Tracey stayed until gone nine that night. The ward was quiet in the evening. She got on to my bed and sat on top of the bedclothes to read, while I lay on my side with my head on her lap. The nurses didn’t mind. Lying on my side was a new treat after weeks on my back. It was so special. The smell of her near me. The feeling of warmth on my face.
There is a photograph of the pinboard in the flat we shared after we first met at university in Hull in late 1981. Vote Labour, June 9th. Robert Doisneau’s kiss. The cover from the second Smiths single. Arthur Miller. A box of Swan Vestas. The cover of Paris Blues (‘The stinging novel of a man seeking escape in a world of cellar clubs, drugs and hot jazz’). Eddie Cochrane. A flyer for Tony Marchant’s Welcome Home. Vivien Goldman. A paying-in slip. A photo of the Humber bridge and a Hull–Brough–Goole–London InterCity timetable. A phone bill. A Women in Literature reading-list. A sewing-kit. A Yale key.
Is this who we were? Or who we wanted to be at least? I see us as always having been the same. We will always be nineteen. I will always be Tannoying her in the Union building on the first day, saying, ‘If Tracey of The Marine Girls is in the building, could she please come to Reception now.’ And she will always be appearing in red scuffed stilettoes, and I will always be saying, by way of introduction, ‘We share the same record label. Have you brought your guitar?’ We were teenagers in bands, and for that reason found ourselves bound together as much by what we were against as by what we had in common. We seemed instantly close, although we came from very different families. She seemed unpretentious and unfamiliar to me, not like the boisterous girls I had grown up around back home.
In the top left-hand corner is a picture of us taken by one of my lecturers (a part-time photographer) during an afternoon that produced the first publicity shot for the band we formed. Me – 501s, white socks, black suede creepers, chunky black sweater, corduroy cap. Tracey – abstract-print fifties skirt, white socks, black pointed slip-ons, grey sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, Alice band. She is looking down. I am looking at the camera. The surroundings are incongruous, and probably explain why we never used the picture. We are the post-punk generation and we are sitting cross-legged on my lecturer’s Indian bean-bag with a cheese plant and a Victorian rocking-horse in the background. We look sulky and intense – not surprising under the circumstances.
I went round to Tracey’s house one morning before we’d started going out with each other and found her sleeping in the scarf I had matter-of-factly lent her the night before. People say we have always been formidable. It’s not how it seems from the inside.
It’s three in the morning and I am lying in bed watching one of the night-time agency nurses eating chocolates one after the other. She is leafing through a two-day-old copy of the Daily Mirror and wearing a cardigan. I am wearing earplugs, yellow foam earplugs. They muffle sound and amplify the inside of my head. I can hear the fluids in my ears and sinus cavities. When I lie still there is a continuous sound, like waves booming in underground caves or jet engines heard from the cabin on a long-haul flight. When I twist my head my hair moves against the pillow. It is loud, like the close-up heavy breath of a sleeping man. I close my eyes again and drift and I am in an under-sea world. Chocolates float dreamily past. I doze for a few minutes.
I open my eyes and the lights are on around the bed in the corner. That’s Victor’s bed. The curtains are drawn. Victor is Hungarian, I think. He speaks little English. I see shadows of nurses. He has had bad trouble with his kidneys. He pees blood a lot. He has thick white hair, swept back like Anton Walbrook. His wife comes after work. All they seem to do is argue. She is small, like a bird – a hawk – with short Samuel Beckett hair and a face weathered and tanned and creased. She wears trousers, and despairs with the expansive silent-movie gestures of sorrow and anguish, so demonstrative and out of place in an English hospital. He rolls his head away and ignores her. He is very unhappy. When I catch another patient’s eye he winks. When I catch Victor’s eye he shrugs. His mouth is turned down. He can’t get comfy in his bed. He sighs a lot. He has learnt the word for coffee and how to turn down milk and sugar, although he grimaces when he drinks the powdered stuff he is given. I think of how thick and strong the coffee probably is in Budapest, sewed in dark cafes with wooden bars, ornate and cosmopolitan like the art-nouveau entrance halls of Berlin.
I doze again. My earplug aqualung is noisy. Hungarian chocolates sparkle on the seabed amid discarded chandeliers and marble. Anton Walbrook swims below me.
I open my eyes again. It is 5.15. Two hours have passed. Two hours’ unbroken sleep. I can’t believe my luck. Victor is asleep now, and the nurses have gone. Tim is sitting up with his reading-light on. He has an Indian wife and a beautiful daughter. They all seem very close. They come and see him in the afternoons. They wear saris. When he gets up to pad around, Tim wears an Indian cotton skirt and an old woolly cardigan. He reads books, and sometimes comes over with an idea for Tracey’s crossword. He is a doctor himself, but he has barely heard of my illness. He wears half-rimmed glasses to read, and scratches his beard a lot. It makes quite a noise. I always look up when he scratches his beard. I wish he were in the bed next to me. We could have the odd chat. I nod off again. I have been sitting up all night. I can’t lie down or twist since the abscess operation.
