Chapter 2
Four weeks’ waiting were over. I was in the office of Dr Johnson Golding, consultant in rheumatology and rehabilitation, high up the tower block of Guy’s Hospital.
I’d spent a lot of time in this room, sitting patiently while machines examined, scanned and scrutinized. But all those tests had involved some polite ray doing invisible detective work while I studied the anatomical charts on the walls.
Not today. Electrodes were taped on my forearms, one on the wrist and one in the crook of my elbow. These were connected by red and black wires to a machine with dials and lights. When the switch was thrown, an electric current fired down the main nerves and the doctor watched my thumbs twitch. It was painful and peculiar in a sickening way, like grabbing an electric cable and not being able to let go. Not the million volts they use to fry murderers in Alabama, of course. This was a spider-leg scratching, an electrical rasp, a dance of millipedes under the skin that you felt could do bad things to your heart but only if given the long leisure of a professional torturer.
Now it was over I flexed my fingers, checking they belonged to me again and only moved when I asked them to. Dr Golding peeled the sticky tape off the electrodes, discarded it into a yellow dump bin and rolled the leads into a coil. He gave his verdict. ‘Nerve conductivity seems within normal ranges for both arms.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘It’s normal.’ He looked at me and blinked, as he always did when I asked him to translate his diagnoses. ‘Each nerve is working fine.’
‘And that means?’
‘Your symptoms are not caused by nerve compression.’
I rolled down my shirt sleeves and put my jumper back on. Another test negative. They were always negative. No swellings, no anatomical abnormalities. No explanations. Just mysterious pain.
Jerry had had this too. He’d had tests for asthma, cancer, HIV, his heart wired up to ECGs. Nothing wrong, the doctors said when they’d examined him. Just panic attacks. Have a green smiley.
Dr Golding wheeled the machine back to its parking space, between the ultrasound and some other scanner I’d also had a close encounter with. He sat down at his desk and nudged the mouse. The screen came on, showing my notes and a series of numbers from the electrocution test. He checked them and flicked to another screen which showed how my arms would look if sliced up like salami, in gaudy colours like Andy Warhol prints.
I knew every patch of grey in his salt and pepper hair, or at any rate, those on the left-hand side of his head. I’d watched this view of him, interpreting my case notes, for at least as long as I’d studied his charts and the green paint between them.
When Dr Golding spoke he looked at the screen, as though those diagrams and read-outs represented me as adequately as the flesh and blood in the chair. ‘You’ve been resting your hands now for – how long? Four weeks?’
‘Four weeks exactly.’
‘And how’s the pain?’
‘A little better.’
It was, a bit. I could open jars if they weren’t too tight and carry light bags of shopping. The mundanities I’d phased out in favour of important things.
Dr Golding opened a drawer and stirred the contents with his finger. He pulled out a thing like a nutcracker and handed it to me. ‘See what happens when you squeeze the handles together. Right hand first.’
I did as he asked. As my fingers closed on the handles I felt the familiar pain, as if all the tendons in my wrist were shifting like a points change on a railway track. I was going to pretend nothing was wrong but he was watching my face carefully.
He took the handles from me and put them in my left hand. That was even worse. He returned the device to the drawer and pushed it shut with his knee.
‘Maybe it’s painful because I’m a little bit stiff,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been playing.’
He typed more notes at rapid speed. ‘I think you need to rest more.’
More rest? Was that all?
‘Can’t you do anything?’
‘Not really. You need to rest. Come and see me again in another month. Try to relax.’
Jerry had been told to relax too. He’d tried a brief flirtation with Buddhism. Herbal pills and weird diets. But it hardly mattered what he did. Several times a month I’d hear him wake with an animal gasp, then he’d pad down the stairs to his studio. I’d hear the rumble of casters on the bare floorboards as he rolled his chair to the computer. As I drifted back to sleep he’d be pounding the keyboard, checking in with other sufferers around the world. In the morning he would still be there, preferring to stay awake than risk the horrors that waited for him in sleep.
And besides, I only knew one way to relax.
If I’d had a hectic day before I sat down to practise, I didn’t start with scales or arpeggios. I played my current piece, slow as treacle. The enemy of good playing is hurrying. If you take your time, you feel how one note wants to move into the next. You understand the function and organisation of the rhythm. Then you bring it up to speed and every note is perfectly placed. If I started my practice like that, I was relaxed immediately. Sit down, slow down, and you’re in the zone.
The trouble is, to do it you need a bloody piano.
I walked out of Dr Golding’s office. Miles of lino stretched into the distance, in stifling medical green. It had a pale streaked pattern like rain marks on a concrete building. I passed wards where people sat in dressing gowns with washed-out faces that never saw the sun, the dialysis suite where a man with a bloated abdomen like a pregnancy waited for treatment. The place reeked of helplessness.
A nurse bustled past me. The green walls sucked all the colour from her face too. I found myself walking faster, as if to prove I was still fit, to stop the green mile draining me too. Look, I told the walls, I’m able to walk around and I’m a lifelike colour. It’s only my hands that are wrong.
And soon they will be all right. There’s nothing structurally amiss, the scanners said so. The nerves are working fine, we found that out today. This is only temporary.
At the end of the corridor was a door to the stairs. It had a twist handle, the kind I found difficult. There were footsteps behind me and I stood aside to let a figure in a white coat pass me. He opened the door and held it for me with his foot, then slipped into a side door marked Staff cloakroom. I mumbled thanks and started down the stairs.
He called to me. ‘You dropped these.’ I turned. He was holding my white gloves.
I walked back up the stairs. I wasn’t looking at the doctor’s face. The white coat made him part of the hospital furniture. I focused on those limp gloves, mumbled thanks again.
‘Carol?’
I looked at him for the first time. About my age. Slim, darkish hair with a side parting that went into a high V on one side of his forehead and made his features look elegant. Eyes emphasised by shadowed creases; that haunted look doctors sometimes have, but quite attractive.
Yes, I recognised him, but only vaguely. It wouldn’t be from college; since the age of sixteen I’d been in music academies. Earlier then. Not my original school because it was girls only, so he must have been a friend of somebody’s friend.
‘It is Carol Lear, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I remember you playing Rachmaninov at Kate Rafferty’s...’
Today, of all days, he couldn’t have said anything more wounding if he’d tried.
I took my gloves. ‘Thanks.’ I hurried away.