INT A HOSPITAL BED - DAY

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AN OLDER MAN SITS UP AGAINST HIS PILLOWS, CHIN ON HAND AND OBSERVES WHAT GOES ON ABOUT HIM. ONLY HIS EYES MOVE, FOLLOWING PEOPLE AS THEY MOVE ACROSS THE WARD, OCCASIONALLY RESTING ON SOMEONE, THEN MOVING ON.

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BRIAN

(to camera, occasionally lifting his eyes elsewhere)

It's odd isn't it. One second your mowing the lawn, enjoying that late, warm spring sun as it massages away the winter stiffness from your joints when without so much as a by-your-leave you're face down in the grass, staring an ant in the face while clutching at your chest as a spasm wreaks havoc with your body.

(beat)

I must've looked like a fish, tossed onto the deck by a heavy storm, gasping for air and desperate to sort of flip-flap its way back to the sea. There's very little dignity in such an event. I reminded myself of one of those supermarket chickens, legs akimbo, waiting to be stuffed, your all exposed for the culinary delight of the stuffer. There's no dignity in being a chicken. I always said that to the wife when she was ramming one to the gills with Paxo. Where's the dignity for that poor creature?

I'd say. She'd look at me like I was one of those simple hearts, the kind that cradles a dead bird for days on end, that it found at the roadside, with no understanding that it's dead. She would call me a fool and say it wasn't a chicken anymore, that it was dinner.

Chickens, she said, were to be found in farmyards clucking and scrapping for seeds. This was to be found on a plate with greens and gravy and slightly singed potatoes.

That's not a dig at her cooking, I liked my potatoes singed. I like burned food. I always leave the toast in too long and don't even get me started on bacon. If it's not crispy, I don't want to know. Apparently, so they say, it can give you cancer. Last week I was watching the BBC news and they said that drinking wine was good for you. Right, I thought, and popped out and bought a couple of bottles. Nothing expensive, you understand, I'm not really a wine buff, but at my age, when you hear wine will give you an extra five minutes on earth, well, it's like a tiger's tooth to a Chinaman. Two bottles for a tenner. It was French. That was all I can tell you, but I liked the label. I always go by the label. Don't trust a label with a country scene. I don't know why, but more often than not, the ones I have bought with a country scene on the label, have been like nail varnish remover. Still, lo and behold, the next week they said, still on the Beeb, that it gave you cancer and heart disease. Well, I'd drunk the wine by then and spent the next two weeks watching for blood in my stools and breaking out into a cold sweat whenever my pulse went up, never mind the fact that I was going up the hill from ASDA, it's like Ben bloody Nevis that climb, or running up the stairs because I thought I was about to exsanguinate upon the toilet.

(beat)

You hope the neighbours don't see you. No one wants to be seen worming helplessly around their lawn, clutching at their chest, as the mower heads wildly and wilfully towards the peony. It's an old petrol mower. It made mincemeat of the peony. It was like confetti raining down on the lawn. I've had that mower almost as long as I've had my nose and wouldn't swap it for one of those Flymo jobs for all the tea in China. They don't cut the grass you see, they chomp at it like a goat. They tear it away rather than cut at it. You never get a smooth finish. I owned one once, so I can speak from experience, and it savaged my grass. No, give me a traditional mower, one with rotating blades and a roller behind it. It's a good mower. But it does tend to run away with itself if you're not careful. It's like controlling a stallion. By the time I've done the back garden, I feel like I've got the arms and chest of Mike Tyson. I like the smell too, that two-stroke engine smell. I could quite happily stand at a petrol station in the days of four- star just sniffing the air. That can give you cancer too, by all accounts. You'd be safer staying in the womb, but someone would no doubt find that amniotic fluid gave you cancer too. Let's face it, as soon as that sperm penetrates the egg, you're pretty much doomed.

(beat)

Yet, at the same time, you hope that this is the one day that the person who has lived next door for the past five years, that you have barely ever seen, let alone said hello to, - how are you?, how are the kids?, the dog?, the wife? Are you married by the way? Have kids?

A dog? - you hope that this is the one day they decide to mow their lawn too, maybe take a peek over the fence, just out of curiosity, as people do, and save your life.

