by David Wood
Personal feelings aside, Carroll was more than adept at his trade. I was never less than safe in his hands, and I don't know how many other patients could profess the same blind confidence in their physician. Nevertheless, we argued almost solidly for the next week. Every time he made an appearance we fell back into dispute, Carroll accusing me of over exertion and a fanciful imagination, me reversing the stroke and accusing the doctor of narrow-mindedness, pig-headed obstinacy and an imagination that was unshakeably banal. The riposte was invariably mine. The man had no soul.
We each became quite adept at feinting and parrying the other's verbal assaults, and ended up firm friends after I gave up trying to convince him of the old man's part in my right lung's second collapse. Carroll's ultimate practicality left no room for belief in the unreasonable. The empirical he had an abundance of time for, the hypothetical he enjoyed, the fanciful he dismayed at. My visitor was my own HoodooMan. If he chose to eat his lunch using my chest for a plate, that was my problem. My body's way of telling me to take better care of it in the future, no doubt. When I stopped pushing for his acceptance it felt as if the disinfected wards around us heaved a collective sigh of relief. I think Carroll viewed it as me taking the first shaky step on the path toward putting the accident behind me.
Aimee came by to visit every day, bringing news of mutual friends and the goings on of the outside world. I hadn't realised just how isolating a hospital could be until then. I lay propped up in bed, listening to her describe the whys and wherefores of the carnival that, until Saturday, had been ninety-five percent of my adult life, and felt utterly superfluous. It stemmed from drear thoughts already well entrenched in my head. Who would miss me, bar the occasional taproom drinker who enjoyed listening to the tinkerings of a not-so-wonderful pianist? Like the gigolo in the Dave Lee Roth song, I was left to lie there thinking: life goes on without me.
Seven days seemed like they were destined to never end. I practised walking with the crutches Carroll provided, spent time prowling the wards, one grey cement rectangle to the next. There was nothing to see, nothing to stimulate the imagination. I saw dropouts with narcotic stares waiting groggily for detoxification. I saw children and pensioners with breakages and disfigurements, braces and crutches, wheelchairs and gurneys. I saw hope in the eyes of patients awaiting the results of tests. I saw despair in the same eyes when the test results came through. I saw tears wept. Heard prayers spoken. Soft words. In the end, I couldn't wait to escape.
That was exactly how it felt.
I was being released to rejoin my life. I had had a scare and now I was getting a second chance to get my act together. A reprieve. Another bite at the apple or whatever other cliché I wanted to adopt. The perfect geometry of the situation wasn't visible to me, I saw it only in terms of being free to do whatever I wanted this time around. I was quite happy to seduce myself with mental images of how things were going to be second time of asking. I would take the Channel 4 job when they offered it it wasn't a matter of if anymore. I would start playing with the club bands at Ronnie Scott's and Bass Clef and take that tour of the old night-club sites, the Bag O' Nails, Jig's Club, and Café de Paris. Soak in the history. Maybe I would even bully Tachyon Web into live shows at impressive sounding venues, with Declan Shea guesting on the keyboard, playing in front of an audience of thousands. My name would mean something to the grungy kids that worshipped the Gods of Heavy Metal and that was kind of scary. I would be a name on everyone's lips. No more sitting back and waiting for the right calls.
I walked out of the Royal Victoria Infirmary ready to grab the world by the ears and shake it until the mouth dropped open and the good times rolled out.
My resolve lasted less than quarter of an hour.
Two
Walking, even with the support of the crutches, was exhausting.
I was forced to stop twice before the hospital gates. Impatient people bustled and steered around me not bothering to hide their wariness and even annoyance. I could see them looking, wondering what it was that had reduced me to paraplegia without leaving any external scars for them to read. I couldn't imagine having to carry their morbid curiosity every day for the rest of life. Their eyes lingered long enough to make me feel dirty.
I forced myself to walk on and found myself making excuses for everyone who thought of themselves as normal.
