The brown bag with his clothes in that the police had brought back to us was on the bed. It looked like a potato sack and had a reference number written on it in black marker pen. I wondered if Matty was wearing the goldfish jeans on the night of the accident and had a look, but of course we’d never got his jeans or his T-shirt back because they were cut from him. I sat and held his leather jacket, his brogues, his wallet and the silly sovereign ring that I’d thought was ridiculous but he’d liked wearing. There was blood on the jacket from where the girl he’d lent it to had put it over him as he lay in the road. I looked in his wardrobe to see if I could find the jeans with the goldfish drawing on, but I couldn’t. He must have been wearing them. I thought of the intertwined goldfish, separated, sliced through as his jeans were cut.
I wish you were here, I thought. I’m a lost soul without you. I thought of him lying in hospital, starting to heal so that he would wake up and come back to us. I wish you were here, I thought. You will be, you will be.
That day, Matty’s eyes started to open at the rate of a couple of millimetres a day. It was a start.
STAR PUPIL BATTLES FOR LIFE AFTER HIT-AND-RUN
A teenager with a brilliant academic career ahead of him is fighting for his life in a Leeds hospital. Matthew Mintern, 16, was the victim of a hit-and-run driver at Snaith as he walked home from a disco last weekend. The driver of the car has since been traced and questioned by the police about the incident. Matthew’s family are keeping a constant vigil at the bedside of the boy who has everything to live for. The bright teenager suffered severe head injuries in the accident which has shocked his school pals and the villagers in the close-knit community of Snaith. And his father, Kevin, landlord of the Bell and Crown pub in the Market Place, spoke of the brave fight being put up by his son who was a star pupil at his local high school. ‘This accident has turned our lives upside down. But he is a powerful, strong-willed lad who is very physically fit. If anyone can pull through all this he can.’ Matthew remains in a critical condition in Leeds Infirmary but is now breathing off the ventilator. He has started to move his eyes and his limbs.
Yorkshire Evening Post, 16 August 1990
‘COMA BOY’
Two and a half weeks after the accident, Matty got the best GCSE results in his school. BBC Look North came to the hospital and interviewed Mum. She told them that Matty’s eyes were starting to open, and then the story was picked up by the newspapers. Lots of them referred to him as ‘coma boy’ and some of them reported that on being told his results by my mother, Matty opened his eyes and smiled at her. This wasn’t true. His eyes had started to partly open, but there was no response that indicated any awareness of his grades.
People were turning up at the pub full of joy, ready to congratulate us, and we had to tell them that no, the newspapers were wrong. There had been no miracle. But it was early days and we were still all convinced that we would get one. Despite the misunderstanding, it felt good to have lots of people talking about Matty and hoping for his recovery.
We took the exam results, the concrete, impartial evidence of how bright Matty was, as a point in his favour. How could the God that none of us believed in want to let this talented young life go to waste? We looked at those A grades, at all the interest in them, and were reassured that Matty would survive because he deserved to.
‘He’s a big lad. He’ll get over a knock like this,’ Dad had said on the night of the accident. My dad, veteran of close shaves, no stranger to hard physical knocks. He’d been in and out of danger all his life, so of course he didn’t believe that his son could be so easily snuffed out.
‘It can’t be right,’ said our head barmaid Carol, shaking her head. ‘It can’t be right that a lad like that won’t get better.’
The story was reported in the Irish papers, too, so all my dad’s family were ringing up and pledging their prayers. There was another flurry of flowers, and cards would arrive in the post to let us know that Mass had been said on Matty’s behalf. We were all quite moved by this.
‘We’ll take anything, at this point,’ Dad said, his atheism temporarily on hold.
I found it comforting to think that across the Irish Sea people were talking about Matty and caring about what happened to him.
We made a collage of the news stories and pinned it up above Matty’s bed at the hospital so that everyone could see what he was like and how much was at stake. We wanted the nurses and physios to know that his headmaster thought he was an Oxbridge certainty; the nurses seemed a little less keen on treating people who were there through their own fault or stupidity. There was a young man who’d been injured when he fell through the roof trying to break into his old school, and the nurses were brusquely disapproving of him. We didn’t want that for Matty.
