Black Bread White Beer. Niven Govinden

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      His last call to the hospital yesterday was around 11 p.m. After that, he gave himself permission to get stinking drunk. The ward sister lacked her earlier seriousness, lightening his worry. He felt her smiling down the phone on hearing his name, as if she was dying to crack some jokes. He had felt their attention on him, the nurses, checking him out when they wheeled up her to the ward. He was weighed down with empathy.

      ‘Get some sleep, sir. She’ll need all the support you’ve got, tomorrow.’ The ‘sir’, tinged with West Country, and burnished with the weariness of the night shift.

      He fell into a brief daydream, wondering at the sheer amount of work to ensure Claud’s bed-rest. The silent monitoring that takes place while she sleeps. He was reminded not to call until after eight the next morning because they would be busy with the medicine-giving and breakfast. But now he is anxious at not hearing from them during the night, and figures that half an hour earlier will not hurt.

      The ward phone rings out for a good few minutes before the bureaucratic dance begins. A breathless nursing assistant picks up, who then has to summon someone senior because she does not have the recognized accreditations to divulge a patient’s condition. The woman does not put him on hold, instead leaving the receiver on the desk while she searches. All the background noises he hears are purely mechanical, rubber wheels on trolleys squelching on rubber-tiled floors, the clang of dropped cutlery, the repeated slamming of lift doors, the wheezy exhalations of a knackered Hoover. There are no human voices at all, as if they are all holding their breath, bound to silence until the receiver is replaced in the cradle.

      The staff nurse he eventually speaks to is estuary accented, and irritated, though she remains factually precise. Claud was given a light sedative just after eleven to help her sleep through the night, she is having breakfast now, managing a sausage and a portion of beans, she will be discharged around ten o’clock once the doctor has made her rounds.

      He is aware that he should be camping outside, as all good husbands are expected to do, and maybe he would, if the sheer scale of the building, its aura of benefaction and stoicism, did not cow him. Besides, there are practical domestic affairs he must attend to.

      He stinks. Fags, booze, and fried food. No one will understand that he has not been celebrating, that this is his way of coming to terms. He brushes and scrubs like it is his first date. After his shower he passes the broom over the wood floors, and empties the dishwasher. She is unlikely to call the house a tip, will probably not even notice, but if he can do these little things, wipe down the fridge, sweep the path, some good may come.

      For all the modernity of their house, a shrine to an architect’s vision of what can be done to Edwardian glass and brick, they often cannot wait to be away from it. Whenever they have free time they rush into the arms of the outdoors, they, the unadventurous, as if unwilling to acknowledge it was the wrong house in the first place, that no amount of renovation could make it otherwise.

      Past the opening round of house-warming parties, they have seldom used the place for celebration. Every birthday, weekend, festival, is spent abroad or down at her parents’ house in Sussex, a nineteenth-century farmhouse, with its half-acre of mature gardens and a kitchen hearth as wide as a football pitch. It decimates the competition, mocking the faux-authentic picture-book efforts of more suburban homes.

      Claud has tried to make their home a warped twin of Liz and Sam’s house in the village outside Lewes, turning the reclaimed carriage door into a table, juxtaposing the dominant СКАЧАТЬ