Two p.m. I am slumped on my bed. I have no strength. I see the same image of the bucket coming up dry again that I saw down in the garden on my first weekend on the Coronary Care Unit. Metal. I feel I have got something metallic in my mouth. Like I have just licked a coin. I started on a new course of oral steroids this morning, and it is a day after the cyclophosphamide. Has something gone wrong? Have the drugs done something bad? I was doing so well. I keep scraping my tongue back and forth under my front teeth to remove an imaginary film. My eyes feel dry and crispy. Dry autumn leaves. I screw them up, trying to get them to moisten. Dry crunched-up leaves. Broken veins and capillaries. Leaf veins. Like the back of a hand with a torch shone through it. I don’t want water. I don’t want to move. If I just lie here my mind will eventually wander and, before I know it, fifteen minutes will have passed and I might feel OK. My gut feels rotten. Trapped pockets of air and gas. A dachshund made by a balloon-twister. My head is an empty box. My thoughts rattle around, dry crumbs in a kitchen drawer.
Six p.m. I am on a lightly rolling ship. I can’t talk. My stomach slops with bilge-water. My nose is full of nausea. Fumes on a car-deck. Oil. Burnt petrol. My ears hum with the drone of low engines. My eyes are opaque plastic windows, salt-blasted, unclear. Don’t touch me. Deep breath.
Nine p.m. I am lying on my side. A waste-pipe running into the sea. Effluence. Warm effluence. Backing up. I am concrete. I am corrugated. The daylight has gone. The sea is black. I am spilling. I am trailing along the seabed. I sit up. My stomach lurches and flails like a dropped hosepipe coursing with water. I grope for the grey cardboard bowl under the bed and I throw up. Green bile.
That night a nurse rolled me over and gave me a Paracetamol suppository to bring my temperature down. I was feeling bad and strange. I asked for extra blankets. I had taken to sleeping on top of my bed, to keep as many layers between me and the plastic undersheet as possible. I pulled a couple of white cotton blankets over me. It was snug. I laid the pillow-rest flat and managed to lie half on my side with my knees up. Sleep came deeply and fitfully.
I dreamed of weevils and termites, burrowing into trunks of wood, leaving them hollowed and pitted like cork. I was stumbling, kicking over little hillocks and mounds of earth. Hundreds of weevils were running over my slippers. My tubes and lines were trailing through the earth. I tried to hitch them up, but I could see insects already in the necks of the tubes, like wasps climbing into bottles. I tried to shake them out, but they were inside, running up the inside.
At 6.30 a.m. a nurse took my temperature. It had climbed to 39.1. I rolled back into my pillows and watched breakfast come round. Dry white sliced bread was on the trolley, which meant the toaster was broken again. Cornflakes. Tea. Powdered coffee. At least the milk jug was cold. I missed breakfast a lot. My head felt like the rind of a fruit, juiceless and extracted.
At eight the surgical team looked concerned. Everyone was aware of the dangers of the latest injection of cyclophosphamide. It had the potential to temporarily leave me with no defences. I was ripe for infection and my temperature was up. Maybe I’d picked something up already. They ordered a course of antibiotics, and a temperature reading every hour.
By nine it had hit 40. By ten it had climbed to 40.4 – about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Nurses were gathering round my bed to watch the mercury rise. It was amazing in its frightfulness. I felt shrunken. I lay perfectly still. My head was a skull. My chin rested on my chest. Inside my head I felt the tissue was too small for the space it occupied. If I moved, it seemed to scrape against the surface. Abrasive. Stinging. Like grazing the fleshy part of the arm against a pebble-dashed wall. Twisting my head would bring out little electrical storms across my brow and down my nose and through my sinuses. Tiny lightning strikes. And I was a small creature who had made its home in this skull. Peeping out from the darkness. Tiny eyes like beads. Silent. Quietly scuffling in one of the sockets. I felt rotten in my guts. Nurses drifted in and out of my line of vision, often asking if I was OK. I didn’t want to move my head, so I would just raise the corners of my mouth into a little smile.