(beat)

That never happened. Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful. I wouldn't want anyone to see me like that. It's like being caught naked. That happened to me once too. I was about to go in the bath. The house was empty and I'd left my reading glasses downstairs. Well, there's no one in I thought and, to be honest, I liked the idea of a naked ramble through the living room. I got to the living room, found my glasses and was just about to head upstairs when I heard the front door go. It's just Mary, I thought, back from the doctors, bag of witch's brew in hand, ready for a cuppa and a bit of Judge Judy. And I wasn't really displaying anything she hadn't seen before, albeit a little baggier and unironed. So, I grabbed my glasses and headed off back towards the bathroom when who should I meet but Mrs Livingstone from next door? She often popped round uninvited to see Mary. They used to spend hours talking over cold tea and ginger nuts. I met her at the door that joins the front room and the hallway. I was going out as she was coming in. Well, she tried desperately to look into my eyes while I tried desperately not to look into hers. 'Mrs Livingstone, I presume', I foolishly said. She wasn't a woman of the world and any humour at that moment passed her by quicker than a whippet towards its Winalot. Anyway, naturally, I cupped myself, in the hope of covering up any offense. She misinterpreted my cupping for an offering and fled. She didn't scream or anything quite so melodramatic, but she did trip over the welcome mat and ended up on her knees on the driveway. My instinct was to help her. It's just my way. You see someone in distress and you try to help. There she was on all fours on the newly laid tarmac with me looming over her like some sort of predator when who should drive by but Mr Livingstone, on his way back from getting some petrol and a few bits and pieces from the garage supermarket. He pulled up sharpish and I thought, well, I'm for it now, on account of me being naked behind his fallen wife as I tried to help her up. (beat)

I can tell you now, life's full of surprises. He went straight to the boot of that duck-egg blue Rover 75, brought out a blanket, walked like a sergeant major under fire onto the driveway, popped the blanket over me and took me by the arm back into the house. Bless. He stepped right over Mrs Livingstone. I heard she'd skinned her knees quite badly. By the time I got back upstairs, the bath was only an inch from overflowing. It didn't matter. I just let a bit of water out and, as I recall, finished off a Graham Greene. It was in the end a very pleasant bath, I'm glad to report.

I explained to Mary what had happened. I had to. If she had found out any other way I'd've been in the spare room in a jiffy and I most certainly did not want to end up back there. She took it in her stride, accepted my version of events with little more than pursed lips and a touch of eye rolling. I found that a bit...disconcerting, if I'm being entirely honest. Any other wife would assume the worst; my husband's a rapist, a philanderer, an exhibitionist, a flasher, but no, not Mary, she just rolled her eyes as if it was quite the natural thing to happen. I don't think she's ever seen me in the Peter Sutcliffe/Casanova role.

I think she married me because I was safe, predictable. There was about as much chance of me going off the rails as there was the great Bruce Forsyth running out of tip-top one-liners. She was right. Oh, don't think I didn't fantasise about ripping her clothes off and taking her unwillingly, but she had big arms and was surprisingly strong for someone of her stature.

I once saw her, one Christmas, crack open a walnut with one hand.

I took it as a veiled warning, unintentional or otherwise. If she could crack one nut, she could crack them all.

(beat)

I thought my time was up.

I thought, 'Well, that's it then. This is it. The well has run dry. The clock has stopped. The battery is well and truly dead’. I flipped myself over, quite unintentionally, spasms, you see, and stared at the sky. Well, it was blue. It was so perfectly blue. It was as if someone had come along and drenched it in Mediterranean seawater. I couldn't help but stare at it; I think I'd hurt my neck as I'd flipped onto my back, but even so, it was beautiful and I thought, well, if there's any time to go, now is it. Mary's been gone some fifteen years now, cancer, too much burned toast no doubt, and I have a very limited circle of friends. Mrs Livingstone stopped coming around after the wife had died.

