Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  We pulled up in front of a run-down brownstone. I threw Emmett’s arm over my shoulder and hauled him through the door of the hospital, into the neon-lit foyer which opened out from the reception desk. The whole place had an air of incipient dilapidation about it, all panelled glass and new-laid tile but already clouded over with a recent film of grease and dust which was there to stay. The reception area itself was a study in controlled bedlam, everything teetered on the edge of shambles; nurses sprinted down signposted corridors and trolleys whizzed by with their broken human cargo. Inside the main door two cops prowled, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee from styrofoam cups. It looked anything but a place of healing.

  I wrestled Emmett over to the admissions desk and confronted this doll-like receptionist. All hair and glossed lips, she stared at me as if a patient was the last thing in the world she expected to be faced with – I half expected her to pop gum in my face at any moment. I then proceeded to spend the worst five minutes of my life trying to make the bitch see the emergency of our situation. She couldn’t seem to get it into her skull that we were only in her godforsaken country a matter of hours and no, we weren’t paying into a health insurance scheme. I had begun to scream and reach into the proscribed areas of my vocabulary when out of the corner of my eye I saw the cops put down their cups and make their way across the floor towards me. Emmett chose that very moment to draw all the attention to himself. With a low moan he slid through my arms and collapsed heavily to the floor like the stricken victim he most surely was. His arm flew outward in a stylized gesture of farewell and the blood cupped in the palm of his hand arched out over the floor, splashing the admissions book on the receptionist’s desk.

  There’s nothing like the sight of blood for drawing attention. A dissonant chorus of shrieks went up from the other patients and all of a sudden Emmett was submerged beneath a huddle of white coats who were ripping away his shirt and calling for plasma and trolleys. Emmett was lifted onto a trolley and whisked away beneath a neon sign marked Emergency. I trotted down the hall in his wake and found myself spluttering out answers to a series of questions fired at me by the doctors – blood type, reaction to anaesthesia and so on. I blurted out what I knew, which was damn all, and then they disappeared into what I presumed was the operating theatre.

  Suddenly I was all alone in the hallway with not a clue what to do with myself. In my confusion I pulled out a pack of fags and made to light one. Then I remembered where I was so I put it back in the pack and walked back to the entrance and sat on the steps outside and lit up.

  It was mid-afternoon by then and the city cowered beneath the accumulated heat of an unseasonably hot day. The sun blazed past its zenith having drained the morning vigour and I sensed a silent, pent-up scream in the concrete and metal all around. It thrilled and vibrated everywhere, a terrific ruinous tension. I felt like opening my mouth also and howling from the depths of my being: I settled instead for burying my head in my hands and grinding my teeth till my jaws hurt.

  I stayed there and finished my cigarette, then went back inside to the operating theatre. I sat down on a leatherette bench beside an ancient Negro with a snow-white beard and a pork-pie hat. His eyes were sunk in some silent dream of ruin and when he eventually rose up out of it he regarded me with a strange complicity. For the first time since the whole shambles had begun I seriously wanted to cry; I felt the tears scorching behind my eyes and begin to flow down my face. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed quietly. After about an hour the doors of the theatre swung wide and Emmett was wheeled away down the corridor, attached to drips and so on. A small, balding surgeon stood over me, peeling away a surgical mask like a second skin and mopping his brow with his sleeve.

  ‘Have you made a statement to the cops?’

  ‘Is he going to be OK?’

  The surgeon regarded me for a long moment. ‘He’s going to wake up in considerable pain and there is no predicting how he will react when he wakes up to the memory. He will need to be handled with kid gloves for a while. Physically speaking the prognosis is good. Provided no infection has set in yet he could make a complete recovery. He’s a young man, his body should be able to cope. With a little adjustment to his diet he should be OK.’

  ‘How serious an adjustment?’

  ‘Not too serious. He will have to cut down on his intake of alcohol and certain other foodstuffs.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘I’m afraid for the rest of his life. He won’t have the capacity to process all the waste that a normal person has.’

  ‘What do you mean? He was only cut, a knife in the belly.’

  The bald surgeon just shook his head blankly.

  ‘It’s not that simple. He’s been cut all right, cut seriously. Someone has lifted one of his kidneys.’

  I spent most of the following week sitting at Emmett’s bedside, watching and listening to the monitors and respirators as they hummed and ticked out his suffering. His tranquil body lent an almost sacral atmosphere to the room and in deference to his efforts I quickly became attuned to the rhythms of those machines. My breathing began to rise and fall in time with the respirator and my own blood began to pulse in sympathy with the peaks and troughs of the cardiograph. I willed Emmett to draw strength from this silent empathy.

  Emmett hardly ever woke during those post-operative days. He surfaced infrequently for brief, disquieting moments, mumbled a few garbled words like a stoned prophet and each time was quickly submerged by one of the fleeting nurses who administered sedatives as if they were trying to thwart some blasphemy. I stayed by his bed and listened to him breathe.