At eleven I sat up and vomited again. As I sat up, my head came away from the pillow like Velcro. I was faint, lightheaded. Two nurses were supporting me. They laid me down again. I closed my eyes. My stomach up to my mouth felt like a soft, hot pipe – pumping, fleshy, too big for my body. The sudden ascent of my temperature was leaving undisguised concern on the faces of the nurses. Two surgeons came back and ordered strong anti-nausea injections. They talked of another possible blockage in my guts from scar tissue or maybe another abscess. They arranged for an ultrasound scan for the following afternoon.
Paul, the houseman, appeared. More blood tests. Blood cultures were needed for signs of bugs and infection. Nobody really knew what they would find or what was really going on. I was deep into myself by now, insulating my responses, lagging myself against the unfolding crisis. My veins were sluggish and hard to find. Local anaesthetics were injected while Paul jabbed around in my arm. The tiny tube of the butterfly needle would spurt for a moment then stop as the vein failed to respond. He asked how I would feel about an attempt to draw blood from a big vein in my groin. I looked out of the window. I knew it was important. I didn’t know what to say. I said OK. When he went in, it felt like a drawing-pin being forced into a stretched rubber band. The syringe filled instantly. I wanted to be sick.
I lay there in my dry skull for the rest of the day, dozing, not speaking. Tracey was there. I vomited again a couple more times in spite of the anti-sickness drug. Nurses would ask me if I was hot. I only felt dried out. Like something once damp, now shrivelled. A peach-stone. That night the electric storms started up in my face again. The worst since ITU. My temples buzzed with blood. I could feel my pulse beating all over my body.
By morning there had been little change. I don’t remember the night passing coherently. Delirious dream landscapes. My temperature was still over 40. I felt crumbly, like parchment paper. Blood cultures had grown nothing. Without firm evidence of an infection, a blockage in the gut was talked about again.
At 2 p.m. Gert, the porter, collected me for Ultrasound. I was taken down in my bed, past the drawn faces of the X-ray out-patients in their gowns and towelling socks. The doctors tinkered around for twenty minutes, digging the scanner hard under my ribs. I fell asleep on the hard bed in front of them. They carried on scanning, running the scanner like a silent electric razor over and over my belly. The soft lighting. The grey quietness. The astronomy of ultrasound. I woke up. I wanted to stay and be swallowed up by something – another world of non-doing. Time-trapped. They found nothing, and a porter collected me.
Most of the rest of the afternoon I slept. The results of the ultrasound disappointed the surgeons. A yet undiscovered infection seemed likely again. It was decided my Hickman line should be removed that night, in case bugs were breeding in the warm milky food at the point where the line entered my chest, infecting my blood. A couple of hours later a young surgeon arrived to take the line out.
The curtains were drawn round. Hickman lines run deep into the chest. The longer they are in place, the harder it is to get them out. The skin tends to grow back around the entry site, binding the tube into the body. A heavy sedative was injected into my arm. My head lolled on the pillow. I went woozy. I thought I was about to be tattooed. A bluebird on my ribcage. And then I opened my eyes. Other patients were drinking hot drinks. But hot drinks don’t come round till late. My chest was burning. I was alone. I looked at my watch. Two hours had passed. A nurse told me Tracey had stayed for a while but had had to go home. The Hickman line was gone and my chest was stitched with a strand of black thread. That night, if I moved, I felt like a hooked fish. The stitch seemed to snag. I had to sleep on my back, half sitting up again.
The next morning bled lifelessly out of the night before, grey, still, no patterns of sleep or waking. I was living on water only. I day-dreamed. Gentle hallucinations. Terracotta. I was made of terracotta. A clay oven, a brick, water and liquids evaporating off my surface, placed inside a wood fire. My temperature was still high. I lay still for hours. Every time I wanted to pee I had to call a nurse over. I wasn’t allowed a normal urine bottle from the communal sluice. Each time the nurse had to crack open a sterilized plastic jug from a protective wrapper, wearing sterilized surgical gloves to minimize the risk of further infection. Everything I was emitting was being measured, recorded, analysed, tested. Amount, colour, consistency, viscosity, smell.
