There is a red dinosaur on my bedside table. It’s a present from Debbie’s little kids, James and Richard. They are seven and four, Tracey’s nephews. Debbie is Tracey’s older sister. They are only two years apart. All four of them have just been to the dinosaur exhibition at the Natural History Museum. I am sitting up in bed. The Prof has returned and put me back to Nil By Mouth. I have a nano gastric tube back in, but I’ve got my old bed back again. James and Richard look serious and wide-eyed, a little shocked and quiet and still. They are only young. They have superb thick blond hair and faultless faces. I think of how I must look to them – ancient, drawn, dry and strange. They each have Mutant Ninja Turtle rucksacks. James rummages in his and brings out another present for me – a programme from the England versus Pakistan Lord’s test match. He asks me who my favourite player is. Richard keeps looking at the tube in my nose. He is terribly quiet. He offers me a jelly snake. In my croaking voice. I have to tell him I can’t eat jelly snakes, and that in fact I can’t eat anything just at the moment.
James pipes up. ‘Ben, what happened to you?’
I think and try to be concise. ‘An illness has attacked my tummy and I have had to have a lot of it removed, but I’m getting better now,’ I say.
‘Oh.’ There is a pause. Then he asks, ‘Have you had your lungs removed?’
Tracey and Debbie laugh. They look so alike sometimes.
Ten minutes later Richard is about to offer me another jelly snake, and then I see him remember and he stops himself.
An hour and a half has passed. The four of them have been out and come back. They’ve been out looking for a riverboat on the Thames. I’ve been dozing. Richard kept wanting to come back and see that I was all right. He wanted to know if the tube in my nose was hurting me.
In the opposite bed to me was Arnold for a while. He must have been seventy or eighty. He had had a stroke and was suffering prostate trouble. He was unbearably gentle and touching in his manner. He struggled to form words, and was incapable of saying anything except ‘Oh, I say!’ This was used for all occasions – to express surprise at being hoisted out of bed by hospital porters, delight at the arrival of apple crumble and custard, as a ‘Good morning’ when I would wave to him after the first ward round of the day. Often the exclamation was combined with a beam and an optimistic thumbs-up. His presence was strangely life-affirming, in spite of the obvious gravity of his condition. It was like having Dan Maskell in the bed opposite.
Patients came and went on the ward. Some men would get restless and fidgety after only two or three days, as they got over operations for piles or prostates. If they racked up ten days they would start to get proud and hardened, thinking they were veterans until they asked me or Kevin down in the end bed how long we had been in.
If I could say five weeks, Kevin could say twelve. Kevin was thin, with stringy long red hair, and probably only my age or even younger. He had suffered dreadful abscesses in his chest cavity from drug abuse. His eyes were beads in their sockets, intense and shining. The nurses would jack him up with opiate alternatives when the pain got bad, and I would watch him slide off the edge into a reeling, sleep-filled haze for a few hours. His parents would come regularly. They were quiet people, bringing fruit and sweets. On the days before he finally went home, some time later, he shuffled up and down the ward in disposable foam hospital slippers, a purple T-shirt and pyjama trousers, smiling and talking intensely, like he was still wired. The day before he went, the nurses baked him a cake and he had a tiny party in the day-room.
As a group – perhaps only one or two of us talking, while the others in nearby beds listened – a bond would emerge in the periods between ward rounds and visiting times, away from the scrutiny of doctors and the quiet flustering of relatives. The bond’s common language was the wink, delivered across the room to the person opposite, as if to say, ‘They all think we’re ill, but we know we’re all right. We’re just having them on.’
Bert, opposite me, was a master of the wink, performed in good spirits or under duress. He always seemed to be saying, ‘Two pounds of carrots and a bell pepper? I’ll see you’re all right.’
I casually winked and smiled at a new arrival, Tim, on his first day, as he was being wheeled in from theatre. He was craning his neck and looked nervously around the room. A week later he came over. He picked up a piece of Tracey’s jigsaw and fiddled with it. And then he thanked me for winking.
