In the unconsciously harsh language of tired nurses the world over, Jamie was not a good patient. He lacked the inner resources and ready passivity necessary for life as an invalid. The very word, invalid, with its connotations of low worth and non-participation, raised his defences. His was not one of those personalities that allowed itself to be overshadowed by an interesting malady. The very opposite of a hypochondriac, he would always deny an illness rather than let it take him to bed, staggering on through attacks of ‘flu when his colleagues would call in sick. It had taken the advent of Sam in his life to persuade him even to take lie-ins, much less enjoy them.
At first, he was so spaced out with fever and pain and drugs that his experience of hospital was ungraspable as a dream. Familiar faces – Sam’s, Alison’s, Miriam’s, Sandy’s – floated in and out of the fish-eye view of his suppressed consciousness, their words boomily nonsensical. He was wiped, patted, squeezed, injected and occasionally led, in a vertiginous daze that was pure Hitchcock, to an echoing bathroom. Insofar as he was aware of his body at all, it seemed to have become all weeping eyes, giant lungs and gasping mouth; a primitive, unsuccessful fish. His intervals of serenity were marked by delicious sensations of floating or sinking his sleepy way through an infinite expanse of harmless water. Then, like a tide, the fever receded, leaving him beached in a hospital room with a grey view of rooftops and his mother crying softly in an armchair.
‘A lot of help that is,’ he said, and she jumped up as though a corpse had spoken and ran into the corridor calling for a nurse.
His body was no longer burning up, his lungs no longer drowning in their own soup and his breath was once more his own, but the fever had left his body weaker than he would have thought it possible to be yet still live. The first few times he made his way down from the bed unassisted, his legs crumpled beneath him like a couple of straws. One of the male nurses – the camp, plain one as opposed to the cute, straight one-brought him a pair of walking sticks without having to be asked. Now Jamie could shuffle like an old man to his bathroom and review, with unflinching curiosity, his new face and body.
If he had been thin before Christmas, the New Year saw him skeletal. He turned his face this way and that in the merciless mirror. He now had the Montgomery Clift cheekbones he had always dreamed of, but the washboard stomach had been ousted by plate-rack ribs and a pelvis by Barbara Hepworth. His buttocks, once meatily pert, now drooped, wrinkled like tired balloons.
‘They could use me to sell famine relief,’ he told a plump Glaswegian nurse. ‘My adam’s apple’s become my best feature.’
‘And your hair,’ she said. ‘You’ve still got lovely hair.’
‘Gee thanks. You can come again.’
‘Look at it this way, sunshine,’ she told him. ‘For the first time in your life you can eat anything, absolutely anything you can keep down. Cheese. Cream. Chocolate. Cake. That sore patch in your mouth is a little bit of thrush, which we can knock on the head with Fluconazole. It’s going to hurt a bit when you swallow, but you’ve got to try to eat all you can.’
His bodily weakness had sapped his appetite, however, and the drugs he was on had placed him within constant sniffing distance of nausea. However delicious and calorie-rich the food that was set before him, he had become like the Queen; unable ever to eat more than half.
No less active than usual, his brain took poorly to under-occupation, which left him angry and bored. Now that he was aware of his surroundings, he started treating the ward like a luxury hotel, leaving towels on the floor for the cleaners to pick up, purposely dropping food on his sheets so they had to be changed more often, complaining about the light, the dark, the heat, the cold, the noise, the mattress. He knew he was being a bad patient. He expected a stiff talking-to, expected the last-ditch summoning-up of some Ealing comedy gorgon in starched hat and squeaky shoes, but the nurses were used to such reactions and maddened him further by meeting his bad behaviour with pained sighs and resolute patience. In their experienced eyes, his frustration was a common, easily diagnosed symptom that would pass with no more medication than time. This it duly did, once he realised that his gracelessness, like a child’s tantrums, was isolating him from small treats and tendernesses.
With her usual efficiency, unaware that he would see straight through it, Alison had worked out a visiting plan to ensure frequent stimulus for him, stave off depression and prevent visitor build-up. Miriam came to see him in the morning. Alison came in her lunch hour, Sandy came in the afternoon and Sam, freshly showered, appeared after work, ate supper with him and stayed, lying on the bed beside him, until Jamie fell asleep. Word spread by the usual mysterious channels, and surprise visitors began to appear too, not always entirely welcome, with their superstitiously generous bunches of flowers, their fearful, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God smiles and numbingly irrelevant observations.
After a few sharp rebukes, Miriam stopped crying on him and began to make herself useful, arranging and watering flowers, filling his little fridge with nutritious goodies – which he usually fed to other patients, the way he had distributed cake at choir school, to curry favour and ward off envy. She chatted to other morning visitors on her way up and down the corridor and made Jamie take exercise, walking slowly at his side, while he made his halting progress to the day room or the balcony, throwing him smiles of patient encouragement as though he were a valiant toddler again, leaning on his home-made pushcart. She tried to excuse Francis’s non-appearance, now saying he was dreadfully busy, now that he had a horror of hospitals.
‘He sent a card,’ Jamie silenced her. ‘A card with horses on it. That’s enough. I never wanted him to visit me when I was well, why should I start now?’