Mid-morning brought firm news at last. Something had been grown from my blood cultures. It seemed like I had some kind of blood poisoning – fungal septicaemia.
Everyone was relieved that there was at least a reason for all this suffering. My weight was plummeting. I’d lost ten pounds in three days. I was down to nine and a half stone. There had been talk a few days ago that I was almost ready to go home, but this latest set-back had distressed everyone. Pharmacy was alerted and a new drug was ordered. A fresh drip was rigged beside my bed in readiness. And when I looked up I thought I saw a sail on a mast and called a nurse over to tell her.
The new drug, an antifungal bombshell called Fluconazole, was dropped at midday. My body retreated further into itself, pulling back into trenches deep and familiar, leaving me half soundproofed from the hospital boom. I fell into a deep sleep. I dreamt I was draining away, water from an outdoor pool, leaves caught in the net above. And, as the water drained, the pool tiles were more chipped and scarred than anyone had ever imagined, so refracted and softened had they been by the soft lapping of life. I opened my eyes. I saw Tracey. The bedside table. Ribena. A beaker. I closed them again. I was dripping wet, my fever half sweated out, and I felt as though silt and stagnant droplets were on my mattress. A puddle. Midges hovering in a sweat haze over the filmy water. I thought I was by a roadside, beaten up, pushed out of a moving car at speed, face down in the verge of tall, dry grass and then rolling down the bank into the gully until I was face up in the filmy water.
I opened my eyes some time later. Like a dried dishcloth pressed into the shape of a clenched fist, I lay awake. It was late afternoon. My temperature was down. I felt at sea. On land, but at sea – the way the body can still sense the rocking of the boat for an hour after reaching the shore. I sat up for the first time that day and vomited. Pale-green liquid filled the bowl. Like lime cordial. It was good. As though my body was taking action. I felt I’d come back from somewhere. The worst was over. Tracey was still there. Had she ever been away? She pressed her hand against my forehead. Human contact. I felt the curve of her ring.
We spent our first night away together in Scarborough. We used to catch the train up to Bridlington or Scarborough and spend the days roaming the beaches and the back streets, eating chips and sitting in cafés on the front with pint mugs of tea, watching the hard winds whip in off the North Sea. We stayed at Mrs Thorpe’s guest-house. It was May 1982. Both nineteen. Two Adults Bed and Breakfast £6 per day. Total £12. Paid With Thanks. Rough wool carpet and red linoleum in the room. A plate of Rich Tea and a kettle on the sideboard in the hall when you came in after 9.30. Tinned tomatoes, circular fried eggs and boiled button mushrooms in brine for breakfast.
We walked round the landscaped lake at Peasholm Park and along Marine Drive and down on to the beach as far as Scalby Mills and rode the out-of-season Astra Glide in overcoats, and then climbed up to the deserted castle and across the freezing headland to the Roman signal station and the ruined chapel by the cliff edge, the keep and bailey behind us. I can’t remember anything we said, only the sea and the grey clouds and the racing winds. I can still see the outline of the priest’s house alongside the chapel, the threshold and step to the door-opening at the west end opening into nothing but sky.
In 1969 one of my dad’s last major jobs before he thought about packing it all in was a summer season at Scarborough. His love was big bands – big, bluesy, Basie-style – and nobody wanted them any more, except for tea dances. Any TV or radio work was always a compromise. He did thirteen weeks as MD of the pit band for Tommy Cooper at the Floral Hall. He says it was the funniest three months of his life. It was a punishing routine – six nights a week, plus an additional Sunday concert while Cooper, who would hire a private jet to fly south for twenty-four hours, was at home with his feet up.
He remembers watching the first Apollo moon landing in Tommy Cooper’s hotel room. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with Cooper’s wife while Cooper himself was stretched out in the next room on a special oversized bed like a catafalque calling out for action updates –
‘What’s happening in there?’
‘Not a lot.’
Two minutes later.
‘What’s happening now?’
