Italian Shoes

  ‘I don’t believe a word you say. Can’t you tell me the truth?’

  ‘I don’t think you want to hear that.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Why do you think I have the sword with me? I want to be able to defend myself. There was a time when I couldn’t. When I was eleven.’

  I realised that this was probably true. Her vulnerability cut right through her anger.

  ‘I believe you. But why have you come here? You can’t really mean that you are on your way to Russia?’

  ‘I know I shall be successful there.’

  ‘What will you do? Dig for oil with your bare hands? They won’t even let you into the country. Why can’t you stay with Agnes?’

  ‘I have to move on. I left a note saying I was heading north.’

  ‘But this is south!’

  ‘I don’t want her to find me. She’s like a dog sometimes. She can sniff down anybody who runs away. I only want to stay here for a short time. Then I shall be off.’

  ‘You must realise that this isn’t possible.’

  ‘I’ll let you if you allow me to stay.’

  ‘Let me what?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  It suddenly dawned on me what she was offering.

  ‘Who do you think I am? I shall forget you ever said that. I didn’t hear anything.’

  I was so upset that I stormed out. I thought about the rumours that Jansson was no doubt busy spreading all over the islands. I would be Fredrik, the man who was secretly taking advantage of young girls imported from some Arabian country or other.

  I sat down on the jetty. What Sima had said didn’t only embarrass me, it also saddened me. I was beginning to understand the scale of the burdens she was dragging around with her.

  After a while she came down to the jetty.

  ‘Sit here,’ I said. ‘You can stay here a few days.’

  I could feel her anxiety. Her legs were shaking. I couldn’t just throw her out. Besides, I needed time to think. A fourth woman had now invaded my life, and she needed my help, though I had no idea how to give it.

  We ate the last hare steak from the freezer. Sima poked around at the food rather than eating it. She didn’t say much. Her worries seemed to be increasing all the time. She didn’t want to sleep in the room with the anthill. I made a bed up for her in the kitchen. It was barely nine o’clock when she said she wanted to turn in.

  The cat would have to spend the night out. I went upstairs and lay down on my bed to read. It was all quiet down in the kitchen, but I could see light coming from the kitchen window. She still hadn’t switched the light off. As I drew my curtains, I could see my cat sitting in the light from the kitchen.

  She would soon be leaving me as well. It was as if she had already turned into an ethereal being.

  I was reading one of my grandfather’s books from 1911 about rare birds, especially waders. I must have dozed off without putting the light out. When I opened my eyes, it still wasn’t eleven o’clock. I had been asleep for half an hour at most. I got up and opened the curtains slightly. The kitchen light was out, and the cat had vanished. I was just going to lie down again when I heard something. There were sounds coming from the kitchen. I opened my door and listened intently. Sima was crying. I hesitated. Should I go downstairs? Did she want to be left in peace? After a while the sobbing seemed to fade away. I closed the door as quietly as I could, and went back to bed. I knew exactly where to put my feet in order to avoid making the floorboards creak.

  The book about waders had fallen on to the floor. I didn’t pick it up, but lay in the dark and wondered what I should do. The only right and proper thing to do was to phone the coastguards. But why should I always do the right and proper thing? I decided to phone Agnes. She could decide. Despite everything, Agnes was the person closest to Sima in this life, if I had understood the facts correctly.

  I woke up as usual shortly after six. The thermometer outside the bedroom window showed plus four degrees. It was foggy.

  I got dressed and went downstairs. I was still treading carefully as I assumed Sima would still be asleep. I thought I would take the coffee pot with me to the boathouse where I have an electric hotplate. It’s been there since my grandfather’s day. He used it to boil mixtures of tar and resin to make his boat watertight.

  The kitchen door was ajar. I opened it slowly as I knew it creaked. Sima was lying on top of the bed in her underclothes. The lamp in the corner by the sofa was switched on and acted like a spotlight to reveal that her body and the sheet were covered in blood.