(pauses to consider his friends)

There's Jolly, he lives a few doors down, retired copper. We call him Jolly because, to be frank, he's not. He knows it. He accepts the fact that he was one of those people who are born without a sense of humour. The last time he saw the funny side in anything was when Richard Nixon said that there would be no whitewash in the Whitehouse. First-class punning, I think he called it. He liked puns. I think it was the detective in him. If we were out and he was a bit down, I would use the opportunity to throw a pun his way. It usually cheered him up. I tried to keep it topical because he was very into the news. Thought the sun shone out of Moira Stewart's backside. I was more of an Anna Ford type man. I dare say if we met them face-to-face we would both have been quite intimidated, but I found something quite headily unnerving in Ms Ford's severe but charming delivery. She could have told me the world was coming to an end and I would have accepted it with the all the calm that her voice projected. I liked Moira Stewart too though, just not as much. Then there was Matt. He's dead now. He got prostate cancer. He was a big feller with a big mouth who ended up like a withered grape in a wheelchair. I never really liked him, but he was chums with Jolly, so I had put up with him. He just thought he knew it all. He had to top everything. If you'd been on holiday to Greece, for example, then not only had he been on holiday to Greece, but he'd had dinner with Nana Mouskouri or played keyboards with Vangelis. I remember when Jolly was telling us all about his trip to Jamaica, Matt had to chip with how him and Bob Marley had written a song together. Which one? I asked. You'll not have heard of it, he said with unnecessary condescension. Why's that? I asked. He said that Bob liked it so much that he didn't want to share it with the world.

The world, he said, was not worthy. Took it to his grave, he said. It was all unicorn farts with Matt. Fake stinkers. On Saturdays we'd get together and go to the Con club to play snooker. Me, Jolly, Matt and Tom Wanklin. That was his real name. It was an absolute gift to Jolly, of course. If he was in the right mood, you couldn't move for puns. He'd have us in tears. Even after fifty odd years, he still managed to squeeze a laugh from it. (beat)

Fifty years! You can't say it as quickly as it's gone by. You'd think poor old Tom would have got some right stick at school for a name like that but, well, where could you go? It's not like people didn't know it was there, it wasn't as if you could transpose it like you could Frank, for example. Frank the wank. That makes sense. The only thing I can think of that rhymes with Wanklin is Shanklin, and you can't bring a charming seaside town like Shanklin into any sort of rudeness. So they just called him Tom. Not everyone was as quick-witted as Jolly and I suppose his miserable demeanour helped it seem a bit funnier.

(beat)

Fifty years! It doesn't seem possible. Me, Jolly and Tom met at school. Faith Street Junior School. The headmaster was Mr Parker, nicknamed Nosey, of course, and the games master was Mr Hare. He was nicknamed Bunny; not taxonomically correct, for sure, but what do you expect from a bunch of eight-year- olds. We didn't choose those nicknames, obviously. They were already in common usage by the time we arrived. I think perhaps that was a sort of awakening for Jolly in the punning sense, realising that words could be twisted and turned. Probably helped as a copper. The three of us clicked the first day and stuck like glue forever. Of course, we didn't understand the implications of Tom's surname at that age and Jolly's punning had not yet come into full force, but we seemed to like the same things; games, food, music, TV programmes. You know how it is with kids. Making new friends is exciting, the way you discover new things, introduce a bit of the unknown world into your own life. Kids like to discover. And, do you know? I still get the same little thrill of butterflies when I meet them for snooker on a Saturday.