My dad stayed up all that time in a small room at the Station Hotel – a pub really. It was a real turf pub. York races. He picked a lucky Piggott yankee one afternoon, and from then on became known as someone worth touching on. Mum would visit. I went up once with her. We stayed out at a country hotel in the Forge valley called the Hackness Grange. I thought it was fantastic. Cooked breakfast and a pool.
In the evening I was allowed in the orchestra pit during the show. My dad was involved in a couple of routines, one involving catching a plastic replica bowling-ball as it bounced off Cooper’s foot from the stage, which made me laugh. I clacked round the backstage corridors in a pair of Will Gaines’s tap shoes, knocking on doors and watching The Square Pegs from the wings, wondering what a barber-shop quartet was.
Two years later we went down to the Bournemouth Winter Gardens, where my dad did one more season. He was just playing piano this time. There was a mixture of comics filling the weeks until the Bruce Forsyth season started. Freddie Starr. Ted Rogers. Top of the bill when I was there were Hope and Keen. I played crazy golf in the afternoons and read the saucy postcards in the revolving stands outside the shops on the seafront, and then met my dad in the theatre canteen for beans on toast before the show and gazed at the chorus girls.
I went back to Scarborough with Tracey a couple of years after leaving Hull. It was 1986. We were on tour in the North and had a weekend off. It seemed romantic to go back. It was October and chilly, but beautifully bright and clear. The front was one long crescent of people catching one of the last sunny days of the year, pensioners mostly, in cardigans and sun-glasses with ice-lollies and binoculars. We had a bit of money by then, and booked in for a night at the St Nicholas Hotel on St Nicholas cliffs. Three-star, with a grotto leisure club. We felt quite up-market, although the hotel staff rather looked down on us. I had, it must be said, dyed my hair peroxide blond at the time. All the same, I played snooker in the lounge to show off and then paid in cash.
Arnold has gone from the bed opposite. His children took him home. Leslie has arrived. He seems to know all the nurses. He is very pale, but chirpy. He is wearing a light-blue anorak and carrying a little vinyl holdall. He pulls the curtains round his bed himself, changes, and has pulled them back again and is lying on his bed in his crisply ironed light-blue polyester-mix pyjamas before the nurses have even got back. He pulls a book from his bag. It is a Western. He smooths his fine and immaculately combed white hair down over his head as he reads. He spends a long time on every page, sometimes even turning back a page to reread something.
A houseman arrives. ‘Come for your top up, Leslie?’
‘Yes. Four pints of gold top, please!’
Leslie, it turns out, is anaemic. He is very patient. He is very pale now I look at him closely – almost see-through, like a phantom. The veins on his skin are like little rivers frozen over.
His blood-bag doesn’t come up from the laboratory fridge for five hours. He stops the houseman as he passes through. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I’m hoping to be in Devon on Monday. On my holidays. Any chance …’
‘I don’t see why not. What’s the problem?’
‘Well, each bag takes eight hours and we haven’t even commenced yet.’
‘Right. We’d better get cracking then.’ The houseman turns quickly.
Leslie stops him unexpectedly. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you from your engagements.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your schedule. I don’t want you to feel I am disrupting your busy schedule and the day-to-day necessities.’
‘The what? Oh, don’t be silly, Leslie.’
‘I know how hospital affairs can impinge, and being only a non-crisis day admission …’
‘Yes. Look, I’d better check on this blood.’ He gets away this time.
Leslie sits back on his bed with his Western.
A nurse arrives with a dinner menu. ‘Will you be eating on top of your transfusion?’
Dr Mackworth-Young, my rheumatologist, arrived in the early evening with news that my eosinophils were responding well to the cyclophosphamide, indicating my immune system was generally dampened down. He was sorry about the septicaemia. He had a gentle bedside manner and blond hair that sometimes looked slept-on from the back. He wore old-fashioned clothes, but of immense quality. Derby boots. Leather Oxfords – Church’s, probably. Pinstripe wool suits. Waistcoats. Collarless white shirts with separate collars and brass studs. His senior registrar, Rod, who often came too, was younger and handsome, with the bearing of a triathlete. I expected to find out he did extreme skiing or rock-climbing on his days off. He wore a diver’s watch. Like his consultant, he had winning blue eyes, but not soft and pale and nursery-book, more vivid and holiday-brochure Aegean. He wore modern striped blue shirts to match. They made a good team. How much is reassurance part of recovery?
