THE DAY THAT ARTHUR GAMBLE DIED

To many just another day...

A lot happened on the day that Arthur Gamble died of Covid 19.

To start with, the sun rose in the east and cast its warming rays through a gap in his curtain and landed on his face, massaging it with an unwanted brilliance and reflected off the oxygen cylinder which lay between this world and the next for him.. It was to be a sunny day, which, a bit of his mind thought, would make a change, but what the heck?

He was in bed, rain or shine alike.

The paper boy shoved his newspaper through the letterbox and he was too ill to fetch it. It might, he thought, hold a secret and then he sighed. It never did, not ever. He was too old for secrets.

The nurse was due to come at ten with her pills and potions, but she’d be late if she was as busy as she’d been yesterday. He really ought to be in hospital, they’d told him so, but he told them when he could talk with more determination that he’d been born in this bungalow and by golly he was going to die in it.

It was almost eleven when she arrived, checked his vital signs and the oxygen apparatus, dropped an amusing quip about the sex life of cats and bustled off.

He appreciated her visits. Yesterday it had been the sex life of dogs.

Outside in the street a group of children was playing, probably in a neighbour’s garden, he couldn’t tell where, but he liked hearing them.

He’d been a boy once, a long time ago. Running about, leaping, playing tag with Amanda who always managed to tag him on his shorts where she really shouldn’t, but what the heck? It was just play and it had made him laugh. And anyway, he’d liked Amanda back then. She was fun.

He’d do anything to get just one of those days back again. Tag in the garden. Jumping over the stream in the back field. Blackberrying with mum on autumn days in sunshine, and with home made cheese and tomato sandwiches.

Blackberry and apple pie. Yummy. He’d not had any of that for more years than he cared to remember.

Nurse had left the radio alarm on so that he had some company and set it to go off after an hour, so he heard the news.

There was a vaccine going round, one that would kill the damned virus stone dead. It would be no good for him, though, He’d either live or die. He was beginning not to care which. The Prime Minister had also said something else yesterday that was stupid. He was always doing that, giving the impression that he just opened his mouth in public and came forth with the first thing that entered his mind, so it didn’t really matter what he said.

The radio man then waffled for a few minutes and some pop tune played, a horrible one, but then, weren’t they all horrible these days? Not like they’d been once, when pop music was invented in the grey but glorious nineteen fifties.

He didn’t know for sure but guessed there must be a war raging somewhere because there always was. There’d be lines of refugees leaving the scarred land that had once been home to them. Some things never change, nor would they whilst there was money in making and selling armaments. That’s what it was all about, really. Making ever more money. Piles of it, more than a fellow could ever need, and persuade some tribe somewhere that they hated some other tribe. Stupid, really, but he supposed it did control the growth of population.

He heard a helicopter overhead, its blades whirring, sounding low, close to his roof, maybe. What was it, then? There were two helicopters that regularly came this way, the air ambulance one and much more often, the police one, chasing some miscreant.

He wasn’t to know it, but a couple of teenagers had robbed the corner shop, leaving the slip of a girl working in it with a bruise the size of a grapefruit on her head, and they were being chased on land and via an eye in the skies, that helicopter.

They were going to get caught, the odds were so much against them that it was inevitable, but still they ran, dodged here and there, followed by thermal camera above their heads.

He didn’t care. He just wanted the helicopter to go away.

He knew that the pub was shut, the pub where he had wiled away the shadows of his life until all that was left of it was the smidgen of time left. That was before he caught this illness. And he knew it was only that, a smidgen of time. He was old and he had the virus, didn’t he? And in between the coughing and the gasping there were flashes of that long black night that was to come.

Shouting. It was lunch time and the hotheads round the corner were shouting. What was it this time? Yesterday it had been grapes. Those in the shops were from Spain and even further afield, and they wanted British grapes only to be told there weren’t any. Since the EU bother those hotheads had wanted everything to be British, and everything wasn’t, so they created a fuss every now and again, until they got moved on.

Anyway, didn’t a lot of British stuff bear the label Made In China?

Sylvia was due. A granddaughter, in her twenties and as perfect as any granddaughter could be. She’d check the oxygen, which the nurse had done already but he’d be dead without it so it might as well be checked twice. Then she’d smile at him, the sweetest of smiles, it reminded him of Alice who’d shared his life with him until she died, what twenty years ago. He missed Alice. They’d got on, hardly ever disagreed but he was only too happy that she’d not met up with this virus, like he had.

It had been his own fault, he supposed, for sitting on what he looked at as his seat in the park, sitting next to a stranger who’d coughed all over him, and neither of them wearing a mask. But what was done was done and nothing could be undone about it.

Not now, anyway.

He closed his eyes and pictures of long ago passed through his mind. Faded pictures of faded times

Then the images were gone. All of them, the cheek of Amanda … might he have loved her? That was the unanswered question, the glory that was Alice, lovely Alice who died too young, only sixty four, and in her grave.

A lot was still happening in the world the day that Arthur Gamble died, but he was numb to the rest of it. His room was silent as the grave. His rasping breathing was stilled. The virus would need a new host.

And the sun set unseen by dead eyes in the west.

© Peter Rogerson 05.01.21