One evening, Matty’s friend Didge came to visit while we were having some tea in the canteen. Matty and I had been friends with Didge since we’d moved to Yorkshire and he was always sleeping over at our house and coming on holiday with us. His father was the caretaker at Carlton Towers, the stately home in the village next to Snaith that we’d come to live in before moving to the pub. Didge and Matty had bought an old grey Fiat 500 for £100 and taught themselves to drive it off-road on the Towers’ land. I loved going up to the Towers as I was allowed to have a look in the enormous library and at the priest’s hole. Lots of the novels I read featured a priest’s hole, and it set my imagination alight to see a real one and know that men had hidden in it.
We came back from the canteen to find Didge sitting down at the wrong bed, holding the hand of the wrong brain-damaged patient, telling him stories about the Fiat. We all made a joke of it, but it was an uncomfortable truth that they looked the same, these young men with shaved, bandaged heads lying there not doing anything. If their eyes were open they had no expression, which made it difficult to tell them apart. So we pinned up Matty’s school photo, the one all the papers used, the one with his lovely grin. We were intent on demonstrating his personality for him, as he couldn’t do it for himself. Look at that lovely smile, we thought. Who wouldn’t want to work extra hard for the chance of seeing that lovely smile again?
A new patient came to the bed opposite. He was a bit older than Matty and his full head of black, curly hair proclaimed he hadn’t had brain surgery, but his legs were in plaster and he’d had a tracheotomy. His mum told us he’d been in a motorbike accident and that his lungs were punctured. He lay surrounded by cuddly toys brought for him by his large, noisy family, who came in droves to pet him and wail over him. His eyes were open; he looked sleepy but aware.
‘They’re treating him like a baby,’ whispered Mum. ‘We mustn’t let that happen to Matty.’
It’s impossible to speak with a tracheotomy, but after a few days of watching the boy look increasingly frustrated and bored, my dad said to the boy’s mum, ‘He looks like he wants to say something. Why don’t you get him some paper and a pen?’ So they did, and he wrote, ‘Bring me some fags and tell my sister to fuck off.’
There was great hilarity and relief at his recovery, but I couldn’t help begrudge it just a tiny bit. It didn’t seem fair. What had that family done to deserve it? They hadn’t been attentive or responsive, they hadn’t even noticed he wanted to communicate. Here we were, all reading up on the latest occupational therapy theory, looking for the first little sign that we would see that smile again, and so far Matty hadn’t done anything except open his eyes.
We were learning everything we could about Matty’s care. Unable to swallow safely, he was fed with a creamy liquid called Ensure that went into his tummy via a nasal gastric tube. One end of the tube hung out of his nostril, secured with micropore tape. Before each feed we needed to check that the other end of the tube was in his stomach and had not got displaced into his airway. We would draw up a small amount of fluid from his stomach with a syringe and test it with litmus paper. Pink for acid meant the tube was in the right place and the Ensure could then be decanted into a bottle and dripped
into him. He was very gaunt and was prescribed 3,000 calories a day, given via several feeds. A red medicine called Epilim was added to the mix, making it the colour of strawberry milkshake. This was to mitigate against epilepsy, which was common after a head injury. There was a little switch on the line to control the flow: too fast and he might vomit it back, too slow and we couldn’t get enough in. The tube was changed quite regularly, and in time Mum learned how to do that too. She asked a nurse to do it to her, so that she knew how it felt.
‘Oh, it’s horrible,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to gag all the time. Poor Matty.’
We realized that as he didn’t make any response to the tube going in, he must not be able to feel it. While we were glad he wasn’t in pain, it was disappointing to realize how little awareness he had about what went on inside or around him.