Michael, a man from Hornsey, moved into the bed next to me after about a week or so. He had just had major abdominal surgery too. Cancer, I think. It was his second time. Different hospital, though. In his first few days on the ward I saw a reflection of myself as I was at the beginning. Flat out, backache, unable to sleep, dry mouth, desperate for a sip of water, struggling across a vast, infinite desert of dulled pain and fatigue and the drawing up of the body’s resources. His wife had brought him quite stylish pyjamas – black, green and red stripes. He looked smart, but he seemed alarmed much of the time. One night he needed a naso-gastric tube inserted to suck out the pools of bile in his stomach. The curtain was pulled round his bed, but he couldn’t tolerate the tickling as the thin pipe was passed down the back of his nose. A male staff nurse was doing his best to encourage a smooth passage.
‘Just swallow now, Michael.’
The sound of Michael retching cannoned round the ward. He spewed. We heard the gush as the staff nurse was hosed with bile. We started tittering.
‘Just swallow. Relax. Swallow. Here it comes. One, two, three …’
Gush! This time with a groan of despair as the bile gurgled in his throat. The staff nurse must have been drenched again. He stayed calm.
‘Now come on. We’re not getting anywhere.’
Michael was gasping. ‘I can’t stand it. Please. Take it out.’
‘I have to put it in. You know that. We’re halfway there.’
I knew the feeling. It feels like a strand of half-cooked dry spaghetti is being pushed up your nostril. It touches the back of the throat and, much as dry spaghetti won’t initially soften and curl into the pan of hot water, so the tube won’t turn the corner easily and it jabs against the soft tissue. Gagging is spontaneous.
‘OK,’ said the nurse. ‘Hold on for a moment. We’ll stop there.’ Silence. In the ward we held our breath. ‘Ready? Right. Here we go again. Now, swallow.’
Instantaneously, effortlessly, Michael barked. I heard the force of his bile come up. Like a tap being turned on hard.
‘Christ, I’m sorry,’ he moaned. He was whimpering now. The ward was transfixed. Nurses tried to carry on as normal, but we were all quietly astonished. Twice more Michael repeated his performance before the tube was finally in place. When the curtain was eventually drawn back and the sodden nurse had retired, Michael was red-faced, sheepish, exhausted. He looked at me and shrugged. A nurse brought him some clean pyjamas. His stylish stripy ones were taken away, probably to be incinerated. Ten minutes later and he was dressed the same as me. Green poly-cotton. Stamped with a large black logo of institutionalization. ‘Property Of Westminster Hospital & The Riverside Health Authority.’ It had seemed like a rite of passage.
Blood-pressure readings. One hundred and twenty over sixty, one hundred over eighty. I never fully understood the differential. Nor could I ever see the thin line of mercury in the glass thermometers when they were held up to the light for temperature readings, or feel my pulse pumping in my own wrist, or make sense of the results from the thumb pricks that drew blood for my blood-sugar litmus tests, but I followed all their patterns closely. Blood pressure, temperature, pulse – these are the basic observations of daily life in hospital. Once established, however, I would memorize my temperature movements and be able to quote them at the Prof to one decimal place to disarm him on ward round. After a while I could even guess my temperature quite accurately. I could feel it rising:
37.6 … 37.8 (learning to recognize the faint sickness it induced)
37.9 … 38.1 (the loss of concentration and desire to talk to anyone)
38.2 … 38.3 (a slight fogging of the eyes and the dry, sucking aridity in my head and the back of my neck)
38.1 … 37.9 (the levelling out and the dropping off)
37.7 (a severe sweat during an afternoon nap, or in the middle of a restless night, maybe a pang of hunger, a need to piss seemingly incessantly, and the final falling back to …)
36.9 … 36.8 (like some calm valley after a long ascent)
Artificially nourished and doped up with drugs, I noticed my hair start to fall out. In the mornings there would be a fine carpet of it on my pillow, and strands would be left hanging from my fingers if I ran my hand through it. I let it grow and swept it back. Audrey, Tracey’s mum, said she never knew I had naturally wavy hair. She said I was very lucky. I let my beard grow too. I felt like Robinson Crusoe, and cornily imagined myself romantically tossed by fate, resolute, adaptable. Sometimes I’d ask my mother for the mirror she kept in her handbag and hold it up to my face and see a man I didn’t recognize, with soft, serious eyes. It was a face of shadows and hollows, and of something learnt. When I was allowed to go to the bathroom to wash myself, I would stand in front of the mirror and look at that same face for minutes on end and would always feel strangely respectful and would quietly say, ‘Keep going’, impressed by the patience I saw reflected. My eyes would burn back at me.