I dream I am in Bombay now. I am riding on an elephant. There is gunfire, and there are people running towards me. Someone is tugging at my arm, trying to pull me off. I resist. The tugging won’t stop. I open my eyes. Sarah, kind Sarah, a nurse who always works nights, is trying to get my arm out from under the bedclothes to get at my drip without waking me. I smile. She says something. I see her lips move. I pull out one of my earplugs. It is 6.30. Drug round. Temperature. Blood pressure. Pulse. Breakfast soon. Maybe I could try some cornflakes today. Wouldn’t be too demanding.
The man in the cubicle next to me died the next day. He would cough in the night. Weak, tight coughs, like the light puttering of a single-engined plane. In his last few days he called out for the nurses, his quietly desperate voice struggling to be heard over the bustling morning activity. And when they went to him all he asked for was for a curtain to be left open or a light to be turned off. His daughter would come and see him, always bringing someone else with her. They’d have come on the bus, after work – a long, arduous journey across the city. As father and daughter, they would never really talk to each other. He was too ill, and she was too long-sufferingly maternal and overworked to be relaxed. ‘Sit up, Dad.’ ‘Don’t play with it, Dad!’ ‘More oxygen, Dad?’ – delivered as reprimands born from too much caring.
I never asked what was wrong, but everyone seemed to know there was nothing that could be done. He seemed resigned, ready for the end. His daughter brought him clean pyjamas every other day. I must have been out for a short walkabout or something on the day he died, because when I came back he wasn’t there any more. The cubicle was empty and his bed had been remade. The curtains were drawn back, and a cleaner was mopping the floor.
By the evening a new patient was installed – a man with a smart moustache, blue ironed pyjamas, leather slippers and a drip in his neck. He was calling on nurses to see if he was allowed to drink.
‘Would it be bad form of me to ask for a sip of water? Don’t want to muck things up.’
His accent was crisp, like an old-fashioned fighter pilot’s. He seemed keen to get off on the right foot with everyone – keen to please, ready to obey, as though he were in a prep-school sickbay and the nurses were all Matron. ‘No trouble. Just say the word. Don’t suppose we could pop the window open?’ He tried out some chatty banter with the surgical team – ‘Expect you’ll want a peep under the old bonnet?’ – but they were typically dry and measured in response. His posh voice sailed over the cubicle wall. Wry smiles were exchanged between the two men in the beds opposite me. A couple of winks.
That night I was kept awake by the sheer absence of coughing.
From the bog window on the ward I can see offices. I can see office workers. They don’t know I’m in here. With diarrhoea. And hard pink bog paper. Pink crêpe-paper bog roll. NHS special issue. I come in here every day with diarrhoea and the hard pink crepe paper that makes my arse sore, and they don’t know. They don’t know the smell of other arses and this warm seat, and the little silver pedal bin, and the little door in the wall that says ‘Engineers Only’. My days are on hold. Their days are the same as they always were. They don’t know what they’re missing. In their offices. With things to do. Memos to write. Sandwiches to eat.
I am having a bath now. The water is hot. The nurse said, ‘Not too hot.’ I have been sitting in this deep old bath for fifteen minutes, the water lapping over my metal stitches. The skin around the stitches is tight and slightly puckered. My arm is over the side and my chest is half upright, to keep the drips and lines dry. The vertebrae at the base of my spine stand out like little drumlins on my back. They knock and grind on the bottom. I feel very thin today.
I have stood up now. I feel light-headed. Maybe the water was too hot. I am sitting on the edge of the bath. My toes are white and crinkly. My nails are blanched like white coral. I crouch awkwardly over the edge of the bath and wash my own hair one-handed with a plastic jug. I pull the plug out and watch the water drain away, leaving a fine mat of my hair on the chipped enamel. It comes out all the time. It bothers me. I dry my hair. The towel is covered in hair. I run my hand through my hair and my hand is covered in hair. I comb it back and the comb is full of hair. I have clean pyjamas – not that they are matching jacket and trousers, but that doesn’t matter. Green top, striped bottoms. I like the ones with the drawstring waistband best. They are gentler on my stitches. I cover my armpits and balls in talc. Lovely. I brush my teeth. I haven’t brushed them for a week. I am exhausted.
I have on the clean pyjamas now. I am sitting out in a chair beside my bed for the first time in a few days. My knees are bent, to be gentle on my belly, and my feet are on the edge of the bed. I have a copy of the morning paper that I paid for this morning – Tracey leaves me a little change each night before she goes, in case I want to ring her from the pay phone on wheels – and a glass of weak orange barley water on the table next to me. In my hand is a book. I am on page 12. I know Tracey will be here in a minute. She will be so happy to see me out in the chair. And I’ve had a bath too. She won’t believe it. I’ll probably need a little sleep later to make up for it. I’ll keep my head in my book, wear my reading-glasses that I don’t really need, and look studious and interesting for when she arrives. I have no pain this morning. Here she comes. Doesn’t she walk well?
