I had never even considered smoking a pipe up until
then, but the way she looked at me with those big doe eyes, I mean, how could I
say no to her? I just fell will to her every command. Later that day we went
down to the corner shop and I bought a white carved wooden pipe with a rosewood
handle. It looked like a Siberian tigers toe with a long black nail. We went
back to our apartment and tried it out. We pulled cushions off the sofa and sat
on them cross-legged on the balcony. I remember it being sunny, because the red
tips at the end of her bleach blonde hair looked pink in the sunlight. We sat
so close that we were able to touch our toes together. She placed a box of
matches, a pouch of GoldBerch tobacco and, of course, the tiger toe pipe in the
space between our feet.
I asked her to do the honours, to break in the pipe
for me because I knew the pipe wouldn’t be mine for long. She would become
attached to it and borrow it constantly until the day came where I was happily
forced to donate it to her properly,
and she would reject it and wait for me to insist. Like always she would snap
it from my hands and cradle it to her chest before throwing her arms around my
neck and telling me how much she loved me. But in that moment, she just admired
it.
She opened up the pouch, pinched a wad of tobacco
between her fingers and stuffed it into the pipe with her thumb. I have tried
since to stick my thumb in the hollow where hers fit so easily, but it wouldn’t.
She picked up the matches and emptied them out onto the balcony.
“Oh,
Goodie.” I remember her saying, “I can finish off my drawing with these.” You
see, Annie was a phenomenal artist, but a terrible clot and as a result of both
we always had an abundance of burnt-out matches lying around the apartment or
‘tiny pencils’ as she would call them.
“They
create the best effects.” She would say when I asked her to clear them up. She
scooped up the ‘tiny pencils’ and dropped them in her pocket. She picked up the
one remaining red-tipped match and struck it against the edge of the box. A
bright red flame burst and fizzed for a second before settling back to yellow.
She was always in the habit of burning herself, so my first instinct was to
reach to protect her hands, her skin, like ivory bone, almost transparent. But
this time she held it steady. She raised the tiger toe to her lips and dipped
the match into the tobacco inhaling the fumes. After a moment thick whitey-grey
smoke blew through her nostril. Then she smiled and I realised I was the
luckiest woman in the world. She slipped an imaginary deer-stalker onto her
head and took short puckered drags from the pipe. I grabbed her by the elbows
and pulled her tiny body onto my lap.
“You
are the strangest and most wonderful girl I’ve ever met.” She clenched the pipe
between her teeth and spoke back to me in a lispy whistle.
“On
the contrary, my dear Watson. I am the strangest and most wonderful girl you
will ever meet.” I pulled the pipe
from her mouth and cupped her cheeks in my hands.
“My
gorgeous girl, don’t ever change.” And then she pressed her lips into mine.
Her
lips were waxy, like raw chicken breasts left out too long to thaw. And when I
stepped back from her she wasn’t smiling anymore. The kiss had probably worn
her out. She was too tired to smile. She was too tired to do anything anymore;
too tired to walk, too tired to speak, too tired to eat. The nurse would have
to wake her up to feed her and even then she would often fall asleep
mid-swallow and almost choke. So mostly I read to her. I read her columns from
her favourite magazines and I read her chapters from her favourite books, but
most of the time she would fall asleep in the middle of a sentence and wake up
in a different world. And it scared her. I could almost recite The Sign of the
Three to her by heart, if I wanted to. But I don’t. I never want to look at
that story or that book again. I decided that neither of us had the time, or
the patience to reread the same adventures over and over, so I decided to start
reading her children’s comic strips. The short little strips, only three or
four frames long, something she might be able to stay awake long enough to
enjoy. Sometimes she listened, sometimes she didn’t, but she couldn’t control
whether she did or not and I could never hold her to that regardless. I placed
my hand on her tiny bony wrist to centre her, to bring her back to me. Then she
opened her eyes and looked at me like I was a stranger. It broke my heart and
this was only a mild reaction.