I noticed how the weather and the outside world held no interest for me. The weather was for other people, out there in their offices and one-roomed flats, their garden sheds and their caravans, for people running for cover on the rain-spattered streets or tramping through the summer’s thick, sulphurous, city air. Tracey and my mum would comment on it, even after a two-minute stroll to the pub on the corner or the nurses-home canteen – how it was mild or muggy or close or fresh. It altered their moods. Summer mornings in ITU had brought Tracey in wearing summer dresses, her bountiful eyes full of hope and light. Humid afternoons meant my mother sitting by a window tugging at the shoulders of her shirt, nurses sighing, a languorous stillness that brought a clock-stopping torpidity to the hours after lunch.
The newspaper reports lost their importance too. Corruption scandals raged, whole countries were imploding, but more often than not I closed the page, simply too listless or self-centred to pay attention. And even when the test cricket was being broadcast on my transistor radio – something I often looked forward to – I found myself drifting away into myself or I’d let the earpiece fall on to the pillow and Tracey would lean over and pick it up to put it back and I would just shrug indifference and roll my head back into the middle of the pillow, hoping for nothing more than a comfortable indentation in the polyester filling, so that I wouldn’t have to move or lift my head for half an hour, and so avoid using the muscles down in my belly. I couldn’t care. I couldn’t care at all much of the time. About anything.
From this quiet disengagement came self-absorption, as I watched and listened out for myself. I regularly seemed to leave myself, and became ego-less, free-floating, non-doing, motionless but for my eyes flicking and blinking, like a lizard on a rock, basking in the alcohol-like fug of Voltarol or the pleasure of being temporarily released from the effects of drugs or pain, until my bed-ridden arse would ache again and I’d have to move, pinching my buttocks together, lifting my pelvis off the mattress, uncrossing my feet to find my calf muscles had gone to sleep again. And maybe another hour would have passed. I would have slumped, my back no longer cushioned in the plump pillows but cross-braced over the bed, a creaking ship’s timber, my neck impacted into the top pillow like the straw in a packing-case. And if I was feeling strong I would reach up for the monkey-bar above my bed and haul myself upright until my back was straight and I was sitting on my sitting-bones, my legs stretched out in front of me like a child, my head loosed and freed, a periscope, cool air passing behind me. And in these hours, often with Tracey silently reading, I felt no anger or resentment, no festering rage at such seeming injustice, at such a seeming non-life, for the question ‘Why me?’ only begs the question ‘Why anyone?’ and the interior world I began to inhabit was not a landscape of fear and stress and acrimony but one where a recognition of my frailty and mortality fed a kind of strength. It felt stylish to be so unwell. I was important to people. To Tracey, my family, surgeons and doctors. And I felt I had the scoop on life and death and everyone else was still running around after it. And should death have come nearby again, as it did on ITU, I would have felt I had slipped under its net once, and perhaps I would do so again. Nonchalantly. With a degree of flair.
The hot sunny afternoons on the ward made me think of riding home from school in the summer. I’d often find my parents stretched out on the lawn. I’d ride my bike straight down the side of the house, past the dustbins and down to the shed at the end. The sun-loungers would be out. My dad never sunned his back but concentrated on his front. The Ambre Solaire oil would mat his chest hair until it glistened, and he’d sweat it out on hot afternoons flat on his back, all dewy with perspiration. He’d have come down in shorts, not trunks, and an unbuttoned short-sleeved pale-blue cotton shirt with Airtex panels that I liked more than his Greek-style cotton smock-shirt that pulled on over the head and had two front pockets at waist level – one for his lighter, one for his non-filter cigarettes.
He liked Turkish tobacco and was the first person I ever saw smoking Camel. One of the reasons he fell in with his old friend Brian Rix when they met for the first time in the Air Force at Scarborough was because Brian smoked Perfectos Finos and his family was sending him two hundred a week. He smoked Three Castles when I was young. Green packet. Or Gold Flake. There was a game where I had to count how many ‘l’s’ were on the box. I always missed one.
My mum would have brought some work down to the garden in a beach-bag. Freelance magazine features – sometimes something big on Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, but often 1,200 words on Trevor Howard or Susan Hampshire or a profile on Noel Edmonds. She’d always bring me back signed photos. Roger Moore. James Galway. The Scaffold. She once asked of Noel Edmonds, ‘Were there any strong musical influences in your life during your teens?’ He replied, ‘Absolutely none. I had no musical convictions or deep-seated knowledge. I’ve been lucky that my whole career has been as a disc jockey.’
