Because when she spoke, he listened...

Mrs. Phillips had been a Miss Phillips for three years now. That is to say that she had stopped considering herself to be married for that length of time. Her husband had no interest in her any more, he paid her no attention. It had not always been so. At first, they were very much in love. He had proposed to her in Paris and she had accepted immediately. She was twenty two -- still a girl, she thought to herself bitterly. They had wanted to have a family but nothing happened. Things began to change. There wasn’t the same feeling, everything became much more routine. She had worried about that but had come to accept it, that when two people love each other for the first time it is special, the excitement and adrenaline of new love must change and adapt over time, the fluttering heartbeat and the ache of even brief separation cannot continue unabated. But something had taken its place. Frustration. They had never really spoken of it directly but it was there. When they had decided to start a family, they had just taken it for granted that it would happen. It hadn’t. Weeks passed and that was OK but then months started to pass. And it was not just that it was not happening but that they weren’t talking about it, that it had become a barrier between them. Trukka, by contrast, had been different. Kind and gentle, someone who would listen, much more like the husband she used to have. She had fallen for him immediately.

Ferris had beaten his son within an inch of his life that very evening. The cuts and the bruises meant that the boy would have to stay at home from school and, indeed, stay indoors for a week. He feigned a stomach infection --- the actual damage done was much worse than that. That day he stopped being Desmond Ferris and became Big Trukka.

… but when he opened his eyes, he wasn’t sitting beside Janet, he was still sitting across the big table from the steward.

“I think you need to get some rest” the big man said.

“Do I get the chance?”

The steward considered this for a moment and then nodded his head.

Janet went to stay with a friend for a few days. She had known Maria for ten years and they had always been very close. Maria had insisted that they go out for the evening ---

“Come on, it will be good for you and I won’t take no for an answer,” and so they had gone to a little Italian restaurant that they both knew well.

“It’s good to see you smile” Maria said as they entered the bustling osteria, “you should try it more often.” The owner knew both women and especially Maria, who was a good customer. A friendly Irishman who had married an Italian woman some twenty years previously, with whom he had established the restaurant ---she had run off with the best man and he had managed to hold onto this place. He wasn’t a bitter man, he was one of life’s great armchair philosophers and a lot of his clients came here as much to chat and joke with him as to sample the food.

“Good to see you Charlie,” Maria greeted him warmly.

“It is always a pleasure,” he replied and pulled her chair back for her to sit.

“I am sorry to hear about Tom” he said with emotion to Janet, “tonight’s food and drink is on the house.”

“Thank you” said Janet, genuinely touched, “that’s very kind.”

Charlie retreated, sensing that to say any more would be inappropriate. Maria lifted the menu and read out the names of a few main courses in her broken Italian. They ordered some olive bread and some red wine.

Trukka withdrew from the football team as soon as he returned to the school, he would not explain why. He also withdrew from his friends who wanted to know what had happened to him during the football match and subsequently. He didn’t want to take risks, he didn’t want to build up people’s expectations of him, he wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

Tom had wanted to ask the steward why he needed to rest, was he human so that he needed to sleep? In fact, there were so many questions that he wanted to ask but the steward was right, he was exhausted, he closed his eyes and he gave in to sleep.

She had not planned it that way. She was not looking for another man. She just felt that she had wanted to be needed, had wanted to be cared for and that, on occasion, she wanted to be looked at in a certain way. Trukka had come into her life in a very gentle way, he had not wanted or expected anything but there was something that they had in common. They had both been bruised and injured a little and were both a little defensive. It’s very small things which very often make huge differences to our lives --- when she spoke, Trukka listened. That was the most important thing of all.

Trukka never really planned anything. He had fashioned his existence around keeping his expectations low. He was appalled when he realised that he liked her. He felt exposed and open to attack. But beneath that, he felt something different, that here was a person that it was worth taking a risk on --- he really liked her and it scared him.

The path of destiny is a circuitous one. Trukka could not have imagined doors or windows opening or closing when he decided to pursue a risk-free life over a happy or fulfilled one and he would not have understood that invoking such a supposed risk-free strategy often exposes the individual to even greater danger. Privation is often seen as a virtuous thing, as character-building, but isolation cannot be endured by any man or beast. When deprived of water for any prolonged period, we drink more thirstily and with greater abandon. The great long-distance lorry of his life was about to go off-road but there were many trees and other obstacles in his path and one thing that you do not want when trying to avoid obstacles in any large bulky vehicle, is to hit the accelerator.