It's the highlight of my week. Sometimes, I'm quite content just to sit back and listen to them go on at each other, the friendly banter. I don't think any of us were so close to our wives as we were to each other. It's odd to say that. I mean, we ate, slept and drank with our wives. We had sex with our wives which, I suppose, is about as intimate and sharing as you can get, to my generation anyway, and I certainly never had sex with any of the lads, but with them there were no reservations, except perhaps with Matt, with whom I wouldn't've shared my last Quaver to be honest. But with Tom and Jolly, I don't think that there was anything we would have shared. Tom was quite the reserved one among us. I think girls liked him more because of that. He wasn't one to let his gob run away with him. Jolly was probably too serious for most lasses and I was, I have to admit, rather boring. That's just me. I've always lived vicariously, had my experiences through others, through the TV, through books. Mary, you see, was never adventurous. We went to Greece that one time but it was too hot for her. She spent most of the time reading under an umbrella. If she even went into the sun for half a second, she would come back as red a lobster. She lost nearly a stone on that holiday. Not because she was ill or anything but because she wouldn't drink and just sweated her weight away. She didn't trust the water, you see. I said, Mary, we can by bottled water, but she was determined that the bottle had just been filled from the tap. It's sealed, I would say, and I would point out the unbroken seal to her, but she wouldn't have it. As soon as she stepped back in England and took a glass of water, she ballooned like a puffer fish. We would never go abroad again. Oh, it wasn't just the water. She didn't like the fact that you couldn't flush your used toilet paper away and had to make use of a little plastic bin on the floor next to the lav. Imagine, I said, imagine being the poor sod who has to empty it every day. I'd rather be the one filling it than the one taking it away. But that broke no barriers with Mary. She had made up her mind. She was unsure about the food too. Not necessarily the type of food, she could be quite adventurous when it came to trying new foodstuffs, but only really if ASDA had packaged it for her and it came off a clean white shelf. In Greece, there was always this doubt in her mind that the fish was fresh. Mary, I would say, look to your right. It's the sea. That's where this came from, probably this morning. I shouldn't have used the word probably, probably. It left an element of uncertainty. What do you mean probably? she would say. She pounced on things like that like an angry cat. She'd pick at things with her fork to see if they were properly cooked. None times out of ten she would conclude that the fish or whatever had never seen a hob and refuse to eat it. I swear she must have lived on bread and jam for that entire week. We were going to go for two weeks to begin with and decided just to cut it down to a week, just in case. I'm glad we did. Two weeks with no fluids and just bread and jam to thrive on would've left her close to dead, I'm sure. I enjoyed my week though. I went snorkelling. It's a wonder what goes on underneath the surface. I saw octopuses and all sorts of different fish and the water was so clear; not like Blackpool or Scarborough. Back in those days you just had to breathe in the sea air to risk cholera. It's better now, I suppose, what with all these blue flags and the like, but I'm not convinced. If you can't see your toes under four inches of water then there's more to it than just a bit of muddy sand.

(BRIAN's eyes follow someone as they go by the end of his bed)

That, just going by, was William. Not Bill. Not Will. William.

If you call him Bill or Will he'll ignore you. And for God's sake, don't call him Willy; he'll fall down and froth at the mouth like he's trying to spit out a devil. Apparently, abbreviated names aren't appropriate. Not appropriate for what? I mean, we're hardly in polite society, are we? I suppose, as with all these young people, it's a matter of identity. They like to be different and I suppose we should be grateful he's not called by one of these modern names; Jax or Zeke or Jayden. I mean, what do they mean? Now you take my name, Brian. It's an old Celtic name meaning high or noble. I like that. I've never really attained being high or noble, but all the same...Tom, Thomas, is of Biblical origin and is, believe it or not, Aramaic. It means twin. Handy if your schizophrenic I suppose. I'm not sure that Jolly is a particularly traditional name, but to us it means miserable old sod. His real name is, wait for it, because this might explain why he's happy with the epithet Jolly, his real name is Author. Really.

There's no explanation. Author Robinson Gates. What a name to saddle a child with. There's just no reason for it. Neither of his parents were authors. I'm not sure they even had a book in the house. As for the Robinson, his mother said it was because she liked their jam. I think sometimes it's the pressure of getting a name down for the record. Some people you can't hurry with this sort of thing. Mind you, Jolly might've just ended up just being called Boy, like the kid in those old Tarzan films. The ones with Johnny Weissmuller. I wouldn't swear to it, but I think his name was Johnny too. Johnny Sheffield. Something like that. Anyway, Jolly ended up as Author. I think Matt just meant tosser, or something along those lines.

(beat)

When I came in yesterday, after four hours tied to a trolley in A&E during which time I was needled a hundred times and pressed by cold hands I don't know how many times, it was William who did the paperwork. It's an extraordinary amount to go through. He brought in this sheaf of papers, must have been half and inch thick, and laid them out on the table like he was going to ask me to pick a card. He was very precise, a bit too precise, if you ask me. I think he's probably one of those who has to have things in a certain order or they start to hyperventilate and end up with their head in a paper bag. I forget what you call them. Obsessives! That's it. OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I learned that from one of those afternoon quizzes on the TV. Not Pointless or Countdown. One of the others. The one with the coins, I think. You need to knock the coins off a shelf by dropping a coin onto them, like that arcade game where you put tuppence into a slot and it has to fall flat on the shelf behind all the other coins and push them off.

