The nurse whispered in my ear, how he had been hanging on for months, or was it years? He may have heard her. “Just to be bloody difficult, eh?” A quick grin lifted one side of his face. “Not that there'll be any fuss,” he said. “Those beggars are not about to mourn me.” And the three of us looked up together, at a framed photograph on the wall beside his bed - a conventional family group, smiling for the camera.


“He does enjoy a chat though,” the nurse said.

As it happened, I was there to visit my mother who had been in the Sunhill Home a week, but hadn't settled. The view my mother had of her age was somewhat unique. She could hardly deny it, she was as old as this old man, but my mother's time was never discussed and, even if it were, I knew she'd admit nothing and she would expect a fuss. The doctor was with her now, a routine check; I could hear her demanding he make her young again and, not wanting to witness her pleading, I'd left them alone. I wandered along the corridor and found J.G. McBride -- found the door to his room wide open, found him braced and cradled in an arc of pillows like a child's doll.

The nurse tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. “Why don't you spend a moment with him while you're waiting. He'd enjoy that.”

How could I refuse a girl so pretty?

And he surprised me. I envisioned struggling with platitudes and patronizing gestures while he lay dribbling on the quilt. But no such thing. Even before I offered a greeting he opened one pale blue eye and said, “Who the hell are you?”

The nurse told him my name and left us. I pulled up a chair and sat beside him. “What a lovely girl,” I said.

“And here am I thinking you came to see me,” he said. “You're right, but she's not half as lovely as my Sally.”

He clearly sought agreement but how was I to know who Sally was? I looked at the picture again, adults and children, a baby, a tall woman with bluish hair who may have been his wife. But McBride had drifted away, as if his mind had calmly risen from the bed and left the room -- dozed off, I thought, leaving me to study hands he'd folded neatly one across the other on his belly, an intricacy of bones clearly visible beneath mottled, transparent skin, their incredible stillness, no rise and fall in them, for breath. A minute passed and then another. I edged toward panic. Should I call someone? But then he looked right at me again, that one blue eye, as if one side of him had woken and the other had not, as if for him there had been no pause at all, “What?”

“Sally?” I pointed at the picture. “You mentioned Sally.”

“No, no, no, no, no ... that's not Sally. Them? They wouldn't know Sally.” He closed his eyes. “She'd have to be over eighty now … eighty-three … she's probably long ago dead.”

Sally was not his wife then. He would surely know if his wife was dead, though in this place, at his age, nothing was certain except an end in sight.

“Not your wife then?” I said.

“That's the pity of it … I had two, you know, and couldn't stand either one … bitches! Both of them!” He moved his lips over the defamatory word, mouthed it again, softly. “Bitches.”

I was intrigued. Was Sally a secret lover then? Was I about to hear a confession? “So who was Sally?”
“Just a girl,” he said. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”

“And what became of her?” I imagined some tragedy.

“I don't know.” He leaned toward me, whispered, “I wish I did.”

“So when did you last see her?”

He seemed to be forcing me to question him, to interrogate him, to extract information he was reluctant to give. “How long ago?”

He stared for a time at a light fitting on the ceiling. “Let me see … it must be all of seventy years.”

“Seventy years! So you haven't seen Sally since 1933?” I may have grinned. I imagine I sounded amazed. “Around then,” he said. He narrowed his eyes. “If it works out to 1933, then that's when it must have been.” His voice had sharpened. “I'm not much good with figures now … but it seems like yesterday to me.” And then he said, “Thing is … the way I remember Sally, she wouldn't have altered.”

What did he mean she wouldn't have altered? Was he confusing Sally with the nurse? “You mean the nurse reminds you of Sally?” I said.

He sighed and shook his head. He moved in the bed and winced. I wondered was he in pain, or perhaps bewildered by drugs? But he went on. “All the women I've known ... how many? ... I don't know. How many women might an ordinary bloke have in a lifetime?”

He looked right at me. I couldn't think how to answer him.

“Well ... I've had my share,” he said. “ And I had to pretend with all of them … it's been a struggle, I can tell you … all that pretence … making love to them, always thinking of someone else ... always thinking of Sally.”
“Always?”

