No life
No trouble
Jeremy Clarke
Dick?' I said to the sister on duty, `Dick Brooking?' She looked doubtful. 'Lit- tle chap,' I said. 'Tiny.' Dick's mother died giving birth to him in a south Devon work- house in 1921. Undernourished in child- hood, he had attained manhood in miniature. 'You mean Wilfred!' she said, directing me to the men's ward. Dick was sitting up in bed wearing an oxygen mask; the tumour was pressing on his windpipe, restricting his breathing. There were sever- al Christmas cards among the get well cards on his bedside table.
`What's all this Wilfred business?' I asked. 'It's my name,' Dick gasped, putting aside the clear plastic oxygen mask for a moment, 'but don't worry your head about it.'
He'd looked so well when he came to lunch a fortnight ago. And he'd laughed so much when Uncle Jack kept asking him what day of the week it was that the tube in his throat became dislodged and he had to return to out-patients the next day to have it realigned. Today, though, he looked frail, gaunt and even smaller than usual. 'So how are you, Wilf?' I asked.
"Tis murder, Jeremy,' he said in his broad south Devon accent. `Turble. I hope you never get like this, I do straight. I told the doctor I don't want to suffer, but I don't want to go just yet either.' Then he started to cry. To cheer us both up I told him a joke, which I'll repeat here. Chap goes to his doctor for the results of a urine test. 'You've got Hags, I'm afraid,' says the doctor. 'It's a virulent combination of her- pes, Aids, gonhorroea and syphilis.'
`Oh dear,' says the man. 'Is there any cure?"Well, what we can do,' says the doc, `is put you in isolation for six months and feed you on kippers and pancakes.' Why kippers and pancakes?' asks the man.
`Well,' says the doe, 'it's the only food we'll be able to slide under the door.' Dick looked sadly at me through his oxy- gen mask, which he had replaced while I told the joke, as if an increase in pure oxy- gen to his brain might help him understand it better. Jokes were never one of Dick's strong points.
`I just don't want to suffer, Jeremy,' he said when I'd finished. When Dick was eight, he was adopted by a lady whom Dick always referred to as Anty. He doted on Anty, nursing her during her latter years when she became infirm. Dick inherited her cottage, which he sold about ten years ago to an insurance company. The deal was that he would stay in the cottage until he died, and receive a generous monthly pay- ment. From existing in near penury on his gardener's wages for half a century, Dick suddenly found himself with more money than he'd ever dreamed of. Dick had no vices to spend his money on that I know of. Instead he bought a colour television and built up an extensive collection of John Wayne videos. When he'd bought every John Wayne video on the market (he had over a hundred of them) he diversified into expensive porcelain figurines. Every Wednesday he'd catch the bus to town, withdraw a wad of cash from his bank and head for the china shop to buy another half a dozen. The girls who worked there looked forward to his weekly visit. 'Dick's out today!' they'd say — for this small nut- brown man with the high-pitched voice and forceful opinions was something of a local character.
Dick asked me to root though his hold- all, which was under the bed, and find him a clean handkerchief. He dried his eyes on it, gave his nose a good blow and composed himself. He'd made all the arrangements for his funeral, he said, right down to the inscription on his gravestone. Everything had already been paid for. 'I don't want to be a trouble to anyone after I'm gone, Jere- my,' he said. We sat in silence for a while, and then I told him I'd walked up to the village shop that morning unaware that I was holding a pair of my pants in my hand. I'd been on the way to the airing cupboard and been diverted to the shop on an errand to buy potatoes. It was my 'Age of Steam' pair, illustrated with famous old engines such as the Mallard and the Flying Scots- man, which I held up to show everyone in the shop, it being the kind of place where that kind of thing goes down well. This greatly appealed to Dick's somewhat ele- mentary sense of humour and for a blessed moment he forgot he was about to die and chuckled happily. When it was time for me to go I asked him whether I could get him a newspaper or anything from the hospital shop before I went. He said he couldn't read — didn't I know? He'd not missed much, I told him. As I walked off the ward I turned and looked back at him. He shook his little fist at me, to show me he wasn't going to give up easily. That was on the Monday. He died in his sleep on Wednesday morning.
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