(beat)

It's no good, I can't remember what it's called. Anyway, William laid out his paperwork very precisely, with a very serious face and once he was happy, right on cue, lifted his head at me smiled. He has quite a disarming smile. It puts you at ease. Then he started flinging questions at me left right and centre, bang, bang, bang, like a bloody Passchendaele serenade. He asked me all sorts of questions, like who is on the throne now?

(smiles naughtily)

Well, it's hard to resist the obvious with something like that, but I did. If Jolly had been here...I said, Elizabeth. Which one? he asked. I'm not right sure, I said. I think her surname's Windsor. I couldn't be sure. She might've taken the Greek fellow's name, whatever string of consonants that happened to be or maybe they were still Saxon hyphen Joburg or whatever it was.

Something very German, 'cause they're all just Germans, you know. Well, German-Greek for the younger ones, but it's all down to George the First. We were importing from Germany then much as now, though I suppose the modern stuff is better built. He seemed satisfied with my answer. In retrospect I think he was looking for 'the Second', Elizabeth the Second. It just never occurred to me that he wanted the simple answer. Next, he asked me to remember the address 42, West Street. Why? I asked. I don't know anybody at 42, West Street. I didn't know there even was a West Street in this town. Then, silly me, I realised about ten minutes after he'd finished, of course there is; it's got that second-hand car place on it. Watsons they call it. Old Trevor Watson. Been there for years. He weathered the financial storm of the eighties like a trooper, although his son might have taken it over by now. I heard that Trevor got cancer and had to have one of those bags attached to his belly to do his business in. It went downhill from there, by all accounts. It's not surprising is it. You know your days are numbered when you've got a belly-bag. It's a quick hop from belly-bag to bodybag, Jolly would say. I'll have to tell him that. He'll appreciate that. I don't know any West Street, I persisted to William. I live on Stanley Terrace, up the hill from ASDA. He wrote something down about that too. Then he asked me the date. I told him he already had it written down at the top of his piece of paper. Why are you asking me such an odd bunch of questions? I asked. To test your memory, he replied.