But he had drifted off again. That terrible stillness returned. I spent a moment wondering what life might have been like for his wives. I looked at the photograph again. Was that his first wife or his second? I could see a similarity in the structure of all the faces. They were all smiling the same smile: ordinary people, his children and his grandchildren -- they looked so normal and nice. I couldn't imagine their mother being a bitch. If that was her in the picture, she didn't look like a bitch. How could she be a bitch and have children that looked like that? I began to sympathize with her, with them. He seemed to care only for this Sally. No wonder they wouldn't mourn him. And who was Sally anyway?

In the end, it was I who broke the silence. “Aren't you going to tell me who she was?”

He returned from wherever he'd been, startled and blinking, as if the light annoyed him. But he collected himself quickly. “I don't exactly know that much about her,” he said. His laugh was high-pitched, almost gleeful.

“Are you having me on?” I said.

“Seventy years ago I was fourteen,” he said. “We were at school together ... in North London ... at the Kingsbury Grammar School … she was in a class below mine ... that made her thirteen … that's how I know how old she'd be now.”
Was I missing something?

“I know how old I am?” he said. I could see him becoming agitated. “She was the prettiest thing … long blonde hair right down her back … I was smitten, I can tell you that … I can remember the exact moment I saw her … the very first time … and I remember how I felt ... I couldn't take my eyes off her.”

He coughed and his head fell forward. I thought he may have been having a seizure; perhaps the nurse may not have realized how conversing with me might drain him. He was so pale and still. I stood up and turned around, but there was no sign of her in the corridor. I thought perhaps I should leave him now and let him rest. But I didn't. Instead, I sat down again. The truth was, I felt somehow privileged. Otherwise, why would he be telling me this, a stranger who had come to his bedside simply to pass the time of day? And, of course, I wanted to hear about Sally.

And then his head came up again; he continued as if nothing had happened. “You know, I couldn't sleep for thinking about her ... couldn't do anything ... couldn't get her face out of my head … I got into trouble at school for not paying attention in class, for not doing my work, for daydreaming … 'mooning,' they called it … they'd say, 'Here comes Mooney McBride.' They used to call me that ... Mooney McBride … what do you think of that? But how could I help it? … I was in love with her, wasn't I?”

“We've all had girls like that in our lives,” I said. “Girls we fell in love with for a while.”

“Well my girl was Sally and I never forgot her … I used to follow her ... I'd follow her home from school, then I'd hang around and wait for her to come out of the house ... that went on for months ... I'd follow her wherever she went ... shopping with her mother sometimes ... and sometimes they'd go to the cinema ... once I sat right behind her, close enough to touch her hair … I can remember every moment ... all the little things … who she stopped to talk to, what she bought, what she wore ... things like that. ”

“It's amazing you can remember all that after seventy years?” I said.

“You don't forget what's in your head every day,” he said.

So there had been a girl, and her name was Sally, but after seventy years, two wives and a mob of children, how could he remember details like what the girl was wearing on any particular day? I couldn't believe it. I couldn't remember what my wife had put on that morning.

As if to answer me, he said: “I can go back there whenever I want … I can relive it all.”

Did he now want me to believe he had special powers?

“I never did pluck up the courage to speak to her though.” He glanced at a decanter on the cabinet beside his bed. I poured some water, held the glass to his lips while he took a sip from it. “That's what I regret,” he whispered. “If only I had spoken to her it might have changed things.”


I moved closer. I could sense that what he was about to tell me was important -- maybe even the key to this whole thing. He was talking about someone who had been with him, but only in spirit, through his entire adult life; someone he had never spoken to, never really known.

“The truth of it is, I was scared to talk to her back then in case she didn't want me … and then it was too late.” He turned his head away.

“Too late?” I said. “What happened?” There may have been a challenge in my voice I didn't intend.

