Nocturne Read Free Page B

conversation over the phone, as they were wheeling you down the hospital corridor to the operating room, I asked you what you wanted me to do for you, and you said,
You decide what’s best. I’ll leave it to you. I give in. I give in to the disease. I’ll stop working
. And I realized then how hard you’d been fighting, that you hadn’t really let anyone help you until that moment—and by then, of course, it was too late.

5
    You will want to know what happened to your things because you (like me) were always very attached to your possessions. It gave you comfort to be surrounded by them.
    When I went out to Vancouver, when you were first in hospital there, I got your wallet and keys from the nurses and I went to your apartment. It was still a mess because you’d just moved in, just moved back out west two weeks before you went into hospital. There were piles of things all over the floor in the bedroom. The living room was more orderly. The books were on the shelves, the furniture in its place. The pictures weren’t yet on the walls, but they were neatly stacked against one wall.
    I slept in your sheets, in the bed you’d ordered that had been delivered the day you went into hospital. You called the ambulance in the middle of the night, so you never got to sleep one full night in that bed.
    I slept in your bed. I used your towel when I showered. I hauled your laundry—load after load—down to the basement where the washers and dryers were behind a steel door that shushed closed behind me. I did all your laundry and I put your clothes away. I washed your dishes. At night I lay in your bed and stared at the ceiling. Sometimes I slid open the single pane of glass that was your bedroom window and I leaned out over the sill and stared down at the row of cedars that bordered the side of the apartment building and the wooden fence next door. It was late November and there had been a lot of rain. The cedars were wet and aromatic and when I breathed them in, I was reminded of the green and damp smell of England, and I could see how this place reminded you of that one—the England we had, at different times, both lived in—the country where I was born.
    I walked through the rooms of your apartment and looked at your belongings. Most of them were deeply familiar. You didn’t like to throw anything out, which was a burden when I came back in January to cleanout your apartment and jammed garbage bag after garbage bag with outdated microwave instructions, old travel brochures, plastic packaging for various electronics.
    But what struck me about your apartment was how little changed your surroundings were from when you were twenty. You had not strayed from our original path, as I had. You still lived a life circumscribed by art. You played the piano, taught the piano, composed at the piano in the day. On the nights you weren’t working, you went out with your girlfriend or for a beer with your friends or to sit in a pub and watch the hockey game. Your life could have been the life of an artist a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago. It was only in the last couple of years that you’d owned anything, that you’d tried to be like everyone else—with a car and a house and a debt load—and you’d found it didn’t suit you at all.
I’m the kind of person who likes living in an apartment
, you’d said to me.
    A lot of your books were the same as mine. I might even have given them to you, but I couldn’t remember. I took
English Journey
from the top shelf in the living room and I read a small part of it every night before I went to sleep. If you don’t remember, it’s the story of a cranky British novelist travelling through the north of England in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley,only she’s dragging along a film crew. She spends a lot of the book desperate for a cigarette.
    It’s a true story. I like that term—
true story
. That’s what this is. Because I have ordered experience, that makes it a story. It’s as