Some things stay the same, no matter how much they hunger for change. Money can be poured into the infertile soil only to wither and die as projects fail, while twenty feet down the road, where the grass is forever greener, the selfsame projects could have been blossoming. Parts of Newcastle are like that. The walk down Leazes Hill to the Haymarket is like that. The Trent House on the corner, with its sawdust, spit and polish atmosphere cynically designed at snaring student grants, is like that. The red brick buildings that stand four and five storeys tall are like that. The Georgian terraces are like that. The wooden portakabins are like that.
I crossed the road at the converted zebra, expecting horns to blare when the waiting drivers realised my legs weren't capable of covering the black and white stripes asquickly as the green man dictated. I poled my way to the centre, looking apologetically at the blind windscreens. Again, I had to pause to gather my second wind. I felt momentarily guilty. I knew I should have waited for Aimee, but I just didn't feel like being shepherded or cloistered. Walking on my own was something I had to do. My own stubbornness saw me refusing the offer of aid when it came my way. The drivers took my halting progress well. The bitter man inside me said it was because they saw a cripple and were thinking: But for the grace of God, there go I.
Somewhere inside all of them was a memory of a moment when a slightly different twist of fate could have propelled them into an involuntary role reversal, be it a knock picked up in a kick-about, a trip on the staircase at home, walking out in front of a car, or over-compensating for a skid. The variations were as endless as the outcomes and every one of them was feeling guilty for thanking their lucky stars. I didn't begrudge them, that was almost exactly what I was feeling myself.
The streets are a hostile place for someone on crutches. Too many people don't think –too set on their trajectory, all elbows and pushes as they arrow for gaps that aren't there. Crutches are trial enough without having to ride against the current of shoppers or go down.
The open air bus station and its wreath of thick exhaust fumes was a welcome sight, even if it meant another road to cross. I sat outside the Oxfam shop on the corner, watching the cars and the starlings. A black cab glided into the rank with its buckled railings.
An old woman wearing too many coats for the tee-shirt weather clutched carrier bags and pushed a wire-framed shopping trolley towards the lights. Her entire world was in that trolley. Clothes, papers, jewellery, boxes and bottles. A scavenger's treasure trove of useless oddments. She stopped before the repetitive beeps of the crossing said it was all right for her to wade out between the stationary cars.
I levered myself to my feet and started to shuffle-walk to stand beside her at the lights, looking past the iron staircase into Eldon Square and the reflections of glass walls to the circling birds above the hidden Grey's Monument.
When she saw me, she screamed. This poor old woman literally dropped the bags she clutched so desperately, opened her cracked lips to say something, couldn't and started shrieking. It was a terrible sound. I stepped forward, forgetting the restrictions of my crutches. One went clattering to the floor. Panicking, she tried to fend me off, throwing her hands up defensively and slapping at the empty air between us. I held up my hands to show her I meant no harm. Her bags spilled rubbish onto the street. People had stopped to look at us. I felt like turning and yelling at them to leave us both alone. I would have if I thought it might have helped.
I took another unaided step forward.The skin across my ribs pulled. She pushed her trolley straight at me. I had no chance to dodge, so I let it clatter into my legs, praying it wouldn't be enough to topple me. It wasn't. Th
e old woman was crying hysterically. Clawing at her own face. Her fingernails dug into the bags beneath her dull eyes. Soon, her tears mingled with blood on her cheeks and her fingernails clawed all the more fervently, scrabbling after her eyes.
I backed off, still in a stupor, bending to grab my fallen crutch. I fell sideways against the side of a car, needed its support to drag myself back to my feet. I couldn't move anywhere near as quickly as I wanted to. My horror effectively hypnotised me.
Her fevered fingers pulled at the skin, burrowing into the wretched flesh. Working by feel, they undermined the roots of her eyes. Splashes of blood gouted down her wrists and forearms. The skein of muscles and nerves beneath the skin parted in some insoluble puzzle of knots. Her face was blazing with the lustre of pitiful triumph.
