2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  ‘I don’t think you’d be an IRA target, Peter.’

  ‘You’re joking. Anyone with a profile like mine’s got to be at risk.’

  ‘Wonderful houses in Ireland,’ I said. It wasn’t worth it.

  ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said. ‘How can you live here with these taxes? You work two months for yourself, ten for the taxman.’

  ‘I live very simply, Peter. Very simply.’

  ‘So do I, dammit. I’m going to regret this whisky. If my doctor saw me drinking this he’d wash his hands of me…How’s Ben keeping?’

  ‘Cancer. Prostate—but he seems to be winning.’

  This news depressed him and he started to list his own complaints—hardening arteries, angina, increasing deafness. We’re falling apart, Logan, he kept saying, we’re pathetic old wrecks.

  I let him rant on. I don’t feel old, although I must confess the signs of ageing are everywhere. My legs have grown thinner as the muscles shrink—and they’re practically hairless; my buttocks are disappearing, the seat of my pants loose and empty. One funny thing: my cock and balls seem slacker, lower-slung, hanging freer between my legs. And they look bigger too, as they do when you’ve just stepped out of a hot bath. Is this normal or is it just me?

  I forgot to say in the midst of all this Gloria sadness that I had a letter from Noel Lange’s office saying that I had been left a property in France in the will of a Monsieur Cyprien Dieudonne.↓

  ≡ Cyprien Dieudonne had died in 1974, aged eighty-seven.

  For one mad moment I thought it might have been Cyprien’s own chartreuse in Quercy but looking more closely at the address and after consulting my atlas I see the house is in the Lot, a mmson de maitre outside a village called Sainte-Sabine. So I’ve written back saying, sell it. Gloria too has left me everything she owns, which amounts to £900 in her current account (thank you, Pablo), two suitcases of clothes and the contents of a storage container in a warehouse in Sienna. What am I meant to do with that? What I need is a benefactor of real substance.

  §

  [On Monday, 7 June, at 11.30 a.m. as LMS was crossing Lupus Street, SW1, he was hit by a speeding post office van and badly injured. He was rushed by ambulance to St Thomas’s Hospital for emergency surgery. His spleen had ruptured, his skull was fractured and his left leg was completely broken in three places, not to mention serious bruising and abrasions on his body.

  After his operation (he had metal pins inserted in his leg) he was moved to St Botolph’s Hospital in Peckham and installed in Ward C. The journal resumes some four weeks after the accident.]

  Monday, 5 July

  One of the old ladies who comes round the ward with puzzle-books and sewing-kits has procured me a biro and writing pad and so finally I am able to log my impressions of this infernal place. Swiss roll and lumpy custard for the third time this week—I’m sorry, but Swiss roll is not a pudding; Swiss roll is a cake. Someone in the catering department is raking off money that should be going to provide proper puddings. Completely typical of this place—built in the nineteenth century and still redolent of that century’s values and practices. For example Ward C is vast, a huge high-ceilinged room like a village hall or a school chapel, and was purpose-built as a ward with tall thin windows on three sides to let in as much ‘healing’ sunlight as possible. There are thirty beds in here, twice as many as ever intended, and the nursing staff is overstretched, harassed and very short-tempered. I spent two weeks marooned in a middle aisle before Paula—the only nurse I like—managed to have me moved to a corner. So now I only have one neighbour—though the current occupant, an old wino, leaves much to be desired. These warm sunny July days make the ward cook up like a greenhouse. At mid afternoon we are lying gasping on our beds, running with sweat, those with the energy or power fling back the bedclothes and fan ourselves with magazines and newspapers. I won’t dwell on the noxious marshy odours that rise up from the exposed sheets. It has provided a small glimpse into the physical conditions of the Victorian age: when you come to think of it everyone must have been intolerably hot in summer—clothes were thicker, people wore many more layers of them, it was considered impolite to remove a jacket. The stench of body odour from both men and women must have been overpowering. Then factor-in all the horse manure on the street…Nineteenth-century London must have stunk like a cesspit.

