside… inside… God Function Parallel System Collapse… inside… inside,” it repeated, stuck in another loop.
“What the hell is that?” he fumed.
The doctor pushed Nigel aside and reacted with much the same stupefaction at the noxious brown liquid, fizzing onto the sheets.
“There’s something inside her. I can hear it! What is that stuff?” Nigel cried out.
“It looks like battery acid,” the doctor observed to himself.
“Battery acid?”
“Listen, could you step outside for a minute and let the doctor do his job?” the nurse patronised.
“Well, is she going to be all right?”
“Sir, please just step outside. We have this under control,” she forced.
“God, I have never seen anything like this before! What the hell do we do now?” the doctor panicked, loud enough for Nigel to hear while he backed out of the ward near catatonic.
The wait outside was the longest of his life, fraught with anxiety, horror and stern self-assessment. Images compounded in his mind of what might happen were she were to pass away overnight and how unable he would be to cope on his own. How would the children deal with the loss of their mother, and how would he function as a single parent left to raise two children with his limited fathering skills? Could he find the strength to pack their lunchboxes every morning or to drop them off at school with a smile on his face? To cut their sandwiches to exact length, comfort them whenever they felt down and mould them into conscientious, intelligent beings with a strong moral centre and stable emotional framework? Could he himself replace the void left by her demise and were he to remarry, would his children respect him ever again? He shuffled into the corridor as the questions snowballed.
The sun blazed in through eleven separate windows in strenuous shafts. Outside, several children padded in a plastic pool and slipped out the side, collapsing in a soggy heap on the grass. He thought about her wound again. Small portals opened up ahead of him and he imagined dealing with Jennifer as she progressed through school. Some acne-ridden teenager flickered into view, her first proper boyfriend, and he stared at the youth with denial and loathing. Jennifer looked so like her mother.
He paid heed to no one throughout his walk. When he emerged from the visions, he peered into several rooms to distract his mind. A nurse with pock-marked skin attempted a smile at him, then flashed him a look as though she wanted to gnaw through his trousers and let loose the dogs on his gonads. The first room he encountered was full of satchel-faced specimens, people quarantined like lepers or moribund victims stricken by some almighty plague that ran the risk of spreading. The word ‘death’ began to flash in front of him.
“God… I need a word with you,” he muttered.
Nigel nipped into the first cupboard he could find and dropped to his knees. Aside from the box at his feet, he saw nothing.
“God, I need you right now. I need you on my side. Theresa needs you on her side. I hope you can help us through this. I go every week, you know. I haven’t missed a mass in years, and that time I missed it at Christmas, well, I had to because my mum was ill. I’m sure you can appreciate that? Please, just help her through this and I’ll do anything you want for the rest of my life. I’ll treat her with all the respect she deserves and never force her to do anything she doesn’t want. Except going to mass, obviously. We’ll keep going to mass, if that’s what you want. Please look out for us, God. Please, just this one favour, that’s all I ask…”
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