'You won't. . . harm me. . . now,' she said, whether to me or to herself, I couldn't tell. Her voice was that of a mewling infant, albeit spoken from an elderly mouth. She was shaking her head wildly, her feet rooted to the spot. Above her head the green man started to flash but the warning was too late for her. Her fingers neatly snapped the worms of nerve and then pulled out her eyes.
Screaming, she turned blindly, drawn by the beeping overhead, and lurched into the traffic, eye sockets empty, blood streaming down her cheeks, hands fighting off whatever demons her blind senses were conjuring. She twisted back on her self, stumbling. She fell to her knees in the middle of the road. Lifted her head to look up. Those vacant sockets seemed to stare right through me. Her hand was on her face, her look now stricken, as she realised what she had done. No euphoria.
I clutched the traffic light for support. I wanted to be away from this place, badly.
Her mouth was a raw wound between the planes of blood. Her head no longer raised above the height of her body. Her voice clung to coherence with the greatest of difficulty, but I heard the remnants of the old woman there, clinging to life.
'You remember, don't you. . ? You remember. If you don't. . . you will. . . I knew you'd come. . . You get down on your knees. . . and you pray. . .'
She fumbled blindly ahead, clawing at the road, her eyeballs abandoned beside her.Her head twisted, hearing something I didn't.
The car didn't slow down.
Three
I heard people screaming.
There was nothing I could do: even my own sick fascination lost its hold when the play became one of revulsion. I poled away from the traffic lights. No one shouted or objected at my disappearance. I don't know how many of the onlookers even registered my presence. They had another act to occupy them; the bag lady's head thumping on the bonnet of the braking car. Her brittle bones breaking on the road. Next to that, what was I? One cripple standing at the roadside?
Head down, I hobbled through the dazed people, not stopping until I was past the car park, the art gallery, tobacconist, record store and the breeze-rocking sign for the Three Bulls Heads. Choking black fumes hung around the mouth of the renovated underground bus concourse, separated from my harbour by the width of the road; this strip of Percy Street one of the most unhealthy in the North East with its permanent pollution of buses. The banshee wail of the sirens wasn't long in coming. I didn't anticipate being called back to answer their questions.
And what could I tell them that twenty other people couldn't? My eyes didn't see anything different. I had no special insight. I was frightened; that is about all I can truthfully say. I was frightened.
There was a sign glued to the billboard above the concourse entrance; a television vicar perched on a Harley with his hands together, his ethic three-feet tall: 'Last Chance To Pray Before The Freeway.'
I didn't put my hands together. I was shaking, pale and jittery. That didn't surprise me in the least. My body felt as though it had been worked over by wooden staves and baseball bats. People were stopping to look at me, to ask if I was all right. I didn't appreciate their concern. What I wanted was anonymity. I fended them off with snarls. All I could think of was beer. Standing, lost on the street with the sirens dying behind me, vicar gazing down on me, I half-convinced myself that more than one form of anonymity was waiting at the bottom of a glass. I knew for sure it wasn't the anonymity I was looking for, but it was as good a place as any to start looking.
The drink, when it came, was left untouched. I listened to the conversations taking place on all sides. People naive enough to think their own words were important enough for others to want to hear. Gossip and rumours. Scandal and outright lies. The words were sucked into a vacuum of bonhomie that was worse than expectant silence. I listened to all of the conversations at once without making sense of any of them.
Something was happening to me, and it went deeper than coincidence. My head buzzed with sour thoughts. There had to be an escape to a saner world than this. A world where an old woman wasn't compelled to gouge her own eyes out because of something she thought she saw in a perfect stranger. A world where the hobo version of the Hoodoo Man wasn't waiting for me on every street corner.
All eight screens of the Video Juke Box were stuck in the same stage of the loop, beach buggies and drag races across the sand dunes, the glitzy muzak backing track enough to bully the afternoon drinkers into feeding the slots for music no one really wanted. More than one smoky fragrance was discernible. The musk of closely packed bodies. I got up to leave, offering my untouched beer to the nearest group of talkers.