  My left leg is enclosed up to the hip in plaster, rendering me more or less immobile. I piss in a bottle and if I want to shit I have to summon a nurse. I refuse to use a bedpan so they have to wheelchair me to the lavatory. There I park myself on the pan and do my business. There are no doors on the stalls. The nurses hate me for not using a bedpan.

  The only vaguely pleasurable consequence of my plastered leg is that I have to have a sponge bath. This is done brusquely and efficiently but for two minutes I return to infancy again—arms are lifted and armpits laved, a cool sponge ducks around my genitals, I lean forward and my back is swabbed. A no-nonsense towelling and a dusting of talcum powder finish off the procedure. If that milkcow Sister Frost heaved out a breast for me to suckle, then the picture would be complete.

  The food is disgusting, condemnable—the worst I’ve eaten since my schooldays at Abbey. We are provided with every institutional horror imaginable—mince with watery mash and tinned veg.; a fish pie with no fish; curried eggs; jammy, doughy dumplings with lumpy custard. You have to eat it—especially me, stuck here in my bed. Once a day someone pushes round a trolley and you can buy biscuits and chocolate bars for extra sustenance. It is a truly terrible diet—everyone complains of constipation.

  Paula is the only nurse I like because she calls me Mr Mountstuart. I thanked her and asked her for her surname. ‘Premoli,’ she said. Right, Miss Premoli it shall be, I said but she asked me to call her Paula in case the other nurses thought it odd. Interesting surname, I observed, and she told me she was from Malta. But you’ve red hair, I said, unthinkingly. And you’ve got grey hair, she replied: how funny is that?

  §

  [NOTE IN RETROSPECT. My memories of the accident itself were very incomplete and disjointed. I had always noted, since my return to London, that post office vans were invariably driven helter-skelter as if the drivers were in danger of missing some crucial deadline or appointment. The one that hit me must have been doing 60 or 70 mph. But it was entirely my fault: my mind was on something else—I simply didn’t look—and I stepped out into the road with as much pre-emptive caution as if I were crossing my kitchen floor. Apparently I was flung some fifteen yards by the impact. I remember nothing of the actual crash itself and experienced no pain. I woke up some two days later in St Thomas’s, wondering where the hell I was and what I was doing. I was very lucky to be alive, I was told. Someone from the post office’s customer relations department sent me a bunch of wilting gladioli ‘wishing me a speedy recovery’. Unfortunate choice of adjective, I remember thinking at the time.]

  [August-September

  OBSERVATIONS FROM WARD C

  Massive bowel evacuation today after what I realize was effectively two months of constipation. Feel better but become simultaneously conscious of just how much weight I’ve lost. I’m now a skinny old buzzard whose hair needs cutting.

  §

  This is a geriatric ward though no one will actually admit it. No one here is younger than sixty. It’s a geriatric ward in the same sense as a cancer ward. We are all old men with old men’s problems. Many of us die. The ward is too big for me to do an accurate count and patients are always being moved around (to disguise the fatalities?). I would say around thirty of us have died since I arrived here.

  §

  Paula went on her summer holiday yesterday. Where are you going? I asked. Malta, silly. She wears a gold cross around her neck—good Catholic girl. Her replacement is a male nurse called Gary—he has many lurid tattoos.

  §

  The man I hate most is four beds along from me. His name is Ned Darwin but I refer to him as Mr No-Fuss. The nurses love him: he never
complains, he always has a bright observation and a cheery smile for everyone, he seems to relish the food. He has had a stroke but can limp about fairly well with an arm-crutch. He knows all the nurses’ names. He came up to me on one particularly hot day and tapped my plaster leg. ‘Must be itching like crazy under there, I’ll warrant.’ He’s the type of man who uses phrases like ‘I’ll warrant’, ‘yea or nay’ and ‘much obliged’. I told him to fuck off.