Matty had no control over his bladder or bowels. At first he’d been catheterized, but now he had a convene sheath fitted to his penis, which was like a condom with an open end attached to a bag by a tube. The convene was changed daily but would often spring off when he was moved, or had a wee, so we became expert at changing a wet bed and I had to get over my squeamishness at seeing him naked. It wouldn’t help Matty, I thought, for me to make a fuss about how horrible and undignified it all was for him. Better to pretend it was normal. We would roll him onto his side, wash him, pull the soiled sheet from under him and fit the clean one, roll him back onto the clean sheet and whip out the dirty one. While he was in bed we kept him without underwear as it was much easier to deal with a wet or soiled bed if we had no pants to get off and on.
Bathing involved getting him into a hoist by using a large sling like a portable hammock. We would get the sling under him in the same way as changing the sheet, and then the loops were fitted to a hoist and he was transported to the bathroom. The hoist was wheeled over the bath and he was lowered in. We bathed him every day.
Physiotherapists came most weekdays to collect Matty and take him to the department. They would start by sitting him on the edge of the treatment table, a physio kneeling behind him with their arms around him. There would be at least two physios and two of us, and together we would heave him up into a standing position. He had no muscle tone at all, so we all had to hold on tight: knees, feet and hips. The physios were always amazed how tall he was. Once, when he had been constipated for a few days, the act of getting him into an upright position activated his bowels and he did an enormous poo. He had floppy boxer shorts on, so Mum just got a yellow bag (yellow bags were for special bins and had to be used for that sort of thing), fished it out of the bottom of his boxer shorts, put it in the bin and carried on with the session.
We worked too with the occupational therapists, and had a ‘box of tricks’ for working on Matty’s senses. There were different fabrics from fur to sandpaper to rub against his skin, little bottles of smells to waft under his nose, safe ways of letting him taste, including a Polo mint on a string and a Fisherman’s Friend wrapped in a muslin bag. We wheeled him out onto the corridors to expose him to different sights and sounds, and even into the small hospital garden when the weather was fair. We learned how to feed him small amounts of puréed food, and had a feeding cup to give him little sips of drinks. And all the time we talked to him. We talked and talked.
The boy that Didge had sat next to by mistake began to get better. He was eventually able to sit up in bed and was then transferred to a rehabilitation centre. It was wonderful to see, and we hoped that Matty wouldn’t be far behind.
‘See you there,’ we said to his family as we waved them goodbye.
Mum kept a diary and recorded Matty’s progress – first sound, first yawn, even first slight erection. All these were signs of new things happening in his brain. We thought he would like to read the diary when he got better. We made a pact that we would focus on hope.
But the doctors were concerned by Matty’s lack of progress and a scan confirmed hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid on the brain. We could actually feel it because his head was often puffy where the piece of skull had been removed. It was one of the things we noticed and commented on when we arrived each day, whether the area was convex or concave. Concave looked odd – a four-inch crater at the side of his head – but no swelling was a good sign. Convex looked better – he looked more normal – but it was bad news. They operated and inserted a shunt which took the excess fluid from the brain into the abdominal cavity. Another tube, but this one was inside his body and couldn’t be seen. The doctors told us that for the rest of Matty’s life his head must never be below the level of his stomach, so that nothing from his gut could flow back up to his brain. ‘No cartwheeling for you, Matty, when you’re better,’ I said.
During the same operation they also put back the bone flap, leaving him with a horseshoe-shaped dent where the edges didn’t quite fit. Dad said it looked as if a loose tile had been refitted without enough grout.
At home, we would try to explain all the things that we were learning to our customers as we served them drinks.
‘Is he still on a life-support machine?’ they’d ask.
‘No one in a hospital uses the term life-support machine. It’s not as simple as that. He breathes by himself, he’s no longer on a ventilator, but all his food and liquid has to be pumped into his tummy through a tube in his nose.’
‘Is he still in a coma or has he woken up?’
‘Well, his eyes can open fully and he has periods of wake and sleep, but you couldn’t really say that he’s woken up.’
‘Can he communicate by blinking?’
‘We think so, sometimes. Sometimes we think he’ll blink yes or no, but we can’t really tell for sure.’
‘Does he move?’
‘Sort of. But it’s all spasms and spasticity. He sort of wrinkles his mouth if he doesn’t like something.’
‘What does he do all day?’