  I couldn’t believe what I saw. I knew it was true, but it felt as if it couldn’t possibly have happened even so. I tried to shake some life into her, at the same time looking for the deepest cuts. She hadn’t used the sword, but one of my grandfather’s old fish knives. For some reason that made me even more desperate, as if she had dragged him, the friendly old fisherman, into her wretched misery. I yelled at her to wake up, but her body was inert, her eyes closed. The worst wounds were around her abdomen, her stomach and her wrists. Strangely enough, there were also wounds in the back of her head. How she had managed to stab herself there was beyond me. The most serious one of all was in her right arm – I had noticed the previous day that she was left-handed – she must have lost a lot of blood. I made a pressure bandage from some kitchen towels. Then I took her pulse. It was faint. All the time I was trying to shake her into life. I didn’t know if she had taken any pills as well, or perhaps used some drug or other – there was a smell in the kitchen I didn’t recognise. I sniffed quickly at an ashtray, another of Grandma’s old coffee saucers that she had taken from a cupboard. She had presumably been smoking hash or pot. I cursed the fact that all my medical instruments were down at the boathouse. I ran out, stumbling over the cat sitting just outside the door, fetched a blood pressure cuff and returned to the kitchen. Her blood pressure was very low. She was in a serious condition.

  I phoned the coastguard. Hans Lundman answered. I used to play with him in the summers when I was a child. His father, who was a pilot, and my grandfather were good friends.

  Hans is a sensible man. He knows people wouldn’t ring the coastguard in the early hours of the morning unless it was urgent.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I have a girl in my cottage who needs to be taken to hospital immediately.’

  ‘It’s foggy,’ said Lundman, ‘but we’ll be there within half an hour.’

  It was thirty-two minutes before I heard the powerful engines of the coastguard boat. They were the longest minutes of my life. Longer than when I was mugged in Rome and thought I was going to die. I was powerless. Sima was on her way out of this world. I had no way of assessing how much blood she’d lost. There was nothing I could do for her apart from the pressure bandage. When it became clear that my shouting at her to wake up didn’t help, I pressed my mouth close to her ear and whispered that she had to stay alive, she couldn’t just die, it wasn’t right, not here in my kitchen, not now when spring had arrived, not on a day like the one that had just begun. Could she hear me? I don’t know. But I continued whispering in her ear. I told her fragments of fairy tales I remembered from my own childhood, I told her about the lovely smells that filled the island when the hawthorn and lilac had come into blossom. I said what we would be having for dinner, and described the remarkable birds that waded along the water’s edge before darting forward to snap up their prey. I was talking to save her life, and my own – I was terrified that she might die.

  I heard Hans Lundman and his assistant approaching and shouted to them to hurry. They quickly transferred her into a stretcher from the bed, and we were off without delay. I ran down to the boat in my stockinged feet, carrying my cut-down wellington boots in my hand. I didn’t stop to close the door behind me.

  We sailed into the fog. Lundman was at the wheel, and he asked me how things stood.

  ‘I don’t know. Her blood pressure is falling.’

  We were off at f
ull throttle, straight into the whiteness. His assistant, whom I didn’t know, was looking in anguish at Sima, strapped in the stretcher. I wondered if he was about to faint.

  An ambulance was waiting on the quayside. Everything was enveloped in the white fog.

  ‘Let’s hope she makes it,’ said Lundman as we left.

  He looked worried. Presumably he knew from experience when a person was close to death.

  It took us forty-three minutes to get to the hospital. The ambulance woman sitting beside the stretcher was called Sonja, and in her forties. She set up a drip and worked calmly and methodically, occasionally communicating with the hospital about Sima’s condition.

  ‘Has she taken anything? Tablets?’

  ‘I don’t know. She might have been smoking pot.’

  ‘Is it your daughter?’

  ‘No. She simply turned up out of the blue.’

  ‘Have you contacted her relatives?’

