The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

Conrad, about ten or twelve years ago hospital boards all over the country noticed that admission rates were starting to fall off. To begin with they were relieved, but the decline has gone on each year, until now the rate of admission is down to about one per cent of the previous intake. And most of these patients are surgeons and physicians, or members of the nursing staff.’

      ‘But, Doctor – if they’re not coming here …’ Conrad found himself thinking of his aunt and uncle. ‘If they won’t come here that means they’re choosing to …’

      Dr Knight nodded. ‘Exactly, Conrad. They’re choosing to die.’

      A week later, when his uncle came to see him again, Conrad explained to him Dr Knight’s proposition. They sat together on the terrace outside the ward, looking out over the fountains at the deserted hospital. His uncle still wore a surgical mitten over his hand, but otherwise had recovered from the accident. He listened silently to Conrad.

      ‘None of the old people are coming any more, they’re lying at home when they fall ill and … waiting for the end. Dr Knight says there’s no reason why in many cases restorative surgery shouldn’t prolong life more or less indefinitely.’

      ‘A sort of life. How does he think you can help them, Conrad?’

      ‘Well, he believes that they need an example to follow, a symbol if you like. Someone like myself who’s been badly hurt in an accident right at the start of his life might make them accept the real benefits of restorative surgery.’

      ‘The two cases are hardly similar,’ his uncle mused. ‘However … How do you feel about it?’

      ‘Dr Knight’s been completely frank. He’s told me about those early cases where people who’d had new organs and limbs literally fell apart when the seams failed. I suppose he’s right. Life should be preserved – you’d help a dying man if you found him on the pavement, why not in some other case? Because cancer or bronchitis are less dramatic –’

      ‘I understand, Conrad.’ His uncle raised a hand. ‘But why does he think older people are refusing surgery?’

      ‘He admits he doesn’t know. He feels that as the average age of the population rises there’s a tendency for the old people to dominate society and set its mood. Instead of having a majority of younger people around them they see only the aged like themselves. The one way of escape is death.’

      ‘It’s a theory. One thing – he wants to give you the leg of the driver who hit us. That seems a strange touch. A little ghoulish.’

      ‘No, it’s the whole point – he’s trying to say that once the leg is grafted it becomes part of me.’ Conrad pointed to his uncle’s mitten. ‘Uncle Theodore, that hand. You lost two of the fingers. Dr Knight told me. Are you going to have them restored?’

      His uncle laughed. ‘Are you trying to make me your first convert, Conrad?’

      Two months later Conrad re-entered the hospital to undergo the restorative surgery for which he had been waiting during his convalescence. On the previous day he accompanied his uncle on a short visit to friends who lived in the retirement hostels to the north-west of the town. These pleasant single-storey buildings in the chalet style, built by the municipal authority and let out to their occupants at a low rent, constituted a considerable fraction of the town’s area. In the three weeks he had been ambulant Conrad seemed to have visited every one. The artificial limb with which he had been fitted was far from comfortable, but at Dr Knight’s request his uncle had taken Conrad to all the acquaintances he knew.

      Although the purpose of these visits was to identify Conrad to as many of the elderly residents as possible before he returned to the hospital – the main effort at conversion would come later, when the new limb was in place – Conrad had already begun to doubt whether Dr Knight’s plan would succeed. Far from arousing any hostility, Conrad’s presence elicited nothing but sympathy and goodwill from the aged occupants of the residential hostels and bungalows. Wherever he went the old people would come down to their gates and talk to him, wishing him well with his operation. At times, as he acknowledged the smiles and greetings of the grey-haired men and women watching on all sides from their balconies and gardens, it seemed to Conrad that he was the only young person in the entire town.

      ‘Uncle, how do you explain the paradox?’ he asked as they limped along together on their rounds, Conrad supporting his weight on two stout walking sticks. ‘They want me to have a new leg but they won’t go to the hospital themselves.’

      ‘But you’re young, Conrad, a mere child to them. You’re having returned to you something that is your right: the ability to walk and run and dance. Your life isn’t being prolonged beyond its natural span.’

      ‘Natural span?’ Conrad repeated the phrase wearily. He rubbed the harness of his leg beneath his trousers. ‘In some parts of the world the natural life span is still little more than forty. Isn’t it relative?’

      ‘Not entirely, Conrad. Not beyond a certain point.’ Although he had faithfully guided Conrad about the town, his uncle seemed reluctant to pursue the argument.

      They reached the entrance to one of the residential estates. One of the town’s many undertakers had opened a new office, and in the shadows behind the leaded windows Conrad could see a prayer-book on a mahogany stand and discreet photographs of hearses and mausoleums. However veiled, the proximity of the office to the retirement homes disturbed Conrad as much as if a line of freshly primed coffins had been laid out along the pavement ready for inspection.

      His uncle merely shrugged when Conrad mentioned this. ‘The old take a realistic view of things, Conrad. They don’t fear or sentimentalize death in quite the way the younger people do. In fact, they have a very lively interest in the matter.’

      As they stopped outside one of the chalets he took Conrad’s arm. ‘A word of warning here, Conrad. I don’t want to shock you, but you’re about to meet a man who intends to put his opposition to Dr Knight into practice. Perhaps he’ll tell you more in a few minutes than I or Dr Knight could in ten years. His name is Matthews, by the way, Dr James Matthews.’

      ‘Doctor?’ Conrad repeated. ‘Do you mean a doctor of medicine?’

      ‘Exactly. One of the few. Still, let’s wait until you meet him.’

      They approached the chalet, a modest two-roomed dwelling with a small untended garden dominated by a tall cypress. The door opened as soon as they touched the bell. An elderly nun in the uniform of a nursing order let them in with a brief greeting. A second nun, her sleeves rolled, crossed the passage to the kitchen with a porcelain pail. Despite their efforts, there was an unpleasant smell in the house which the lavish use of disinfectant failed to conceal.

      ‘Mr Foster, would you mind waiting a few minutes. Good morning, Conrad.’

      They waited in the dingy sitting room. Conrad studied the framed photographs over the rolltop desk. One was of a birdlike, grey-haired woman, whom he took to be the deceased Mrs Matthews. The other was an old matriculation portrait of a group of students.

      Eventually they were shown into the small rear bedroom. The second of the two nuns had covered the equipment on the bedside table with a sheet. She straightened the coverlet on the bed and then went out into the hall.

      Resting on his sticks, Conrad stood behind his uncle as the latter peered down at the occupant of the bed. The acid odour was more pungent and seemed to emanate directly from the bed. When his uncle beckoned him forward, Conrad at first failed to find the shrunken face of the man in the bed. The grey cheeks and hair had already merged into the unstarched sheets covered by the shadows from the curtained windows.

      ‘James, this is Elizabeth’s boy, Conrad.’ His uncle pulled up a wooden chair. He motioned to Conrad to sit down. ‘Dr Matthews, Conrad.’

      Conrad murmured something, aware of the blue eyes that had turned to look at him. What surprised him most about the dying occupant of the bed was his comparative youth. Although in his middle sixties, Dr Matthews was twenty years younger than the majority