Sitting on the bed wasn’t done. Granny didn’t do it because it suited her sense of formality to sit elegantly on a chair facing me. After the failure of simulated horse-play Mum only did it very rarely, and when she did she was careful not to rest her full weight on it. She would perch on the very edge instead, with her legs braced, so that she almost hovered.
Dad wasn’t so careful. To some extent he thought I was putting it on. Well, he did and he didn’t. I could hear him saying to Mum that I had everyone running around me in small circles, and when were they going to stop letting me have my own way about everything? It didn’t help that he had lost his own invalid privileges from the time I became ill. Mum would no longer make him tempting little dishes when he was under the weather. I monopolised the nurse in her, so that there was no one left over to fuss over him. I hogged her help-meet side. It didn’t help that with her rather perverse sense of family drama, Mum sometimes used me against him in their marital quarrels.
One awful morning, after a row which had culminated in Dad throwing the marmalade pot at her (the crock and the preserve it contained hit the wall with a double impact I could hear and interpret very easily), she came in and coached me with reproaches to make on her behalf. It wasn’t a job I wanted, it wasn’t a game I was eager to play, but I couldn’t stand against her for long. I put up a small fight, and then I was parroting to my father, ‘I’m really quite cross with you, Daddy. You mustn’t make my mummy cry.’
Disgraceful. Shirley Temple stuff, really, to which I wasn’t suited, and to which Dad responded, quite rightly, with a look of disgust. His wife was hysterical and his son was a malingering ventriloquist’s dummy.
Even then he didn’t turn against me. Another day I was looking at my old What I Want To Be book, and went through doctor, scientist, priest as usual, but this time on impulse I added actor. Mum was busy pouring cold water on this fourth crazed ambition when Dad pitched in to back me up.
‘I say let the lad be an actor if that’s what he wants.’
‘Oh Dennis, please!’ she said. ‘As if things aren’t difficult enough already. Can’t you act responsibly for a change? Surely you can see he worships you? Now I’ll never get the idea out of his head.’ I think Dad and I were both taken aback by the idea of me worshipping him, but certainly I was full of adoration in that moment when he stood up against her and defended me. ‘Be realistic, Dennis … what part could he possibly play?’
‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘he could be an old lady sitting in an upright wing chair in the corner.’
‘But what sort of part is that?’ she pleaded.
‘Oh, I would say it’s quite a good one!’ he shot back. ‘For one thing, he could direct operations, like a general in a battle. He gets it straight from his Great-aunt Molly, of course. Anyway, it’s really only a slight twist on what he’s doing now. There would be nothing for him to learn. Being thoroughly selfish is what he knows best, and I must admit he does it quite superbly. Even better than your mother, m’dear.’
I was beginning to see the less enjoyable side of being championed by my father.
‘The only snag is that he couldn’t sit in a wing chair because his hips don’t bend, but I dare say that’ll all be sorted out by the time he’s grown up.’ He may only have been using me as a weapon to get back at Mum, as she had used me to make him feel guilty about throwing the marmalade, but at least my father was holding a possibility open, while everyone else was busy shutting up shop on any bearable future I might possibly have.
So when he sat down on the bed one cold night there may have been a hint of hostility in the heaviness of his movements. In any case I had learned to over-ride the reflex of tensing up in such situations, which only brought the pain-spasm on, and to relax whether I felt like it or not. There was no real ill will driving his body weight down onto the bed. Nothing bad need have come of it.
It’s just that he sat down on the hot-water bottle, and it burst. It was an old item, which had come through the War (I expect) and was at the very end of its useful life. People of a less thrifty generation would have replaced it long since. It was entitled to fatigue, to perishing. Still, if only Collie Boy had sat down so squarely on the whoopee cushion lying in wait for her! Surely then it would have sung its vulgar song.