They would both have just settled down when the phone would ring. I hated this moment. There would be a frantic ninety seconds while one of them would launch themselves out of their deck-chair, knocking something over, and sprint round to the front of the house, let themselves in, and race up the stairs to the first floor to catch it before it stopped ringing. There wasn’t an extension at ground level, and the promise of ‘a piece for Vanity Fair’ meant the phone couldn’t be ignored. Mum would sometimes have even left it on the back-bedroom window-sill so they could hear it ring early, but that meant precious time was lost in getting to it. Often it would stop ringing just as we’d hear my dad thundering into the bedroom, and then we’d listen to him cursing and shouting at it.
Friday and Saturday nights were the hospital’s fight nights. There would often be a late admission on to the ward a few hours after the pubs shut and clubland got under way. A geezer would be trolleyed in out for the count with severe concussion and be put into one of the spare beds freed up after the end-of-week discharges.
A thickset man was levered into one of the beds opposite me one night. He snored and farted his way through the small hours and then woke with a start as the ward ground into life again at 6.30, disorientated and still half-pissed.
A nurse came over with some warm cornflakes. ‘Breakfast, love?’
‘Wha …?’
I don’t think he could believe he had been woken. He rolled over in disgust and went back to sleep until the doctors came round at eight. They left him sleeping but made him ‘Nil By Mouth’ – someone had obviously punched him hard enough the night before to warrant caution – and the little plastic sign was hung over his head.
He finally came to around ten. He looked fiercely unwell. Blotchy and grim-faced, he threw back the sheets and stood up. He certainly didn’t expect to find himself in a back-to-front hospital gown. He fiddled with the tassels unsteadily. All that remained of his best gear from the previous night was a pair of socks.
He stopped a nurse. ‘My clothes?’ It came out in a croak. He cleared his throat.
‘Patients’ Property,’ she said, speeding past. ‘You’ll get them later. You can have a bath if you want. Not too hot, though.’
He fumbled with the back of the gown, tugging it over his bum-crack, and shuffled off to the bathroom.
Half an hour later he reappeared. I could see he was hungry. He sniffed round the tea-and-biscuits trolley as it went by. I could see him lining it all up in his mind – eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, beans, fried slice, mug of tea.
He stopped another nurse. ‘Any chance of something to eat? I’m starving.’
‘Sorry, love.’ She pointed to the sign above his bed. ‘Not for now, anyway.’
‘But I’m starving.’
‘I’m sure, but Doctor’s said – not me. It’s probably for your own good.’
‘But I’m starving. Cup of tea, then?’
‘Sorry, love. No can do. You’ve taken quite a knock. I’ll see if you can have sips of water after eleven.’
He sat down heavily on his bed. His face was grazed down one side, and a swelling was coming up under his left eye.
A doctor arrived. ‘Ah, Mr Piper. In the land of the living at last. Glad you could join us. Now then, what can you tell us about last night, mmm?’
He hesitated. ‘Erm, dunno.’ He hesitated again. Nothing was coming. ‘I went down Victoria. Earlyish.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Just a quiet drink.’
‘Who brought you in?’
‘Dunno.’
‘It was around 1.30.’
‘Dunno. Some mates, ’spect. Don’t remember.’ He was spectacularly dormant.
The doctor pressed on. ‘Mr Piper, you were found by two police officers crawling through the flower-bed on the roundabout at Lambeth Bridge with no shoes on, bleeding from a head wound. Do you have any recollection of this?’
‘Maybe. I see …’ The doctor was looking at some notes. ‘And what about your head, Mr Piper? It looks like you were hit with some kind of iron bar.’
Such grisly tales often unfolded on Sunday mornings and made something of the slow weekends.
It’s five past six. The curtains have been pulled round my bed. A staff nurse and a student nurse have pulled my sheets back. My abscess has been draining into its plastic bag for several days – red, deep-red, mucous.
‘Close your eyes. Relax,’ they say.
I have been dreading this moment. The drain is to be pulled half out. Through the skin and flesh. I can feel them fiddling with the stitch that holds it in place. I can hear scissors.
‘Breathe in after three. One, two, three …’
I breathe in. The plastic pipe is withdrawn. How far? An inch? A foot? And in that moment I am reeling with anxiety. I stop my mouth with the back of my own hand. I feel my teeth pressing through the skin. In my mind I see the pipe pulling free of the wound, like a shoe pulls away from fresh bubble gum. I feel the pipe moving through my flesh like a pencil through tight polystyrene. I hear the blood flooding to the site. I smell putrefaction. Illness.