She has always walked that way. I used to watch her come home across the campus in Hull in calf-length jeans and summer shoes with bare feet even in midwinter, picking her way across the icy paving like a wader. I used to think how I never imagined I’d ever be lucky enough to have a tall, thin girlfriend. She’d wear her worn-down high heels if we went out into town in the evenings to the Cecil or the ABC for a film, or Desolation Row for drinking and dancing, and she’d clack along beside me like a real girlfriend.
When we moved in together in Hull I wrote to tell my mum. She wrote to me regularly. She wrote back very understatedly with a genuine liberal spirit, wishing us happiness, but at the bottom she’d added a typical PS – ‘Just written 1,750 words on Arthur Lowe for TV Times for first week in July and received my ticket for my holiday in Pyrenees. Do you want anything? Aftershave? Espadrilles?! WALLET? GOLD CHAIN?! Glorious day. Garden gorgeous.’
All her letters were generally racy streams of thought and full of news. ‘Dear,’ one began, ‘Grandma has GONE. (No comment) We are trying to persuade her to rent a COLOUR TV. Skipper has cemented round our garden shed in an ANTI-RAT campaign. I got a story in Nigel Dempster’s column on Wednesday.’
I came back from the TV room one afternoon to see a man the size of a house being winched down on to a special bed next to mine. It was like watching a grand piano being moved. The bed was hydraulically powered, like a dustcart. Broad, almost a double, it folded across the middle and could sit the occupant up or lay them down mechanically. Frank, the bed’s occupant, was so gigantic that if he lay down he would never have got up again on his own. He was massive, like the combined halves of a heavyweight-wrestling tag team. I never really found out what he was in for, but people said he was having his stomach stapled together and his teeth wired to lose weight. They said he had been known to eat three sliced loaves (thick cut) at one sitting but was now facing a liquid diet of soups and juices fed through a straw. He was bearded and wore a white shirt that could have served as a sight-screen. I found myself just looking at him all the time. I would lie back in the very middle of my bed and watch him sleeping. When he dozed, the slow, steady stream of air that passed through his nostrils sounded deep and hollow like ventilator shafts. The bristles would flutter on his top lip, and he’d puff out air from time to time as though he were dismissing something out of hand in his sleep. His cheeks would flap like udders, and his stomach rose and fell so far that sometimes the sheets were lifted clean off the bed. He was a real-life sleeping giant.
His family came in to see him. They were huge too – big people with jowly faces and XXL T-shirts, all in cushion-soled shoes and elasticated waistbands, all drinking, eating and talking seemingly simultaneously, gathered round his bed like creatures at a watering-hole. Things looked so small in their hands. Beakers became eggcups. Newspapers were just little paperbacks. Even the children were colossal. Colossal youth. Fleshy, sugar-enriched hulks of teen and pre-teen self-consciousness.
During visitors’ hours, usually in the afternoons, all sorts of relatives would set up shop by the beds, some making themselves comfy straightaway, pulling up chairs, pouring themselves a glass of squash, getting the cups of tea in, others remaining discontentedly nervous, leaning in from the edge of their seats, keeping their coats on.
Kevin’s parents always brought more fruit and more fizzy drinks. Sweets too, like wine gums and Mintolas. I strained with jealousy sometimes, so bored was I with 30 ml capfuls of water. Kevin would slosh back a Tango and a handful of seedless grapes. It seemed so spoilt and Roman. He’d meticulously line the drinks up on his bedside table in descending height – barley water, blackcurrant cordial, Tango and Citrus Spring together, and maybe a mini-carton of Just Juice, and then manically roll the round fruits back and forth, back and forth, across his invalid-table under the palm of his hand while his parents watched in silence.
Bert’s wife would knit, knit, knit – barely speaking to her husband – just the pickety-pick of needles and wool. She brought him library books on war and Flypast magazine. She kept a copy of Cat World in her bag. She seemed at ease. She would often turn her chair away from Bert entirely, to face the ward to keep up with the afternoon’s action while Bert dozed or flicked through his mag. Sometimes she’d turn her head over her shoulder to speak to him –
‘All right, love? Need a nurse?’
‘No, I’m all right.’
‘Cup of tea to flush you through?’
The incessant knitting would sometimes get to Bert. He’d loll his head towards her across his pillow. ‘Could you stop that, love?’
‘What’s that?’
Pickety-pick pick pick.
‘The knitting, love. Could you just stop for a bit?’
‘Sorry, love. Can’t hear you. I’ll stop knitting.’ Silence. ‘Now then, what were you saying?’
Pickety-pick pick pick.
