I was truly home. I looked at Kirsty but her eyes were downcast, a smile curved her mouth, and I knew no words were needed to thank my big sister for bringing me into the squabbling bosom of the family once more.
When bedtime came and I was feeling somewhat strange in my little iron bed the feeling was soon dispelled when Margaret’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘Tell us a story, Chris.’
‘Yes, tell us a few.’ Alec’s words tumbled from the bed recess. ‘Could you tell us that one about the Christmas star that fell out of the sky?’
‘I might,’ I taunted, feeling my old power returning.
Muted cries of encouragement filled the room.
‘Be quiet, you lot!’ roared Da.
‘I’ll tell you a new one,’ I whispered, ‘about an old lady who died and became a Christmas angel.’
‘Oh yes,’ hissed Margaret, the tears already in her voice for an old lady who became an angel at Christmas. So I wove Granny Walker into my tales and even convinced myself that far above the stars of infinity she flew on silver wings, her spirit as bright as the spirit of Christmas itself.
That year a most longed-for gift came to us in a fateful and unusual way. Da had never allowed us to have animals though we tried everything to get him to unbend. Once he had relented and told us we could have a cat but it had to be orange. He had been a keen Orangeman in his day and his choice of colours for various things had been greatly influenced by this fact.
We had searched high and low for an orange cat and eventually found a big battle-scarred tom with one eye. He was dirty, smelly and bossy but his faults were tempered by his charming affection. Da took to him immediately, loudly proclaiming his virtues, but I suspected that he saw the one-eyed cat as a kindred spirit, one with the same disability as himself and with the same single-minded ideas for gaining the upper hand.
We had Tom for a week, a week in which he reigned supreme in our household. In the afternoons he catnapped on a comfortable bed and slept on top of the oven in the evenings. But he had obviously been a Casanova of the cat world and went off on the tiles one night never to return.
To console ourselves we fed and nursed every stray in the district. The neighbours complained bitterly about the smell of cats in the close till the strength of their united voices couldn’t be ignored by Mam, who loved animals and closed her eyes to a lot of our cat-caring activities.
We tried to forget about having a pet till that eve of Christmas 1953 when a quick light rap came on the door. A scruffy small boy stood on the landing and in his arms snuggled a beautiful black and white kitten. The boy’s story was long and involved but we managed to discover that he had rescued the kitten from a crowd of boys in the act of throwing it from a stairhead window. Our patronage towards animals was known to the boy and he hoped earnestly we would give the kitten a home, thus justifying his act of heroism.
‘My Mammy’s oot workin’ and canny keep cats or dugs,’ he concluded with a dismal sniff. ‘And my faither’s oan night shift and would skelp my lugs if I go hame wi’ a cat in the middle o’ the day.’
Mam simply couldn’t refuse the plea. She took the kitten in her arms, gave the boy sixpence, and shut the door.
‘What about Da?’ we asked, joy and apprehension struggling within us.
‘Leave him to me,’ she said firmly.
We swarmed round her into the kitchen. ‘Will you look at what I’ve got, Pop?’ she said, stroking the kitten who was purring fit to burst.
Da looked up from his paper and his expression grew fierce. ‘There’s no bloody cats coming in here!’ he snarled.
‘It’s already in,’ said Mam, with that special quiet determination she had. ‘It’ll be good for the bairns to have an animal … you never give them anything at Christmas … let the kitten be a present.’
He stood up, his one eye blazing with fury. We all took up strategic positions round Mam. Da’s fists bunched but the expected blast of rage didn’t come. He lowered himself back into his chair and muttered, ‘I’ll kick the brute if it gets in my road … I tell ye that!’ He glared at me, ‘Chris, you see and keep it away from me.’
It was his way of telling me the kitten was mine. My weak legs trembled with relief.
We spent Christmas mopping up little puddles and keeping the kitten out of Da’s road, but it showed a marked preference for his knee. Each time it approached he swiped it away.
