15. Exit with Jenny

David is weak and in hospital and his consciousness is no more than a mishmash of memories...

THE BODY IN THE BED

15. Exit with Jenny

David’s mind was in a state of almost complete confusion as night threatened eventually to give way to day in his small hospital room. Unaware that he was actually in a hospital bed he was almost conscious of odd chinks of sound, could feel the touch of fingers on his skin, on rare moments gentle fingers needing to respond to no more than an urge to give a fellow human being the reassurance that he wasn’t alone in his chaotic world.

And then odd images from a past he would always have preferred to forget grafted themselves onto the nothing that was his unconscious mind and threatened to return him to wakefulness.

Daddy, he wept in the bleak frailty of a broken mind, and for s splintered moment that daddy, that father, leered at him, stick raised in anger though David had no idea what had angered him. But when that fractured moment was over he knew the man would come back again and again, just as angry, hardly smiling or giving any impression of humanity.

He knew nothing of love of kindness.

And there would be pain. Always pain when the man was anywhere near him. Even after he was led out of jail once his punishment was over. David had been a little older, but remembered, relived, the fear he felt. It was true in his mind that when his father was actually no longer living in the house his shadow was there, every room containing a remnant memory of hi perverse anger.

Even when he had left school and gone out into the world in search of work, and even finding it in the council offices, dealing with the problems of tenants in the dwindling number of council homes, his father had been smouldering somewhere in the world or at the local pub gathering enough strength to be angry even at a distance.

To every life a rainbow shines a multicoloured light.

Unexpectedly and without seeking anyone he had met Jenny.

Jenny was mousey and timid, but he had loved her with so much passion that he had been forced to tell her again and again how he felt. And she was back now, in his mind, the sweetest, loveliest shadow from a shattered past.

“My darling David,” she had crooned as she slipped one hand past the belt of his trousers, and that had been all right even though he knew his absent father would rise up in anger at the very thought of it. But it had been a physical token of something that wasn’t hatred and punishment. It hadn’t hurt. It was alright.

“Sweetheart Jenny,” he had stammered back, sure and yet unsure of what to say or do, and she had smiled that wide-lipped smile of hers and had understood.

“You’re alright with me,” she hafd said.

ALRIGHT WITH ME!

The three words burned their way from hiss brain and became an audible whisper.

ALRIGHT WITH ME…

Because Jenny hadn’t lasted for long. Not because she had rejected him, she had never done anything like that, but because she had died.

He had knocked her door and a white faced mother had looked at him, and she was crying.

“The doctor said it was sudden adult death. Unexpected,” she had said as if that was explanation enough because Jenny had always there when he knocked the door, mousey little love, smiling for him, a broad mouthed smile welcoming him like it didn’t that day.

“She passed away in the night. Unexpectedly.” her mother had said, “My little girl, my angel, my only child…the doctor came and said it was sudden adult death, no reason, it just happened...”

And it had hit him like a pile driver might hit a man who had never known that sort of grief before. It wasn’t the sort of sadness from endless tirades of blame or the viciousness of a father’s wrath, but a kind of empathy for a girl he’d held in his arms and in his heart for no more than a few brief weeks.

“Sudden adult death… I don’t understand.” he had said.

“Go away, you silly boy,” the distraught mother had cried at him, and shut the door before he could ask her what she was talking about.

Now it started to come home to him.

“I’ve come for you, dear boy,” she said from the doorway, and he opened his eyes to see her standing there. Her mother had said, sudden adult death, but there she was, in all her mousey radiance, the beautiful, wonderful Jenny, and she smiled her special smile.

“Come on,” she said, I’ll take you... you’ll be alright with me...”

“You’ll take me? Where?” he whispered.

“Silly boy, with me. Come on, out of that bed! Come to your Jenny.”

And suddenly it was easy. He stood up on legs that felt more sturdy than they’d ever been and looked down at his motionless flesh still lying on the bed, pale and forgiving. It wasn’t breathing, nothing stirred the air of the pre-dawn hospital room, but anyway he walked, or was it glided? Could he have somehow just transported himself like in a dream? To Jenny.

And she took his hand in hers.

Her cold hand warmed him.

“you’re alright with me..” she breathed, soundlessly, this way,” she somehow transferred the reassurance into his thoughts, and the two of them somehow moved through the hospital, through a ward, past an operating theatre, down some stairs and through a crowded reception, to the world outside.

“Now you’re free,” she blew at him, and kissed him firmly on the lips, and he knew he was free.

“I didn’t do it,” he managed to convey to her, “and I feel so free.”

Free to feel nothing. Free to have nothing else to fear. “Free to spend his last long second of consciousness knowing just how much he loved his Jenny before the two of them dissolved into the pre-dawn air and were no more than shadows in the memories of others.

© Peter Rogerson 10.06.23

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