“No,
love. It’s me. It’s only me. Don’t worry, it’s only me.” Once she put my face
back together and realised I was human, she relaxed her shoulders and almost
smiled with those waxy lips I used to spend whole nights dreaming about
kissing.
There
was a long moment of silence while she studied every detail of my face, like a newborn
scans their mothers face. A split second later her face had contorted into a
mask of absolute stilling fear. And she had forgotten me… again.
“No. No please, Annie. Listen to me. It’s
Martha. Please listen to me it’s Martha.” I went to touch her arm very gently,
but as soon as I touched her skin, she jolted in the bed and her face was set
in tremendous shock.
“Darling, please listen to me. It’s Martha.
Your Martha. Annie, darling. Can you hear me?” I jumped up and grasped her
shoulders firmly. Tears were flooding my eyes and streaming down my face. Her body
was stiff and dark shadows flushed across her face as she held her breath tight
in her lungs, like it was the last breath she would ever take. She tried to
move her limbs but they were too heavy. She started to panic and whimper, like
a child and I was all but rolled up in a ball at her feet. I didn’t want to
call the nurse because I knew my time was almost up with her. So I improvised. Looking
around the small room I saw a small red plastic table adorned with children’s
books and toys. I raced over and picked up a cardboard book with a family of
bears on the front, all with fur lined bellies. I hoped it would be soft enough
to calm her down. I tried to lift her wrist but her bones had locked into place
with panic. The blood pounded so loud in my ears that I couldn’t even check to
see if she was breathing. I flipped the book over and rubbed the fur across the
back of her hands, hushing softly over and over. My breaths were shaky and my
face was wet with tears and mucus but I didn’t care what I looked like. I
needed her back. I needed her more than the air she was depriving herself of in
fear. In fear of me. Because to her was a stranger that only fades in and out
of existence. Sometimes my face was friendly and she would smile when she saw
me. Other times I was the sum of all her greatest fears coming to destroy her.
But I never knew which I was to her, a friend or a monster. Right then I must
have been a monster.
It took several minutes and my arm was seizing
from the motion. But it work. Her body relaxed and went limp in the bed. The
glowing purple drained from her cheeks I remember thinking in that moment that
Annie was right after all. I would have been a terrible nurse. If I couldn’t
even look after Annie, how could I possibly look after those who meant almost
nothing to me? I rested on the side of the bed, trying to ease my nerves before
I leaned over her with shaky arms and whispered.
“Annie,
it’s me. Please, please remember me.” I curled my fingers through hers as
tightly as I could.
“Please,
Annie. Please remember me.” I was crying into my arm when I felt her fingers
twitch in mine. I looked up and saw that she was looking down to our hands with
something similar to simple curiosity clouded her face. She ran her thumb over
my hand and her waxy lips curled into a smile.
“Mar-tha.”
She
said it. She said my name. And for the first time since that horrific winter
night I saw Annie again. I saw my Annie.
“Yes,
of course, darling it’s me.” I held her face in the palm of my hand and rubbed
her temple covered in red tinged bandages. “How are you feeling? Are you in
pain? Will I call the nurse?”
Annie
gripped my hand tighter. “Oh, Martha. I’m so glad you’re here.” A small tear
formed in the corner of her eye and dribbled down her face. I brushed it away
with the pad of my thumb.
“Of
course, I’ll always be here with you.” She smiled and closed her eyes for a few
minute and I was the happiest person in the world once more.
But
then her eyes changes. I saw it happening. I witnessed it, the moment she
forgot everything. The doctor told us afterwards that before… before the… that
everything fires up one last time. One last hurrah before the end. But at the
time I didn’t know. So I just kept screaming at her to remember me, to remember
my face and remember my name over and over. But I was too late. I was so tired
of trying, trying to save her, of holding on to that last glimpse of a dream,
and when I looked to her once more I saw her face was grey. She was scared of
me. I wept openly because right then I really was the monster she saw in me,
this stranger lying in a hospital bed. And the world started spinning.