‘I’ll strangle ye, ye skunk!’ was Da’s loving cry of encouragement. He took every opportunity to indicate that the cat was nothing but a nuisance, yet one day I caught him with it on his knee, his rough fingers tickling the little white throat, its purrs filling the kitchen.
‘Ye damt wee puffer, ye,’ chuckled Da affectionately, thereby christening the kitten with the most suitable name so far suggested.
So Puffer came and stayed, proving her worth in Da’s eyes by turning out to be an excellent mouser.
‘Jist as well it earns its keep,’ Da growled sullenly, slipping Puffer a tit-bit when he thought no one was looking. Puffer was a feline aristocrat, aloof, mysterious, intelligent, more cunning than Da himself. She made the most of any opportunity to make herself an agreeable cat in the eyes of this soft-hearted tyrant who was a mass of contradictions. In the end her dignified perseverance won and she soon earned a comfortable and assured place in the family circle.
When the magic of Christmas was over I settled uneasily into a new way of life. I was sent to a special school which taught physically and mentally handicapped children. In my mind, the very word ‘special’ set it apart, labelled it as different. I wanted to be tomboy Christine Fraser, wilder and stronger than any boy, with legs that could carry me up trees and over walls.
I hated the school with a hate different from that I had felt for my old school. That had been a dislike of discipline and certain academic subjects. This was a dislike of an alien world, a disbelief that I was a disabled child, the same as all the others. I wasn’t the same, I knew that, but no one else seemed to know it because the teachers treated me the same as the rest. It was wrong of them to lump me in and I resented them. Even though I had lost a lot of schooling I was well ahead of the others in my class. Some were older than me yet I felt they were babies. I was too young then to realize that the majority of the children had probably spent more time in hospital than out.
Epileptic fits were quite a common occurrence in the classroom. The teachers were cool-headed, efficient, kind and, most important of all, they were patient. My youth and ignorance blinded me to these facts. I hated it all, from the little grey bus that took me to and from school to the pink, rhubarb-tasting medicine we all lined up for each day after dinner.
It was a world where I stood on the fringe, an onlooker, a stranger. I looked at poor little twisted limbs and felt horror, I stared at calipers and crutches and felt frightened. That wasn’t going to happen to me; I couldn’t be looking at effigies of my future self. From my old school came gifts of fruit and sweets. Strict, fussy little Miss Black was the benefactress and all at once she loomed in my mind as an angel. I forgot all about her leather tawse, her flying skirt, her long bloomers. In my mind’s eye she was benign and smiling. I wanted to be back under her regime once more, to know I was normal and devilish enough to be on the receiving end of her sharp tongue. I cried into the fruit, I pushed aside the sweets. They were lovely gifts but the kind of things only given to the sick. I didn’t want to be thought of as anything other than untidy little me, a rogue, an urchin.
Shamefully, I took my feelings out on Mam, alternating between temper tantrums and moods of resentment.
A few months went by. I was in poor health. My pent-up excess of calcium sought an escape and my body broke out in torturous sores. It was possible to squeeze calcium from the smaller sores, like toothpaste from a tube. Pot-holes in my knees and the base of my spine were agony to touch. Mam was a wonderful nurse. Three times a day she dressed the open wounds while I cried with pain. I was attending the out-patients depart
ment of the hospital and after one such visit it was decided that I would have to be admitted once more to hospital.
‘I can look after her, doctor,’ said Mam, loath to part with me though I meant so much work for her.
‘No, Mrs Fraser,’ he told her. ‘Christine needs to be under our supervision and there are one or two new drugs we’d like to try.’
So I returned to my old ward, the medical ward for adults. It was easier to put me there because the doctors were familiar with my case. I wasn’t really sorry to go back to hospital. I was very tired and no longer ran about the ward. My muscles were so weak I could barely lift my head from my pillow. The sight of food made me feel sick. Injections of cortisone restored my appetite though the drug’s side effects puffed up my face and caused my heart to race. I was tried on a calcium-free diet, then a salt-free diet. When the doctor told me I was being put on a diet that included charcoal, I didn’t know what he meant and smiled dumbly. I always smiled like an idiot at the doctors because they were objects to be treated with awe, not people but objects who patted your hands, smiled, told you how wonderful you were, how brave you had to be.