A million brilliant midsummer afternoons rush through me – days on bikes, horse-racing, driving fast, pebble beaches, earthworks, hill forts, swathes of corn, disused railway lines, cold gin, open windows, sunlight turning rivers into tinsel, lollies, poppies, dog-rose. I’m scrambling up a hillside in shadow and the air is cool and my feet slip and the earth is loose and the dust is under my nails and in my hair and mouth and I grasp at small rocks and thistles that have no roots and the grit fills my shoes, my scuffed shoes, and I have no puff and the wound in my side is open and hot and I know I should have stayed on the track and I want to go home and I am going to fall and the ridge is still above me and the sun is on the ridge and a plateau of grass and wild flowers is behind it and over it the brilliant midsummer afternoon recedes.
The staff nurse coughs. He pulls off his latex gloves. The watch on his shirt is upside down. Time stood on its head. Is it twenty past six or ten o’dock? The nurse says I can take my hand out of my mouth now. I have left little red toothmarks on the surface. I suck in saliva. The sterilized stainless-steel trolley is wheeled away silently, and the curtain is pulled back. I look under the bedclothes. The drain looks the same as before.
When I was finally allowed to drink, I had no appetite for tea or coffee but drank sweet soft drinks in crazes – weak Ribena and orange barley water cooled by ice-cubes from the ice-dispenser in the hospital kitchen. I was only allowed little 30 ml capfuls on the hour. They turned into treats. I’d watch the second hand going round on my watch. Thirteen minutes and twenty-one seconds to go, and then I could reach for another capful. It was like knocking back half-measures from a nonalcoholic pub.
Fluids were encouraged, to keep my kidneys well flushed. Sometimes additional bags of saline would be rigged up to add to the fluids from my dripped-feeding system, especially when I was back to Nil By Mouth for a couple of days. I would lose the desire to drink, and lie for hours on end, motionless, except for having to piss. One night I woke to find the sheets and mattress soaking wet. I thought I had wet the bed. I called the night nurse over. The drip in my arm was throbbing, and it was the bandage dressing around it that was wet through. The vein had closed off and the saline was welling up in the site and then dribbling out over my wrist. My arm was fat and red. The nurse pulled the line out and I went back to sleep with my arm supported above me on three pillows. If I laid it on the bed, the stinging and swollen vein kept me awake. In the morning the houseman arrived with his Velcro tourniquet to put another line in. To me, it was like jabbing the needle adaptor on a bicycle pump into the bladder of a football.
My TPN feed-bag was changed every twenty-four hours. Everything was sterilized. Gloves, tongs, bags, paper. As the valve on the bag was opened, I’d watch the fluid run round the twists and bends of the feed-pipe with the same fascination I had as a child with curly straws. The nurse would let a small amount pass out into a tray and then reconnect me. The pumps on the ward were older and less reliable than the flashier ones on ITU. Little air bubbles would get trapped in the collar of the pump, setting off the alarm. A nurse, or sometimes Tracey, would pull the thin flexible pipe free and flick it until the bubbles broke up and dispersed into the milky liquid. The pipe could then be reinserted and the pump started up again. Sometimes this went on all night.
I was gradually encouraged to start eating again. The abscess had been a bad interruption and had set me back a week or two. Nobody had much idea of what I would be able to tolerate. A patient with an 85 per cent loss of small intestine was a new experience for almost everyone, and it still wasn’t clear whether the mechanics of the gut were definitely working and the passage of food was going to be unimpeded. I began again with some soup and a slice of white bread. The senior dietitian came down to see me to explain the basis of a low-residue diet – foods that put the gut under little stress, were easy to absorb, and left little waste behind. She left me with a few guidelines that I could have worked out for myself – rice, boiled potatoes, white meat, fish – and asked me to consider build-up drinks. She ran through the flavours. Tropical fruit, chocolate, lime. A future of boiled cod and lime glucose drinks stretched before me. I wasn’t listening by the end. She left me and told me to pick my meals out carefully from the hospital food trolley.