I
was vaguely aware that the door was knocking behind me. Then a tall, African
American woman with wide hips came in and told me I had to leave. But I didn’t
want to leave. Not when she had just started to remember me again, or so I thought.
The nurse told me I had to leave, that there were other people in to see her
and that I couldn’t be there.
“But
she said my name. She remembered me.” I told myself out loud. But she didn’t
believe me and she didn’t notice the fear in Annie’s face. She didn’t care. But
I did.
“She did. She did say it. There a second ago
before you came in.” But the nurse was
starting getting angry with me, said that I was being a nuisance around the
hospital and that I had to leave. But I didn’t want to leave. So I just stood
there and held on to the end of the bed shouting at her. It was terrible of me,
looking back on it now. She was only doing her job. I just kept telling her
over that she had said my name, with my own ears I heard her say it. She came
over and grabbed my arm, pinching the skin with her nails. I can still feel it
sometimes; the pressure of her grip on me. When I looked at her I knew she
didn’t want to kick me out. I knew she was under orders from a higher
authority, and I wasn’t paying her bills. She dragging me to the door but I
wasn’t going without a fight. So I kicked and screamed like a child and called
back to Annie
“Annie. You’re going to be okay. Everything
will be back to normal. I promise. We will have our lives back. I promise.” And
I immediately regretted my words because when I looked at her in the bed, Annie
was lying with wide bulging eyes and was reaching with thin fleshy arms towards
the sky.
Suddenly
a loud high-pitched tone sounded from the cardiac monitor. And a wave of nurses
rushed into the room.
I
can still heart that sound. It haunts me every night when I try to sleep. The sleepless
nights have caught up on me to the extent where the world passes by and I barely
register what’s happening. When I awoke from another void blankness, I was
standing in the doorway of an old church. It was raining sideways into the
doorway and my feet were getting wet but I didn’t feel the cold. I ran my
fingers along the wooden panels of the doors trying to feel something, anything
at all. I just needed to feel sensations again. But it didn’t work. I saw the
splinters in my fingers and the blood run down my wrist, but I didn’t feel a
thing not even heat. I felt like I was watching the life a character on screen through
a grotty spy glass. I remember an elder man in a black suit told me to stand
aside as six men in matching suits walked by carrying a wooden coffin. It was
only when I looked to the long black hearse ornamented with flowers that I
realised where I was. It was spelled out for me in daisies, her favourite,
Annie’s favourite, my beautiful wonderful Annie. People didn’t sympathising
with me because they didn’t know about me. They didn’t know about the life
Annie and me had built together over the last eight years. No one shuck my
hand, not even her family. Because we were in sacred grounds, and according to
them I was not sacred. After I watched the men in black suits put Annie, my
poor Annie, in the back of the hearse, a young woman came up to me. She was a
friend of Annie’s from home and she knew about her and me and our life in the
big city. Then she hugged me. And I felt it. Like lightning. Sadness burning in
my chest. It was the heat I wanted all along. She pulled back and big fat tears
were rolling down her cheeks.
“I’m
so sorry, Martha.” She whispered to me and pulled me in tighter. When I looked
up I could see Annie’s mother staring at me with big red puffy eyes. It was the
first time I had ever seen her in person. And hopefully I’ll never see her
again. I hugged the girl back to make it look like I was consoling her and
to take away from my humility. I never said a word. I couldn’t push the words
past my lips, waxy with the cold. I was just so tired, too tired to speak. Then
I watched as the hearse drove out of the yard and down the street away from me.
I
remained in the courtyard of the church as the crowd left and made their way to
the small graveyard at the bottom of the hill behind the hearse. I could see
them all congregate in black around a hole in the grown. I don’t know how long I
stood there in the cold watching from a distance as they lowered the love of my
life into the cold, hard grown in a cold, dark box. Annie had always been afraid
of the dark and that just made the fire burn hotter in my chest.
I lifted my hand palm out and whispered to her before
walking out of the courtyard.
“Goodbye Annie, my beautiful, wonderful Annie.”