Fillets of Plaice

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘Both, probably,’ said Breeda, ‘and he thinks that Harvey is someone who invented sherry.’

  ‘And that angina is a double-barrelled name for a girl?’

  ‘Yes, and take penicillin,’ said Breeda.

  ‘You mean that emporium that specialises in writing materials?’

  ‘The very same. Well, one day . . .’

  But what Breeda was about to vouchsafe will never be known, for at that moment Pimmie re-entered the room.

  ‘Up yer get,’ she said to me. ‘Dr Grubbins says yer to go to the Waterloo Hospital and have yer nose cauterised.’

  ‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘Just as I feared. A red-hot poker to be shoved up my right nostril.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Pimmie, getting me my coat, ‘they’ll use a cauterising stick.’

  ‘A stick? A flaming brand? I was supposed to come here for peace and quiet?’

  ‘Yer can’t have peace and quiet until we stop yer nosebleed,’ said Pimmie practically. ‘Here, get this coat on. I’m coming wit yer. Doctor’s instructions.’

  ‘And the only worthwhile instructions he’s given since leaving medical school,’ I said warmly. ‘How are we to get there?’

  ‘Taxi,’ said Pimmie succinctly. ‘It’s waiting.’

  The driver, we soon discovered, was an Irishman. He was a tiny, carunculated man who looked like a walnut with legs.

  ‘Where will yer be going?’ he asked.

  ‘Waterloo Hospital,’ said Pimmie clearly.

  ‘Waterloo . . ., Waterloo . . .’ mused the driver. ‘And where would that be?’

  ‘Westminster Bridge,’ said Pimmie.

  ‘Of course it is, of course it is,’ said the driver, slapping his forehead. ‘I’ll have you there in a couple of jiffs.’

  We bundled into the car and wrapped ourselves in a blanket, for the night was bitterly cold. We progressed some way in silence.

  ‘And I was going to wash me hair tonight,’ said Pimmie suddenly and reproachfully.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said contritely.

  ‘Ah, don’t give it a thought,’ said Pimmie, adding somewhat mysteriously, ‘I can sit on it.’

  ‘Can you?’ I asked, imagining that this was some up-to-date method of cleansing hair.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pimmie with satisfaction. ‘It’s that long. I was offered seventy pounds for it recently.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t look half so attractive bald,’ I pointed out.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Pimmie, and we relapsed into silence again.

  The cab stopped at some traffic lights and the driver craned round to examine his fares. The blue and white street lighting lent a weird pallor to my bloodstained face.

  ‘Are you all right in the back there, now?’ asked the driver anxiously. ‘It’s an awful lot of blood yer dribbling about in the back there. You wouldn’t want to stop for a lie down, would yer?’

  I looked at the rain-lashed, freezing pavements. ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Have yer tried sticking something up yer nose?’ asked the driver, suddenly struck by this powerful thought.

  I explained that my right nostril had had so much rammed up it that it closely resembled a municipal rubbish dump. At the hospital, I explained, they intended to cauterise.

  That’s what they used to do in the old days, isn’t it?’ asked the driver with considerable interest.

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Well, they’d hang, draw and cauterise yous, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘No, no. That was something quite different,’ I said, adding, ‘I hope.’

  We arrived at the hospital after driving up a ramp that had a notice saying (I could have sworn to this) ‘No Protestants’ but which later proved to read ‘No Pedestrians’. I attributed this misreading to my close association with the Irish throughout the evening.

  We bustled inside and found it free of drugged hippies, meths drinkers and little boys with tin potties jammed on their heads. In fact, the out-patients was deserted except for the duty nurse. She ushered us into a sort of tabernacle and laid me tenderly on a species of operating table.

  ‘The doctor will be with you in a minute,’ she said with reverence in her voice, as though announcing the Second Coming. Presently, what appeared to be a fourteen-year-old boy clad in a white coat made his appearance.

  ‘Good evening, sir. Good evening,’ he said heartily, rubbing his hands together, obviously practising for Harley Street. ‘You have a nosebleed, I understand, sir.’

  Seeing that my beard and moustache were stiff with congealed blood and that it was still dribbling from my right nostril and that my clothing was plentifully bespattered with gore, I did not feel that was a particularly brilliant and perceptive diagnosis.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said the doctor, producing two pairs of forceps, ‘we’ll just have a look at the damage, shall we, sir?’

