by Ben Watt
Five
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 th
e 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 ki
ssed 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.