  On the second day I gave a ten-page statement to one of the cops who seemed to have a regular beat in the hospital. I answered a hoard of lunatic questions about our mission in New York, our circumstances, why we hadn’t visas and so on. On the fifth day I was locked out of Emmett’s room and he was kept awake just long enough to give a statement of his own. That evening I was confronted by the same cop who bluntly presented me with two choices: we could leave the country of our own volition in a few days after Emmett was discharged or we could wait, in which case we would be served with expulsion orders, thus making it virtually impossible for us to ever enter the country again. Either way it was no choice. I was coming quickly to realize that these people had no souls.

  ‘Will there be an investigation?’

  ‘Yes, we have your statements but I wouldn’t hold much hope for it. Unless what happened to your friend can be tied to a wider circle of similar incidents then I’m afraid it doesn’t have much priority, not considering your status. It might be the case that it is part of such a circle but either way your presence here isn’t needed. We have your statements, that’s all you can do. Take my advice and get your friend out of here and home to where he can get some proper medical attention.’

  ‘What did he say about the whole thing?’

  ‘Not much, he can’t remember anything. He got into the car with the lady and that’s about it, it’s all a blank from there on. He can’t even remember how he made the call to you. You know as much as he does.’

  Emmett was discharged the following Monday. Our bitter sojourn in the land of hope and opportunity had lasted barely nine days. The very basic terms of our travel insurance didn’t stretch to the type of extended care he needed and anyway, right from the moment it became known we were illegals, he was only in the hospital on sufferance. It was made clear to us that his bed was needed for other, more needful cases.

  We got a taxi to the airport and I led Emmett through the departure lounge, aware that I was getting a lot of quizzical looks from the other boarders who kept staring at the big, glazed child I was hauling by the hand. He sat beside me in the window seat, morphined out of his skull and staring wall-eyed through the tiny window as we flew between cloud levels. He had his hand clasped over his midriff and I turned out the palm every so often to check he wasn’t bleeding. We didn’t speak a word during that whole journey, there was not
hing to say. From time to time the trolley dollies checked to see that he was OK and I answered in his stead; Emmett was miles away, floating serenely in a warm sea of anaesthesia.

  Both sets of parents were in Shannon to meet us. I towed Emmett by the hand into the arrivals lounge and delivered him silently over to his parents and the medics who were there to take him away. I assured them I was OK and then handed over the medical charts and stood back out of the bubble of hysteria which now surrounded him. They lifted him onto the trolley and both sets of parents followed silently in its wake as it made to the exit. I watched as they moved away, moving silently like a private cortege, and I didn’t know it at the time but I was seeing Emmett Ward, my best friend, my right-hand man, my brother in arms, for the very last time.

  I kept in touch with Emmett for a while after that. I called on him each time I went home. After a period of convalescence he lived with his mom and dad and underwent counselling for some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder, another fucking American ailment. Odd times he was in good form and he’d talk away and we’d go for a pint together but these were only odd times. Most times he was so full of grief and depression he would just take to his room and wouldn’t be coaxed out. Sometimes he wouldn’t even see me. I used to stand outside his room and listen to him making this low, whimpering sound like a whipped animal. It’s the most awful sound in creation, the sound of a fractured heart.

  I tried to persuade Emmett to return to college with me. The following spring I managed to bluff my way through an interview and onto a post-grad diploma and I had it in mind that he would come back with me and I’d look after him, take him under my wing, a kind of role reversal. But Emmett wanted nothing to do with the idea. ‘That’s all over,’ he said quietly as if saying goodbye to a part of himself forever. ‘I want to stay at home for a while and get myself together.’ I didn’t push it. To tell the truth, for all my good intentions I wasn’t entirely confident of being able to do anything for him. You see, something had died in Emmett, a light had gone out in his eyes and his mind. Sometimes when I went to see him I’d look into his face and I’d see right through to the back of his skull. There’s nothing in there any more, nothing but blank space.

  Now he spends most of his time tending a small garden that runs from the back of his house, a beautiful, geometrical thing with rows of veg and herbs; so many herbs that I cannot name half of them. Right now it’s the joy of his life and he spends every minute of his day there, weeding and tending it. But I hate that garden, I hate it with a passion. When I saw him working in it for the first time I knew that his contentment and happiness were genuine and yet it saddened me to the core. I wanted to walk through it and start kicking and smashing the whole thing, pulling up roots and trampling stalks. Something’s been ripped out of Emmett and this garden, with all its lush colour and beauty, has become the piss-poor substitute for the life he should have had.

  A couple of months ago I came round the gable of his house and I stood and watched him working there. He was pulling weeds and fiddling with a hoe between the ridges. What got me, though, was the way he moved, a kind of soft lumbering that threatened at every moment to topple over into disaster. But he never damaged a stalk or a plant, he just kept moving one foot in front of the other like a somnolent giant. As far as I knew he wasn’t on any medication at the time but you wouldn’t have thought that if you’d seen him. I stood there in the shadow of the trees and I thought of all the misery and shit and spoiled dreams that make up the world. And then I turned and walked away. The pain in my chest had got so bad I was going to cry out and I don’t think Emmett would have understood.