When the doctors made their morning rounds it was a revered hour. A pin could have been heard to drop. One deaf old lady gave me many private giggles because of her sweet oblivion to all conventions. Unfailingly she needed a bedpan during doctors’ rounds. What a crime that was! For anyone to need a mundane thing like a bedpan while the Gods were on their rounds. Disgraceful!
Little student nurses scurried to draw curtains round Granny Mitchell’s bed and a discreetly covered bedpan made a discreet journey from slounge to Granny, who grunted and fussed while the nurses shooed at her to be quiet. But Granny Mitchell was an incorrigible old dear. No one could stop the rumblings that issued from behind the screens; ably amplified by the metal bedpan, they ripped the silence of the ward apart. Doctors listening for heartbeats were confused. They frowned, and Sister McQuarry’s lips became a thin line. In her I had met my real-life gorgon. Unlike my Hebridean Sister she didn’t look like a gorgon. She was young and slim with a pretty face, but her lips were tight and her blue eyes cold. She didn’t have to speak twice to send the nurses running at her bidding. A flush crept over her neck to her face when she was angry. Unlike my fat old Hebridean Sister, she didn’t appear to like children, and I knew my tender years would earn no concessions from her whatsoever.
She was clinically clean, from her starched white head-square to her neat, medium-heeled black shoes. No wrinkles marred the seat of her skirt and I often wondered if she ever sat down.
One day Doctor Masters approached my bed, patted my hand, and asked how I was feeling. I gave him my unfailing answer, ‘Fine, thank you.’ I think if I was dying I would still have said that.
‘Good girl, Christine, good girl,’ he approved, and I felt like a small puppy who was taking to a rigid training routine quite admirably. He mumbled to Sister McQuarry and she whipped the screens round my bed. My starched hospital gown was drawn up to my chin and I lay passively while my famous spleen was prodded and my limbs worked this way and that. Again my belly was poked, stimulating my bladder. But I had learned a lot of control since my illness. Granny was rumbling uncaringly from behind her curtains and my stifled giggle came out in a snort.
‘Did that hurt, Christine?’ asked the doctor, his fingers fluttering above my navel. Sister McQuarry glared behind his back and I hastened to assure him, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Good girl,’ he approved again. ‘You’re coming along nicely but we are going to try you out with something new.’
That was when he told me about the charcoal, but I didn’t take in the full import of his words till a nurse came to my bed the next morning bearing a plateful of shrivelled black morsels. ‘Specially for you,’ she beamed cheerfully.
‘I can’t eat that!’ I said in horror.
‘It’s part of your treatment,’ she said firmly, leaving the plate on my locker.
‘I’ll get poisoned,’ I told my fellow patients tearfully.
‘Get it down!’ they cried with all the sadistic fervour I had thought was only common to Da. ‘Get the boilers stoked.’
I crunched the hideous stuff, washing it down with the watery orange juice from the jug on my locker. After a few days I was sick of the whole business but felt too ill to protest or care much about anything. It was difficult for me to sit upright in bed. Even with pillows stuffed round my back I lolled to one side, unable to stay put. The pillows were eventually taken away and I spent my days lying flat on my back. I ate and drank in this position. The nurses were often too busy to help me at mealtimes. I rejected such aids as feeding cups, which I felt were too related to helplessness. Flat on my back, I refused to depend on anyone and devised my own methods for getting food and drink past my lips. Da’s seed was in me, there was no doubt of that. I had inherited his tenacity, which was my most valuable asset at this critical stage in my life.
Day merged into day, doctors came and went but could find no ready cure for my illness. I was too young and terrified to question the Gods. Mam did, of course, but they couldn’t tell her very much. One night she went off determinedly to seek out Sister McQuarry. I saw them in the corridor, Mam small-looking beside the tall, coldly detached figure of Sister McQuarry.
When Mam came back her eyes were very shiny. She looked odd, the way she looked when she wanted to cry but was holding it back.