They had brought me a name for my illness too, having finally settled on a full diagnosis. Tissue-analysis tests had confirmed it as an autoimmune disease called Churg-Strauss Syndrome, an extremely rare disorder seen in individuals with a background of asthma and hay fever whose immune systems unpredictably and violently respond after further, but not necessarily related, antigenic stimulation. The result, as the immune system’s antibodies battle overactively with the irritant in the body’s connective tissue (in my case, most likely an allergen connected with my asthma), is wrecked blood vessels and interrupted blood supply (vasculitis), causing potentially fatal organ death. The immune system then roller-coasts out of control and begins no longer to recognize the body’s own tissue, producing antibodies that start to devastate that too – hence the term ‘autoimmune’: literally, ‘antagonistic towards oneself’.
The critical moment is characterized by the appearance of massive numbers of the immune system’s marshalling forces (hypereosinophilia). Not only is the disease itself rare but the fact that it had chosen to settle in the tissue around my small intestine is rarer still. Most of the few known cases have been seen in the lungs.
It turns out that a history of asthma going back as far as childhood is uncommon. While it is one of the initial stages in the syndrome, asthma usually develops after the age of twenty, largely in young men. The gap between asthma and onset of the life-threatening vasculitic stage averages out at about three to five years, all of which fitted my pattern. So many of the debilitating symptoms I suffered in the first six months of 1992 are typical of the disease too – fatigue, muscle pain, arthritic pain, fever, hypertension, hoax heart scares, and a sudden improvement in the asthma in the run-up to the life-threatening phase after a noticeable bad downward trend. To paraphrase Joseph Heller, ‘You know it’s something serious when they name it after two guys.’
The next two days passed in a seamless stretch of time. I floated on the surface of the day-to-day activities of the ward, lying down to sleep and rest, sitting up to vomit. The early blood cultures were matching the later ones, and fungal candida had been found on the tip of the Hickman line that had been removed from my chest. It had, as suspected, got into my bloodstream via my liquid food. With enough evidence to discount an alternative source of infection, my antibiotics were finally stopped, and for good measure the antifungal drug was doubled. I was encouraged to eat and drink a little again. The doctors were concerned about my weight.
Nurses would come round in the afternoons, sit me up on the edge of the bed, wait for me to vomit, and then help me on to the weighing-chair. Stripped down to my pants, I looked like an enfeebled bantamweight boxer at a bottom-of-the-bill weigh-in. That evening I fiddled with a cheese sandwich and dribbled tomato soup off the spoon and back into the bowl until it was cold.
My body started calling for sugar. I got a craving for lemonade, and one of the housemen told me old-fashioned lemonade used to have traces of quinine in it, which was supposed to aid digestion. I sent Tracey out on a search for original R. White’s Lemonade. She scoured the local shops but could only find modern brands. I took a bottle anyway, and guzzled two whole glasses chilled with ice the following afternoon before bringing it all back up in one long, hilarious, foaming, bubbling white chunder an hour later. The next day I tried another glass of lemonade at 6.30 a.m., after the early-morning drug round. It came straight back up. I tried a bowl of cornflakes at eight, and that too returned immediately. Suddenly things seemed more serious. The Prof began talking of a blockage again on top of the septicaemia. He ordered another barium meal.
Little in the ward distracted me during those days. It was the illest I’d been since ITU. It wasn’t until a man arrived in the bed opposite to have his pile removed that I really took much notice. He was due up in theatre that morning, but there had been a delay and he had already had his pre-med. It was one o’clock, and he was so stoned he couldn’t stop laughing. The man in the bed next to him was talking to him.
‘Are you all right, mate?’
Giggling.
‘Mate, are you all right?’
