My brother and I spent a lot of our time on our own projects, but near the end of his life we talked a lot. His name was Charlie. Those days, I would go to the hospital and afterwards I would sit out on the steps and cry. The doctors smoking outside grew to recognise me and mostly left me alone, the ones with a better bedside manner giving me a brief smile perhaps. Sometimes I borrowed a lighter off one of them, having started smoking again – I would say it was due to the stress, or the strain, but really it seemed like a good excuse to reacquaint myself with it. Usually, after weeping and having my cigarette, I would pick my way home along the A-roads, the cars whizzing past the narrow bank of earth that separated me from them.
On the way to High Wycombe, the A4010 cuts through the turf of a hundred ancient fields, the grains whipping in the spring air, bristly heads waving at the motorists who ignore them. You see different things when you go on foot. Things scaled for cars seem looming and ridiculous, sheet-metal signs the size of two men, slate-grey barriers fit for a siege. The houses, which are tiny toyboxes when you drive past them, gain a newfound solemn dignity, their brickwork pitted and scarred with old growth. The inhabitants, though you never spot them, are always about to peer out from a net curtain at you, or return from their gardens caked in sap and dirt.
One time, after maybe forty minutes of walking, I reached into my pocket and realised one of the doctor’s lighters was in there. A hard plastic bic, candy-blue and small as a little finger. I stopped and tried to remember which doctor I had taken it from, although it was difficult. They all looked very similar, pink and balding, as if they’d all been suffused with some kind of dye upon graduation and it had spread from the inside out over the years. I made to turn back, froze again; then continued anyway. I had very little to do that afternoon, except take my medicine. The doctor had probably just borrowed another lighter from one of his similar colleagues. Probably – or what if all that smoking clique had relied upon his lighter, having lost or borrowed away their own at earlier times? The thought of all those doctors huddling around outside, pulling the pockets of their faded jeans inside out, settled it for me, and I increased my pace.
An argument was happening ahead. A car sped past me, and close behind another. The windows on both cars were open and people were shouting, but the words smeared in the air and I could only remember their bared teeth, their craning necks.
Eventually I made it back to the hospital. I asked the receptionist if anyone had asked about a lighter, to which she shook her head. When I showed it to her, she made a face.
“That’s my lighter.” She said. She explained that she lent it a doctor, a man called Bradshaw, several days ago. She had been wondering what had happened to it.
I went to go see my brother again, but he was asleep. He slept badly most nights, and used the quiet afternoons to recuperate instead. By his bed was his notebook, or one of them. Notebooks were a fixture in his life, even then, and he never seemed to finish them. Whenever he came close another would bud off it like an amoeba and he would give in to the temptation of an uncracked spine, the virgin snow of all those pages, and move on. I took the notebook and flicked through it. Mostly it was filled with geometric designs, prisms and mandalas. On a few pages he had written does that make me a loser? Is it a loss?
After a while I realised he was looking at me through slits in his puffed-up eyes.
“Sorry.” I said, although he had given me permission before to read his notebooks.
“S’fine.” he replied, then coughed. “What day is it?”
“Wednesday. I came back to drop off the lighter for the receptionist.”
“You shouldn’t smoke. Bad habit.” He coughed again, although his lungs were fine. Whatever was killing him wasn’t in his lungs. It wasn’t anywhere.
Alexander James 