‘What’s wrong, Mam?’ I asked in panic. ‘What did she say?’
‘A lot of nonsense. I don’t like that wifie very much. She’s a cold fish. Don’t worry, lamb, I’ll make sure they get you up out of this bed.’
That which had upset Mam so badly wasn’t known to me till years later. That night Sister McQuarry had told her, quite unemotionally, that my bones would just crumble away, I would deteriorate quite quickly, and if the calcium didn’t stop its rampage through my body it would get into vital organs like heart and kidneys, all of which didn’t make for a very bright future if a future at all.
But at the time I knew nothing of this. Despite my weakness I was full of hope. Every time the doctors came I waited with bated breath for them to reach my bed. The great decision on whether a patient remained ‘inside’ or went home lay with the real Gods, the professors who came once a week on their hushed rounds. Next to them the ordinary doctors were like real human beings with no pedestals to make them seem ten feet tall.
The fuss on the great day was unbelievable. An army of cleaners arrived at daybreak. Beds were tidied to such a state of neatness they seemed to be much more important than the mere humans who occupied them. All unnecessary items were packed into lockers with the concession of a magazine or book that one could pretend to read till the Gods came to your bed.
Bladders and bowels were squeezed dry as the great hour approached. Little ladies hastened to add discreet smudges of rouge and lipstick to pale faces in an effort to deceive the Gods into thinking that they were bursting with good health. Granny Mitchell was enthroned so long on a bedpan she was eventually driven to roar out despairingly, ‘I canny pee any more, nurse!’, bringing to mind the realization that even the Granny Mitchells of the world had their limitations.
During that stay in hospital I had a young companion of my own age in the next bed to mine. We were at the giggly stage and the sombre procedure of preparing for the Gods only served to make us more merry.
Two days after Mam’s talk with Sister McQuarry the Great Gods came on their weekly visit to our ward. The swing doors opened and they crowded in, a silver-haired professor, another with beetling brows straying over horn-rimmed specs, three ‘ordinary’ doctors with my own Doctor Masters in their midst … and, horror of horrors, a large entourage of students with shuffling feet and pimply faces. My rare disease evoked a great deal of interest from the professors who took a real delight in showing me off to the students. There was a general move to the first bed. The patients on the left-hand side of the door were the lucky on
es. They were the first to be visited. Those at the top of the ward weren’t so bad either, though much sweat and frustration had to be endured before the Gods reached them. The poor souls on the right hand side of the door were the worst off. An hour could pass before their turn came. By that time they might be bursting for a bedpan and with the dinner trolley having arrived in the kitchen the smell of cabbage would be in full competition with perfume and talcum powder.
My bed was near the top of the ward on the left so I only had half an hour to tremble before the Gods descended on me.
The ward was hushed. Only the mumble of the medics’ voices broke the deathly silence. The students shuffled. One or two dared to smirk at each other. The rows of neat white beds might have contained corpses, so quiet was everyone.
Granny Mitchell sat up amidst the folds of a voluminous pink bed jacket. Her bright little eyes took in the scene with interest. She was not in the least awed by the Great Gods and spoke to them at length about her two cats, her gas bills, the state of her bowels, the effect the hospital food had on her delicate digestion. But she had a long wait before the Great Gods reached her bed that day, because she had been moved to the other side of the ward. Her bright eyes grew heavy, her head lolled, tiny snorts and puffs escaped her lips.
Mary began to giggle. ‘Granny’s teeth are coming out,’ she gasped.
‘Shh!’ I warned in agony, because the Gods were only five beds away. But Mary, blonde, blue eyes shining in a cheeky face, had started and couldn’t stop. ‘Look at Granny,’ she persisted.
I glanced over and sure enough the old lady’s teeth were hanging over her sagging lips. A sucked-in breath snatched the precarious teeth back in. Moments later they were expelled once more on to her lower lip.
The bubbles of mirth rose inside me and I choked them back desperately. Mary was already lying on her back with her hands clapped over her mouth.
Blue Above the Chimneys Page 9