The night after the party, David could not sleep. He had eaten too much cream cake. For him, the party was not a joyful event, although he had taken a leading part. He had tried to give the appearance of enjoying himself. He wanted Cathy to have a cheery send-off, but it was marred by his own feeling of impending loss. And his concern about the pain the move would inflict upon Cathy. Keith’s image of the sixth floor cell remained in his mind.
One touch of brightness, now that the tussle over Poppy had been resolved, was the possibility of a visit to London to see Cathy. He was determined that he would manage this somehow. He was fairly sure Cathy understood his plan, but she was unmoved. And he found Cathy’s attitude towards leaving unnerving. The proposal had turned her to stone. These thoughts, and the indigestion, kept him awake.
David heard the sounds of a disturbance down the corridor about two am, low cries and calls of consternation, possibly from staff. The night shift care assistants were climbing the stairs on the thin carpet, and the lift clattered. A vehicle scrunched on the drive. He had not drawn the blinds, and the windows were spotted with rain. A green coloured light, flashing from the vehicle outside, lit the globules of rain on the glass, and blazed on the wall of his room. He got out of bed, and looked down from the window. It was the emergency doctor’s car.
He went to the door of his room. He saw a huddle of people, cases of equipment, and a stretcher at the end of the corridor. He could not tell for certain, but a kind of gnawing inside told him that the huddle was around Cathy’s room.
He pulled on his dressing gown, and waited in his own doorway, listening, for a long time. People were still in the corridor, but very quiet. He wanted to go down there, and see for himself, but he feared to do so. He would be sent back to bed very sharply if he was seen by staff. Eventually, the people ebbed away taking their stretchers and bags with them, and only the usual night lights remained on in the empty corridor.
Now he ventured down the corridor. Yes, he could see as he approached, that the door of Cathy’s room was open, and the light on. He looked in. Maggie was sitting in a chair by the bed where Cathy lay. The side panels had been removed. Maggie sensed him, and looked up.
“Gawd y’ frightened me, David. What y’aboot at this hour!”
“Cathy?”
“Och, the pur wee thing’s gone.”
They both looked at what David had first thought was a sleeping figure. It was Cathy, on her back, the bedclothes smoothed over her arms and chest, her head visible, and surrounded by the wild rush of hair that had been released from her hair band. Her eyes were closed. The tension and worry, which had pitted her face since she had been told she would be moved, was gone. Her skin was shiny, smooth, and almost transparent.
“She looks… peaceful,” he said.
“Yes, she was peaceful. She never really became conscious, as far as we know. She struggled a little, and then gave up.”
“Can I stay a while?”
“You shouldn’t really, David… I know she was your friend.”
David sat down in a chair next to Maggie. He felt a deep blow, but no shock or surprise. His plan to see Cathy in London was really a fantasy. What had happened tonight had started weeks or months ago, when the initiative to move Cathy was only an idea. The idea had swelled into the gradual ordering of events by many people. The idea gained substance, and force, always moving forward, and coming to the inevitable conclusion. There was no surprise. Only the heavy weight of the arrival of what was expected. David was a bystander who could see it all. Perhaps he was the only one who had a glimpse of the possibility that Cathy would not allow herself to be moved, and could not be moved, from Denby Hall.
The regime of ‘no choice’ was over.
Ian, the night supervisor, loomed out of the shadows behind him. “What are you doing here, young David?”
“Just…sitting.”
“I think you should come back to your room with me. Maybe I can give you something to make you sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep,” David said, following Ian up the corridor, back to his room.
Ian turned in the doorway “OK, but don’t think too much. Cathy was very ill.”
David lay back on his pillow, and heard another vehicle arrive, lights flashing on the bedroom wall, voices, then the rumble of the elevator and more muted voices in the corridor.
His thought about Cathy was that at last the final brick had been placed in the wall of the cell around her; she was in perfect, soft darkness, and she didn’t really mind.
In the morning, David was awake long before breakfast. He put on his dressing gown, waited until the corridor was clear of staff, and went back to Cathy’s room. The door was closed.
He opened the door. The empty bed had been stripped to the mattress. The bedclothes had been removed. The dresser was clear. The wardrobe, with the doors hanging open, empty. The drawings, and cards, and notes, and coloured strings, and bells, that had been stuck on, or hung from the walls, had been taken down, except one home-made tinsel star near the door. The little bottles of lotion and perfume, useless gifts, which clustered on her shower-room shelf, had been removed with her toilet articles.
All Cathy’s possessions were in three black plastic bags, leaning against the wall with her television set and radio-CD player beside them. David opened the black bags, and looked inside. Two were crammed with clothes.
In the other bag were the photographs of her family. Desmond, his son and daughter, the nephews and nieces who were never seen, the dead parents, with the faded postcards, all jumbled about, facing each other, and facing away from each other, in the darkness of the bag. Words written to a Cathy who couldn’t read them, images of people and events that were, now that she was gone, meaningless.
He saw the ragged bundle of love letters, packed into the dark clutter. He thought of the passion behind the blurred handwriting, in a foreign language, which had come across the Atlantic Ocean, and perhaps been returned by a gentle young woman. A couple had faded away, across miles of implacable ocean. Now only a bundle of paper, in a black bag.
Keith caught David in the act, as he was rushing past the open door.
“Whoa, David! Ian put it in the book that you were here last night. She’s gone, man, but at least she had her party.”
“Do not resuscitate,” David said.
“That was Cathy’s choice.”
“She had no choice.”
“Whaddya mean?” Keith said, cuttingly.
David wanted to speak, but he couldn’t find suitable words. He wanted to say that Cathy had been unhappy about Do not resuscitate, but the forces ‘out there’ were irresistible. David wasn’t sure Keith would understand, well meaning as he was.
“What… happened?”
“A stroke. Now you go back to your room, get dressed, and go down to breakfast.”
David stood still. He could see in the wall mirror, that his plump cheeks were pale, and the usual tiny lines of good nature, which gathered around his mouth and eyes, had gone. He met Keith’s wide-open, receptive gaze with silence.
“OK, David. Stay here if you want. What the hell is breakfast anyway? We have one every day of our lives.”