‘He sleeps a lot. Like a really poorly person would. We talk to him and tell him stories. He has a lot of visitors. He has physio. We’ve taken in a telly and play him comedy videos. We try to get him to eat and drink tiny bits.’
Misunderstanding abounded. Because we always talked positively and hopefully about Matty, people tended to think he was doing better than he was and were then shocked if they visited him to find that his gaze was either vacant or his eyes locked over to the right, that his skin was deteriorating and that he had spots and blackheads for the first time in his life. When Dad told someone that we’d been walking Matty in physio – a task that involved four people lifting his toneless body to a standing position and gently manipulating him backwards and forwards – the story spread around the village via Chinese whispers until someone came into the pub to say how happy they were that he was walking around on his own and would he be match-fit by the start of the next football season?
September rolled around. I didn’t want to go back to my sixth-form college in Scunthorpe. I no longer cared about my academic future and was convinced that Matty would need me for his rehabilitation.
I had always loved school and learning, especially reading. Mum said that when I was a baby I didn’t much care for toys but would gum on a cloth A-Z book as though I knew how much books were going to mean to me in the future.
This aptitude for reading could cause trouble. In my first year of school, when we still lived in Cornwall, my teacher, impressed with my ability, sent me in to read to the class above. It was all a bit much: I looked down and watched my wee searching out the cracks between the wooden floorboards. When we moved to Yorkshire a few months later, my new teacher didn’t believe that I’d read all the books I said I had and made me start again. In the free choice reading time, when I finished my book and went back for another, she shouted at me: ‘You can’t possibly have read that. Sit back down and read it properly.’
When I was seven, Dad went to adult literacy classes because he needed to be able to write shift reports. Mum would test us both out of the same big red spelling book every night
. I always won and Dad was always proud of me. He talked a lot about the importance of education. He earned a lot of money, but the work was difficult, dirty and dangerous. He’d often tell us that if we worked hard at school, we wouldn’t have to work night shifts or spend most of our time in tunnels underground. We weren’t convinced by this as his working life seemed very glamorous to us, and we loved it when he came home off nights just as we were waking up and sat, his eyes rimmed with coal dust, telling us tales of what had gone wrong the night before as he ate his breakfast. We adored the men he worked with and it was a massive treat to go over to Selby and see them in the pub. He’d stand us up on a table and we’d sing the Irish songs he’d taught us to great applause.
My favourite place when I was growing up was the library in Snaith. I’d been getting out all the Anne books by L. M. Montgomery, but there was one I hadn’t read because they didn’t have it. One Sunday evening we were all watching Mastermind and one of the contestants chose Anne of Green Gables and its sequels as her specialist subject. I got all the questions right except the two based on Anne of Windy Willows, my missing book. My parents were very pleased, and that Christmas gave me the boxed set so I could own them all myself.
We were teased for having posh voices. Matty developed more of a Yorkshire accent in time, but I never did. This meant later on that I was used whenever anything needed to be said. At the Catholic secondary school we went to in our village, despite our parents being atheists and us being unbaptized, we settled in nicely: the teachers were kind and liked the fact that we were clever. We grew up winning prizes and races. We were captains of sports teams, heads of house, got the lead parts in school plays. We stood up to bullies, looked after the underdogs, had lots of friends, but were also both a tiny bit rebellious. When I got chosen to have lunch with the visiting Tory MP, I wore long red socks, and Matty got into a major row about evolution with an RE teacher who believed in the literal truth of the Bible. We were lucky to be all-rounders – it was a way to survive. On top of that, I started smoking and swearing when I was fourteen as a considered tactic, along with the overuse of eyeliner. I practised the swearing in my bedroom, watching my mouth in the mirror as it formed the bad words. I wanted to be able to carry on being top of the class without committing social suicide. I wanted to be able to go everywhere and do everything. I liked smoking behind the conifers with the bad kids, and I also liked pleasing my teachers. When I left school my RE teacher, a good man, who did not believe in the literal truth of the Bible, sent us all off with a little note. Mine said: ‘You have been a continual breath of fresh air in the occasional fish market of school.’
The Last Act of Love Page 4