I had nowhere to go but home, but there was nothing waiting for me there, and I really didn't want to be alone, so home was the last place I was going to go. I could have gone looking for Aimee. It didn't occur to me that she might have been anywhere other than work, and I thought of intruding on her there, the one place where I wouldn't be glossed over with pity, and I thought of how she would feel; and I stayed away.
Instead, I haunted the streets of the city during the long hours of the day, stopping frequently for respite from the strain the crutches placed on my arms, listening to the murmurs of the pedestrians. The effort and concentration walking required kept my mind off thoughts of escape, old women and dossers.
Four
I heard his voice first, bemoaning our lack of faith. Accusing us of betraying Jesus Christ, Our Lord. My walking had led me in a grand series of circles and through the most crowded byways, to Grey's Monument as always, the hub to my slow meanderings.
He was carrying his wooden crucifix, though it took all of his strength to bear the burden, both hands grasping the wooden spars to keep it from falling. He was vying for attention with the Animal Rights Anti-Vivisection table and the Socialist Worker touts. The pigeons and starlings were his audience, a cross between the bible and a misplaced loyalty to the Twentieth Century his gospel. The last of the shoppers ignored his preaching with the self same deaf ears he was decrying, intent only on dodging the Socialists so they could carry on with their orgy of spending. Children screamed and squabbled, rode skateboards and made as much of a nuisance of themselves as their own street credibility would allow. They smoked, ate burgers and drank from cans, swilling the lager down as fast as they could drink it for fear someone might spirit it away.
My God, I thought, watching the circus. The philosopher has a point. I stopped and eased myself down onto one of the benches outside the book shop to listen, resting my crutches on either side of my legs and crossing my arms. Sometimes these street corner philosophers were interesting enough to warrant the waste of ten minutes, and I had ten minutes that could have done with wasting.
His words came in excited bursts, part of his address lost amid the swirling noise of Newcastle preparing to close down for the night, but he caught my attention all right.
'Do you think you have contented your Lord?' he yelled, pointing. 'Do you? You, the cripple over there, do you think your God is happy with you?' The way he laboured over the word cripple made it sound like the basest insult he knew. I started to gather my crutches together as soon as it became evident the philosopher was looking for me to respond in kind. I wasn't getting into a slang
ing match over a God I didn't believe in. He laughed mockingly. 'Did He strike you down because you were a good citizen or because you were an exile from His example? Did He touch your soul and wrench out your heart as a reward for a good life?' His voice was spiralling as he propelled himself into his tirade heart and soul. 'No, of course He didn't. He looked upon your countenance and reviled what He saw. He looked upon the image He created, the reflection of Himself and He saw corruption. He saw sin.' I levered myself up to my feet. 'That's it, get up. Flee. Flee before God reclaims the little dignity He left you.'
'I don't have to take this,' I muttered, but he left me with no choice at all: either I crutched away down Grey Street to the riverside with him heckling at my back, or I faced him down.
People were slowing down to catch a glimpse of the carnival now, human nature as it is, their curiosity frightened it might miss something of the coming entertainments. No one wanted to walk on by before this one hand had played itself out. They weren't all well-dressed shoppers, either. I picked the rags of three tramps out from the congregation. The I saw a fourth. There were probably more working the outside of the gathering for coins.He saw me coming and laughed harshly, his eyes blazing with righteous indignation. I couldn't help but wonder what I had ever done to him.
But then the cadence of his laughter changed. He backed up a stumbling step, clamping his mouth shut. I saw why. Blood was spilling out between his clenched teeth. The cross fell from his hands. He wasn't laughing now. It was as if his closeted world of God and Evil had collapsed around him in one shuffling backstep. His eyes blurred with abject terror. He opened his mouth to scream and his tongue spilled out. The gash where he had bitten through it looked like the body of a crimson millipede. Spindly legs that convulsed in the ripples of sine waves. Panic took the philosopher. He backed up to the body of the Monument, thrusting his hands out to fend me off, and staggered. Then he fell.
