4

  When the young Dr. Hadja Bannerje sat on the edge of the bed and told Philip Griffin that he had advanced cancer in his left lung and that the disease had spread into his bone marrow, the tailor received the news with no surprise and simply leaned forward to ask how long.

“How long have I to live, Doctor?”

The Indian was unsure Philip had understood.

“It is widespread,” he said. “It is growing all the time.”

“How long? Tell me.”

“We can’t tell the time precisely. It is not exact.” He paused; the patient was waiting for more. “There is no science, Mr. Griffin, for the passing of a spirit.”

“It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”

Dr. Bannerje looked at the old man and saw the watery signs of illness in his eyes.

“We’ll do more tests,” he said. “You can consider radiation, but in your case …”

“Will I have six months?”

“You must have terrible pain. There are many with less than your condition who are dead.”

“Will I have six months?”

The young Indian did not answer at once. He was twenty-nine years old and had come to Dublin from Bombay. The second son, he was the one chosen to be the doctor, while his brother had taken over the small family shop. He had a stillness like white linen folded inside him. But when he heard in the man’s tone the desperate beseeching for life, Hadja Bannerje felt the grief rumple him like an illness of the stomach and acknowledged in himself the awfulness of reaching this place at the end of medicine. This, he thought, is beyond the last page of all the books I have studied. This is a place further than prescription.

And yet it was familiar to him. His dark eyes turned to the thin curtain about the bed, and for a moment he was not seeing it. He was a twelve-year-old boy seeing his mother when she was dying in the small bed in the back room with the candles lit beside her. His father had moved out into the tiny bedroom of his sons and transformed what had once been the untidy room of his marriage into the ordered and serene place of the dying. The old man had carried lotus and jasmine from the market in his arms and filled bowls, jugs, and vases about the room so that the scent in the air was more heavy and beautiful than sorrow. He had told Hadja death was coming, and the young boy had sat by the bedside waiting for it daily. His mother had lost speech, but lay in the bed weeping and moaning continuously until the medication daily slipped her through the door of oblivion and settled a small peace. When she awoke, two hours before she was allowed the next injection of the morphine, she opened her eyes to see Hadja sitting there and began weeping at once. She could move her hands only in hopeless wavering gestures that fell away from what they reached. Within minutes of her waking, the pain would burn through her again, and she would cry and groan with it. He had thought she was trying to tell him something, and time and again leaned down to moisten her dry and flaked lips and place his ear next to her mouth. But the message never came, she could make no words. Day after day she lingered in that place between living and dying. His father threw out the flowers onto a growing heap in the back yard and brought new ones, sitting through the night in that room where the pain kept coming back and death did not arrive. He held her hand as he would a child’s crossing the road, but no crossing happened, only the agony inside her and the cries they could not cure. She endured for five weeks and two days, and in that time Hadja, who had already been nominated a future doctor by his father and his teacher, sat beside her bed and understood in her eyes that the beseeching was not for death but for life. She could not let go despite the pain, and the waves of it that rode her body could not wash away that final resolve to cling. His father had thought there was something she wanted to say to them, and had assembled the two boys, an aunt, and two uncles by her bedside. The heat outside fell on Bombay like hell’s blanket, and the little group stood around the dying woman waiting. Hadja’s father held a copybook and pencil to note down the slightest sounds that might have been curled-up words. But there was only moaning and the human evidence of anguish. Sweat dripped off them, and the perfume of the flowers made their heads swim. She might be trying to say goodbye to us, his father had said. But Hadja knew it was not that, and when, after elaborate and suggestive goodbyes, the aunt and uncles had gone, he stayed by the bedside and watched his mother’s milky eyes flash with the desperate longing for him to help her. She did not want to die, and threw her head backward and forward on the feather pillow, crying out in terror when she saw the spirits in the room waiting to take her.

Dr. Hadja Bannerje remembered his mother in the thin white curtain about the hospital bed, and then turned to Philip Griffin.

“We have no science to say how long,” he said. “We die when we die, Mr. Griffin. We treat the body, not the spirit, but sometimes it is the spirit that is sick. No medicine for the body cures the spirit.” He paused and looked at the tailor, who was leaning forward in the bed as if for some hope in the doctor’s tone, which was soft as the word “India.”

“This is not what Mr. Higgins, the oncologist, will say to you. It is my own foolishness perhaps, and you will forgive me for saying it. But there is nothing here for you. Mr. Higgins will say you will die when the disease shuts down the vital organs.”

“Soon?” Philip wet his lips. “Tell me.”

The Indian nodded. “Mr. Higgins will say so,” he said.

Philip Griffin slipped back into the clutch of the blankets. He felt suddenly more ill than he had ever felt in his life, and imagined he could see each of his vital organs struggling under the duress of the cancer. His heart seemed to be racing, his breath was shallow, as if all the air of the world were swiftly being sucked away from him.

Dr. Bannerje watched the news age the patient. “Is there somebody I can call for you?” he said.

“No. No, thank you.”

“I will come back and talk to you again,” said Hadja Bannerje, turning slowly to draw back the white curtain from around the bed and walk out of the ward, the weight of failure on his slim shoulders and the smell of smoke about him as he saw his father on the evening of his mother’s death setting fire to the great mound of dead flowers in the back yard in Bombay, the glitter of the stars, and the ashes of love spiralling upward and then falling and alighting in his hair.

After the doctor had gone, Philip Griffin lay in the thin air left to him at the edge of the world. The illness was increasing so rapidly, he imagined, that he could be dead by evening. Already he felt the cotton of his pyjamas loosening from the wastage of his body and feared that when he stood to go to the bathroom he would have to grab a handful of the material at his waist. He looked across the ward at two other men who were sleeping like corpses in the deep dream of their medication. Oh God, he thought, he will be destroyed if I die now. I can’t die now.

He turned to his side and wept into the pillow. He smelled the smell of hospitals, in which there was no season or life, and was stricken with a new terror that he might never leave the ward again. In the big window a thin rain was blurring the view of Dublin like an overwashed water-colour, and sharp short gusts of wind blew, weakening the resolve of the sick to get better and be outside. But not Philip Griffin: I have to stop it, just delay it. Oh, please, God. If I die on him now I’ll have done nothing but bring him grief all his life.

Where no one could see him, and while he was turned on his side towards the gloom of the November afternoon, he raised his right hand slowly to his forehead and blessed himself. He did not know if he believed that God could help, for He had not helped Anne or Mary.

Still, he prayed. He said the Our Father five times. Then, in the beginning of the sixth, he stopped. The pain was sharp in his chest and he clutched himself.

“Shaggit!”

He waited a moment. In his mind he saw the cancer moving like a shadow into a new, still healthy corner of his organs. The room darkened. The sky outside fell like the sea in thickened grey waves, as if the world was spinning upside down and the air was flooded and the light was lost. It was like night in daytime.

I don’t know if you are there, Philip Griffin said in a silent voice. I don’t know if you can hear me. But please let me live for another while. For my son.

He paused and hugged himself against the pain. Then added: If you let me live, I will try and do …

He couldn’t find the word.

I will try and do some … some act of goodness each day.

Philip Griffin waited, but nothing happened. The pain continued like a fierce storm that November afternoon, pain like rain, falling like a cold monsoon on the head of Dr. Hadja Bannerje in the car park of St. Vincent’s, where he missed his mother and promised himself to return to his father in Bombay at the end of his final residency, pain falling out of the grey heavens in a deluge of despondency and loss, until at last Nurse Grainne Mangan came into the ward and turned on all the lights, and Philip Griffin did not tell her to turn them off.