An old friend came to see me. He looked shocked as he came round the corner. I have known him since I was about five or six. He used to live in my road. He brought me books to read. Loads of books. He thought I must be bored witless, not knowing – how could he? – that the middle distance and the inside of my own head were more interesting than books. He left them on my bedside table. Hardbacks. Stoppard. Pinter. Drama criticism. Bellow. Books we used to talk about at school twelve years ago. He kissed me on the forehead. None of my other friends do that.
When we meet, he always hugs me. I feel his bristly chin against my face. I often miss the moment, don’t get my arms out in time, and he just bear-hugs me, pinning my arms to my sides. I sometimes catch my own reflection in a mirror and feel a prat. I used to think he was a hard man, but he is a very soft man.
He talked and talked. I can’t remember what he said. I remember his grey jacket with its wide shoulders, though, and his bristly chin and the books, but not a word of what he said. No, that’s not true. I remember one thing he said. He said he liked my beard. ‘Very casual and relaxed,’ he said. He sat on the bed. Really quite close to me. Other friends and family tended to sit at a distance. In a chair. But he sat close. He seemed moved. I wasn’t young any more. Not a boy. We used to pretend we were brothers at school. In the playground. Marching round, arms over each other’s shoulders, chanting ‘Who wants to play football?’ in loud, squeaky, rhythmic voices until a whole gang of us had joined up, all arms over shoulders, all chanting, wheeling round like the wings of a huge bird. When I was young I got up from the table round at his house and ran all the way home because his mother had put a plate of spaghetti bolognese in front of me. I’d seen spaghetti bolognese before, but had never been expected to eat it.
He looked at me with soft eyes. I was older now. Thinner. I tried to be natural and smiled as much as I could.
I never really expected anyone to come. I was always surprised when Tracey said a friend would be along the next day. I felt I must be uninteresting to anyone but myself, and that the sooner I sorted everything out myself and got back to how things used to be the better for everyone. My illness struck me as just a nuisance in many ways, nothing too serious, even when I was aware I was on a ventilator, or on the way up to theatre for the third time in a week, or groggy and lost in the recovery room. I thought a few more days, a quick shower and I would be right as rain. And when I wasn’t fighting back I was strangely calm and resigned. I felt if someone had come up to me and said, ‘I think it’s time to make your will. There is only one drug left we haven’t tried,’ I would have just shrugged and thought, ‘Never mind. Death’s not such a bad prospect, all things considered. What’s everyone making such a fuss about?’
Eileen, our manager at the time, visited a few times, often with her business partner, John. Eileen had dropped everything and come straight to the hospital when I was first admitted. They had had to be the ones who phoned round and cancelled our summer tour in America, and then I’m sure spent long afternoons sitting opposite each other in their tiny office in Notting Hill asking each other if I’d ever play again, or be able to record, or travel or eat or drink, feeling desperately involved but excluded too. They both came when I was first on ITU. They seemed ill at ease. They brought me little presents. John had been out to Tandy and bought a minicomputer tennis game that ran on a battery. I tried it out a couple of times but I couldn’t work out what was going on. I thought I was still knocking up when the screen flashed up that I’d just lost in straight sets. The screen was really low-resolution and I had to squint. It was exhausting. Five minutes and I was finished. Eileen brought me a copy of Viz. I didn’t dare look at it for fear of laughing and hurting myself. For a while it lived up on the top shelf next to my bed in ITU. I used to look up at its green cover and think about asking one of the nurses to get it down so I could have a peep at one or two of the cartoons, but Johnny Fartpants and Buster Gonads didn’t seem quite appropriate after four small-bowel operations and a room full of people on life-support machines. Once Eileen came on a Sunday and was a different person. She had on denim and a white roll-neck sweater. She sat by the bed. She was much more relaxed and just chatted, letting the afternoon spread out before us all, as though Sunday was a window that looked away from all concerns.
In many ways, that was how I wanted visitors to be. The most rewarding visits were when people came and didn’t feel they had only half an hour in which to sympathize, adhere to an imagined code of conduct and then get out. I wanted people to stay if I had to have a short test done, wait outside if they felt happier, but then come back and stay a little longer and try to see it as normal and that I was the same. But hospital unnerves people, in the same way that being in the presence of disabled people and old, infirm people unnerves people. The proximity of death and pain is unsettling and embarrassing. The parameters of the appropriate response seem to change, and I watched friends stumbling over their self-consciousness and battling with over- or under-reaction. If I held out a hand I’d see them choking back a tear. If I were quiet for a few minutes they would feel they had overstayed their welcome. If I smiled weakly I’d feel I had inadvertently created a moment of unbearable poignancy. And curiously, because of this, I felt a huge amount of power over them. I realized I could manipulate their emotions, and I was fascinated at their impressionability. It seemed easy to exploit their good intentions and, if I chose, to turn a cough into a dying breath, a goodbye into a last farewell. Their hearts were open books, their eyes wells of sympathy. I surprised myself at the times I contemplated such duplicity – not so cruel as to ever really put it into practice, but cruel enough to consider it.