Dad leapt to his feet as if he was scalded, though of course it was me he was worried about. The water wasn’t close to boiling, I doubt if it was even very hot. He yanked the bedclothes off me and threw the leaking hot-water bottle into the corner. Then he must have started to lean over me, reaching for me with his hands, signalling his intentions. His course of emergency action was to scoop up the entire disaster area, the boy in his steaming pyjamas, and carry it to Mum for her to sort out. That’s when I must have said what so wounded him, to discourage him from bringing so much movement and excitement to a body that had been insulated from events for such a long time. I said, ‘Please fetch my mother.’
It was the formality of the request that was so wounding, the implication that he might not know instinctively who my mother was, and apparently I made it with a hideous sort of grin on my face. As if he was nothing to me. So Mum was duly fetched to sort things out, to soothe me, to peel the pyjamas gently from me, to dry me, to change the sheets and bedclothes without disturbing me too much, so that the whole alarming incident ended as a sort of accidental bed-bath. Very little water had reached the mattress. It really wasn’t serious.
Except for what I said to Dad, and the nasty grin I wore while I said it. Dad’s great love was biology on a small scale, dealing with miniature organisms that revealed themselves under the microscope. He wasn’t much of a mammal man. I don’t imagine he had read Darwin on facial expression in the animal kingdom (which would certainly have been a set text if he had gone to university as planned), and he interpreted my grin as a sardonic rejection of him and his attempts to remedy the small disaster he had caused.
What he saw on my face was a changeling expression, something looking out of a child’s face that was not the child. Of course the primate grin can express a number of things, submission sometimes, aggression when the lips are lifted defiantly off the teeth. In my case the rictus had a simple cause, physical pain, as my brain filled up with signals from spinal joints inflamed and in spasm. I suppose I had the option of screaming, which might have been more reassuring to Dad (though that could go either way), but filling my lungs to scream would have jarred my back more and made the pain worse, so all I could think to do was grin and bear it. Unwittingly I offered him a grinning fox mask of pain.
I’m reconstructing my part in all this. I have no memories of that evening, I who memorised so much. You’d think that after so much inactivity my mind would seize on something as dramatic as a scald. Life was visiting my sick-bed with a vengeance. But I think the events of that evening didn’t stay with me for exactly the same reason. My idea of a major event had been re-calibrated since the days of my mobility. By now it was a big thing if two wet leaves of different colours, one red, one yellow, happened to be plastered against the window, just like that, one two, by a gust of rain, while I was watching in the mirror. Like the paw-prints of some window-walking animal.
It was headline news if Dad hung up his trousers in the bedroom upstairs without taking the change out of his pockets, so that coins rained down on the floorboards. After years of becoming accustomed to the rhythms of the day-to-day, fragments of gossip about people I hardly knew, scrupulously neutral lessons, excitement banished, a real event flashing its teeth and barrelling towards me from the cloud of plankton would simply burst the fine mesh of my attention. There is a fuse-box in the brain, and under the impact of such charged events I think a traumatised filament blew in mine, saving the rest of the organism from shock.
It would have been better, though, if it had happened the other way round, if I had remembered and he had forgotten.
As for Dad’s changeling idea, I have to say that he wasn’t altogether wrong. The look that he saw on m
y face, the construction he put on my words, neither of these expressed actual rejection on my part, but there’s no doubt I was leaving his world. I was being changed away from him, and I could no longer be expected to carry the weight of his hopes. For Dad the fantasy aspect of parenthood collapsed early. It became clear before I reached school age that my life would be no sort of extension of his, and he went into an angry mourning.
Usually parents have the feeling that their children are stolen from them when they’re bigger, almost grown. The current word that has something of the flavour of ‘changeling’ is ‘adolescent’. It carries that sense of malign substitution. Nowadays children are abducted not by fairies but by their peers. Only a poor copy of what was taken is left behind.