Miriam also started harping on about the Beards. No more sure than she had ever been which was his father, she nonetheless felt it her duty, as his mother, to give them all the chance of contacting him. He had no desire to hear from any of them, but encouraged her because the process of tracking them down gave her an occupation and Alison a source of amusement. Unfortunately the results of her research only depressed her. Two Beards had died of accidental overdoses and one in a sailing accident. One had become a successful Chicago restaurateur who sent Jamie a signed copy of his recipe book, and one had evaporated into the clouds of Tibetan Buddhism, leaving a trail of bad debts and a Californian indictment for mail fraud. Jamie said he hoped his father was the one who died at sea, because it was a romantic yet clean way to go, and they left the paternity hunt at that.
Miriam tried to teach him to paint. Amid the books and flowers and chocolates, someone had given him a sketch pad and a small set of watercolours. Jamie had no visual gift and quickly lost interest, but he soon found that the paints kept Miriam quiet. Ostensibly still teaching him by example, she executed little paintings of the view from his window, of bowls, of flowers, once, disastrously, of him. She rediscovered her old ability and soon, for all her shy protests, the nurses were pinning her work among the timetables on their noticeboard and circulating it among the other patients. She had to buy herself a second block of paper and became something of a ward celebrity.
Visiting in her lunch hours, Alison was often in too much of a rush to stay long, but she kept Jamie supplied with newspapers and magazines. She seemed anxious lest he lose touch with current affairs. He had never been so well informed to so little purpose. If she resented the extra time that Miriam spent with him, she hid it well. She never cried. Sometimes he wished she would, because he feared she was crying on Sam, who was less able to take it. The mask of resolute cheerfulness she wore in his presence fitted her ill. On several occasions it even drove him to behave badly with her, mounting displays of depression and unconstructive petulance so as to goad her into a more honest reaction.
Jamie had never felt that he and Sandy had much in common. He had always regarded her merely as an adjunct of his sister and was slightly perturbed when she began to call in without Alison, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, always on the pretext of dropping in on the way to visiting somebody else. She made no attempt to hide what she was feeling. If she was in a bad mood, she dumped her feelings on his bed like so much heavy shopping, if her mood was high, she brought him ice creams in the shape of feet, trashy novels or spotted bandannas to wear in his pyjama pocket. She talked baldly about the progress of his ill health and made him do the same. He found they had more in common than he had imagined, and encouraged her in turn to regale him with details of her erotic conquests, finding he was as hungry for them as Alison had once been for his.
Sam’s visits were entirely different from any of the others. He was obviously frightened by what was happening, and Jamie found that he was having to reassure his lover rather than vice versa. As far as possible, their evenings together in hospital began to mimic ordinary evenings together in the flat. Sam would pace around a bit, drinking beer from a can, then flop on the bed and, between hugs and kisses, recount the comforting banalities of his day. They would eat, then, often not talking at all, they would lie arm in arm to watch television. He never left before Jamie had fallen asleep, however long this took. Sometimes Jamie woke again as Sam pulled his arm out from beneath him and the sight of the stolid figure stealing from the darkened room filled him with an unspeakable regret. Once he teased Sam that he must be looking elsewhere for sex. Sam was as furious as he was scandalised, however, his anger frightening in so confined a space. Having conjured up the possibility, though, Jamie returned repeatedly to it when he could not sleep, wondering how he would react if Sam were unfaithful. He suspected he would feel a kind of release; it would make him officially invalid, relieved of normal social duties and responses. Alison confided that sometimes, after visiting the hospital, Sam came to spend the night back at her house in Bow. She said it was because he felt unhappy being in the flat on his own, but Jamie wondered if it were not Sam’s way of removing himself from the temptation of having so discreet a love-nest at his disposal.
When he wasn’t being visited, Jamie found it impossible to avoid encounters with others on the ward unless he pretended to be asleep – a pretence which frequently melted into the real thing.
‘We have nothing in common but a medical affliction,’ he told Alison. ‘I don’t see why we should all be expected to get on. It’s Belsen up here, not a holiday camp, for Christ’s sake!’
But gradually his curiosity and the social divisiveness of their common condition got the better of his reluctance. Several of the twenty or so patients were, like him, walking wounded, and would drift in and out of each other’s rooms exchanging gossip, comparing symptoms and treatments, discussing visitors. Often they were accompanied by militant buddies or cheery but painfully tactful volunteers. One of these wore a badge saying POSITIVE, as though to assure patients he was one of them too and could be trusted. One of the more politically minded patients had even had HIV tattooed on his forearm. Relentlessly, Jamie found himself drawn into a kind of exclusive brotherhood founded on the ravages of an unexclusive virus.
For better or worse, this socialising slipped into all the spaces in his day when he was not being visited, emphasising the otherness, the healthiness of his visitors. When the two worlds overlapped, as when Sam arrived and froze in the doorway, finding him chatting to a patient whose body now displayed more purple lesion than healthy skin, or when his room was invaded by a shriekingly effeminate posse of two ex-waiters and a chorus boy during one of Miriam’s tranquil painting sessions, he felt guilty as an outwitted adulterer. Of course there were women on the floor too, and even, briefly, a pitifully undersized child, but these were often kept from joining in with garrulous ward society by the haunted, hostile presence of their families. Jamie once slipped into a woman’s room to return a video of Come Into My Parlour she had lent him. Her relatives were gathered around her bed in a premature wake. The stares with which they answered his polite greeting were so heavy with blame that he found himself shaking uncontrollably on his way back to his bed.