I didn’t see much of my half-brothers. They each came a couple of times, but their visits were muted and awkward. I felt the family was being driven into itself by my experience. It is said a crisis can pull a family together, but strangely I thought we were forced apart and I found myself thinking how different we all were, relations as if only by chance, each wrapped up in very different versions of what was happening.
When I think of us all together I see the old family house. We had the top two floors of an Edwardian house in South London, with my grandmother living on the ground floor. After my grandmother died, my mum and dad rented out the lower flat for a while, but in the end the whole lot was sold. I grew up and lived there until I went to university. Whenever I fly home I look out for it on clear days, banking out of the holding pattern above Heathrow, a figure of eight over Lego London. The south-west suburbs. Richmond Park. The reservoirs. Hammersmith Bridge.
I always see Christmas. We all ate turkey in the sitting-room. Every available table in the flat was put in the middle of the room and covered in red crepe paper and then surrounded by all the available chairs. Even deck-chairs were fetched from the shed. My grandmother was summoned from downstairs and then, shortly after four o’clock, we all began. Tinsel hung from the huge gilt mirror on the wall. We were all reflected in it. The room seemed packed with people and paper and presents. At the end of lunch one year, my mum, wearing a scarlet and white floppy hat, presented my grandmother with her present from the family. It was a huge cardboard banana box of tinned food. She wouldn’t keep a fridge, and food was always going off in her flat.
After we’d all watched Morcambe and Wise, my dad slipped away and started playing the piano – ‘Love is Here to Stay’ and ‘We’ll be Together Again’. He always did this. They were the songs he played to my mum when they first met when he had his band at Quaglino’s. The piano was kept in my mum and dad’s bedroom. There wasn’t really anywhere else to keep it. Gradually the family drifted in one by one to listen and sing along quietly. Great-aunt Margery, who taught English in a school in Willesden, was allowed to perform an English pastoral, and my mum sang ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. Then my dad got back on the stool and hammered out some boogie-woogie with joky lyrics sung by my eldest half-brother, Simon, before climaxing with some loud ragtime to which Helen, my mum’s first husband’s partner, vigorously danced the charleston. We all clapped along and whistled and cheered at this. Nothing could follow Helen’s routine. She often did it. It was her moment, and for several years it was the crowning moment of Christmas. After that the crowd dispersed, leaving Simon playing his own sad compositions in the style of Roy Harper. My half-sister Jennie stayed and listened for a little bit, and my mum, and then the room was empty.
I didn’t like it when they put someone old and obviously ill in the bed next to me. Tracey said most of the time no one looked more haggard than me and Kevin, but, even so, I always preferred it if I got someone straightforwardly middle-aged and evidently on the mend. If they were too young – and by that I mean my age or younger – it made me think too self-pityingly about myself for my own good, and I would dwell silently and darkly for too long at a time. Too old and I immediately felt uneasy and I constantly seemed to be waiting for them to die or convulse or something. Middle-aged, though, and I felt OK. But they put Pat in next to me all the same.
Pat was yellow. An oily yellow. He was loud and old. He barked at the nurses, especially the younger ones, which made me jump.
‘Bleeaarrgghh!!’ he seemed to say to them.
He sat in his bed with long, lank, ratty grey hair, unshaven, in piss-stained long johns for two days before he was given clean pyjamas that he didn’t want. He had wild eyes like he’d just seen something bad and it was still in front of him. He had long uncut toenails, perfectly shaped. They were filthy and as sharp as winkle-pickers, and the tips were starting to curl back under his feet. Until he spoke in sentences made up of more than two or three words, I couldn’t place him at all – rich, poor, posh, ordinary. He used to detach the bag from his dripstand when he got up to slouch off for a piss – he wasn’t meant to do this – and then worsen things by holding the bag too low so the blood from his arm would flow down and back up the tube, mixing with the saline halfway, turning the fluids pink like diluted grenadine. It was a gruesome sight. The nurses told him not to, but he would forget the next time he got up and he had to have his line changed in his arm three times in the first two days because of it.
He went up to theatre a couple of days later and came back looking worse. Still jaundiced, his skin had turned more sulphurous. The days passed and he didn’t look any better. His eyes were duller, and he got quieter and lay stiller. He had been given a catheter up in theatre, and he didn’t try and get up so often.
He would perk up in the mornings, though, when the papers came round. Every day he asked for the Sporting Life. Of course the paper trolley never had it. He’d try asking for the Racing Post, which was even more unlikely, and then settle for the Daily Express and would pore over the racing pages on and off all morning. He asked one of the nurses to place bets for him a couple of times.
‘It’s a Carson double. Can’t fail,’ he barked.
We all laughed.
‘Sorry, Pat,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start. Anyway, you don’t want to be throwing your money away now, do you?’
‘Look, love. It’s a Cecil horse in the first and a Group winner in the second. Carson’s on top. Take the money.’