But there's nothing wrong with my memory, I protested. I know that now, he said, but I didn't before I had asked you them, did I? That, I thought, was a bit clever-clever. However, it was a point well-made and I took it in the spirit intended. Tipping Point! That's it! The name of the quiz show with the coins. I knew it would come back to me. There's nothing wrong with my memory. It might not be quite the superhighway it once was, but it'll suffice for my needs and let's face it, I don't have to remember much except for getting up in the morning and getting dressed. Life's not exactly a challenge anymore. It would seem that cutting the grass was one challenge too many. The doctor in A&E said I'd had a myocardial infarction. That, I said, sounds like a summer drink, one with bits of pomegranate and mint in it. He was quite clearly at odds with speaking plain English and had to be prompted by a nurse to explain himself. I mean, it's alright using all this technical chatter for those in the know, but to people like me, it might as well be Portuguese, which sounds like Russian to me anyway. When I take my car to the garage, and apparently, I can't drive for at least six weeks now, by the way, I don't want to know if it's the servo or the hypernodule differential buboes. If it's the brakes, say, 'it's the brakes, Brian'. It's the same with my body. I don't want to know the Latin for my ailment. I don't speak Latin. I only just about get away with English, so when some well-educated Bachelor of Bodyworks in an expensive suit and white coat starts babbling on in a way that I could never hope to understand, I have to say, woah there. Bring yourself down a level. It's Brian your talking to, not Kenneth Branagh. I left school after my O levels and went straight into the warehouse. Only in admin, of course, I didn't do any of that weightlifting or whipping about on a forklift truck, although I'd like to have tried it because it always looked like such fun. They were very dextrous those forklift drivers. They could turn a ton on a sixpence and get a square peg into a round hole. So, I said to him, the doctor, what does that mean, a myowhateveritis. A heart attack, he said. Who would have thought that just mowing the lawn would stop your heart? Not me. I could understand losing a toe in a blade or an eye from a stone thrown up, but not a heart attack. It wasn't, he explained, in a mildly patronising tone, necessarily cutting the grass that caused the heart attack. That was a shade disappointing because I could have simply paid someone to do it for me and prevented this situation ever happening again. He said that it had built up over time, that my intake of fatty foods over time had thickened my arteries and made them too narrow for the blood to flow through. I thought at that point that this was too much of an explanation. I would have settled f or just 'heart attack', precise and to the point. I don't want to know about the fat in my veins and the narrowing of my arteries. It sounds like your describing one of those fatbergs that you see on the news, great collections of discarded fat that have poured down the drain and eventually hardened and blocked the drain up. It's a bit sickening, concept-wise, to think that my veins are full of fatbergs, so 'heart attack' is probably enough. He then went on to say that, because they had caught it early - early! I was laid out on the lawn for what seemed like a day and half - that they could give me what they called a clotbuster. He then reeled off more questions; was I already on any blood thinners? No, I said. Did I have blood pressure? Probably I said. I'm alive. No, I didn't say that, but I felt like it. Was I allergic to anything? No, I said. I sneeze a lot in dusty rooms, I said, but he thought that probably wasn't down to an allergy. Did I have any liver problems? Had I had surgery recently? Did I have a stomach ulcer? No, I said, although I was beginning to get a bit of nervous reflux with all the questions. Anyway, he ran off a whole string of questions and then, to add insult to injury, explained the side-effects of these clotbusters which included such things as bleeding tears and spontaneous exsanguination. I was torn, I admit. I mean, it's quite a difficult choice and they do make you choose whether to have it or not and sign a consent form. I thought that was a bit crafty, shifting the responsibility onto me, just in case anything went wrong; the thing is do you run the risk of turning into a blood clot on a trolley in A&E or have another heart attack or maybe even a stroke? My first thought was, well, you don't see many one-armed snooker players and I would simply be adding to Jolly's treasure-chest of puns and, in this instance, I would probably begrudge him his sense of humour, so I agreed to the treatment. In my head, it was a bit like the red wine experience, only a little more...powerful. He'd sown the seed of thought, you see, through no fault of his own, that one sneeze and my nose would detach itself and fly across the room as I bled to death from the hole in my face. It's not a logical thought, granted, but it's the kind of thought that goes through your mind when someone runs off a list of lethal side-effects to a powerful drug that they are about to stick into your veins. In hindsight, I'd probably just risk the wine again. As an addendum to this, it would seem that I was at the hospital within forty minutes of my meeting with the ant. Apparently, they couldn't have given me the clotbuster if I hadn't been there within the hour. Door to needle time they call it. I still have no idea who found me or how. I asked the ambulance crew, but they just said they got a call. They had no idea who from. No doubt someone will tell me. I'll probably get a film crew on my front door step, supplemented by a tearful neighbour who claims to have saved my life. Oh, Brian, Brian, they would say, I thought you were dead. Who are you? I would ask, blinking in the bright lights of the cameras. I'm the nosey neighbour, they would say.

Ah, I would say as it dawned upon me, the one with the yapping dog and the irritating friends who insist on talking too loudly of an evening so that I can't have my windows open in the height of summer.

(beat)

Still, I suppose some gratitude wouldn't go amiss. At the very least, I'm grateful that I'm not a one-armed snooker player or lying in an intensive care bed with pipes in every orifice.

(beat)

I'm feeling a bit sour. Can you tell? I don't want to be here, but I'm forced to be. I never liked the idea of that sort of thing. I think that's probably why I was never entirely happy at work. I only ever went in for the money. That's a small reason for such a chunk of your life. Oh, don't get me wrong,

I wasn't badly paid and I got a good pension out of it and the people I worked with were perfectly nice people, but the weekends, to be honest, were too short and the working day too long. And fifty years is a long time to donate to a single cause. It's amazing really that they don't just put us to sleep when we reach a certain age, like that film, the one with Jenny Agutter. My God, Jenny Agutter. I always loved Jenny Agutter, right from the time I saw the Railway Children. Logan's Run! That's it. I knew it would come to me. Logan's Run. Once people reached thirty, they were put down. Naturally, she and the main feller, Michael York, decided to rebel. Well, you would wouldn't you, but I remember Jenny Agutter wearing a very short skirt in that film. If you showed it to me now I'd need a drop more of that clotbuster, I can tell you. Then there was An American Werewolf in London. She was a nurse in that. Now that was worth a heart attack, I can tell you. If Jenny Agutter turned up to give me a bedbath right now...well, I'd probably just grip onto my bedclothes tightly and weep like a broken man. You're too late, Jenny, I would cry. Where were you when I was eighteen?

