I Save Another Life and Nunky Shines

Norbert

14

I Save Another Life and Nunky Shines

My interview is scheduled for a month after the inspection. I tell Auntie I have to attend a training day in Macarbrough. (Imagine the ridicule if I didn’t get the job!)

There is a morose-looking man sitting on the back seat of the 32 bus. I choose the seat in front and turn round. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but the back seat is reserved for dead people. Look, there’s a sign.’

‘It’s all right, young fella, I’m practically dead anyway.’

‘I admit you don’t look very happy, but technically you’re still breathing, which isn’t dead. I know. I work at the hospital.’

‘I’m on my way to Termination Bridge, to chuck myself off and drown.’

I find myself wishing I didn’t have such a strong sense of civic duty. ‘Life can’t be that bad, surely?’

‘Wife trouble,’ he moans. ‘Marriage might just be a word to you, but to me it’s a sentence.’

This happens a lot in my job, having to listen to the woes of others. It cheers me up for nearly a minute.

He looks out the window in reminiscence. ‘I got married in France, whilst working there as a TV repairman. The reception was excellent. After a year we came home to Brundy, and for a while I was earning good money operating a concrete mixer, but I found the work getting harder and harder.’ He shakes his head. ‘When the marriage turned sour we returned to Paris to try and rekindle our love, but things got so bad I threw myself into the river.’

‘You must have been in Seine?’

‘Yes, it was bad.’

‘So what happened? Has she left you?’

‘Much worse, she’s come back.’

I think about the last few weeks and how low I sank. I’m still not out of the woods, but at least there is a glimmer of hope on my horizon.

‘I know someone just like you. He tried to commit proper suicide a month ago and inadvertently over the past three years through substance abuse. He was in despair with nothing to live for, but then out of the blue something positive happened and he changed his mind. You never know what’s round the corner.’

‘A fast moving bus, I hope.’ He manages a weak grin. ‘How were you planning on ending it?’

‘Poison,’ I say, without thinking. ‘I couldn’t jump off a bridge. I’m scared of heights.’

‘It isn’t the height that kills you, young fella, it’s the floor you have to worry about, or in my case the water. I can’t swim.’

We spend the rest of the journey cocooned in introverted misery, and are the only two passengers left on the bus at the Interchange. We have both missed our stop.

‘Come on, guys. This is the end of the road. It’s time to get off.’

We look at one another and sigh. We stumble off the bus and shake hands. Then we stumble back on the bus and thank the grim reaper – cunningly disguised as a totally bemused bus driver – for his advice. Then we stumble off the bus and say more sad farewells. Then we stumble back on the bus and ask for a single to Termination Bridge and one to the hospital.

I think this is why I’m not at my sharpest for the interview.

The panel consists of the Haematology Chief Technician, Baldy Warnetires-Skidmore, Peregrine Foote-Wharmer and a long-nosed woman from Human Resources who has forgotten to remove her bicycle helmet, which I find distracting.

The interrogation starts off badly when the cyclist from HR asks if I’ve brought along my CV.

‘I haven’t got a Citrôen. I don’t even drive. I came on the bus. Twice.’

Next I screw up a serological question on Low Ionic Strength Saline (the liquid we suspend red cells in to stop them from bursting). Warnetires-Skidmore asks: ‘What is a LISS auto?’

To which I reply: ‘A country in Africa.’

Mr Foote-Wharmer takes control and guides me through. Luckily, I am the only candidate. If an orang-utan had turned up, the job would have gone to the monkey.

On the way out, I notice a puddle of water gathering below a trolley in the corridor outside A&E. It is the jumper from the bus. He is soaked to the skin and clutching a sheet of paper.

‘You survived, then?’

He looks at me, morosely. ‘I got off at the wrong stop again and asked for directions, but there was a mix-up. I threw myself off Temptation Bridge instead, which spans a paddling pool in the park. I was rescued by a six-year old.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘What about you?’

‘I got the job. I’ve turned the corner. It’s time to put the past behind me and make a fresh start.’

