The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

tired him, and his thigh seemed raw again. He wondered if they would be able to call for a taxi from the house.

      Dr Matthews turned his head. He seemed to be able to look at Conrad and his uncle with a blue eye on each of them. ‘Who have you got for the boy?’ he asked in a sharper voice. ‘Nathan is still there, I believe …’

      ‘One of the younger men, James. You probably won’t know him, but he’s a good fellow. Knight.’

      ‘Knight?’ The name was repeated with only a faint hint of comment. ‘And when does the boy go in?’

      ‘Tomorrow. Don’t you, Conrad?’

      Conrad was about to speak when he noticed that a faint simpering was coming from the man in the bed. Suddenly exhausted by this bizarre scene, and under the impression that the dying physician’s macabre humour was directed at himself, Conrad rose in his chair, rattling his sticks together. ‘Uncle, could I wait outside …?’

      ‘My boy–’ Dr Matthews had freed his right hand from the bed. ‘I was laughing at your uncle, not at you. He always had a great sense of humour. Or none at all. Which is it, Theo?’

      ‘I see nothing funny, James. Are you saying I shouldn’t have brought him here?’

      Dr Matthews lay back. ‘Not at all – I was there at his beginning, let him be here for my end …’ He looked at Conrad again. ‘I wish you the best, Conrad. No doubt you wonder why I don’t accompany you to the hospital.’

      ‘Well, I …’ Conrad began, but his uncle held his shoulder.

      ‘James, it’s time for us to be leaving. I think we can take the matter as understood.’

      ‘Obviously we can’t.’ Dr Matthews raised a hand again, frowning at the slight noise. ‘I’ll only be a moment, Theo, but if I don’t tell him no one will, certainly not Dr Knight. Now, Conrad, you’re seventeen?’

      When Conrad nodded Dr Matthews went on: ‘At that age, if I remember, life seems to stretch on for ever. One is probably living as close to eternity as is possible. As you get older, though, you find more and more that everything worthwhile has finite bounds, by and large those of time – from ordinary things to the most important ones, your marriage, children and so on, even life itself. The hard lines drawn around things give them their identity. Nothing is brighter than the diamond.’

      ‘James, you’ve had enough –’

      ‘Quiet, Theo.’ Dr Matthews raised his head, almost managing to sit up. ‘Perhaps, Conrad, you would explain to Dr Knight that it is just because we value our lives so much that we refuse to diminish them. There are a thousand hard lines drawn between you and me, Conrad, differences of age, character and experience, differences of time. You have to earn these distinctions for yourself. You can’t borrow them from anyone else, least of all from the dead.’

      Conrad looked round as the door opened. The older of the nuns stood in the hall outside. She nodded to his uncle. Conrad settled his limb for the journey home, waiting for Uncle Theodore to make his goodbyes to Dr Matthews. As the nun stepped towards the bed he saw on the train of her starched gown a streak of blood.

      Outside they plodded together past the undertakers, Conrad heaving himself along on his sticks. As the old people in the gardens waved to them Uncle Theodore said, ‘I’m sorry he seemed to laugh at you, Conrad. It wasn’t meant.’

      ‘Was he there when I was born?’

      ‘He attended your mother. I thought it only right that you should see him before he died. Why he thought it so funny I can’t understand.’

      Almost six months later to the day, Conrad Foster walked down towards the beach road and the sea. In the sunlight he could see the high dunes above the beach, and beyond them the gulls sitting out on the submerged sandbank in the mouth of the estuary. The traffic along the beach road was busier than he remembered from his previous visit, and the sand picked up by the wheels of the speeding cars and trucks drifted in clouds across the fields.

      Conrad moved at a good pace along the road, testing his new leg to the full. During the past four months the bonds had consolidated themselves with the minimum of pain, and the leg was, if anything, stronger and more resilient than his own had ever been. At times, when he walked along without thinking, it seemed to stride ahead with a will of its own.

      Yet despite its good service, and the fulfilment of all that Dr Knight had promised him for it, Conrad had failed to accept the leg. The thin hairline of the surgical scar that circled his thigh above the knee was a frontier that separated the two more absolutely than any physical barrier. As Dr Matthews had stated, its presence seemed to diminish him, in some way subtracting rather than adding to his own sense of identity. This feeling had grown with each week and month as the leg itself recovered its strength. At night they would lie together like silent partners in an uneasy marriage.

      In the first month after his recovery Conrad had agreed to help Dr Knight and the hospital authorities in the second stage of their campaign to persuade the elderly to undergo restorative surgery rather than throw away their lives, but after Dr Matthew’s death Conrad decided to take no further part in the scheme. Unlike Dr Knight, he realized that there was no real means of persuasion, and that only those on their deathbeds, such as Dr Matthews, were prepared to argue the matter at all. The others simply smiled and waved from their quiet gardens.

      In addition, Conrad knew that his own growing uncertainty over the new limb would soon be obvious to their sharp eyes. A large scar now disfigured the skin above the shin-bone, and the reasons were plain. Injuring it while using his uncle’s lawnmower, he had deliberately let the wound fester, as if this act of selfmutilation might symbolize the amputation of the limb. However, it seemed only to thrive on this blood letting.

      A hundred yards away was the junction with the beach road, the fine sand lifting off the surface in the light breeze. A quarter of a mile away a line of vehicles approached at speed, the drivers of the cars at the rear trying to overtake two heavy trucks. Far away, in the estuary, there was a faint cry from the sea. Although tired, Conrad found himself breaking into a run. Somewhere a familiar conjunction of events was guiding him back towards the place of his accident.

      As he reached the corner the first of the trucks was drawing close to him, the driver flashing his headlamps as Conrad hovered on the kerb, eager to get back to the pedestrian island with its freshly painted pylon.

      Above the noise he saw the gulls rising into the air above the beach, and heard their harsh cries as the white sword drew itself across the sky. As it swept down over the beach the old men with their metal-tipped gaffs were moving from the road to their hiding-place among the dunes.