I was already a poor copy. Dad forfeited his due as a father – the knife box brought home from carpentry class, the girl-friend brought to dinner who would look at him slyly and tell him she could see where I got my looks. The thing which happens between fathers and sons happened early in our case. He never stopped being the father who threw a red ball to me from his æroplane – whatever the reasons he had for that – but I soon stopped having anything in common with the son who had caught it.
Brute fact
As for Mum and the dentist’s, what happened was that she went to have two teeth out. She read an article in a magazine while she was waiting to be seen. She had always been more of a magazine person than a book person, even away from waiting rooms. Over time magazines had rewarded her with household tips, recipes, sensible opinions and even the idea for keeping and breeding budgies – that fulfilling pursuit, that life-saver. Now the world of magazines punished her with something it normally kept at arm’s length, brute fact, not to be bargained with. Not to be cooked, cleaned, common-sensed or hobbied away.
Mum was going to have two wisdom teeth taken out – only the upper ones, which isn’t normally traumatic. It’s pretty much in and out. The dentist was only going to use a local anæsthetic. It’s the bottom ones that give the grief. Mum was half-way through reading the article when her name was called. At that moment her whole world was going smash. She didn’t even think of cancelling the appointment. It was something people just didn’t do in those days. She would keep her appointment with the anæsthetic needle and the extraction pliers, but as she stood up to go through into the surgery she slipped the magazine into her handbag. She was only stealing a second-hand magazine that no one else was likely to want anyway, but this was by her standards a steep descent into lawlessness. The abandonment of morals showed that she was in shock. She held the handbag tightly against her, despite the dentist’s cajoling, all the way through the raid on her mouth.
The dentist injected her in the gums, each side, and also in the palate. When he does that it feels as if someone has stuffed a shoe in your mouth. He tells you that you’ll feel as if you’re unable to swallow, although if you try you’ll find you can.
He tested the inside of her mouth with a probe, to make sure that the anæsthetic had taken hold, while she held the magazine against her heart.
I don’t think dentists enjoy inflicting pain any more than any other health professionals. I quite enjoy my own sessions in the chair. I find the dentist’s working position comforting, leaning over me from behind, so that I can sometimes rest my head against his chest. I enjoy the warmth transmitted through his smock to the crown of my head. There’s a soft connection there, where the bodies touch, as well as a harsher one where the scientific illusion makes its investigations, usually with something sharp, into the ‘I-am-the-body’ illusion.
The anæsthetic deadens pain, but it has no power to muffle the disconcerting sounds of extraction, which are transmitted sharply along the bone to the ears so close by. The groans of the gums are silent, but the teeth creak and crack under the pressure of the pliers in the moments before they give way. The sounds they make are very much like iceberg calvings, frozen sunderings. Cracks echo from an arctic distance as the dentist consolidates his grip on the condemned tooth and starts to pull, yanking its roots from bone.
Mum’s dentist was a competent one, and he didn’t take long to perform the extractions. He asked her if she wanted to see the teeth he had removed, but she didn’t hear him. She was already pulling the dog-eared magazine from her bag. He showed her the teeth anyway, with a touch of professional pride, explaining that one of them had been infected and would have given her grief before too long. Between his pliers the crown of the tooth was mush. She barely glanced at it. Her eyes strayed only for a moment towards those shattered trophies before they returned to the pages in her hand.
The dentist asked Mum to open her mouth, and when she obeyed him he popped in a little cotton-wool bolster on each side, to absorb the blood. Her mouth was still numbed, and she found it hard to close her mouth round the cotton wool. Then she wandered into the waiting room again. She sat there, as if she was still waiting for her appointment, until she had read the article to the end. Her legs had received no anæsthetic, but she didn’t trust them yet to carry her home. Normally she was the one who did the pouncing in waiting rooms, with sad or happy stories, bed rest or budgies, but now she had been pounced on herself.
