George’s mistake was to stand naked in front of the mirror.
He had paid his last visit to the surgery. The wound had granulated and no longer needed daily packing. Now he simply removed the previous day’s dressing after breakfast, slipped into a warm salt bath for ten minutes, got out, dried himself gently and applied a fresh dressing.
He was taking the tablets and rather looking forward to the wedding. With Katie and Ray running the show there was very little for him to do. Making a brief speech seemed a very simple contribution to the proceedings.
The mirror was foolish bravado in part, a celebration of the fact that he had put his problems behind him and was not going to let them restrict his behavior any longer.
Not that the reason mattered much now.
He got out of the bath, toweled himself dry, sucked his stomach in, pulled his shoulders back and stood to attention in front of the sink.
It was the cloud of red dots on his bicep which caught his attention first, the ones he had seen in the hotel room and managed to forget about. They seemed larger and more numerous than he remembered.
He felt sick.
The obvious thing to do was to back swiftly away from the mirror, get dressed, take a couple of codeine and open a bottle of wine. But he was unable to stop himself.
He began examining his skin in detail. On his arms. On his chest. On his stomach. Turning round and looking over his shoulder so that he could see his back.
It was not a good thing to do. It was like looking at a petri dish in a laboratory. Every square inch held some new terror. Dark brown moles, wrinkled like sultanas; freckles clumped into archipelagos of chocolate-colored islands; bland flesh-colored bumps, some slack, some full of fluid.
His skin had become a zoo of alien life forms. If he looked closely enough he would be able to see them moving and growing. He tried not to look closely.
He should have gone back to Dr. Barghoutian. Or to another, better doctor.
He had arrogantly thought he could solve his problems with long walks and crosswords. And all the time, the disease had laughed and spread and tightened its hold and given birth to other diseases.
He stopped looking into the mirror only when his vision blurred and his knees buckled, pitching him onto the bathroom floor.
At which point the picture of his own naked skin, still vivid in his mind’s eye, mutated into the skin of that man’s buttocks going up and down between Jean’s legs in the bedroom.
He could hear them again. The animal noises. The wrinkled flesh being wobbled and swung. The things he had not seen but could imagine only too clearly. That man’s organ going in and out of Jean. The sucking and the sliding. The pink folds.
In this house. In his own bed.
He could actually smell it. The toilet scent. Intimate and unwashed.
He was dying. And no one knew.
His wife was having sex with another man.
And he had to give a speech at his daughter’s wedding.
He was clinging to the bottom rung of the heated towel rail, like a man trying not to be swept away by a flood.
It was like before. But worse. There was no floor beneath him. The bathroom, the house, the village, Peterborough…it had all peeled back and shredded and blown away, leaving nothing but infinite space, just him and a towel rail. As if he had stepped outside the spaceship and found the earth gone.
He was mad again. And there was no hope this time. He thought he had cured himself. But he had failed. There was no one else he could rely on. He was going to remain like this until he died.
Codeine. He needed the codeine. He couldn’t do anything about the cancer. Or Jean. Or the wedding. The only thing he could do was to dull it all a little.
Keeping hold of the towel rail he started getting to his feet. But as he straightened himself the soft flesh of his stomach was exposed and he could feel it itching and squirming. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it round his abdomen. He transferred his hands to the rim of the bath and stood up.
He could do this. It was a simple thing. Take the pills and wait. That was all he had to do.
He opened the cabinet and took the packet down. He swigged back four tablets with water from the bath tap so as to avoid the mirror above the sink. Was four dangerous? He had no idea and did not care.
He staggered into the bedroom. He dropped the towel and somehow managed to slip into his clothes, despite his shaking hands. He climbed onto the bed and put the duvet over his head and started reciting nursery rhymes until he realized that this was where it had happened, right here, where his head was lying, and he felt like vomiting and knew he had to do something, anything, to keep himself moving and occupied until the drugs started to work.
He threw the duvet off and got to his feet and took a string of deep breaths to steady himself before heading downstairs.
Assuming Jean was busy elsewhere, he planned to grab a bottle of wine and head straight out to the studio. If the codeine did not work he would get drunk. He no longer cared what Jean thought.
But Jean was not busy elsewhere. He was halfway down the stairs when she appeared round the banisters brandishing the phone receiver saying, exasperatedly, “There you are. I’ve been calling you. Ray would like a chat.”
George froze, like an animal spotted by a bird of prey, hoping that if he remained motionless he might blend into the background.
“Are you going to take it or not?” said Jean, waggling the phone at him.
He watched his hand rise up to take hold of the phone as he walked down the last few steps. Jean was wearing a rubber glove and holding a tea towel. She handed the phone over, shook her head and vanished back into the kitchen.
George put the phone to his ear.
The pictures in his head toggled giddily from one grotesque image to another. The tramp’s face on the station platform. Jean’s naked thighs. His own sick skin.
Ray said, “George. It’s Ray. Katie tells me you wanted a chat.”
It was like those phone calls that woke you up at night. It was hard remembering what you were meant to do.
He had absolutely no idea what he had wanted to chat to Ray about.
Was this really happening, or had he tipped over into some kind of delusional state? Was he still lying on the bed upstairs?
“George?” said Ray. “Are you there?”
He tried to say something. A small mewing noise came out of his mouth. He moved the receiver away from his head and looked at it. Ray’s voice was still emerging from the little holes. George did not want this to carry on any longer.
Carefully, he put the phone back onto the receiver. He turned and walked into the kitchen. Jean was filling the washing machine and he did not have the energy for the argument that would ensue if he walked out of the door with a bottle of wine.
“That was quick,” said Jean.
“Wrong number,” said George.
He was halfway down the garden in his socks before he realized why Jean might not have fallen for this brilliant piece of subterfuge.