(beat)

I've been promised a bedbath here.

I don't need it, I can wash myself. A few years ago, it would have been a dream come true. Now, it's just more of nightmare, with my potbelly and wizened undercarriage. I'd rather just have a bowl of water and the curtain round and get on with it myself. You tend to become more private as you get older. Everything has taken on a downward drift and you don't want anybody to see that. I was reluctant to let them unbutton my shirt in A&E, let alone expose my man-boobs to the ECG girl. She seemed to take it all in her stride. But you don't know what they say once they get out of earshot, do you? Did you see that man's boobs? They're bigger than Victoria Beckham's. Never mind his boobs, the other girl will say, you should see the penis on the bloke in cubicle thirteen, it's like a tiny carrot. You don't want that, do you? Not at my age. You don't want your appendages compared to fruit or veg at any age, I suppose, unless it's a marrow.

(beat)

No, I don't want to be here. I spent long enough in this place with Mary. Fifteen months from diagnosis to death. Fifteen months. They found it first in her breast, then in her bones and then in her lungs. Once it was in her lungs, that was it really. First of all, she did what Mary always did, just brushed it under the carpet and got on. That was her way. Then, one day, she was just putting out the washing and down she went, like a sack of potatoes. I can remember it because I was in the shed and I thought next door's do was yelping at something again. It had this high-pitched, irritating yelp, like someone was mistreating it. It was just one of the many sounds it made. Irritating little dishcloth. Anyway, then I heard Mary call me and there she was, on the ground, much like I was yesterday, only in absolute agony. I thought she'd pulled a muscle. Anyway, a vertebra in her spine had just sort of crumbled away. The nerves in her back had been caught in the debris, so to speak. I called an ambulance and they took her to A&E. That's when she fessed up to me about the breast cancer. She knew. She had seen the doctor and come up to the hospital to see the specialist and managed to keep it all from me. I was at work, you see. I was out earning money while she was on her own going through...

(beat)

That was a kick in the pants, I can tell you. We like to joke about our wives, us men, about how we're browbeaten and bullied and never allowed to do the things we want, but that's not true. We were a year shy of forty years. One year. I did the easy part, going out and grabbing the money. She stayed at home and raised the kids, fed us, washed our clothes, made sure we all had big birthdays and enormous Christmases, mothered them and me. I wouldn't have swapped her, not even for Jenny Agutter. Jenny would have been pure animal sex. How can you compare thirty seconds of bestiality to thirty-nine years of unquestioned, unconditional love? I'm boasting of course, about the thirty seconds. I doubt I'd've managed to get my belt undone. And Jenny wouldn't have stayed. I would have driven her away with my pernickety ways. And she would never have put up with the boredom. I'm very boring, I admit that. Changing socks is about as exciting as my day gets. It's that vicarious living. I could never do the real thing. I'm too much of coward, too much of home-body. I need my comforts. I need a toilet above ground that can take toilet paper and a place to plug my stereo and my mobile phone. I need to wake up in a bed. My bed, not some futon on Fiji. I do feel rather ashamed to have settled, but then, we do in the end, don't we? She was fifty- eight years old. We had barely got to know each other. Our final child, April, had left home a few years before and got married herself, to a nice lad named Jeremy. He was something in the civil service. What else would you do with that name? Acting, I suppose. He's doing well for himself. They worked in the same department when they met. They moved to Reading. I don't know why anybody would want to move to Reading. It's far too busy and too close to London for my liking. They seem very happy though. They have two kids who are all but grown up. I don't see them so much, but there's the phone and I've learned to Skype. It's not the same, but it's more than my parents ever had. It's clever too. How is that possible? I can talk to my daughter, all my daughters, on my mobile phone for nothing. That is amazing. It's always easy to impress a Yorkshireman with something free though. I can remember when Telstar, the satellite, not the song by the Tornados, made it possible to communicate in real time across the world. I would have been fifteen then. I can remember how astounding that was. And now I can talk to my daughters on my telephone and see their faces, no matter where they are or what time it is. There's a lot to be said for that to folks like me who live alone. I wish Mary could have seen it. I wish she could have seen April's kids, but she went just too early. She spent the last two months of her life in this place. I did too, pretty much. We didn't talk much, it was just quiet companionship. I wish we had talked a bit more, but she wasn't one for words. She could be when she wanted to be. She could be very funny in her bitter, sarcastic way, but not the deep stuff; not the deep stuff. If she was allergic to anything, it was probably emotions. She used to break out in backhanders if I tried to cross the line. She didn't think they had any place in the day to day running of things. She was probably right. Me? I tend to lachrymosity a little too easily. I cried my eyes out at West Side Story and don't even go near Les Mis without a box of tissues next to me on the sofa. I went to see Toy Story Three with the grandkids when they were up one year. I bawled my eyes out. It's just the way I am. I can't help it. Maybe I'm lacking something to react so easily. Mary said it was a spine. She probably hit the nail on the head with that one. I've never been what you might call spinefull. I'm a bit of a jellyfish.