Horribly perfect
The article she read was about a special hospital where they sent sick children, children whose joints swelled and then locked, whose first symptom was a pain that kept coming back at the same time of day. As the article described them, they were children exactly like me. They didn’t have rheumatic fever. What they had was systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, known as Still’s Disease after George Frederick Still (1868–1941), the professor of pædiatrics who first described it.
She read the article again and again, trying to find something in it that didn’t fit my case. The fit was horribly perfect, the symptoms identical. The only discrepancy was the diagnosis. The only thing that didn’t fit was what the doctors had told us. Lightning had struck twice in exactly the same place – in my joints. The first strike had been destructive enough, but this second strike was worse. It seemed to blast with a sort of irony.
Mum rolled the magazine up without looking around and put it in her bag. She was smoother in the business of stealing now. She was hardened. She passed her hands over her face, and braced herself against the chair to stand up.
Only on the way home did unnatural calm give way to hysteria in its other form. Granny was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee when her daughter came flying in, her swollen mouth stuffed with blood-soaked swabs, hardly able to speak, making sounds that were more like howling than anything else.
Mum should have remembered who she was dealing with. It was a point of principle for Granny not to be taken by surprise. She said, ‘Laura, dear, whatever’s the matter? You look like a molested guinea-pig.’ Mum spat the swabs out into the sink, making fastidious Granny wince, and she tried to explain, though the anæsthetic did her articulation no favours. She was trying to master a new language.
‘I can’t understand a word you’re saying,’ said Granny impatiently. ‘Calm down and then start from the beginning.’ Instead Mum thrust the magazine at her, stabbing at the fatal article with her finger.
Granny didn’t like wearing her reading glasses, even in front of close kin. Her eyes flickered over the pages, but it may even be that she didn’t take in the full details. She gained an impression, and that was more than enough, usually, to enable her to marshal her forces.
‘Oh that,’ she said, pushing the magazine back to Mum. ‘The daughter of a very dear friend got that. I sent them both along to the top man. She’s cured now, quite cured.’ Granny couldn’t break the habit of knowing best, however little she knew. Send along was a very characteristic phrase. She popped people with problems into the post, making sure they were properly addressed to the Top Man, and then everything was sorted out.
Mum pushed the magazine back in her turn, and this time her finger was jabbing down onto one word out of the many in the article. Granny put her
face near the paper, then pulled her head back and looked down from an angle. And still the word was incurable.
Sidelong Heather monopolising
The sensations in Mum’s mouth began to alter, as the pain that had been postponed returned in instalments to take the place of chemical numbness. She waited for her tea to grow cold before she drank it, and then, fortified by the national drink, she set off for Dr Duckett’s surgery. Mum practically barged in, which wasn’t at all her usual hating-to-bother-you style, her sidelong Heather monopolising. She was beside herself, adding queue-jumping to the crimes of the day. Duckett was simply baffled when Mum produced the fateful pages. ‘Oh it won’t be that,’ he said. ‘I can set your mind at rest. That’s just something they teach you about at medical school, for completeness’ sake. You never actually see it.’ But I suppose somebody has to have it, if someone has gone to the trouble of naming a disease. It simply hadn’t occurred to him. As Dad put it when he heard, ‘It wasn’t on his radar.’
Granny got to work on the Top Man angle. A week after Mum’s appointment with the dentist she put in another appearance. She took a piece of paper out of her handbag, and also, this time, her glasses case. She put the glasses carefully on her nose, now that there was something worth reading, a name written in her own hand-writing. ‘The top man in this field, Laura,’ she said, ‘is a Professor Eric Bywaters. As it happens, the friend of a distant friend.’ Mum just stared at her. It was the same Bywaters who was heavily featured in the fateful article, and he held out no hope of a cure.
After that first time, Granny made no further reference to knowing someone whose daughter had had Still’s but was now cured. She didn’t admit to having been wrong – it wasn’t quite such a crisis as to call for that. She certainly didn’t apologise for holding out false hope at a terrible time.
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