  ‘I don’t know who they are. She lives in a foster home. I’ve only met her once before. I don’t know why she came to me.’

  ‘Ring the care home.’

  She reached for a mobile phone hanging from the wall of the ambulance. I rang directory enquiries and was put through to Agnes’s house. When the answering machine responded, I explained the situation precisely, said which hospital we were heading for, and left a telephone number that Sonja had given me.

  ‘Ring again,’ she said. ‘People wake up if you keep on trying.’

  ‘She might be out in the shed.’

  ‘Doesn’t she have a mobile?’

  I didn’t have the strength to phone any more.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t have a mobile. She’s unusual.’

  It wasn’t until Sima had been taken into A&E and I was sitting on a bench in a corridor that I got through to Agnes. I could hear her anxious breathing.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s in a very bad way.’

  ‘Tell me exactly how things are.’

  ‘There’s a risk that she might die. It depends how much blood she’s lost, how deep the trauma is. Do you know if she took sleeping pills?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I passed the nurse the phone.

  ‘It’s the girl’s guardian. Talk to her. I’ve explained that it’s serious.’

  I walked along the corridor. An elderly man naked from the waist down was lying on a trolley, whimpering. The nurses were trying to calm a hysterical mother with a screaming infant in her arms. I continued until I reached the A&E entrance. An ambulance was standing there, empty and unlit. I thought of what Sima had said, about the telescope that could home in on an individual person standing on the moon. Try to stay alive, I whispered to myself. Chara, little Chara, perhaps one day you will become that person who went unnoticed here on earth, but got her own back standing on the moon and waving down to the rest of us.

  That was a prayer, or perhaps an invocation. Sima, lying in intensive care and trying to stay alive, needed all the help she could get. I don’t believe in God. But you can create your own gods whenever you need them.

  I stood there appealing to a place near Los Angeles called Mount Wilson. If Sima survived, I would pay for her to go there. I would find out who this Wilson was, the man who had given his name to the mountain.

  There’s nothing to prevent a god having a name. Why shouldn’t the Creator have the name Wilson?

  If she died, it would be my fault. If I’d gone downstairs when I heard her crying, she might not have injured herself. I’m a doctor, I ought to have understood. But above all else, I am a human being who ought to have recognised some of the enormous loneliness that a little girl can feel.

  Without warning, I found myself longing for my father. I hadn’t done so since he died. His death had caused me great pain. Even though we had never spoken intimately to each other, we had shared an unspoken understanding. He had lived long enough to experience my success in training to become a doctor – and never concealed his surprise and pride over it. During his final days, when he was confined to bed with his excruciatingly painful cancer that had spread from a little black spot on the heel of his foot to become metastases all over him that he compared to moss on a stone, he often spoke about the white coat that I would be privileged to wear. I thought his concept of power being embodied in that white coat was embarrassing. It was only afterwards that I realised he envisaged me as the one who would gain revenge on his behalf. He had also worn a white jacket, but people had trampled all over him. I would be the means through which he got his own back. Nobody belittled a doctor in a white coat.

  I missed him now. And that magical trip to the black forest pool. I wanted to turn the clock back, I wanted to undo most of my life. My mother also flitted before my eyes. Lavender and tears, a life I had never understood. Had she carried around an invisible sword? Perhaps she was standing on the far bank of the river of life, waving to Sima?

  In my mind, I also tried to talk to Harriet and Louise. But they remained silent, as if they thought I ought to be able to sort this out myself.

  I went back inside and found a small waiting room that was empty. After a while, I was informed that Sima’s condition was still critical. She was going to be moved to an intensive care ward. I shared the lift with her. Both men in charge of her trolley were black. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back, and had an urge to tell him about that remarkable telescope on Mount Wilson. Sima was lying with her eyes closed; she had a drip and was being fed oxygen through a nose catheter. I bent over her and whispered into her ear: ‘Chara, when you are well again you will visit Mount Wilson and see that there is somebody standing on the moon who looks remarkably like you.’