  I don’t see Emmett any more. I avoid going round to his house. I sometimes meet his old man in the street or the pub and he smiles and shakes my hand, then asks me when am I going to call over. He can barely keep the pleading note out of his voice. I tell him that I’ll call over soon but I never do and I never will. There’s nothing I can do any more and besides, Emmett frightens me now. My parents get on to me about it as well but I just avoid talking about the subject. All I know now is that for the first time in my life I’ve turned my energies to my studies and things are going well. I’m getting the grades and I’m keeping my head down, I’m beginning to see the big picture. I hope Emmett Ward understands.

  Speedie Ryan didn’t give a fuck. No money or job, no woman or qualifications and no prospect of acquiring any in the near future. But Speedie wasn’t worried, Speedie was laid back, so laid back in fact that if he was any more laid back he’d be a rug.

  Speedie had his mother’s heart broke and his father’s also. Sitting round the house all day watching vids and chain smoking, he was driving them to despair.

  ‘Speedie, wouldn’t you try and get a job?’ his mother would plead. ‘At least put in an application for one, college or something. You’re twenty-eight years old, ten years on the dole. That’s a crying shame for a young man like you. One day you’re going to wake up and the best years of your life will be gone and you won’t have one thing to show for it.’

  Speedie would hold up a lordly hand.

  ‘No rush, Mom,’ he’d say. ‘All in good time. I’m thinking.’

  ‘Thinking! What are you thinking about? All I see you do from one day to the next is sit there watching telly.’

  ‘I’m thinking about life,’ he’d say. ‘Thinking and taking preliminary notes. Making sure I get it right when I make a start. You wouldn’t want me to start out on the wrong foot and spend the rest of my life out of step with myself, now would you?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ she’d say resignedly. ‘Well then, don’t worry, all in good time, all in good time. Mom … are you making tea?’

  But one day everything changed for Speedie. He was coming by the dole office after scratching when he passed a young woman going the opposite way. She was one of those slight, New Age waifs, hung with pendants and anchored to the ground with Doc Martens, topped off with lank, blonde hair that made her face look smaller than it really was. And Speedie knew straight away that this was the woman for him. Speedie knew that he was going to spend the rest of his life with her and that she was going to have his kids and they were going to live happily ever after. A whole future opened up for Speedie in that instant and it was as clear to him as newsreel running in his own head.

  So Speedie got his act together. He went out and got a job in a kitchen. A job as a gofer, scrubbing pots and floors, making sandwiches and emptying bins. It wasn’t much of a job but it was the first he’d ever had and it pleased his old pair. It was the first step in his new life. On the evening he got his first pay he put on a clean pair of jeans and T-shirt and went in search of the waif. And Speedie had researched his quarry’s habits so he knew where to find her. She was in a pub sitting alone, reading, a near-empty glass before her. Speedie bought two pints, sat opposite her and got straight to the point.

  ‘Hello, my name is Speedie Ryan and I’m here to propose to you. I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you. What do you say?’

  The waif regarded him blankly.

  ‘Thanks for the pint,’ she said curtly. ‘Now fuck off and leave me alone, I’m expecting someone.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Speedie said. ‘I’m in love with you and if you don’t accept me then my life will be worthless. I will wander the earth a broken man with a cavity in my chest where my heart should be. I know also that you will love me if you give me a chance.’

  ‘Jesus, just get out of my face and leave me in peace. Who the hell are you anyway to come here with this shit?’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to tell you a lie. I’m not going to say that I’m the only son of some wealthy business magnate with interests in copper and timber in Latin America and I’m not going to say that I’m some stud who’s hung like a donkey on steroids. I’m Speedie Ryan and I work as a skivvy. It’s a job with no prestige or prospect of advancement. Also, my sexual experience is negligible. I do know, however, that given time
I can make you happy.’

  ‘Oh please!’ she cried with disgust.

  ‘I’m going to pursue you to the ends of the earth,’ he said, ‘and one day you are going to be mine.’

  ‘You’re an arrogant bastard,’ she retorted.

  ‘No, not arrogant. I just know what I know and I know that one day you are going to be mine. I’m going to go now,’ he finished, ‘I’ve said all I’ve got to say for the moment and I can understand that it might be a bit much to take on board straight away. Just think on what I’ve said.’ He got up to leave.

  ‘You’re not even going to ask me my name?’

  ‘I know your name. It’s Olwyn Crayn and you’re twenty-one. You’re from west Mayo and you study English and French. If you keep your head down you’re on course for first-class honours in your finals.’

  ‘You bastard,’ she hissed. ‘How the hell did you know that?’

  ‘Like I said, I know what I know and I know everything about you.’

  And Speedie left her to finish her pint alone.

  Speedie worked hard in the following weeks. He worked hard at his job, about fifty hours a week, and his parents were bemused at the change that came over him. His habits changed, he was barely around the house any more and when he was he spent most of the time in his room. But what worried his parents most was the distracted, driven look which had entered his eyes. They could hardly get a word out of him any more.