Tom hit the accelerator at 10:16 AM. He must have floored it because the roar of the engine jolted him. A second later, he hit something else – a person. For some bizarre reason, all he could think of at the moment of impact was of the car from behind which the man had stepped, a large red Renault. There was a terrible, sickening impact and then, once again, he was falling … this time, however, he did hit the bottom.

The steward stayed at the table and watched Tom sleep. They’ll have worked it out by now, he thought, and they’ll be after both of us.

She had been drawn to his shyness, hadn’t she? The fact that he blushed and shifted his weight uncomfortably whenever she stood close to him. And she asked herself if he had ever been with a woman before. He must have… It was not that he didn’t like women – he did, and it was not that he didn’t like her, she could tell that he did. So what was he so afraid of? And then she was intrigued and she had to know the answer. That’s how it all started, all of it : a professional curiosity.

“Oh no, it’s happening again,” Tom had thought to himself as once again the lights came on and he was in a long corridor. He didn’t want to move. The first time he had been here, he had been elated just to be alive but now he merely felt empty. This time it was a little bit different though, there was only one door at the end of the corridor. He picked himself up and walked towards it. This time there was no writing on the door but there was a picture of two large red-coloured dice. He turned the handle and held his breath.

The steward’s every instinct was telling him to run, to take Tom with him and to get out of there but to where? Where could they go? Nowhere was safe. They had found out by now, he could sense it and the net was beginning to close. He looked over to Tom but Tom was in another place and he knew that if he tried to wake him, he might not come back at all. He stood up. He walked to the corner of the room. He would have to think carefully about this.

Hospitals can be cruel places. Not just because people are ill and some will die, but because of some of the decisions which have to be made there.

Between life and death. When to keep on trying and when to accept the inevitable. Ken Travers was the doctor who was going to make the big decisions regarding Tom’s fate. He had already met Janet and the rest of his family and had liked them, he wouldn’t have wanted to give them false hope. He had shared the disbelief of everyone concerned that Tom had managed to survive initial impact but his own view from the start of it was that it would have been better if he hadn’t, whether or not he was suffering much pain wherever he was now, Travers had been sure from the very outset that there would be no coming back from this, there would be no happy ending to this story. He felt that he would have to wait the normal period of time before it was clear to everybody that this patient was dead and that they should let him go. Travers felt that that time was now approaching and that he would soon have the awful job of telling the family that, in his opinion, they should switch off the life-support and do exactly that.

She remembered touching him on the cheek, he had flinched and wanted to get away but, at the same time he didn’t and he kept her hand there. That had been the first time and how sweet the memory of it was.

Trukka had stayed away for a while after that, hating himself for his own weakness but she knew that he would come back. When he did come back, he seemed a lot more sure of what he wanted and he knew that he wanted her. Her husband hadn’t even noticed the change in her but for her, her whole world had become brighter and she had started to look forward again instead of always looking back. She could see the change in Trukka, that would not have required a genius --- everybody who knew Trukka could see the change in him, he was like a new person. He was happy again and she had done that. He bought her gifts, she could not accept them, how could she explain them to her husband? But still he went on, flowers --- she had always loved to receive flowers and so she took them and put them in the middle of the kitchen and told her husband that she bought them for herself because he had given up doing that years ago.

It felt very wrong to take advantage and to score cheap points like that but also very right for was it not true? Is that not the way of the world, we give our love to somebody and if we do not feel that it is being returned to us properly, we want to hurt that person, or at least we are less concerned if what we do does hurt them. She felt confused and guilty at the beginning but not now, now it was like being twenty again, she thought of Trukka, not of her husband, when she went to bed at night and the first thing when she woke up in the morning. Even when she lay with him, which was not often these days, it was Trukka that she was thinking of. How could she resolve it? She wanted to spend every day with him. She was colder and more distant to him now, she thought that he didn’t care but there were signs recently that maybe he did, maybe he had changed but it was too late, she had gone too far and she could not go back. Some decisions cannot be revoked, the price is too great.

Maria sensed that Janet was coming back, she had been away for a while but that now she was returning. Perhaps not the same Janet who had left, perhaps that would never now happen but something like her and she was pleased. One cannot live on a state of constant red alert, always waiting for bad news on the telephone or in the hospital. Eventually one has to prepare for the worst, hope for the best --- yes, but prepare for the worst. But she also sensed that that worst was probably very close. She had accompanied her friend on several of her visits to the hospital and she could see that the doctor who was responsible for his treatment was not optimistic. Janet could not, she did not want to, she had blinded herself from the truth but she could see. She hoped that she was wrong but she wondered what it would do to her friend if she was right.

