The white hospital room was the size of small shipping container and with as much charm. To my right, is a white bedside table. There’s a jug of water and three ‘get well’ cards. A posy of flowers sits in a glass. Doris, the cleaning lady, chucked them on my bed last night. The woman next door won’t be needing them, she said. The clock above the door goes ‘clunk’ as it hits 12 midnight but not at 12 noon.

The smell of the antiseptic and floor polish hangs in the air long after the polishing machines have gone. The wax is mildly perfumed and it reminds me of the stale incense smell which clung to the clothes of the hippy girls I dated as a teenager. Their bedrooms were full of crystals, books on the I-Ching, posters of Krishnamurti and Kahlil Gibran’s ‘Desiderata’.

My room is on the seventh floor. If the sliding door wasn’t locked, I could walk out on to the balcony and stare at the other poor bastards in their pyjamas in the adjacent hospital block. The surgeons’ Mercedes and BMW’s squat below in the car park. I raise my bed to the ‘greeting guests’ position and stare at my wife reading ‘Jude the Obscure’. She calls herself Poppy but her real name is Bernice. She dresses in bohemian chic and for a woman of 53, wears it well. Good legs and a strong chin. She goes to pilates and plays competition squash once a week. She arrives in my hospital room at 2.00pm every day and leaves on the dot of 5.00pm. We’ve been married for 21 years but the conversation ran out ten years ago. The marriage is based on the blind faith that tomorrow will be better than today. I’ve got liver cancer and I’m fucked.

I retired from teaching maths at the university five years ago. Our small two-bedroom apartment is filled with pictures of us cruising down the Danube, walking around the cobbled streets of Dubrovnik and sailing off the Costa Brava. We are childless and a caricature of a post-war generation couple.

Poppy wouldn’t like me telling you this but I’ve made two suicide attempts in the last six months and she has stopped each one. She’s a hero to her friends. A veritable Joan of Arc sticking by her depressed and dying husband. Before my last attempt, she’d meet her girlfriends for coffee at Positano’s Café in leafy Bunyon Street.

“How’s Paul going?”

“He’s doing as well as can be expected. He ate a veal schnitzel for dinner last night.”

“A veal schnitzel! That’s marvellous. You’re a saint, Poppy”.

Then a jewelled hand would reach across the table and give Poppy’s wrist a little squeeze.

I don’t make much of the first attempt. I’d just got the prognosis. Poppy had gone to her squash lesson and I was home alone. The place was full of packing boxes as we had just sold our beautiful house and were moving in to an apartment near the hospital. It was Poppy’s idea. I loved that house. The walls held good memories. We had big parties there and the music was loud and the wine was good and plentiful.

I went to the double garage, fitted the pool hose to the Mazda’s exhaust, closed the garage door, sealed the windows and started the car. I sat in the driver’s seat and listened to the motor. It had just been serviced. I hadn’t written Poppy a suicide note. To say what? ‘Thanks for all of the clean shirts and by the way, I’m dead in the garage’? I played with the indicator lights for a few seconds. I looked at my old surfboard in the corner. Only used it once. The lawnmower needed a new spark plug. It would take 15 minutes for the carbon monoxide to fill the garage. I wound down the windows, laid the seat back and closed my eyes. Little motes danced across my eye lids as my breathing slowed.

A pair of hands hauled me roughly from the driver’s seat and out in to the backyard.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Paul, of all the dumb things,” Poppy yelled. “Can you hear me? Can you bloody hear me?”

She rolled me over on to my left side, called an ambulance, then ran inside, got a glass of water, and as I was vomiting, threw it in my face.

The ambulance arrived three minutes later.

“Can you pull the ambulance into the garage,” she asked. “I’d rather not have the neighbours see this.”

The two ambulance men ignored her. They lifted me on to the trolley and slid me in to the back of the ambulance. I could see our neighbour, Mrs Taylor, make her way across the common. Mrs Taylor did to gossip what the Murdoch press did to the truth.

That was my first attempt. People say that it was a cry for help. No. I was trying to kill myself. That’s what I told the medical registrar in the hospital. I didn’t want to die alone, screaming in pain, shitting in my pyjamas, in a hospital bed. Poppy said that was an utterly selfish attitude and not only would it bring shame on her, it was cowardice. Life was a gift from God, she said, and killing myself was taking a shit on that gift. The registrar nodded sagely. Poppy had never mentioned God before. She was spiritual, as many women are who don’t need to work and who come from a privileged background. But invoking God was a new one.

In my last year of teaching, I had an affair with a younger student. Helena was doing a Master degree by research in probability theory. She was 27 and looked like a young Charlotte Rampling but with a brunette pony tail. Helena had wrongly interpreted my solicitude as a romantic overture. By the time I realised what was happening, we were meeting in her flat for sex. If a man uses lines such as, ‘by the time I realised what was happening’ as an excuse, you are in the company of a liar. It had been so long since a woman had looked at me without handing me a tea towel, I threw caution to the wind. The affair lasted 12 months. Helena ended it by finishing off her degree overseas.

That was the first and only time I ever cheated on Poppy. I’m not proud of it. Around that time, I started to get fatigue. I trudged 20 paces behind Poppy when we went shopping. It was a sign that the minute hand of my life was moving to midnight with a ‘clunk’.