  A doctor came and said nothing was certain, but that they would probably need to operate and that Sima was not reacting to anything they attempted. He asked me several questions, but I had to tell him that I simply didn’t know if she was suffering from any illnesses, or if she had tried to commit suicide before. The woman who would be able to answer questions like that was on her way here.

  Agnes arrived shortly after ten. It occurred to me to wonder how she could drive a car with only one arm. Did she have a specially adapted vehicle? But it wasn’t important. I took her behind the curtain to where Sima was lying. Agnes sobbed quietly, but I didn’t want Sima to hear anything like that and took Agnes out again.

  ‘There’s no change,’ I said. ‘But the very fact that you’ve come makes everything better. Try talking to her. She needs to know that you’re here.’

  ‘Will she be able to hear what I say?’

  ‘We don’t know. But we can hope.’

  Agnes spoke to the doctor. No illnesses, no medication, no previous suicide attempts as far as she was aware. The doctor, who was about my age, said that the situation was unchanged but slightly more stable since Sima had been admitted. There was no reason for the moment to be unduly worried.

  Agnes was relieved. There was a coffee machine in the corridor. Between us we managed to scrape together the necessary small change for two cups of awful coffee. I was surprised by the adroitness with which she used one hand where I needed two.

  I told Agnes what had happened. She shook her head slowly.

  ‘She might well have been on the way to Russia. Sima always tries to climb mountains. She’s never satisfied with walking along normal paths like the rest of us.’

  ‘But why should she want to come and visit me?’

  ‘You live on an island. Russia is on the other side of the sea.’

  ‘But when she gets to the island I live on, she tries to take her own life. I don’t get it.’

  ‘You can never tell by looking at a person just how badly damaged he or she is inside.’

  ‘She told me a few things.’

  ‘So perhaps you have some idea.’

  At about three o’clock, a nurse came to say that Sima’s condition had stabilised. If we wanted to go home, we could. She would phone us if there was any c
hange. As we had nowhere to go to we stayed there for the rest of the day and all night. Agnes curled up on a narrow sofa and dozed. I spent most of the time on a chair leafing through well-thumbed magazines in which people I’d never heard of, pictured in dazzlingly bright colours, trumpeted to the world how important they were. We occasionally went to get something to eat, but we were never away for long.

  Shortly after five in the morning, a nurse came to the waiting room to inform us that there had been a sudden change. Serious internal bleeding had occurred, and surgeons were about to operate in an attempt to stabilise her condition.

  We had taken things too much for granted. Sima was suddenly drifting away from us again.

  At twenty past six the doctor came to see us. He seemed to be very tired, sat down on a chair and stared at his hands. They hadn’t been able to stop the bleeding. Sima was dead. She had never come round. If we needed support, the hospital offered a counselling service.

  We went in together to see her. All the tubes had been removed, and the machines switched off. The yellow pallor that makes the newly dead look like a waxwork had already taken a grip of her face. I don’t know how many dead people I have seen in my life. I have watched people die, I have performed post-mortem examinations, I have held human brains in my hands. Nevertheless, it was me who burst into tears; Agnes was in so much pain that she was incapable of reaction. She grasped my arm; I could feel that she was strong – and I wished that she would never let go.

  I wanted to stay there, but Agnes asked me to go back home. She would stay with Sima, I had done all that I could, she was grateful, but she wanted to be on her own. She accompanied me to my taxi. It was a beautiful morning, still chilly. Yellow coltsfoot were in bloom on the verge leading up to A&E.

  A coltsfoot moment, I thought. Just now, this morning, when Sima was lying dead inside there. Just for a brief moment she had sparkled like a ruby. Now it was as if she had never existed.

  The only thing about death that scares me is its utter indifference.

  ‘The sword,’ I said. ‘And she had a case as well. What do you want me to do with that?’