"I'm cryin' for you, Barry, every night I'm crying for you."
Nervous in the doorway, hands hidden like moles in black jacket. "'Tisn't natural, Julie darlin', to be cryin' like that, every night for hours. Sleep, machushla, don't be worrying over me. I've always come."
Silent in the bed, starched sheets and thermometre in permanganate in the window. Doubting, feeling her bones break through the skin. She's turning into a bone herself, knows it; she's never seen Barry so unsettled.
"Baby, I know what you're thinking, and I'm thinking it myself. You're looking at me for me to say I'm going with her, and you know that's just not true now, Julie darling." There's too much sunlight in the room, reflecting off every surface, white and white and ice and light down to the livery lino under the bed. It's a hole and he's falling through it, too much on his shoulders to keep floating, wants to fall but can't fall. Everything he loves and hates and would kill and die for is holding him up, steel needles out of that sharp white face.
Julie pulls her knees up, prays they were Barry. He's too distant, not close, not doting on her. She can't go to him, can't walk anymore without the shivers and the cough. "I think you'll be going to see her the instant you walk out of here, Barry Casserly, so you may as well leave now." Too bitter, too short. She can't hide her jealousy under a skin that can't hide her veins. The sunlight is overpowering, shines nearly through her.
Uncomfortable in the doorway. He can't come any farther. There is no balance here, and it's overwhelming. She's been stripped raw, pared of superfluities and comfort and restraint. "I gotta go, Julie, I gotta go." He is Satan, Heathcliff, kicking conscience and care into one coffin. His heart could be their pounding against the padlocked lid.
She is reaching up, shivering, feet like dead fish hitting the harshly waxed lino. "Don't go, Barry, don't go... I need, I.. need a glass of water, please, love, go to the nurses and get me a glass of water." Swaying, cheating physics and physicians. Barry between her and and the cheese-box-hatted nurses with their armour-plate aprons. Patient out of bed, out of options. She'll put her arms around him, love him, die trying.
The room's too cool now, sun behind clouds, and he's a fool with a dying woman clinging on, clinging, dragging him down through that big blessed hole. Her chin is sharp, digging in his chest, shivering with holding her insubstantial weight. "I gotta go, got things to do, Julie. Tell you what, John's coming around later with a bottle of lemonade for you, remember baby? But I gotta go..." A fool now, in this cool room. She's caught him out with that acerbic insight peculiar to the dying. He can't love this thing, this dying thing, can't stand to watch her disintegrating.
She's crying now, into his jacket, crying and coughing when she can't pull any air. "Open the window before you do. Open the window, darling, and let me breathe." It's impossible now, with the shaking in her bones and the dampness in the room. "I need a glass, need a glass of water, please stay just a moment..." She's killed him, suspected him to death. Magnified, he is cotton: porous, regular, simplistic. He can't hide his revulsion under a skin thinned by mental exhaustion. He has to go, go, into the air, out of the noxious and nauseous and horrible air.
Forces himself to hold Julie, lead her back to that gaol-barred iron bed. She's hardly there, no weight at all; pure wretched emotion and melting lumps of uneasy disease, poisonous with the need to be comforted, cossetted, appeased. She's dragging him down through the floor that is a hole, a portal to the worms and the earth and the dank dull smells of churches. Whispering now, demanding something; her expired voice is unnaturally forceful, harsh, an inaudible klaxon. "Would you, could you turn on the radio? It's so lonesome here, nothing to hear but yourself breathing."
She holds herself up by the headboard, half turned away from him, watching the street: three young mothers with black perambulators, respectable and firm and every one the same, living and breathing and walking alike. She is the centre of a nimbus, indistinguishable from the toxic rays of a sun Roentgen might have envied. "I watched for you in the street, Barry, watched all the afternoon. I thought you wouldn't come, wouldn't ever come with me so wasted up. You'd go to her, to her, she's alive and I'm stuck here with this damned - nothing."
Barry watches that narrow chest, her fish's chest, inflate; she will curse him, call down death and sorrow upon his uncomplicated workman's head. Curse her first; she will die anyway, and so much the better; twists his fingers together to stop his wicked urges to shake the spun-glass witch. "So what if I do go with her, eh? So what if I can't bloody stand to watch you die, die, and die hating me? You're over with, you're through; I'm alive and going to be alive when you and your bones and your hateful little mind are dust! Maybe I won't come tomorrow, did'ya think about that? You cried about it, cried to pass the time, that's what; really cry now because I'm gone, Julie. God help me, woman, I loved you, but I can't stand to see you die."
No answer from the window, only cold and clammy silence from the emaciated snow statue watching the windowpanes with exacting equanimity, circumspect and mathematical and wrenchingly false.
Pantomime rhonchi, aptheoses of ausculations, slide through the doorway's safe haven. "Visiting hours are nearly done, Mr Casserly. I think it's best that you leave and allow Miss McCarthy to get some rest." A nurse, young, ruddy in the cheeks and stoically solid of body behind her hard-starch apron. Her eyes accusing and direct beneath that white student's cap are judge, jury, and executioner, convicting him of murder. She carries, like an especially apt and perverse proverb, a glass of water. Julie's eyes, invisibly fixed on the mothers with perambulators, pull the lever, drop the trapdoor, and snap his neck. I'm a fool, a murdering fool, in this sick room, this cool room. The unencumbered sun will be cheerful, painfully and insanely cheerful.
Outside, he can smell the sickness on his skin.