For the next couple of days I tried a mouthful of cold turkey, mashed potato, tomato soup, all with little enthusiasm. The food on the ward was like old-fashioned school dinners – beef curry, lamb cutlets, boiled carrots, ham rolls, custard – and the smell that rose from the serving-dishes and warming-ovens was like hotel kitchens or cross-Channel-ferry cafeterias. Arnold opposite me would greet each course with an ‘I say!’ and then proceed to eat everything with an eagerness that baffled me. Custard was a big favourite with Arnold. He was dedicated. Every spoonful was appreciated.
In the mornings the shop trolley would come round. White-haired women in cardigans and tweed skirts – all volunteers – would call out ‘Shop trolley!’ in bright, sharp, church-hall voices. The trolley was laden with Lucozade, soft drinks, Handy Andies, chocolate, talcum powder, Rich Tea biscuits, toothpaste. Nobody bought anything. Most of us were barely on water most of the time.
Once a week the library trolley would come round too. Len Deighton, Agatha Christie, Dick Francis. Ghost-written biographies. Books on fishing. All in hardback, with plastic covers dulled by fingering and sunlight.
‘What do you like?’ the woman would say brightly. ‘Detectives? Crime? Something light, or something exciting? How about something romantic?’
‘Have you got anything historical?’ a new man in the next bed asked.
‘Ooh, I don’t think so.’
‘Something factual. A historian. A. J. P. Taylor perhaps.’
‘Hmm, let me see,’ she said, spinning the trolley round. ‘What about The Eagle Has Landed?’
‘No, never mind.’
‘How about Jaws?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I’ve got some sport,’ she ventured.
‘No. Really.’ He returned to his paper.
‘Golf?’
‘No.’
‘Kevin Keegan?’
A young German came in one evening with stomach pains. He spoke little English, but the nurses – as is the English way – would not slow down the patter of their speech or ease their grammar to help him understand. They just spoke louder.
‘Now then, sir. How are you feeling in yourself?’ said a staff nurse the next morning.
Awkward phrase. He looked puzzled.
The nurse spoke louder, like we do to old people, simply turning the clauses round in her sentence. ‘In yourself. How are you feeling? All right, are we?’
The royal ‘we’. That should fox him.
He struggled to speak. He sounded so German. ‘Sorry … I …’ He opened his eyes wide and shrugged helplessly.
The nurse tried again. She put one hand down on the bed. ‘Any pain?’ Blank response. She sighed a little petulantly and spoke up. ‘ARE YOU IN ANY PAIN?’
Three or four of us looked up at the volume of this. The German started to look round the room for help.
The nurse tried once more. ‘Hurting? Anywhere?’
Still nothing.
She had started to include gestures. It was like a bad round of charades. She put both her hands to her head, placed the palms against her temples, and shook her head from side to side while saying, ‘In your head? Any pain? Pain. Up here. In your head?’
I expect there would be with all that shaking.
Strangely, however, this new action seemed to stimulate meaning, and the German’s eyes brightened. He said loudly, ‘No. I sleeped well.’ He was shaking his head too. For a moment the two of them looked stark staring mad, each shaking their heads, one with her hands clasped round her ears, and talking so loudly.
His girlfriend came in. When she left later he was bored and lonely, sighing loudly and turning over and over on his bed. After two days of not eating he was brought some breakfast. His girlfriend was in to see him early that day. The look on their faces when the food arrived was one of complete astonishment. The British NHS breakfast – Rice Krispies with warm milk, two slices of untoasted white Sunblest, a pat of warm butter, a tiny plastic tub of watery fruitless jam, and coffee made with coffee powder from an industrial-size tin of Maxwell House – is perhaps a weak spot in the service. It hardly surprised me when their astonishment quickly ascended into covert derision. She started to flick Rice Krispies at him. He performed origami with the bread. He looked so much better for this. Perhaps the breakfast is intended to get people back on their feet. Shock therapy. When the doctors came round he was bright-eyed and free of pain. They discharged him. As he left he took out his wallet from the breast pocket of the candy-striped, faded, flannelette, fifties-style hospital pyjamas he had been given to wear by the Riverside Health Authority and asked a surgeon who to pay for his stay. When he learnt it had all been on the house he was thoroughly defeated and left the hospital just shaking his head in wonder and disbelief at our free and brilliant shambles.