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I met Poppy travelling in Scotland. I’d taken three months off after finishing my PhD. I was staying at an old hotel in Applecross on the north-west coast. The town sat like an emerald facing Skye and the Atlantic. It was so remote, I fell in love with it. It was Friday night and the hotel was full of American tourists. I was playing darts with a local fisherman when she walked in wearing blue jeans, a check western shirt and Doc Martin boots. She ordered a pint of Guinness and played ‘Big Country’ on the juke box. She sat by herself and looked at the dinner menu. I walked over and said the lamb cutlets were good but stay away from the curry. It had hair on it. She looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘sit down’ and I did. Three days later, we drove up the Bealach na Ba Road together in my dodgy hire car and we haven’t been apart since. Until now.

The second suicide attempt was embarrassing. We’d watched ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ for the 40^th time after dinner. I said Andie McDowell’s character, Carrie, was a psychopath. She purposely arrived at Charles’s wedding to tell him that she’d split from the old Scottish bastard, thereby creating a large amount of psychic turmoil. Like clockwork, Poppy, dunking a Monte Carlo in to a cup of English Breakfast, said Carrie had to go otherwise there wouldn’t be a happy ending. I countered that there would be no happy ending for Charles because she had yanked his chain for most of the movie.

I got up at 1.00am, walked to the garage, started the car and drove to the red-light district of town. I’d made notes in my private journal how and where to buy heroin. My research skills were second to none. A young man who looked like Catweazle lurched past. “You chasin’?” I nodded and said I wanted, “two grams of your finest pink rocks”. He looked at me, looked at my car parked across the lane, realised I wasn’t a cop and said, “$500”. I handed him the cash and he placed two foil-wrapped packets of heroin in my hand and quickly walked off in to the night.

I drove to Kiss Kiss Point, where young couples came to look at the city lights. My plan was simple. I’d drink a bottle of 30-year old Glenfiddich and then snort the heroin as the sun came up. The scotch would steady my nerves. I sat in the car and chugged down the scotch. A sharp pain rose and fell just below my gut. My pancreas was giving me the two-fingered salute. I opened heroin and tipped the white powder on to the back of an old street directory. I used a credit card to chop it up and form two large, white lines. I put my nose over the white powder when there was a loud knock on the driver’s side window.

Poppy heard the Mazda pull out of the drive. She went to my journal, found my plan and called her cousin, a drug squad detective and told him I was going to kill myself with a lethal overdose of heroin at the Lookout. Could I be brought home without too much fuss? The detective assigned two patrol officers, who, believing they were doing the right thing, hauled me in to police headquarters. I was charged with possession of an illicit substance and driving under the influence. It was bad luck that as I left the station, a news photographer was standing outside, waiting to get pictures of a paedophile priest who was also arrested that night. My picture appeared in the newspaper that morning, with his.

“Former academic busted for drugs at lover’s lane”

Poppy didn’t meet her girlfriends for coffee for two weeks after that.

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This afternoon Poppy pulled her chair next to me. That was new. The afternoon sun poured in to the room. She wore black ankle boots, a grey dress with a thin black belt. She’d had her hair done at Penny Lane. She looked beautiful and I told her. She shifted in her seat.

“It’s been a while since I’ve heard that.”

Doris poked her head around the door. “Can I get you a cuppa, Poppy?”

They’d been on a first name basis since I was admitted.

“No thank you, Doris”

I raised the bed and took a sip of water. I was always thirsty. The clock on the wall said 2:05pm.

“’The days run away like wild horses over the hills,” I said. “Do you remember that line from Charles Bukowski?”

Poppy smiled and nodded. “You read those poems to me in Rome. I had flu and you bought me icecream. My throat was so sore. So long ago.”

A pain crept like hot wire up my intestines. I chose to ignore it but my hand was trembling. Tomorrow they’d start me on morphine.

“You look like you’re going to an important function?” I said.

“It’s nothing. I’m having drinks with my squash coach in an hour. It’s his 50^th birthday. I told you about him. You call him the ‘Christian Backhander’.”

“You must be dangerous with a squash racquet. You’ve been taking lessons for a couple of years now. Give him some ‘Hail Mary’s’ for me.”

Poppy smiled and held my hand.

“I have to leave at 2.20,” Poppy said. “I hope you understand. I bought you a little something.”

She handed me a copy of Richard Yates’ ‘Revolutionary Road’. She knew I liked the film. Tears welled. The present was so thoughtful and sad. Poppy hadn’t seen the film or read the book. She thought it was a political thriller. I moved the placed the book on the side table.

Poppy stood up, smoothed her dress and walked to the door. The clock said 2:15.

“I just want to say one thing before I go,” she said. “While I think life is precious, I respect that you have other ideas. I’ve always loved you. I’m just not very good at showing it.”

I raised my finger tips to my lips and blew her a dry kiss.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. “Same time, same place”

“I’ll be here,” I said. She walked out the door and closed it gently behind her. Her copy of ‘Jude the Obscure’ lay on the seat.

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Doris was distracted. Normally she cracked jokes but her boss was cutting her shifts. She had to find another job. I gave her the name of the head of maintenance at my old university. When I returned from the toilet I found a small bunch of flowers on my bed with a note, “Thanks xx” and a block of half-eaten Cadbury chocolate.

In her excitement, Doris had forgotten to lock the balcony door. I walked out on to a small veranda. The other patients in the building opposite were walking around their rooms or lying in bed watching TV. Venus was about 30 degrees off the western horizon, ready to make its way east by south east.

I went back inside and got Poppy’s chair and stood it against the railing. In the distance, I heard music. There was a free concert playing Elgar in the Botanical Gardens. The cellos sounded like bees circling a flower. I tied my dressing gown tight and stood on the chair and placed one foot on the railing. I was a man on a mission and night was coming.