  He spread the nostril as wide as a bushman’s with one pair of forceps and with the other proceeded to pull out several feet of bloodstained bandage.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said intelligently, peering into the gory cavity thus revealed, ‘you appear to have something more up there, sir.’

  ‘They pushed everything they could find up there,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if you found a brace of staff nurses and a matron or two lolling about in the labyrinthine passages of my sinus.’

  The doctor laughed nervously and removed a slab of cotton wool from my nostril.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, peering up the nostril with a small torch. ‘Yes, I see. I have found the bleeding spot. As a matter of fact, you have got one or two large veins up there, sir, which would be well worth keeping an eye on.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  I wondered how you kept an eye on a vein that was lurking in the dimmer recesses of the nose.

  ‘Now,’ said the doctor, ‘a little cocaine to, you know, kill it, as it were.’

  He seized something like a scent spray and squirted cocaine up my nose.

  ‘That’s it,’ he went on chattily. ‘Now, Nurse, if I can have the cautery stick? That’s it. Now, this won’t hurt, sir.’

  Curiously enough, it did not hurt.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the doctor again, standing back with the air of a conjurer who has just successfully performed a particularly complicated trick.

  ‘You mean that’s all?’ I asked in astonishment.

  ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, peering up the nose with his torch, ‘that’s all. It shouldn’t give you any more trouble, sir.’

  ‘I really am most grateful,’ I said, vacating the operating table with alacrity.

  Pimmie and I made our way out to where the taxi was waiting.

  ‘My, that was quick,’ said the driver admiringly. ‘I quite thought yer’d be in there an hour or a couple.’

  ‘No, they made a very quick job of it,’ I said, taking deep, unrestrained and joyful breaths through my nose.

  The taxi rumbled down the ramp and into the street.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ said Pimmie suddenly and with considerable vehemence.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked the driver and I in unison, startled.

  ‘We’ve been to the wrong hospital,’ said Pimmie faintly.

  ‘Wrong hospital? What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Wrong hospital? No, that was the one you asked for,’ said the driver aggrievedly.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ said Pimmie. ‘It said St Thomas’s on the side. We were supposed to go to the Waterloo.’

  ‘But it’s by the bridge. You said by the bridge,’ the driver pointed out. ‘Look, there’s the bridge.’

  He gave the impression that life was quite difficult enough without the added complication of somebody shifting all the London hospitals around.

  ‘I don’t care where it is,’ said Pimmie, ‘it’s the wrong hospital. It’s not the Waterloo.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ I
asked. ‘After all, they did the job.’

  ‘Yes, but I’d alerted the Waterloo,’ Pimmie explained. The night staff were expecting us.’

  ‘Come to think of it,’ said the driver thoughtfully, ‘Waterloo does sound a little bit like St Thomas’s, if you follow me, especially if yer driving a cab.’

  There did not seem to be a really adequate reply to this.

  We returned to Abbotsford and while I sat drinking gallons of lukewarm tea, Pimmie went to phone the Waterloo Hospital and explain the confusion.

  ‘I told them it was your fault,’ she said triumphantly on her return. ‘I said you were a bit nutty and we put yer in a taxi and yer’d given the taxi driver the wrong hospital.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

  That night and the following day passed uneventfully except that another patient endeavoured to sell me a fake Louis Quinze dining-table in the reception hall and another one insisted on practising Morse code on my door. However, these were minor irritations and my nose behaved beautifully.

  When Pimmie came on night duty that evening she fixed me with a basilisk stare.

  ‘Well,’ she inquired, ‘have you had any more trouble with yer nose?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ I said with pride, and the words were hardly out of my mouth when my nose started to bleed again.

  ‘Dear God! Why d’yer have to wait until I come on duty?’ inquired Pimmie. ‘Why can’t yer give the day nurse a treat?’

  ‘It’s your beauty, Pimmie,’ I said. ‘It sends my blood pressure up and starts my nose bleeding.’

  ‘Whereabouts in Ireland did yer say yer came from?’ inquired Pimmie, busy stuffing an adrenalin-soaked bandage up my nose.