Maria had taken her out dancing, taken her to the cinema, taken her to the restaurant --- anything to get her mind off that hospital and it had worked, mostly, and it had been good for the two of them --- it had been a while since they had done everything together but this had brought all the happy memories of those younger days flooding back. There was a time when they had shared everything with each other but that was before family and responsibility and mortgages and careers had threatened to cut all of that away but despite all the years, they still knew each other better than any other living soul, they were almost telepathic in that little circle of two and Maria was afraid for her friend, she was not the strongest person in the world and she tended to give herself completely to other people, she did not really know what would happen to Janet if Tom did not pull through.

She hoped that the new-found strength she saw in Janet was because she had realised the futility of spending her every moment thinking of him, that she had started to let go a little but she was afraid that the opposite might be true, that because Tom had survived thus far and against everybody’s better judgement, that he was bound to make a full recovery. She hoped that her friend didn’t think this because that way, she suspected, lay madness.

Tom’s dilemma had just got worse. Without even knowing who he was, he had somehow been bounced into Trukka’s personal nightmare and that football game so many years previous where everything had changed. He felt that the eyes of one man in particular were on him and he knew not why. That one particular man was staring at him with a lot of hostility, more than Tom had known in his lifetime but it was clear that it was someone that he knew, or rather the person that he had now become knew this person very well. More than an uncle or a friend of the family, was it possible that this was his father? He felt cold, physically cold but from the inside out and it came from a sense of fear which seemed absurd, why would any boy be so afraid of a football match? --- all that might happen is that you lose. Nevertheless, it would not go. It had been so long now since Tom had actually experienced a physical presence in the real world, he had been floating in this ethereal wilderness for so long now that he had almost forgotten what his physical attributes were --- was he tall or small, weak or strong, fast or slow? He still had the impression that this boy was much bigger than he had been, many of the other boys in his team were looking to him and so was the manager, he had the impression that he was now a very good player and that much was expected of him. How disappointing then, that he started the match so badly, he gave the ball away straight from the kick-off and things didn’t get much better after. Despite his bewilderment at being thrust into another entirely new situation, he could not help but feel bad at the disappointment everyone around him felt at how badly he was playing. He looked over at the man in the crowd he had noticed at the very start, he was furious --- it was a look he had somehow recognised but he didn’t know how. Contained anger. Anger contained so well that probably nobody else on the field or in the crowd knew that he was angry but Tom knew it and he felt more scared. His knees turned to jelly. But the more worried he became and the more he absolutely needed to play well, the less it happened. Soon the team was losing by three goals and it was still the first – half! Just as he felt something coming back to him, some strength or some courage or belief --- he saw his manager, was it his teacher? beckoning him to the sideline. His game was finished, he could not believe it. And just as Trukka had done so many years previously, he felt the temptation to look over to his father and he, also, refused.

Ferris had noticed a change in his son also, he saw something new and it made him feel real regret for the past --- had this new and happy, vibrant person always been there, just waiting to get out? Ferris was much older now and he knew that he would not be here much longer. He felt the temptation to atone for the past, to try and help his son become a happier man, not a more successful one but a happier and more contented one.

How he had despised those people who had taken the easy way out though, had lived their lives a certain way until the eleventh hour and then become afraid and wanted to change everything on their deathbed. He had sacked a million people during his life, he had screwed a million people in business but it had always been to improve the business and business had improved. The consequence of that was that he now employed a million people, he provided food for their tables and a roof to put over their heads. Such is business : the bottom-line is the bottom-line. To succeed means to make sacrifices and he had been doing it all his life, if he had been softer then he would not be so successful. Success breeds and propagates success, this was his contribution and if he was ever asked to justify his life, this is what he would say. One of the people he had fired many years ago had asked him how he could do it. And he had thought about it for a long time afterwards. How could he do it? He had to do it. Should he be a charity case? What would that gain anybody? The man had appealed to his sense of decency, to the fact that he was a family man but many men have families --- how many families was he supporting by being good at what he did? He had come from a very different background to the one which was so popular today, he often felt that people who fulfilled their ambitions in this new environment were expected to almost apologise for their achievement. More so if they did it through their own hard work and endeavour. He would not. Never apologise was his philosophy. What is done is done. But still, he felt regret --- now, at this late stage because he saw what might have been, the man who Desmond might have become and all the money that he had made seemed less important to him than yesterday.