Controlled movements still pose a problem. On Bastille Day I wake myself up by throwing a glass of water in my own face. With the black box to accommodate, every excursion needs care and precision, so I start to make a heap of my possessions on my bed on the window side, and here I hoard my books, an extra towel and a clean sheet, and tussle with anyone who offers to tidy them up. There are three things I need, apart from pain control. One is a reading light, pointing at me and not across the room; I read all the time, whether I’m in or out of my wits. The second is a fan, pointing at me also. The third is a closed door, to shut out the noise of groaning and retching, and also the cheerful rattle of cutlery and the smell of other people’s dinners. It’s a happy half-hour, when I can secure all these three things together. It doesn’t happen often and when it does I feel blessed. Hospital dramas are small, desperate, self-centred: ‘I had my pill, then I fell over.’ ‘They said they would . . . but instead they . . .’ ‘The tea came three hours late and was coffee.’ I have no problem with asking for something six times, because eventually I will get it. And what is time, to me, in here? The trick is to keep smiling and not refer back to the other failures. Each moment one is made new.
I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and three Ivy Compton Burnett novels, though later I can’t remember which ones. I read a new biography of Catherine of Aragon in proof. I read On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf. What schoolgirl piffle, I think. It’s like one of those compositions by young ladies mocked in Tom Sawyer. I can’t understand what she means when she complains about the ‘poverty of the language’ we have to describe illness. For the sufferer, she says, there is ‘nothing ready made.’ Then what of the whole vocabulary of singing aches, of spasms, of strictures and cramps; the gouging pain, the drilling pain, the pricking and pinching, the throbbing, burning, stinging, smarting, flaying? All good words. All old words. No one’s pain is so special that the devil’s dictionary of anguish has not anticipated it. There is even a scale you can use to refine it: ‘Tell me,’ says the doctor, ‘on a scale of 1 to 10, how much this hurts’: one being a love bite, I suppose, and ten the fiery pit of hell. Pain may pass beyond language, but it doesn’t start beyond it. The torture chamber is where people ‘speak’. No doubt language fails in that shuttered room called melancholia, where the floor is plush and the windowless walls are draped in black velvet: where any sound you make carries only feebly to the outside world, and can be taken for some accidental, natural sound, a creak or a sigh from door frame or drawer. But then, mental suffering is so genteel; at least, until the dribbling sets in. Virginia only has decorous illnesses. She has faints and palpitations, fevers and headaches, though I am mindful that at one stage they tried to fix her by pulling out her teeth. But she is seemly; she does not seep, or require a dressings trolley, she does not wake at dawn to find herself smeared with contact jelly from last night’s ECG. Virginia never oozes. Her secretions are ladylike: tears, not bile. She may as well not have bowels, for all the evidence of them in her book.
Towards mid-month, when the date I should have gone home has long passed, I see that it was probably an error to have read the Catherine of Aragon biography, because the twists and turns of reformation theology are added to my already ecclesiastical concerns. I write: ‘I feel as if someone has given me a set of Endurances, the opposite of Indulgences.’ The nurses are worried that I never eat. They give me a warm croissant and it takes me five minutes to work my way through one bite. If I can’t think of anything else I ask for a fruit salad, but I begin to feel I am being bullied by kiwi fruit, its jealous green eye falling on me as I poke it about with a spoon. One night I say, aghast, ‘I won’t die, will I?’ But the next moment I am writing and laying plans and asking for an omelette. It is a yellow sprawl, like a window cleaner’s chammy slapped on a plate; that is what an omelette looks like, but I have forgotten. I wonder if it’s a joke they’re playing. I list in my head all the window cleaners I have ever known, beginning with my great-uncle Martin O’Shea, who died before I can remember him, but I think I knew him all the same. After prolonged study of my fork I apply a tine to the edge of the yellow object. Fifteen minutes pass and I’m not much further. If beaten eggs prove too much of a challenge, they say, I can have jelly instead. I want to say tartly that, unlike Virginia Woolf, I still have my own teeth.