A week after the abscess operation half my staples were removed. The wound had been oozing a little bit in the middle. A dressing change was in order. Every other staple was to be taken out; the rest a few days later. I lay flat and tipped my head up to watch. Cold sterilizing liquid was rubbed along the site, leaving the clips like a polished single-gauge railway line. I admired the surgeon’s work for a moment. The clips came out quite painlessly. A small lever was pushed under each one and then used to ease out the staple. One of them pinged on to the floor. We laughed at that. The eight-inch healing scar ran down the right-hand side of my belly button. One of the nurses said I was lucky, because sometimes they go straight through it, leaving patients without a belly button at all. Fourteen clips came out. I half expected the whole thing to come apart. A fresh dressing was put on and the nurses went away.
The physios were on to me straightaway for exercise. At first I would walk with one of them over to the TV room or out into the corridor and on to the glass-covered walkway that linked the main hospital block with the Page Street block. It was a little promenade. Patients and relations would use it for a quick smoke. Somehow the glass must have given them the impression of outdoors and fresh air. It must have seemed like their cigarette smoke wouldn’t be noticed, but the corridor was largely enclosed and the smoke would get trapped, leaving it slightly fuggy like a station waiting-room. Signs were regularly left to encourage smokers to go outside, and some of them would slip out on to the balcony alongside. Some people would be chatting, some grieving, others consoling. Patients in wheelchairs on their way to X-ray would pass by with porters. I’d stand and watch people park their cars in the road below. Sometimes I’d see one of my doctors on his way to lunch and have the urge to knock on the window and wave.
‘Sliced you up good and proper then, didn’t they?’
I am in the TV room. I have just given the other man in the room a brief description of what has happened to me. He is wearing green NHS pyjamas and a white martial-arts-style dressing-gown.
‘They’ve cocked me up once already,’ he says. He is smoking Embassy. The short filter ones.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yeah!’ Scuse my French, but I reckon …’ He leans forward and lowers his voice. ‘… they’re all fucking useless.’
I raise my eyebrows.
‘All of them! Doctors. Surgeons. The lot. They’ve all got their minds on other things. All that private work. Harley Street. They’re all fucking loaded.’ He pulls on his Embassy.
I don’t want to be drawn in. I don’t want to say anything, so I open my eyes in interested disbelief.
‘Take me, right. They’ve been in once already,’ he says. He gestures to his chest. ‘Missed it. Missed it! Can you fucking believe it? Mickey Mouse, I can tell you. I shouldn’t be smoking, though. They don’t like it. Still, you only live once.’ He blows out smoke, affecting boredom, before carrying on. ‘Can you eat, then?’
I shake my head and flick my eyes up to the drip food-bag I’ve got with me.
‘I’m fucking starving. The food you get in here!’ He shakes his head. ‘Is your ward noisy?’
‘I don’t know. No, not really. It’s all right.’
‘I can’t stand it. It’s not the people in the beds; it’s the nurses. Yak, yak, yak, all day long.’
I look at the TV screen. Colour images. The sound is off. A little green megaphone with a cross through it is winking in the top left-hand corner. He starts again.
‘D’you watch this Channel-4 bollocks, then?’
That’s it. Enough. I push myself up out of the chair. ‘No, no. It’s all yours.’ I roll my drip-stand towards the door and over the metal-strip plate in the doorway. I have to take it at speed to get the wheels up and over. Some days it refuses, like a horse at a fence, and the wheels slam to a halt. Today it glides over and I’m away.
The day after my first set of staples came out was a Sunday. My dad popped in on his own. The ice had been broken. He was open and relaxed. He opened his carrier bag and got out a box. He’d been into Oxford specially. He unwrapped the tissue paper and got out the shoes. We admired them greatly, looking at them from all angles. And then he pulled up the bedclothes and put them on my dry, bare feet. I waved them around and kept them on for twenty minutes. He touched my feet gently. I felt his hands on my skin. It felt strange. I realized the only contact we’d had for years was shaking hands.
He used to come home late from Soho clubs, often with two or three friends, when I was very young. I’d hear them come crashing in. They would sit up drinking into the small hours, playing cards and listening to records – Bud Powell, Roland Kirk, Charlie Parker. He brought a couple of musician friends back one night and then came to my room. It was dark. I saw his figure against the landing light. I heard laughter downstairs. The tip of his cigarette was glowing. He lifted me out of the bed. I must have been young. I felt the crisp wool of his suit rough up against my skin, the cigarette packet through his pocket. He carried me downstairs into the sitting-room and sat me down on the carpet in front of the hi-fi speaker. I was still half asleep. The speaker was three feet tall, part of a monophonic sound system, with a brass grill across it. When it wasn’t on, I used to run my hand down its smooth polished sides. It seemed so huge and solid, like the front of an enormous car. I’d hang my Action Men from it, fitting their rubber fingers into the holes and imagined them rock-climbing on a sheer face. My dad settled down with his friends again. The music throbbed over me, warm music, rich in tone, until I fell asleep curled up on the floor.
