Case Histories

On Christ's Pieces a man was cutting the grass, sitting on one of those little tractor mowers. Theo could hardly see for the tears rolling down his face. The handkerchief he was holding up to his nose was already sodden. People were giving him odd looks but he lumbered on regardless. The buses at the Drummond Street Bus Station roared their engines like mechanical beasts, Theo swore he could taste exhaust fumes in his mouth. Who would build a bus station next to a green space? He could hear the breath in his chest, it sounded as loud as the lawn mower. To be allergic to summer seemed wrong some-how. His wife, Valerie, had never been sympathetic, she'd seen his allergies and asthma as another kind of character weakness. There'd been no pets in the house until Laura was fourteen and she'd wanted a dog so badly that he had finally given in and they drove to the dog's home and came back with Poppy. She was still only a few months old, someone had thrown her out of a moving car. How could any-one do that? What kind of person could inflict suffering like that? Laura said she was going to "smother" Poppy with love to make it up to her. And Theo had gradually grown accustomed to the dog hair, until he could even let her sit on his knee while he stroked her. He loved that dog too, it had been terrible when she was run over, a tiny premonition of what was to come.

Theo could feel his chest tightening. He began to wheeze and reached in his pocket for his Ventolin inhaler. It wasn't in the usual pocket. He tried all his pockets and then had a sudden, clear pic-ture of his inhaler sitting on the hall table, waiting to be transferred from one jacket to another. The panic was like a punch to the heart. His legs almost went from under him and he stumbled to a bench in the Princess Diana Memorial Rose Garden, trying to keep calm, trying to keep the terror at bay. The sunny day had already grown black round the edges and spots were dancing before Theo's eyes. He could feel a knotty pain in his chest and wondered if he was having a heart attack.

He was fighting for breath. He should try and signal to someone that he needed help, that he wasn't just some fat bloke sweating on a park bench, that he was a fat bloke who was dying. The panic was screwing up his chest, wringing it hard. He could hear the terrible noises he was making as he fought to find a breath, surely someone could hear him?

This too shall pass, he thought to himself, but it didn't. He would have expected that by now he would be feeling peace and acceptance, that the oxygen deprivation would have made him ready for death, but his body was still struggling with every nerve and fiber. Whether he liked it or not he was going down fighting.

There was a dark silhouette in front of him, a person, blocking out the sunlight, and he thought it must be Laura, come to take him home. He wanted to say her name but he couldn't speak, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. She was saying something to him but the words sounded as if they were coming from underwater. She touched his arm and her fingers felt icy. He heard her say, "Can I help you?" the words booming and crashing in his ear like the surf. and part of him wanted to say, "No, I'm fine," because he didn't want to worry her, but another part, a stronger insistent part over which he had no control, was clawing at the air, trying to convey his desperation. Now he could hear voices, there were other people there and someone thrust something toward his mouth and it took him a second to realize it was an inhaler.

Then blackness. Then the ambulance, where he felt nauseous and weak, but the oxygen mask on his face was extraordinarily reassuring. The paramedic lifted it slightly so he could speak and he asked if he'd had a heart attack and the paramedic shook his head and said, "No, I don't think so." And then he slept. And woke in a bed in a side ward. There was an old man in the other bed, hooked up to a lot of tubes. Theo realized that he was hooked up to a lot of tubes as well. When he woke the next time the old man had gone and when he woke the time after that he was in a different ward and it was visiting time, people flooding into the ward with magazines and fruit and plastic carrier bags of clothes. Theo turned his head to follow the visitors' progress and saw a girl sitting on a chair next to his bed. He realized two things at the same time: first, it was the beggar girl with the custard-yellow hair, and second, it had been this girl who had helped him on Christ's Pieces. Not Laura.