Free How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall Page B

delicate in the storm of the landing.
    And that was that for Nicki. Deep Indefinite Unconsciousness. Technically, she is still alive. Officially, she was lucky. They got to her just in time to scrape up off the hillside the last biological part of her life. It’s not hard for you to associate the north with tragedy. Nicki. Danny. There’s always half a truth to cliché.
    You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you. For example, when will Nicki’s family finally give up hope and switch off the machines? She lies there, day after day, as she has for years, living by medical proxy, her hair glossy as conkers, electrically retrograde behind her skull. You still visit her when you are home. You’ve got used to it–being chatty and fey, nothing but the sound of your voice in the room and the soft flushing of the ventilator. You tell her what is going on in the world, wondering if she has any notion what year it is now. After the nurses leave her room, you ask her to wake up. There is never a response. You whisper down into her ear. It’s like making a confession to the oblivious ground, or blowing across the top of an empty bottle.
    Her sisters send you Christmas cards each year on her behalf–the secretarial custodians of Nicki’s half-life. How could they know if a week after The Decision was made–after they had brushed her hair and changed her nightgown a last time, and told her goodbye we love you darling girl –that this was not the week she was due to sit up, finally, and ask what she got for her A level history, say she fancied a Rich Tea biscuit, and wonder if her boyfriend Andy had been in to see her. Only to find out the prick had married her younger cousin, a year after she went under.
    The doctors measure her brain activity. From time to time there are electrical spikes, heat blooms. There’s no way of knowing how aware she is, what she is hearing, what she is feeling. The doctors say the green flares might be dreams. They say: don’t dismiss her existence in case she is trapped within herself. Her spirit rattling around mutely, like a pea in a dead whistle.
    On your fifth date you told Nathan about Nicki, about what happened when you were teenagers. You were in a café on Betterton Street. There was a plate of cheese on the table in front of you, a basket of bread, two glasses of red wine. Downstairs there was a reading going on. Every few minutes you could hear thin choppy clapping, like the clapping at a village cricket match. His face fell. I know it’s sudden, but I love you, will you marry me? It was as if it was you who had survived near-death in the winter snow, as if the true miracle was that you were sitting there eating cheese, and it was vital that he ask you.
    He reached over and put his hands behind your neck, and in doing so caught a finger in your hair-band and pulled out your ponytail. It was an awkward moment. Your hair spilled forwards. He kissed you. You said nothing. There was silence for a while, then sporadic clapping. He has never asked again. He was hurt, you’re sure. But you kept going out, regardless. You became comfortable, dependent, you enjoyed mutually satisfying sex. You cooked fresh pastas in the evenings, slept against each other’s backs, holidayed abroad. Then you moved in together. You upgraded from two shared suburban houses with fox-skunked gardens to one stylish sky-lit conservation-area flat, right by the heath.
    Here, you have domestic security. The mortgage goes out by standing order; sensibly you pay more than the interest every month. Laundry collects in a wicker hamper and is regularly washed. The floors are slick, dust-free; in the cupboard is one of those click-together devices to sweep, with detachable cloths that attract cobwebs like magic. Ladles and spoons live in the second down of four fitted pine drawers, below a sophisticated granite counter. Everything in the flat is ordered, utilised, pleasing. The second