ON OUR USUAL drive from Northwick Park Hospital to Harrow town centre for supper, Edwyn stuns me by bursting into song.
‘I’m searching for the truth
I’m searching for the truth
Some sweet day we’ll get there in the end
Some sweet day we’ll get there in the end.’
A song which has sprung from nowhere, he sings it over and over as I transfer him to his wheelchair and push him to our regular haunt. Our choices are limited by the chair, and the unlovely pedestrianised shopping centre location, but Nandos has tasty free-range chicken and good access. Edwyn is in full celebratory voice all the way there, and all the way back. After six indescribably weird months, he’s due to leave hospital for good in two days, so I christen it his demob song. Back on the ward, he sings it to Mark, his last remaining room-mate. Soon the two of them are belting it out together.
Mark was here before Edwyn and will be there when we’ve gone. He remembers our first meeting. Edwyn was stuck on a phrase at that time (something that has been a feature of his speech and language affliction), but I can’t remember what it was. Mark does: ‘The possibilities are endless. The possibilities are endless …’
•
I AM COMPOSED of my thoughts. Imagine it. Suddenly there are no more thoughts. Your brain doesn’t work properly. The damage is such that you barely know who you are, the nature of your existence. The loss of your intellect, your wit, doesn’t begin to describe it.
The way it was for Edwyn, for Edwyn and me, was deeper and stranger. Before we could even think about his cleverness, his fabulous sarcasm, his highly developed sense of the absurd (where they had gone? Were they coming back?), we had to wrestle with questions of simple identity.
It’s impossible to imagine what it felt like to be inside Edwyn’s brain as he struggled to return to awareness, to self-knowledge. He describes it thus: ‘I was peaceful and tranquil at first. No thoughts at all. Edwyn Collins, that’s me, I knew that. But everything else, it’s gone.’
Brain damage was an especial dread. For two years I would not even utter the words. I used any euphemism I could think of to avoid describing what had happened to Edwyn in these unthinkable terms. Edwyn was much more courageous. His honesty had not deserted him, nor his bluntness. He confronted his new self unflinchingly. ‘Brain damage, I think. I’m a moron.’