  ‘Gomorrah, on the borders of Sodom,’ I said promptly. ‘I don’t believe yer,’ said Pimmie, ‘although ye’ve got enough blarney for five ordinary Irishmen.’

  But her ministrations with the bandage were of no avail. The nose continued to drip like a tap with a faulty washer. Eventually Pirnmie gave up exhausted and went to phone Dr Grubbins for further instructions.

  ‘Dr Grubbins says yer to go to the Waterloo Hospital,’ she said on her return, ‘and he says will yer try and get the right hospital this time.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Pimmie.

  ‘But, why not?’ I protested.

  ‘I don’t know the hell,’ said Pimmie. ‘But yer going in a staff car with a driver.’

  The staff car driver was determined to take his passenger’s mind off his troubles.

  ‘Nasty thing, nosebleeds,’ he said chattily. ‘We used to get a lot of them when I played rugger, but I’m getting too old for that now.’

  ‘Too old for nosebleeds?’ I inquired.

  ‘No, no. For rugger, I mean,’ said the driver. ‘Do you play at all yourself, sir?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I dislike all organised ball games except one.’

  ‘And which one is that, sir?’ asked the driver with interest.

  It was obvious that he could hold forth in the same boring manner about any game that had ever been invented. He must be silenced at all costs.

  ‘Sex,’ I said brutally, and we travelled the rest of the way in silence.

  At the hospital a pleasant night sister led me into a ward which at first sight appeared to be deserted. Then I saw in a remote bed an old man coughing and trembling his way along the brink of the grave, and, at a table some six feet away from and east of my bed, a family group of father, mother, daughter and son playing Monopoly. I listened to their conversation in a desultory manner as I got ready for bed.

  ‘Are you sure it won’t ’urt, Mum?’ asked the boy, shaking the dice vigorously.

  ‘ ’Corse it won’t, dear,’ said the mother. ‘You ’erd what the doctor said.’

  ‘ ’Corse it won’t,’ echoed the father. ‘It’s only your tonsils and your hadenoids. Tisn’t as though it was a big job, like.’

  ‘ ’Corse, it’s only a small operation,’ said the mother. ‘You won’t feel anything at all.’

  ‘I want to buy Piccadilly,’ said the girl shrilly.

  ‘You’ve seen ’em on the telly, ’aven’t you?’ asked the father. ‘They don’t feel a thing. Even when it’s big things like taking the ’art out.’

  ‘ ’Enry!’ said the mother quellingly.

  ‘Piccadilly, Piccadilly. I want Piccadilly,’ said the little girl.

  ‘But it’s afterwards,’ said the boy. ‘It’s afterwards, when I come round, like. Then it’ll ’urt, I expect.’

  ‘Na,’ said his father. ‘Na, ’corse it won’t. They’ll ’ave you under sedition.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Drugs and things, dear,’ said his mother soothingly. ‘ ’Onest, you won’t feel a thing. Come on, it’s your turn.’

  Poor little devil, I thought. Scared as hell, and the sight of me all covered with congealed blood can’t possibly do his morale any good. Never mind, I’ll have a few words with him afterwards when I’m cleaned up.

  At that moment the nurse arrived.

  ‘The doctor’s coming up to do your nose now,’ she said, drawing the curtains round the bed.

  ‘Ah,’ I said pleasedly. ‘Is he going to cauterise it again?’

  ‘I don’t expect so,’ said the nurse. ‘Dr Veraswami likes plugging.’

  Plugging, I thought, what a beautiful word. It summed up the plumbers’ art so succinctly. I plug, thou pluggest, he plugs, I thought. We pluggey, you pluggest, they plug. I stuff, thou stuffest, he stuffs . . .

  But my thoughts on the English verbs were interrupted by the arrival of Dr Veraswami, who was a dark fawn colour and surveyed the world through enormous pebble spectacles. His hands, I noticed with satisfaction, were as slender as a girl’s, each long finger being very little thicker than the average cigarette. The sort of hands that were so delicate they reminded you of butterflies. Slim, elegant, fluttering and incapable of hurt. A healer’s hands. Dr Veraswami examined my nose, giving tiny falsetto grunts to indicate alarm at what he found.