I wonder, though, if there is a little saint you can apply to, if you’re a person with holes in them? I can hardly expect the Trinity to care about my perforations, and I see the value of intercession by some lesser breed. Saint Sebastian, shot full of arrows? It seems like overkill. There is a term for what is happening to St Teresa in Bernini’s sculpture; it is ‘transverberation’. But she was pierced suddenly by the fiery lance of God’s love, whereas I was pierced by prearrangement, in a hospital just off the M25. After that initial cut, nothing went on time or to plan, and it was no one’s fault. Most of July was gone before I was told I could leave the hospital, and after its clean, clear spaces, my own house seemed dimity, fringed, a patchwork of colour, full of overcrowded and complex angles. There was too much of everything and it smelled of the past – it was as if, without me to order it around, it had reverted to the character suitable for a building put up in the 1860s. I still had the black box tied to me, and for that first weekend of freedom, though the hallies were back in their holes, I needed to study, moment by moment, how to get up and lie down, how to sleep always on my back. Two days later I was back in hospital, driven along a moonlit road, 11 o’clock, a perfect summer night that I would never have seen if I had been less precarious. When we arrived at the little building the main door was locked and so, clutching a vomit bowl made in the shape of a cardboard hat, I sat on a bench, breathing in icy dew. The hospital campus has one beautiful building, a curve of shining white. As you sight it you say, ‘What is that lovely thing?’ It is the mortuary.
But re-entering the life I had so recently left, if not the very room then one just like it, my dreams were of birth, not death. Perhaps it was because of the weight of dressings on my abdomen that I dreamed I was carrying a child. It was born offstage as it were: at a fortnight old it talked like a philosopher. Only it would not acknowledge me as its mother. But then it offered to address me as ‘Queen Mary,’ and everybody seemed happy with that solution. The line between hallucinations, dreams and waking nightmares had blurred, and for a time I wondered if it would ever stand firm again. Once again my concentration was on details: pens, notebook, reading glasses, watch, breathe in, breathe out, pick up that fork and show that egg who’s boss. I was discharged, returned once more, and when I went home finally, still with the wound and the vacuum machine, day to day life was complicated and onerous. I had pictured a mild and productive convalescence. Instead I found the illness had used up all my resources. I imagined every day would be better, but then things would go wrong in totally unexpected ways. For a good part of the time I felt so cowed and humiliated that I would have liked to sit in a corner with a sheet over my head, but this was not practical. I kept trying to rearrange my life so that illness was only a feature of it, and not the whole, but illness insists on its pre-eminence. Now the black box has gone, and it takes ten minutes to dress my healing wound, but I am woken in the night by the itching and burning of the process of repair. Sometimes I incorporate the sensations into nightmares and imagine, for instance, that the bed is on fire. One night in my dreams I meet the devil. He is 32, 34, that sort of age, presentable, with curly hair, and he wears a lambswool V-neck with a T-shirt underneath. We exchange heated words, and he raises a swarm of biting flies; I wake, clawing at my skin.
Just before my discharge I scribbled, ‘When I go home I could write up my hospital diary. Or, you know, I could not. I could defiantly leave it unprocessed, and that way the marks of experience might fade.’ The truth is that, needing more surgery, I am not sure what kind of story I am in. Perhaps a shaggy dog story, or a mangled joke with the punch line delivered first. The poet J
o Shapcott used a nice phrase recently about confessional writing; ‘chasing your own ambulance’, she called it. I am guilty of that. In my defence I can say that I am fascinated by the line between writing and physical survival. In the days after the procedure I was sometimes so exhausted by movement that I would wait patiently for someone to come in and give me a paper cup of pills that was almost, not quite, out of my reach. But somehow, I would always contrive to get my pen in my hand, however far it had rolled; my mood was even, despite uprushes of shame, and the only thing that would really have upset me was running out of paper. The black ink, looping across the page, flowing easily and more like water than like blood, reassured me that I was alive and could act in the world. When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf? For a time, into September, my religious preoccupations continued, as if the operation had been on my brain and not my guts, as if the so-called ‘God spot’ had been stirred up by a scalpel. Even now I am content that the unconscious should continue to empty itself into waking life, like some constantly flushing lavatory. ‘Are we somebodies?’ the voice on my right asks. ‘Yes, we are somebodies,’ comes the reply. ‘The church counts us all. But very few of us are saved.’
About the Author
HILARY MANTEL is one of our most important living writers. She is the author of eleven books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Giving Up the Ghost, Beyond Black, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize, and Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain in the London Review of Books, November 2010
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 2010
All rights reserved.
Epub Edition 2010 ISBN: 9780007427758
The moral right of the author is asserted
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