She said no, but then when later in the week a winner and a dual forecast came up trumps on consecutive days, and he started bragging and complaining, one or two of us started to take him seriously and she soft-heartedly took his money for an each-way double at Kempton, and promised to go down to the bookie’s at lunch-time.
The next day when the paper trolley came round we all got papers and I could sense everyone turning to the racing results first and none of us could believe it when we saw the horses had come in. Pat was crowing and coughing, laughing and spitting, fetching up huge globules of phlegm off his chest in his excitement – which was more than the physios had managed to do in a week.
‘Told you. Told you. Pillar to post. Pillar to post.’
We all waited expectantly for the nurse to arrive for the late shift. At three she waltzed in grinning with the winnings. She was thrilled for him. She said she’d never been in a betting-shop before, and then told him she’d been given a tip for the St Leger if he needed one.
The girl from the hospital radio came round that evening. She had a pad of paper and was asking patients for requests. They were going to be broadcasting at 8.30, and we were to tune in on our little headsets above our beds. She seemed relaxed, wearing faded Lee jeans and a green sweater. She looked like she’d prefer to play some loud rock ‘n’ roll. From the beds on the other side of the ward I heard the requests.
‘Tony Bennett.’
‘Sinatra.’
‘Anything lovely by Pavarotti.’
‘What, love? A tea with two sugars, please, if you’re making it.’
Somebody asked what else would be on the programme. We were told there would be something from Cats and that there had been quite a push for Glen Miller from Erskine Ward. I was banking on Kevin to ask for something frenzied and punky – a little New York Dolls or maybe some Stiff Little Fingers – but he was asleep. Victor didn’t understand what was going on, which left me. I toyed with asking for something obscure and specific and meaningless, like ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ by Lieutenant Pigeon, but I hadn’t the courage.
It is the day arranged for my second shot of cyclophosphamide, and Ignatius, a young Spanish student doctor, has been chosen to inject it. My eosinophil count has been creeping up, again signalling continued dangerous over-activity from my immune system. They warned me it might happen. Another chemical hammering should beat it into submission. Nobody has exactly been looking forward to it, though. Ignatius is nervous. The drug is serious. Pharmacy won’t release it without special authority. Two or three consent forms have already been signed by leading doctors. Cyclophosphamide is a cytotoxic drug. Cytotoxic means cell-damaging. It was originally developed to kill malignant cells in cancer treatment, in the hope that they would be more sensitive to it than ordinary cells. In practice it has proved to be highly effective on the white cells connected with immune response, but it has to be carefully measured and monitored as it has the potential to stop all natural cell development in the bone marrow. When used a lot, cyclophosphamide can cause sterility, make hair fall out, and bring on vomiting and nausea by damaging cells in the stomach lining. Ignatius basically has his hands on a small chemical weapon.
A drip has been rigged up above me with fast-running saline. The drug has to be injected into this river as it enters my arm, to disperse quickly. Neat cyclophosphamide can cause renal failure. The drug is all contained in one needle, but must be injected laboriously over ten minutes with no gaps. It is important it goes to plan. The drip will then stay running all night, filling my system with litre upon litre of water, after which I am expected to pee every twenty minutes for the next day and a half to help flush out the drug’s residue.
Ignatius takes off his watch and lays it on the bed to read the second hand going round. Steel interlinked strap. He has brown, muscular arms. He slips his thumb into the butt of the needle. He has the shakes. He tells me he has always had them but is adamant about becoming a surgeon. I smile and try to remain casual.
The drip is turned up full and he slips the needle into the line and starts to depress the plunger. Tracey is there, and Paul, the houseman. We are all quiet and watch. Paul says a few light-hearted words, and then falls quiet again. I try to relax. Ignatius is sweating. His temples are moving. He stops for a moment and flexes his hand. He has got cramp. Four minutes have passed. I close my eyes. The seriousness of the occasion sets my mind racing. I feel the cool water running in my arm.
Time stretches. I see fells and damp heather and mountain streams, hilltop tarns, Lakeland, baby waterfalls, hydroelectric power stations, fine drizzle, sheep with their fleeces stained red with dye, the reedy turf covered in droppings, scarred and striated valleys, buttresses of rock truncated and shattered into a million bits of scree, and, further down, stepping-stones, stone walls, stone bridges, dappled light, a river so clear and cold I can see boulders on the river-bed, and I want to bend down and cup my hands and drink the fresh water as it flows over my wrists. I see Rydal Water and Windermere and Tracey at the plastic wheel of a tourists motor boat, her hand in her mouth, looking all around her and across the wide water, convinced we will capsize if we are not careful and vigilant. And I see myself as a boy crossing a charred and burning stubble field towards a beach, my dad in front, my mum behind. My mum wears a turquoise towelling dress. Suddenly a lark bolts from the earth at my feet and screams into the sky above my head, singing and singing, a kite in a high wind, and my mum stops and cups her hand across her brow to see it against the bright September light and we all stop in the smouldering field and listen. I can smell the sea coming. And the dead corn. I ask my dad why the field is burning, and he says it is to enrich the soil for next year and that destruction can be for good as well as bad.