(beat)

Eventually, they put a sort of pump on her that delivered pain medication to her; morphine, I think it was. The pain was too much even for her in the end. After that, she slipped away pretty quickly. Turned out I got the last word in the end. I told her everything. It's the best way to get a word in edgeways with a woman, wait for unconsciousness. Don't worry, she wouldn't mind me saying that. Anyway, I told her. I think she heard. I hope so.

(beat)

Last night, the old fella in the bed opposite me tried to climb into bed with me. It was a bit startling and I wasn't sure what the safest thing to do was. Should I let him get in or should I make a fuss.

They do say that sleepwalking can be dangerous, but I'm not sure if they mean dangerous to the sleepwalker or those around them. Anyway, he' get a foot under the covers when a nurse caught him and took him to his own bed. She was all apologies. That's alright, I said. These things happen. She asked if I was alright, if I needed anything.

(beat)

No, I said. No thanks.

(beat)

That wasn't strictly true. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see my Mary again. I wanted to go back twenty years when this, all this, would have been unimaginable. Never in a million years was I going to end up alone. I wasn't even going to live this long. I had it all planned out in my head. Work until I'm sixty- five, retire and die. I don't mean twenty years on, I mean the same day. That way, Mary would get my pension and she could do whatever she liked, when she liked and never have to answer to anyone again, let alone me. Bloody me. Bloody me who could do nothing for come the end except sit an armchair and watch fade away. Bloody me who she didn't even have the trust and confidence who share her last secret with until she had no choice. Bloody me. Bloody useless, shameful me. She told me that she didn't want to burden me, that's why she didn't tell me until her spine snapped in two at the washing line. That wouldn't have been a burden. That would have been an honour, a privilege. If you don't marry someone to share that, then what do you marry them for? Children? Fine. Money troubles? Fine. Cancer? Oh no. Don't share that. It's too personal, too emotional, too close to the knuckle. God, I was so angry with her! If she couldn't share that with me, then what was the point of ever being married? Did she have no idea how I worshipped the ground upon which she walked, how I would have turned my back on a thousand Toms and Jollys for one extra minute with her? The chances are, if we'd ever had that extra minute, all we would have done is sat silently watching the second hand go round. It would have been another minute shared, no more, no less.

(beat)

I'll be honest. There was a part of me yesterday that hoped no one would save me. I'm too much of a coward to do away with myself. But I think, just for half a second, I was prepared to thank God for the chance to see if she really would be there, waiting for me. It always seemed to me that the closer you got to God, the further away he became. Now, I'm not so sure.

There was a warm reassurance in what awaited me yesterday and I would gladly have taken it, come what may. If there was the slightest chance that I would have seen my Mary again, I would have taken it, but by the time the ambulance arrived, it was out of my control. The only choice I had belonged to others, not to me. And when I came to, I don't mind admitting I was a little bit afraid. You see, I hadn't seen Mary. I hadn't seen anything. I didn't even remember being unconscious. Now all I'm left with is uncertainty. Maybe if you truly haven't passed, then you don't get to know. Maybe it's only when it truly is your time, that you see what you hoped for.