August, Bank Holiday

We are at home now and the wine bottle is empty. Katie is staying put, wrapped up in that cheap fluffy white dressing gown that her mother recently bought for her. She is royally pissed off with me. Yes, I let her down again by spending too much time in North Staffordshire decoupling from the scent and touch of Lydia’s body.  It was about nine when I got back to the flat and too late for the cinema and now have been sitting here together for two painful hours; Katie the stoic and John the penitent. The ’Exorcist II: The Heretic’ on the television.  I’ve had enough, ‘I am off to bed.’ Her head does not move, she is playing deaf as she stares at the plasma screen. ‘Fuck you.’

 The T.V. is louder than usual; hollers and screams pass through the ceiling and shake the light fittings. Katie can sometimes be vindictive and petulant. Childish even but I let her moment and then undress.  In hindsight, I must have fallen asleep quickly as I cannot remember any nightmares, happy dreams, sad dreams, images of people – Katie, Lydia – they were not there but there was something…something…

 At first it’s just a feint noise, building and bubbling in my ears like water coming to the boil. Shadows are roaming around our room. Absurd questions are spoken from a black mouth, ‘drugs, what drugs you have you taken?’  What am I thinking? Confused, I am unable to answer back. My jawbone feels like it has been hit repeated by someone who does not want me to ever speak again.  I am paralysed. In the dust and the dirt with the mites and dead skin. Down and out. My thoughts in tatters. Concepts of time and place are absent. The harder I try to think the less I understand. They lift me from the floor, put me in the chair and tighten the belt and things fall into place; a pile of clothes, the print on the wall, the book by the bed, jewellery neatly arranged on the dressing table. However, the focal point of this neat bedroom arrangement is the bed itself, the yellow mattress, which yesterday, I could have sworn was white.

I am regaining consciousness and a semblance of order but it is fragile, thin and brittle, poised to tilt into something so much worse.

They carry me down the steps and the panic heightens and spread all over me like a childhood rash. Down on the dimly lit street the ambulance patiently waits. Calm voices pass me over the threshold but the panic is growing and everything is beginning to unfold before me. I start to associate objects with their functions and their intentions: heart monitor, plastic tubing for aspiration, hypodermic syringes, blue gloves, neck braces and collars and lastly, the oxygen mask that they are trying to force upon my face. I am in free-fall. The plane is coming down and nothing can stop the momentum, the descent of accelerated time. I am crashing with no one to rescue me and set me down outside of the panic, the fear, the terror of the hunter on my trail. I am over. Extinguished; the smell of death and cordite is everywhere. And yet, amid all the chaos, a part of my brain is still processing and asking some very big questions –

‘I am only thirty three years old and I am too young to die.’ 

‘I believe in you God. Where are you?’ ‘

‘Where is he? The Man on the Cross? I need his comfort. I need his words.’

‘Why aren’t the scenes from my life replaying? Come on, someone promised me. Childhood. Youth?’

 ‘I will be okay someone will save me won’t they?’ ‘Mum, Dad, Katie?’

            But the dread returns, stronger and more potent and I plead and I say to anyone who is listening,

 ‘I do not want to die not now, it is too early.’

A siren wails and the blue lights pulsate and makes patterns on the windows. I am conscious but I am waiting, guarding against that sudden swoon that will make my heart stutter and stammer and suddenly stop. My eyes are like suckers, locked onto the monitors, to the peaks, the troughs and the oxygen levels. These are my lifelines and I watch over them and guard them. I am controlling them and keeping them steady. There is no one else but me and my body. I work with it and calm it down. Doors fly open and the lines move faster across the screen as the warm night air rushes into the van. Gently and carefully, they set me down on solid ground. The stars overhead are shining like silver pinheads in a sky made of black carbon paper.  I leave them behind and pass through the hospital doors and into a bright and polished light. The doors close behind, life is returning but everything has changed, and I know that nothing will ever be the same again.

A nude coloured curtain shades me from whatever is going on outside. Katie is with me, her eyes are full of tears and the look on her face is disturbing. Her expression is one of pure fear. I don’t want her near me. She is making everything worse. I try to ask her what she is looking at but the words remain inside my mouth. I have the words in my head, but I cannot force them out. Language is internal and cannot be spoken. The frustration that I feel is deeply embedded like a splinter beneath my skin that cannot be eased out. I want to scream but my tongue will not make the necessary shapes to call out. Her pupils are shrinking; now it looks like its Katie who is dying. She is the one that’s passing out.