Tittering.
‘Shall I call a nurse?’
More giggling. He was lying on his side like a little boy in bed on the morning of his birthday, likeable, charming, face pushed up into the pillow.
‘You won’t be laughing later, after they’ve tied a knot round it and it’s dropped off.’
Open laughter. The whole ward was laughing. One of the nurses was stiffing a smirk and trying to tell him theatre was sorry for the delay. ‘The porter will be down in ten minutes.’
‘Arseholes he will.’
It was pointless. A wave of good humour was rippling round the room. It made me think of Sid James and Bernie Bresslaw and Hattie Jacques and striped flannelette pyjamas. We were all laughing and smiling while trying not to laugh, grimacing with the pain of bruising and stitching. It was the best feeling in the ward for weeks.
The porter arrived with a trolley. ‘All set, then?’
We all collapsed. The man was helped on to the trolley. He was still sniggering to himself. As the porter and the nurse tried to lay him down he kept sitting up, pursing his lips and blowing air out in a weak raspberry. The porter cottoned on, and the whole party – the porter, the patient and two nurses – passed out of the ward on their way up to the operating theatre in a mini-pageant of tittering and clanging oxygen tanks.
The next day he was back on the ward. He was up and walking around. Still smiling, he looked as though he had got an egg clasped between his buttocks. Earlier on he’d been for his first crap since the operation. He’d come back looking startled. Expecting to see the residue of his last meal floating below him, he had looked down and saw, as I heard him describe to the man in the next bed, ‘a bloody great big piece of bandage in the pan’. They then spent the next half-hour talking about it.
‘What I want to know is, How did they get it up there?’
‘Search me.’
‘I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d eaten the wrapper off something.’
‘I bet you feel better for it, though.’
‘Not half.’
‘Was it a big ’un? Did the doctor say anything about it?’
‘Like a conker, mate.’
The day I felt stronger again, Tracey suggested a walk across to the TV room. It was only fifty-two paces away. It took a while, but we got there and I tried watching a nature programme. I was slumped into one of the TV room’s toffee-brown leatherette sofas with so little support in it that I was folded up like a half-open jack-knife, so low down my knees obscured my view of the TV screen, like in a dragster or a hot rod. The drip-line in my arm was pulled a little too tight. The stand was too far away and I couldn’t reach it to move it. I couldn’t be bothered to move again.
There was a commotion outside the door and a family came in – mum, dad, daughter, son and grandad. They sloped in and all tetchily fell into the other leatherette sofa. Grandad sat near me on a chair, in slippers that looked like they had been made from bus-seat upholstery. Mum was wearing a pink sweatshirt with a sequinned pink panther on the front and a towelling shell-suit. Her face was tired and drawn. No make-up. The colour of porridge. She spoke in a kind of hissing shout.
‘Stop that!’
‘What?’ whined the little boy. He was stabbing his sister with the ring-pull off a can of 7-Up.
‘You know very well what.’
‘What?’ he whined again.
‘Tell him to stop, Mum.’ The little girl, older than the boy, was not really being hurt but saw an opportunity to get him into more trouble.
‘Once more and I’m telling your dad!’ hissed Mum.
It was not as though Dad was unaware of the situation. He was, after all, sitting right next to them all, but he was currently mute and staring vacantly at the TV, absent-mindedly tapping himself on the head with a rolled-up copy of the Mirror.
The little boy stopped and, with his ring-pull, started trying to slice strips into the arm of the leatherette sofa instead.
‘Can I get a Pepsi?’ the girl asked, without taking her eyes off the TV.
‘No, you can’t,’ said Mum.
‘Plea … se’
‘No. You’ve got a drink.’
‘Plea … se. It’s only downstairs.’
The little boy joined in. ‘I want a Pepsi too.’
Suddenly Dad snarled. He made me jump. ‘Shut it. All of you. Can’t you see there is a man here who wants a bit of peace and quiet.’