His first break came with the Carl Barriteau band during the war. Barriteau was from Trinidad. His band was it. Number two in the Melody Maker poll that year. My dad was thrilled. He had volunteered for the Air Force after leaving school in Glasgow but had been given an eighteen-month deferral because he was only seventeen. He met a pianist called McCormack who was homesick for Glasgow and simply offered to exchange his job playing for Barriteau for my dad’s gig with the Jack Chapman band at the Albert Ballroom. My dad jumped at the chance.
One night, after playing in Leamington Spa, he happened to call home. It was 1944, two years since volunteering. He was shocked to learn that his call-up papers had been there for two weeks. The next morning he called Reading and cheekily asked for an extension, saying he was on tour. He was told flatly to report as ordered. He stalled for a day, but at lunch a car drove up and two corporals got out ready to drag him away. He promised to report to Scarborough by ten the next morning and he got away with it.
He got to Scarborough on time. At the call-up he was wearing a pin-stripe suit and Tommy Dorsey glasses with clear glass in, just for effect. A huge corporal was shouting.
‘Anyone ’ere called Watt?’
My dad stepped up. ‘I’ve been on tour with Carl Barriteau.’
‘Carl Barriteau! Let me carry your suitcase.’
He was taken to the induction centre at the Adelphi Hotel, where an officer grilled him.
‘Now, look here, Watt. Explain your absence.’
‘Sorry sir. I did volunteer, sir, but it’s been nearly two years and I was on tour with Carl Barriteau. I play decent piano though.’
He was let off jankers and after the interview, just to cap it off, the officer invited him to the officers’ mess ‘to have a practice’.
In the evening, after he’d gone, I was waiting for a new feeding-system bag to come up. My abscess drain was gone, I had no naso-gastric tube and, after another swelling in my arm, my fluid drip had been temporarily removed. For the first time in weeks I was disconnected from the hospital. I asked suddenly if Tracey could wheel me outside for a push-about. The nurses said OK, and one of them capped off the line in my chest. I started to get dressed. I wanted to wear real clothes for an hour. My trousers were enormous, and my jacket hung on my shoulders as if over a wire coat-hanger. I was still hunched over. I had Tracey put my new shoes from my dad on my feet, and a nurse fetched us a wheelchair. We went down in the lift and out through reception.
The air outside was evening air – settled on the city, day-old. We passed by the news-stand on the corner, crossed over, and passed along a covered wooden pavement made by a construction company for the building site opposite the hospital. The cars were noisy. Breezes blew. They disturbed me, flicking at my hair, whipping out from the side-streets. An insect landed on my jacket. I flicked it off. A dog barked. It startled me. We crossed over again by the roundabout at Lambeth Bridge and Tracey pushed me into the garden that runs from the bridge up to Westminster. We trundled under trees. I felt tiny, empty, perplexed. Wind off the river rustled the huge canopy of leaves above me. It was loud. I couldn’t speak. The trunks and branches were big and strong, sap-full and lean. The river’s embankment was black and brick. We stopped. Cut into the wall were two steps up and a viewing platform. Tracey pulled me up out of the chair and hugged me. She was tearful. We stood there for minutes, the wind still in the trees, loud and restless, and I stood there limp on her shoulder and I thought how the line of trees was like a tunnel stretching ahead and behind and we were alone and halfway along it.
A few tourists passed. We climbed up to look at the river. I was transfixed by the water. Thick, muscular currents swirled below me. There was so much life in it. By the wall, little eddies rippled on the surface. Waves slapped against the dark stone. I wanted to fall in and be held up, borne afloat, rushed downstream in turning circles of disorientation, under bridges, past children waving and tugs and river boats, police launches and dredgers, and down through the suburbs and the playing-fields and boat clubs to some wide delta with meadows and plains and green hills behind and the shimmering sea, salt flats and seabirds and air so fresh it would tear at my lungs, rich in oxygen and dewiness. Tracey asked if I was cold. I shivered a little. We climbed down and I got back in the chair and we headed back.