Speech returns and takes me by complete surprise. ‘Katie, what has happened to me?’ Her eyes widen and reveal two black orbs of recognition. Her pale hand with her long fingers interweaves with mine and I strengthen my grip so hard that she winces and visibly struggles to stifle a scream. I will not let her go; I am so frightened by the fear that a sudden gust of panic will disturb the newly granted calm that has settled about me. I question her again, ‘Kate, what has happened to me?’ However, she will not tell me, she is dumbstruck; it is too much for her as she reaches yet again for the comfort of her midriff.

            The curtain rustles and opens wide to reveal a small, squat, young nurse. The first thing that I notice about her is ridiculous, but a sign that I am regaining some kind of normality. As she bends over me I assess her hair and decide it needs a wash and that the hideous and gaudy scrunchy that is pulling tightly on her hair has to go for both our sakes. I hold up my arm and she cuffs me, numbers rise and fall and bottom out. Katie and I sit in suspense for something profound to fall from her lips and when it does, I know exactly where I am –

            ‘Da ya wanna a cuppa tae mate?’

            The Black Country. Not home. Not Brindley Place. Not Birmingham. I ask Katie why am here, ‘Walsall Manor Hospital WS2,’ and she gives me a garbled explanation about a bed shortage. I listen, and drink the scalding tea that the scrunchy beheaded nurse, who has now taken up residence on my bed, has given me. The ‘cuppa tae’ tastes surprisingly good, the best that I have ever drunk perhaps. The three of sit in cosy collusion before the young nurse speaks up and readies her papers. The young nurse explains that these are routine questions, universal, and it’s all just procedural stuff. I ask again, ‘what has happened to me,’ but she cannot provide an answer, ‘she’s not qualified,’ however, she feels that she has the right to ask me as to whether I piss or shit myself. Katie recognises that I am losing my patience and asks me to calm down but no one is getting this. I lean back on the pillow and for some unknown reason I have a vision of Picasso’s ‘Three Dancers,’ a print that hangs on our bedroom wall. ‘Love, sex and death.’ I don’t want to be here anymore. The intensity of my thoughts are breaking me down into pieces and all I want to do is to leave this place and get back to yesterday and its certainty but my past is slowly being effaced and binned. The little nurse asks me if I am ‘okay’ as she attaches a paper bracelet around my wrist that has my name and a number printed upon it. Little do I know that this alphanumeric tag will be with me for the remainder of my days – it will be my emblem, my coat of arms, a virtual tattoo that will be ingrained and absorbed into the National Health Service.

 I am sitting quietly when the curtain opens again. The nurse seizes her chance and exits quickly. He is tall, six feet may be, sub-continentally thin, his hirsute arms protrude from his powder blue theatre scrubs as his spidery fingers leaf quickly through my admission notes and then he starts coughing. A deep tubercular rattle. I hear him curse under his breath. Eventually he regains composure –

‘Sharma, my name is Doctor Sharma.’ His rubber theatre clogs squeak as he navigates his way around my bed. Sharma raises a finger as though he about to scold me for a childish prank or bad behaviour. ‘Can you please concentrate on the bridge of my nose?’ The nose is long and fragile but in proportion with the rest of his facial features. He moves his finger across my field of vision and ignores the bleeping noise coming from inside his upper chest pocket. ‘Reflexes.’ The doctor calls for the scrunchy nurse. ‘I need a hammer.’ The trust that he had implanted in me upon his arrival is now slowly starting to ebb away. She returns with a hammer. ‘This is a Queens Square reflex hammer. Important.’ Grinning, he takes up his stick and taps away at my knee joints before scrapping the soles of my feet with the handle of the hammer. ‘Okay.’ A tone of disappointment creeps in to his voice. ‘Any allergies?’ I shake my head. ‘Can you describe what happened to you? Precisely please.’ He listens and his bleep goes off again. ‘Okay, I’ll come back to you but in all likelihood, you will need to be admitted. I could send you home but if what you say is true we best err on the side of caution.’ I feel a warm hand cover mine and Katie pipes up –

‘Is that it? Is that all you can say? Can we have another opinion? Someone else. Get someone else to see him?’ I’ve never seen Katie as animated and as passionate as this but the tired nocturnal fellow is taking it full on the chin as he’s heard all protestations and pleas before. He lets my Katie finish and then he leaves us behind and I understand completely why he is leaving us behind. On the other side of the curtain, the whole place has suddenly erupted into pandemonium; the night clubbers have arrived and all I can hear is moaning, retching and crying but there is one voice, that cuts clean through the noise and it seems to speak directly to me – ‘he has sown the wind and he will reap the whirlwind.’ I place my hands over my ears and smile. Lewis Hyde is calling me.