Christ, he means me! I kept my eyes on the TV. Tracey was looking straight ahead too. Everyone went quiet. I felt very English and just ignored the comment. My arm was tugged. I thought it was going to be Tracey telling me it was time we went, but it wasn’t Tracey and the sticky tape across my wrist holding the cannula in place started to stretch and pull.
‘Dad!’ Mum shouted.
Grandad had got up and was walking across the room. He was walking straight through my drip-line. He hadn’t noticed. He kept going. I kept thinking he must stop, but he was like an athlete breasting a sagging tape. The drip-stand was starting to roll towards me, and I was being pulled out of the sofa.
‘Dad!’
Tracey started to get to her feet.
‘Look out!’
Grandad looked up and stopped in his tracks. He looked down. Without a word, he sighed, grunted, stepped back, and decided to sit down again. I eased back into my seat.
‘Prat!’ said Dad under his breath.
No one said sorry. Tracey sat back. I stared at the TV. She stared at the TV. We should have left right then but it would have seemed pointed, and anyway if we were going to leave our moment had been five minutes before, just after they’d arrived. It could have seemed like we were just going anyway. We’d blown it. I caught Tracey’s eye in my peripheral vision. Neither of us stirred. We were pinned in our seats by the Englishness of the moment, and plumped for trying to seem undisturbed and natural. I tried to feel the cannula in my arm without drawing attention to it.
‘Can we turn over?’ The little girl was getting restless.
‘No we can’t.’ Mum again.
‘Please.’
‘No.’
‘This is boring.’
‘The man wants to watch it. He was here first.’
Me again. Please don’t drag me into this.
‘It’s boring. I want a Pepsi. Can I get a Pepsi now? I’ll use my own money.’
Dad exploded. ‘Right that’s it. All of you. Out. Come on – out.’ He rapped his son on the head with his newspaper. The boy started to cry loudly. Really loudly.
I knew it. I knew it. We should have quit while we were ahead.
‘Arrrghh! Mum! Mum! He hit me. He hit me.’
Mum was bristling now. She turned on her husband. ‘You brute. What would Nan say if she could hear us all squabbling in the hospital where she’s at death’s door?’
‘She probably could hear you with all the noise you’re making. Come on. We’re going.’ He levered himself out of the sofa.
‘I’m not going with you in a mood.’ She folded her arms and sat back. Both kids were crying now.
‘Look,’ said Dad. ‘There’s a bloke here trying to watch …’ He gave up. ‘Just come on. Up. Out. All of you.’ He gestured to them all.
They all got up. He ushered them towards the door like a farmer shooing sulky geese, while we stared at the TV like nothing was happening.
My fever responded well to the antifungal therapy. The barium from the second meal started to come through. The commode was full of it. It looked like Key Lime Pie. Within another forty-eight hours my temperature had stabilized one degree above normal. I was fed vitamin syrup, which made me puke, and iron tablets, which didn’t. I was anaemic and undernourished, but the Prof was worried I had spent too long in the hospital and seemed in danger of becoming soft-boiled, hospital-ridden, dependent. I know he had been hoping to discharge me a lot earlier had things not turned out so unluckily. He thought I should try some time at home, and so on the Friday of the August bank holiday, with my weight at only nine stone four and barely on my feet four days after a massive blood infection, he said causally that if there was no deterioration in my condition by the following morning and my temperature stayed down I could go home for the weekend. He left. I just stared at the ceiling.
That night new pains began in my chest and lower back. I couldn’t twist or sit up. Paul, the houseman, was on duty. He was on a ludicrous shift, expected to be on call in any emergency for a mind-numbing forty-eight hours. He had just gone to snatch an hour’s sleep. I didn’t really want to disturb him. He worked hard. I liked him. The pains got worse across the base of my back and over the front of my ribcage. I lay still for another hour, until I couldn’t breathe without discomfort, and then said I ought to see someone. Paul arrived ten minutes later. He said it could well be muscle strain from my trial walk on the stairs earlier in the day, but he wanted me to go down to X-ray straightaway to check for shadows. It was 2 a.m. on the eve of my possible discharge. I didn’t want to think about home any more. I was collected by a porter.