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. “She didn't come to school one day ... and when I went to her house I found it empty ... they'd all gone.” He made a sound I can only describe as a sob, and then continued, “… you see, I had in my head that no matter what, we would someday be together, me and her … I had that fixed in my head … it didn't matter that I hadn't spoken to her yet ... I was going to, it would happen, I knew that ... I had it all planned … I knew exactly what I would eventually say to her … but I didn't get around to it … I didn't expect her to disappear like that ... to just up and go … when you're young you think you have all the time in the world, don't you?”

“So she didn't say goodbye?” I said.

“You don't get it, do you?” he said. “How could she say goodbye to someone she didn't know?”

“Are you telling me she didn't know you were following her?” I said.

“She never gave a sign of it.”

“You'd think she'd have noticed someone taking that much interest in her,” I said.

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe she did … maybe she didn't.”

We stared at each other. We had come to where he was now -- confined to this bed, possibly his last. This was the point of it all. Now I could see what he was getting at. He didn't know. That was what this was about. Here he was, close to the end, still asking the same question he'd been asking himself most of his life. Had this girl, this Sally, been aware of him back then? Had she perhaps been waiting for him to speak to her, even hoping he would, before she was carried away?

Looking up again, I could see the shadow of this old man's disappointment etched into the faces in the photograph. Sure, I felt sorry for them. But now I felt a deep compassion for him. Something had occurred all those years ago, something magical had come into his life and then, tragically, had disappeared from it. Such a simple, silly thing, that would hardly mark the rest of us, had scarred this old man's entire existence.

“And you never saw her again?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” he said.
“What an unhappy story.” I felt ashamed I could think of nothing better to say to an old man on his deathbed.

He looked at me dispassionately. “I did try to find her … I tried to find out where she went … someone said they up and went to Australia ... all of them ... mother, father, she had brothers too ... but no one knew for sure … it's hard to find out anything like that when you're young … nobody takes a fourteen-year-old seriously, do they? Everything's just a phase you're going through when you're fourteen … but, when I was older, I traveled a bit ... there was the war for a start ... I saw a few places … I was in Aussie, and I was here in New Zealand … I was in Auckland and I remember thinking this is where she is ... it was a feeling, that's all … I went to the Post Office and looked through all the telephone books.”

“And was she?”

“Was she what?

“In the phone book?”
“The name was there ... the family name … but I figured she'd have got married ... a pretty girl like that would never have stayed single … her name would have been different, wouldn't it?”

“But did you call any of the numbers?” I asked.

“No, I didn't.” He closed his eyes.

“But someone might have known where she was,” I said.

“I didn't want to,” he said. “You still don't get it, do you?”

At that moment my mother began calling my name, insisting I return. “I have to go now, but I've enjoyed talking to you,” I said. I wanted to tell him he might yet find his Sally. I wanted to tell him he shouldn't give up the search. But I didn't. It seemed so pointless to say those things. At the door I turned and looked back at him -- a tiny pixie of a man, eyes glinting in a puppet's face.

“Bigalow,” he said.

“What?”

“Sally Bigalow ... that was her name.” He was staring up at the light fitting again, as if puzzled by its complexity.

I stopped in the corridor, suspended between their rooms. My mother called again, commanding me to come, but I couldn't move. My mother's maiden name was Bigalow. Her given name was Sarah but my father sometimes called her Sal. She was the right age. She was born in London, and went to school there before coming to New Zealand.

The nurse appeared from my mother's room. “There you are,” she said. “The doctor's gone. She's getting fretful. You'd better go on in.” I held back and she took my arm to lead me. That unruly strand of hair had come adrift again. She laughed. “Old McBride's a character though, isn't he? You know, through all his ups and downs he's never lost his sense of humour.” And then she frowned. “Are you all right? You look as if you've seen a ghost.”

Not a ghost - the old man's frailty gave him substance -- but I was trapped between them now, in a space of seventy years, trying to decide how best to approach my mother. Would she recall being followed by a boy in a class above her own at the Kingsbury Grammar School when she was just thirteen? Would she believe me when I told her that same boy was in the room next to hers at this moment? Would she remember? Would she remember him? And if she didn't ... how was I going to tell McBride?

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