I open my eyes. Paul has gone. Ignatius has finished. He is tidying up. He slips his watch back on and clicks the strap, and then says goodbye. I say thanks, and then look round the ward. Kevin is drinking Coke and pulling at some fruit. Victor pads past forlornly in his pyjamas on his way for a crap.
I think of cyclophosphamide in my body – a wrecker, a healer, tampering, meddling with the roots of life, like an insecticide washed off fields of crops into the gullies and brooks, bubbling and frothing up like detergent, running into my veins as into rivers, and down through the topsoil and sandy loam, through underground channels and soft, porous rocks like body tissue, to settle at the water-table which feeds my roots. And all I can think is, If and when I recover from all this, in the years ahead, will I be as I remember myself, unbowed, organic and strong? Or will I always be a weak strain, in need of shelter, susceptible to the wind and the rain?
It is said to be quite common for patients to lose their voices temporarily if they have been on a respirator for a time. The throat can become sore, but corrects itself within a couple of days. When, after a week on ITU, I was still croaking and whispering, doctors had started taking note. They encouraged me to try to project, which was pointless, as I was trying. Tracey told me recently that they had told her at the time that my loss of voice was psychosomatic and she was to try to get me to speak. It was a sign that I was hiding in my own illness. It shocked many who came to see me. Not only did I look like Howard Hughes, but I sounded like I was about to pop off at any moment. Richard and Michelle, friends, rang the unit from their holiday in France one morning and the nurses brought the phone over. I didn’t usually take calls, but I was light-headed on drugs and asked for the receiver. I whispered away in a mild haze for a few minutes. Michelle later told me how upsetting it had been.
After three weeks on St Mark’s and six weeks after my first operation I was finally referred to a throat specialist in the hospital. Things were no better. I was still croaking and rasping. He was holding an out-patients’ clinic on the ground floor. Tracey helped gather up my drips and stands and I was sat in a wheelchair with my notes on my lap. The file was enormous.
Down at the clinic, it was throbbing with life. I was taken to the front of the queue. People looked at me cautiously. I felt I frightened them. Although we were all in a hospital, I looked too ill. Children were silenced by my presence. Women whispered to their husbands as I passed.
The consultant sprayed the inside of my throat with a local anaesthetic and pushed my tongue down with a wooden spatula, shaped like a large lolly-stick. Two minutes later he told me flatly one of my vocal chords was paralysed. I paused for a moment. I was stunned. I saw the end of my current life as a singer and the beginning of something even newer than I had been preparing for. I stared at the floor blankly. My voice. It frightened me more than anything else that had happened over the past weeks.
I asked him how it had happened. He said the cause was unknown, but it had probably come on as a result of heavy physical stress and suffering. He said he’d also been given to understand that neuropathy was a symptom of my illness. I asked him how long it would last.
‘Difficult to say,’ he said. ‘A month, maybe nine months, maybe more – who knows? Depends on how badly the nerve is burnt out. Steroids might help.’ He was guessing. I sat there for a moment. I told him I was a singer. He sympathized. There was a silence. He wrote his name in blue ink with a fountain pen on to a piece of paper. All consultants use fountain pens. He told me to ring him if things didn’t improve when I was finally discharged.
I slipped the piece of paper into my dressing-gown pocket and the nurse wheeled me out into the bright waiting-area. Tracey wheeled me to the lift. I walked the last bit. We didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say.
Two teenage student nurses are seated at the big table in the middle of the ward filling in their patient-progress forms. I have seen the kind of things they write about me –
‘Ben is a well-kempt gentleman and his pain management has gone smoothly this morning.’ ‘Ben sat up and ate a piece of toast this afternoon.’ ‘Ben produced two stools of loose consistency, vomited and partook of light conversation.’
They look like they could be revising for their GCSEs. It is after lights-out. They are talking in hushed voices.
‘Gary gave me a tape after the party. Loadsa music on it. Really good.’
‘Oh, tell me. Like what?’
‘Well, mainly The Waterboys.’
‘Who?’
‘The Waterboys. You know that Mike Scott bloke. The hat. “Whole of the Moon”.’
‘Oh, yeah, yeah …’course.’
‘And then there was this stuff by this other bloke on the other side. Really good. I mean really, really good. Sort of doomy but amazing words.’
‘Who’s that then?’
‘Never heard of him before. Leonard Cohen.’
‘Leonard Cohen. Oh he’s really old. From the sixties.’
‘Never is!’
‘I’m telling you, he is.’
‘How old.’
‘Oh, ancient. In his forties. Must be.’