The corridors were quiet and the lift was cold. I was taken to X-ray down in Accident & Emergency. The Page Street department was closed for the night. Down in the dim back corridors on the ground floor the last thirty years seemed to have passed unnoticed. No major redecoration could have taken place for years. The fittings were utilitarian and coldly functional. Bare bulbs in steel-grey pendant tin-hat shades hung from high, shadowy ceilings. Colours were muted and dull. Signs were illuminated by low-wattage lights. Pale milky-white letters. Black pipes. It made me think of wartime, pallid skin and death. We passed a couple of the night admissions. Blood-sprayed Air Jordans showed from under the curtain of a silent cubicle. An Italian was trying to get into the service lift. He was lost, looking for his daughter. The porter had to stop him and point in the other direction.
In the X-ray room I could barely move. I stood up from the wheelchair and gripped on to the chest X-ray periscope, a sickly koala on a tree, and then I was eased down on the hard trolley for abdominal films.
‘Breathe in and hold it there.’
I took a shallow breath. The machine clicked hard and buzzed.
‘And breathe normally.’
The X-rays showed up nothing. Back upstairs I slept a little after a shot of Voltarol.
In the morning I felt in less pain. The Prof – amazingly – said I could still go home. I lay in the bed for a moment after he had gone, just looking round the ward, unsure of what to do next. My drips were gone. I could have called Tracey there and then, but I didn’t. Instead I picked up my washbag and shuffled to the bathroom. I took a shallow bath and combed my hair. I spoke to myself out loud. I brushed my teeth. I dusted myself with talcum powder. I turned around. I was aware of every choice I made. Everything was self-conscious, super-real. All mobility seemed to come from a multiple-choice test going on in my head. Do I open the door? Do I stand here for another minute or two? Do I go home now? Is this how prisoners feel when they finally get to go home? I slid the door back and walked out to the phone to call Tracey.
‘How soon can you come down?’
‘Why? What’s wrong?’ She was immediately alarmed.
‘Nothing’s wrong. Can you come and get me? They say I can come home for the weekend.’
‘What? Are you sure?’ She thought I was woozy with drugs again.
‘Yes. I saw the Prof. Honestly. How long can you be?’
‘I don’t know. An hour. Look, are you sure? I’m only just up. I’m just having some toast.’
‘Oh. OK. But come soon. See you soon.’
‘OK. Bye. Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Bye. Oh, can you bring me a belt for my trousers.’
And I put down the phone, the blue phone on wheels in the fourth-floor corridor, and looked down the corridor at the people in it, the strung-out teenager nurses, the languid service staff, the young, confident, overtired doctors and the creeping patients. I thought of moving and getting up, but instead I sat there for ten minutes just looking at the back of my hands.
I was worried about my main scar. It hadn’t healed neatly. When the last set of staple clips had been removed a couple of days earlier it was clear that the two sides of my belly hadn’t joined properly and a hole the size of a penny piece was opening under the strain. Seen from above, it looked like a Jammy Dodger. It was infected and had started to ooze a bit. One of the Prof’s team had popped down to look at it and had pinched and poked it in a very casual manner. It was being dressed twice a day with salt-soaked non-stick seaweed dressing. I could never understand how it would join up again, but nurses told me that skin and flesh in the belly repair themselves differently from a cut finger, building up tissue and filling in the gap. I was worried about looking after it myself.
Tracey arrived. The clothes I had turned up in nine weeks earlier were brought up from the Patients’ Property. Everything seemed huge. I felt like a tortoise in its shell – thin, wizened, reptilian, my neck thin, my head small. I felt as though I could start walking and be able to take half a step forward before my clothes even started to move. I thought of David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. I belted my trousers loosely at the waist, afraid of my gauze dressing and my funny belly.
Paul, the houseman, came up from pharmacy with a bag of drugs to take home and told me to report back after the bank holiday. I felt like a soldier going home on compassionate leave. I said a few goodbyes, but I knew I would be back. Tracey took my elbow, and we just walked ever so slowly downstairs and out on to the street.