  ‘Ve vill have to plug the nose,’ he said at last, smiling down at me.

  ‘Help yourself,’ I said hospitably. ‘Anything to stop it bleeding.’

  ‘Nurse, you vill kindly get the things,’ said the doctor, ‘then ye can begin.’

  The nurse trotted off and the doctor stood at the end of the bed and waited.

  ‘Which part of India are you from?’ I asked conversationally.

  ‘I am not coming from India. I am from Ceylon,’ said the doctor.

  Black mark, I thought, I must be careful.

  ‘It’s a beautiful country, Ceylon,’ I said heartily.

  ‘Do you know it?’ inquired the doctor.

  ‘Well, not exactly. I once spent a week in Trincomalee. But I wouldn’t call that knowing Ceylon,’ I said. ‘But I believe it’s very beautiful.’

  The doctor, thus encouraged, went off like a travel poster.

  ‘Very beautiful. On the coast ve have the coast with many palm trees, sandy beaches and sea breezes. Plenty of things to shoot. Then ve have the foothills, banana plantations and so forth. Very rich, very verdant. Plenty of things to shoot. Then there is the mountains. Very high, very green, many cool breezes. Views of the most stupendous imagination. Plenty of things to shoot.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ I said uncertainly.

  I was spared further eulogies on Ceylon by the reappearance of the nurse bearing the necessary accoutrements for the nose-plugging operation.

  ‘Now, Nurse,’ said the doctor busily, ‘vill you just hold the gentleman’s head steady. That’s it.’

  He seized on the end of what appeared to be a bandage some three miles long with the end of a pair of sharply pointed forceps with very long blades. Then he strapped a light to his head and advanced upon me. The nurse’s grip on my skull tightened perceptibly. I wondered why. After all, Pimmie had plugged my nose with bandage and it had not hurt. The doctor plunged th
e forceps holding the bandage into my nostril and the pointed ends came to rest somewhere, it appeared, at the base of my skull, having penetrated my sinus, and left a searing trail of pain behind them. So severe was the pain that it paralysed my vocal cords so that I could not even utter a protest. The doctor removed the forceps and gathered up a foot or so of the bandage. This he plugged into the nostril and rammed it home with all the dedication of a duel-list making sure that his pistol is primed. As he was packing the bandage home, his enthusiasm occasionally got the better of him and the pointed forceps would cut a groove in the delicate skin of the sinus. It now felt as though the nostril was being packed with red-hot coals. Although my vocal cords had now returned to normal, I was prevented from voicing a protest for another reason. The Monopoly party had fallen silent and were listening avidly to the faint sounds that were coming from the curtain-shrouded bed. If as my reason dictated, I uttered screams of pain, kicked Veraswami in the crotch and then burst from behind the curtains trailing yards of bandage in a wild bid to obtain freedom, this could only undermine the morale of the smallboynow nervously awaiting his own operation. I would just have to put up with it. The nurse, in order to hold my head steady, had it clasped in a vice-like grip. So firmly was she holding it that her thumbs made two circular bruises over my eyebrows which did not fade for some days.

  Veraswami continued to pack foot after foot of bandage into the offending nostril, pecking away at his task with the eagerness of a blackbird worming on an early morning lawn. When we reached what appeared to be the half-way mark, I, rather hoarsely, asked for a brief cessation in hostilities.

  ‘Is it hurting?’ asked Veraswami with what could have been academic interest but sounded more like relish.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The whole right-hand side of my skull, face and neck throbbed and ached as though it had been pounded with a sledge hammer and I felt that an egg dropped into my sinus would fry to a turn.

  ‘Ve have to be cruel to be kind,’ explained Veraswami, obviously delighted that his command over the English language had allowed him to use this well-worn maxim. The rest of the bandage (eleven feet of it, I discovered later) was packed and then firmly wedged into place by Veraswami’s thumbs, which had ceased to be ethereal and butterfly-like. I had read of tears spurting from people’s eyes – either from pain or grief – and had always considered this to be poetic. I now learned differently. Under the ministration of Veraswami’s thumbs the tears of pain spurted from my screwed-up eyes like machine-gun bullets. Veraswami gave the bandage a final prod to make sure and then stood back with a satisfied smile.