Dog's Chance

Nat Edwards

Between two heartbeats; a moment of perfect stillness. Catch it now and remember. Every smell and taste. Tomorrow, the memory will be different but here it is now.

It starts with colour. Grey upon grey. Clouds and power lines and year old thistledown miraculously clinging to old stalks. Gunmetal silhouettes of sleeping carnival rides at the edge of view - half-hidden flashes of peeling paint promising something different - a respite from this relentless grey good-for-f***-all day. It would be fitting if a faint fairground tune echoed across the wasteland - but there is nothing except the low drone of wind and the steady ebb of Saturday afternoon football traffic on Shooter's Hill. We spend so long looking for reasons or patterns. The music would have provided a nice symmetry - so would the football. He had, after all stopped traffic for two hours after the mid-week godawful draw with Bristol Rovers and that was why we were all here.

The wind makes my eyes water. I look back from a low ridge of thistles and brambles across dry grass to the small, glass hospital entrance. There is a weight in my pocket. I absently reach for it and let my fingers play over the lump of metal and plastic while trying to focus on the small group of figures clustered by the hospital. Trying to make them out, I look at their relative sizes; at who is standing closer to whom; at how they are standing - and identify them. I imagine them watching me or each other; or wrapped in their own moment and wonder whether they are worrying about me - or whether they need me to worry about them. What he would want me to do? I become aware of the 'phone in my pocket and pull it out - scrolling through the address book.

The smells go deeper than the colours. More absolute and more final. With the colours there may be some appeal - some sort of cosmic adjustment of the histograms. However, smells are smells. Chocolate, tobacco and mud. Strangely pleasing anti-bacterial alcohol gel smells. The smells of old family friends like paper and childhood Christmases and other smells that simply mark the end of memory. Acrid and acid-etched. Final smells. The reason that we are all here.

Reason - pattern - logic. We always look for them. It is what kept our naked, helpless ancestors alive; when they could recognize a pattern in a flash of yellow and brown in a jungle instant and know whether they needed to run for their lives or to throw themselves into the hunt. Reason had guided our decision and it was for this reason that we had known what this day would bring. The judges' decision is final. - But I still had so much to give. - The judges' decision is final. - But this is all I know - it's all I really ever did. - I'm sorry - but you just don't have the X-factor. We really need people who can breathe for themselves. 'Who can think for themselves. Who can. - But. - The judges' decision is final.

We had sat, his girlfriend, his brother and me, his son, in a small room with comforting pictures of fish, a kind nurse and an awkward, strangely inarticulate doctor to make our decision - our judgement. If he survived, explained the doctor - he could face months in hospital and would be disabled. I wanted to know what that meant - disability could mean being wheelchair bound, or perhaps a bad limp. The nurse leant forward and calmly interpreted. It would mean a persistent vegetative state. The doctor shifted uncomfortably and looked at his shoes.

When the time came to remove the ventilator - when the time came for us to instruct them to remove the ventilator, they moved him into a private room and cancelled all the other visits to the ward. We gathered around him with loved ones and did our best to make this last day something that reflected the man he had been. A proud and stubborn man who had last been in a hospital as a teenager, we knew he needed something special. We, his last judges, needed something special. We put Billy Holiday on the CD player and bought chocolate bars. We sat and stroked and soothed him, each impossibly hoping that his sightless eyes and deaf ears could sense something beyond the overwhelming verdict of brain death.

I took out a deck of cards and dealt each of us a hand, carefully placing cards in his warm, rough hands. We played knock-out whist and laughed when he almost beat us. He had always been an awful card-player and cheated, even when he had played me as a child. Now, with nothing left of that sharp, funny amoral mind, he nearly won the game. But only nearly. Even with a dog's chance, he didn't quite manage to trump us all.

His brother, the scientist, explained the monitor readout. We watched his heartbeat rise, fighting to sustain the dwindling oxygen levels in his blood. Impossibly, it rose and rose, like an athlete's; as if he was going to break some miraculous record. He fought long after we had all given up fighting - holding on to that one last card; as ever, fighting against reason and all the rules.

He's no hero out of books - sings Lady Day. His labouring breaths slow to a single sigh and his ruddy face fades to a cold yellow. I take a cloth and wipe the pink foam from his mouth, gently as if he was my own child. I ask the others to leave the room for a moment. When they have gone, I say those things that are only for him to hear. I walk out onto the grey wasteland in front of the hospital. It is 5:15 and the fans are making their way home from the nearby game. Charlton lost again. It seems there are no miracles today.