Occasional parties would be thrown over in the Queen Mary’s nurses home on Saturday nights, largely attended by freshers or end-of-year leavers. Doctors and consultants would get ribbed in the days running up: ‘Gonna strut your stuff, sir?’ ‘Get on down, Dr Brown!’ And from nine until midnight the dull thud of kick-drum and sub-bass would pound quietly across the gardens. The nights would begin with reasonably up-to-the-minute club music but spiral downwards from then on through Abba and The Police until the last half-hour turned into a shapeless free-for-all when strains of oldies would float through the open window behind my bed – ‘Dreadlock Holiday’, ‘Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick’, ‘Layla’, ‘Y.M.C.A.’
I watched the younger nurses on St Mark’s come in for the day shift after the weekends. They’d always get in just in time, like at school, scuffling and skidding into the ward for the morning update, leaving their identities at the door – rave DJ, crusty, swot, homebody. Accessories denoted allegiances. Dubplate and twelve-inch shoulder-bag, nose stud, nurses handbook, bicycle clips. Some took to the job like ducks to water, able to submerge their egos beneath their work, or – better – merge them seamlessly into their patient-relationships. For these nurses, nothing ever seemed too much trouble. Kindness and patience seemed to flow naturally. Everyone liked these nurses.
Others struggled with themselves and seemed to find it hard to give. Their personalities would chafe against the day-to-day mundanity of many jobs – especially the relays back and forth to the sluice with bottles of piss. The irrational behaviour and sometimes wild knee-jerk accusations of neglect from the patients rubbed up badly against their own adolescent intolerance. They had a need to assert themselves. It would manifest itself in little huffs as they turned away from the bed, deliberately clipped and swallowed speech, apathy or bullishness, subtle levels of inappropriate response. I really hated one or two of them some days, and I know they really hated me back some days too.
The next morning I wanted to walk somewhere. I was becoming more and more mobile as the days went by. I offered to fetch a paper for anyone who wanted one from the shop in reception. Lots of winking and the handing over of small change preceded my departure and, stooped over, I pottered off with my drip-stand and a pocketful of coins. I took my time. It was a trip out after all. I smiled at people in the corridors, kept the lift door open for doctors and patients in wheelchairs, and generally was as charming as I could be in my role as a rather emaciated, bearded Quasimodo.
Reception was buzzing. I queued behind nurses buying lunch – cheese roll, crisps, Lilt, Snickers – and paused by the huge granary baps stuffed with ham and salad, poppy-seeded subs crammed with egg mayonnaise, crusty baguettes of sliced turkey. Strangely, I didn’t really crave them, in spite of not having eaten properly for weeks, but viewed them with the interest I’d give to arresting museum exhibits.
I asked for seven newspapers and bottle of Volvic. I got a carrier bag and hung it on my drip-stand and shuffled off. The place was vibrant. I loitered for a couple of minutes just watching. A pregnant woman was crying, her hand held by a little boy in full Batman outfit. He had on the cape, and the black mask with the hood and with the little pointy ears. An old man sat on his own with a walking-frame and a white plastic bag printed with the words ‘I Ran The World’. A girl spilled a tube of Smarties all over the floor and they scattered like ball-bearings. People waited on a line of chairs for prescriptions, and nurses hurtled past as lift doors started to close.
I took the lift all the way to the seventh floor and got out into the empty corridor and pushed open the doors to the chapel. Tracey told me she had been up there when I was unconscious. She didn’t really know why. Some restlessness. It was lonely and dry and lifeless. Heavy oak panelling lined the room. A huge oil-painting hung above the altar. There was no natural light. The carpet muted my footsteps. I felt my presence wasn’t registered. I stood for a moment, but no thoughts came. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the austerity was suffocating. I took the papers back down to the ward.
When I got back, a man was cleaning under my bed. The cleaners made the tea and washed the floors. Almost all the women on the staff were black. They wore bright yellow nylon dresses and would clack around in hard wooden sandals, languorous, taking their time. In the mornings one of them would bring fresh jugs of iced water and clean plastic beakers. Hot, weak tea came round with Marie biscuits at around eleven, and again at four. In between, the women mopped floors and changed the waste-paper bags by our beds. They chatted to each other in thick, accented language. The men who swept the floors and damp-wiped the surfaces seemed to be mainly from the eastern Mediterranean – Italian, Cypriot, Turkish, maybe. They wore blue nylon trousers with yellow Marigold washing-up gloves. The man cleaning under my bed had a feather duster.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hallo.’ He looked surprised.
‘How are you?’
‘OK.’
‘Where do you come from?’
He paused. ‘Tunisia.’ He stopped dusting for a moment. ‘Harlesden now.’
‘Really? How long have you been here?’
‘One years.’ He started running his duster over the wall.
‘What do you think?’
‘OK. Bad food.’
‘Oh? What do you eat?’
‘Lemons. Lemons and bread.’
‘That sounds healthy. I eat this.’ I pointed to my food drip. He smiled.
‘I think I like lemons in Tunisia better.’
‘Me too.’