‘You won’t need the poison anymore, then?’ he asks, hopefully.

I squeeze his shoulder. ‘Maybe jumping off the wrong bridge is a sign things are about to change for the better. When you get home she might be gone again.’

He raises the sheet of paper slightly. ‘Not to worry, I’ll try again tomorrow. The nurse very kindly drew me a map.’

*

I walk into the house and announce the good news.

Nunky bursts into tears. ‘Mi babby. Mi babby don’t love me no more.’

I had warned him I might be moving to the city, but only during the week, that I would come home at weekends and holidays and off days and that he would hardly notice I’d gone, but I guess he’d simply not understood.

Auntie is livid. ‘How dare you go behind my back?’ she yells. ‘Go outside and lay down in the road. If you’re not run over inside two minutes I will come out and rub your face on it.’

‘Mi babby, mi poor babby,’ Nunky wails.

‘Get up to your room, moron,’ she shouts, slapping Nunky across the head before turning on me. ‘I will cut you off. You won’t see another penny.’

‘I’ll open an account at a bank in the city and have my wages transferred.’

‘It doesn’t work like that, numbskull. You will still be working for the same trust, your wages paid into the account I manage as your guardian. Changing hospitals doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.’

‘I’ll ask them to stop the payments and give me cash instead.’

‘It doesn’t work like that either. I’ve got you by your overworked balls. You’ll be destitute, a pauper.’

‘I thought you hated mi babby and wanted to get rid of him?’ says Nunky.

He is still defiantly sitting at the dining table, polishing his collection of bone china egg cups, which are all models of characters in a TV programme called The Simpsons. The lead character, Homer Simpson, is yellow and doesn’t have the proper number of fingers. (Cartoon characters don’t always have double-barrelled names. It is how you can tell they’re not real people.) Because they are so alike, Nunky is certain that Homer suffers from the same illness as him and has written to him on numerous occasions, asking what is wrong with him, but all Homer does is get somebody called Groaning to send Nunky a bone china egg cup in response. Mr Burns arrived only yesterday. His long curved nose acts as a handle. My favourite is Marge, because her big blue hair is detachable and keeps the egg warm whilst I butter my soldiers.

Auntie turns to Nunky. ‘I would like nothing better than to have him out of my life and especially out of my house, locked in his room fiddling with himself all the time.’ She turns to me. ‘You are the bumfluff on Satan’s anus.’

‘How can you say that? After all I’ve done to help look after Nunky. I care more about him than you do.’

‘And this is how you repay him, by upping and leaving?’

I look down in shame.

She points to the door. ‘Go if you must, the pair of you. Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

‘Kick us out and the authorities will stop you from managing our accounts,’ says Nunky. ‘I might be one wet fart from soiling my pants, but I was a…’ He pauses and looks at me.

‘Solicitor,’ I prompt.

‘Long enough to know you only get away with it because we live under your roof and you supposedly look after us.’

Focusing on things like his precious collection of egg cups and the bus stop outside the house is the best way for Nunky to concentrate and stay within the realms of normality. At the moment, therefore, he is so far into the light he is shining with lucidity. ‘Hear, hear, well said, Nunky, that’s right.’

Auntie picks up Homer, the star item in Nunky’s collection, and hurls the egg cup at the wall. It smashes into a million pieces. ‘What have you got to say to that?’

Nunky stares at her calmly and says: ‘Doh!’

‘You shining, Nunky. You shining bright.’

She turns on me. ‘If you leave this house without him, I will make his already miserable life totally unbearable.’

‘You achieved that years ago,’ says Nunky. ‘You can’t hurt me no more. I’m too far gone. I don’t care. I’ll run away and sell petrol. I’m good at that. I can do it in my sleep, can’t I, mi babby?’

‘You’d be a brilliant petrol pump attendant, Nunky. You shining like a star.’

Auntie strides over to the closet in the corner and emerges with her boxing gloves, big padded things that don’t leave any marks.