  §

  I demanded to see some sort of managerial⁄administrative figure to protest about the absence of doors in the lavatories (a significant factor in our collective constipation problem, in my opinion). This was rocking the boat in a very unequivocal way and drew darker looks than usual from the nurses. A young, suited man eventually appeared and listened to what I had to tell him. This measure is in place for your own safety, Logan,’ he said. I asked him to call me Mr Mountstuart, which he neglected to do, not employing any name thereafter. Nothing is going to happen: I have merely enhanced my reputation as a troublemaker.

  §

  The description of the Pecksniff family’s trip to London in Martin Chuzzlewit (Chapters 8 and 9) is the greatest passage of comic writing in English Literature. Discuss.

  §

  The drain has been removed from the area of my spleen. The ache in my leg seems reduced. No side effects so far from my fractured skull. I must have seen ten doctors since arriving here, each one taking up my case with no evidence of foreknowledge: ‘So, you were in some kind of a car crash?’, ‘Oh, I see you ruptured your spleen.’ I don’t blame them and I don’t blame the nurses. I hate living in this ghastly place—God knows what it must be like working here. The thought remains, however: there must be a better, more humane, more civilized way of looking after our sick and infirm. If the state is going to take the job on, then it has to be done in a wholehearted way: everyone is demeaned by this petty, vindictive, penny-pinching, care-less world.

  This is the first time in my life that I have been badly injured and seriously unwell; the first time I have had an operation and a general anaesthetic; the first time I have been in hospital. Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell—their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.

  §

  A new sister on the ward: ‘I hear you won’t use a bedpan.’ You hear correctly, I said. Then she said that if I ‘needed the toilet’ I had to go under my own steam or use a bedpan, nurses would no longer be detailed to wheel me to and fro, it took up too much valuable time. Then you’d better find me some crutches, I said, because I will not be using a bedpan. You’re not authorized crutches, she said with a triumphant smile, and a bedpan was brought. So, when I needed a shit I hauled myself out of bed and managed to make my way over to No-Fuss. ‘Can I borrow your crutch? Thanks.’ I knew he didn’t want to lend it to me because he thought he’d get into trouble. Sod him.

  §

  The spleen. My ruptured spleen. I looked the word up in an encyclopedia. ‘A small purplish red organ that lies under the diaphragm. The spleen acts as a filter against foreign organisms that infect the bloodstream.’ In the crash my spleen burst. In medieval times the spleen was regarded as the source of melancholy emotions in man. Hence ‘splenetic’—a tendency to produce melancholy or depression of spirits, having a morose or peevish disposition. I worry that my ruptured spleen has released its special poison into my body. Is this the source of my new bile-filled and rancorous nature?

  §

  I worry about my flat—no one’s been there for weeks. Paula asked me why I never had any visitors and I said my family all lived abroad—a pathetic lie. I said my daughter was in America. ‘Still, you’d have thought she’d’ve come over to see her dad,’ Paula said.

  A Roman Catholic priest came round. ‘Paula told me you were of our faith.’ How did Paula know? Do we give ourselves away, somehow? Certain words, expressions, gestures: . In some way or another our common ground must be revealed. I told him that I was a devout atheist and that I’d lost my faith at the age of eighteen. He asked me if I had never felt God’s love in my life. I told him to look around this room with its cargo of human suffering and misery. But God is in this room, he insisted with a smile. I said no plumbline could fathom the depths of my faithlessness—quoting John Francis Byme, Joyce’s friend, at him. He didn’t know what to say to that, so I asked him to leave.

  §

  The old man next to me died this morning. He lay in his bed as if he had been nailed to it, immobile, an oxygen mask hissing on his face. Only his eyes were expressive and he would roll them alarmingly my way from time to time. Eventually I decided to interpret this as a signal. I swung out of bed and raised his mask.

  ‘You an Englishman,’ he whispered.

  ‘Sort of. Yes.’

  §

  His bulging eyes flicked everywhere like a chameleon’s.

  ‘Pull the plugs out, mate. I want to go.’

  I looked around. For an insane moment I thought I might actually do it but I saw a nurse marching over to us. I put his mask back on. He died about two hours later.

  §

  Mr Singh [LMS’s upstairs neighbour] came to visit, bringing with him the accumulated weeks of post. He told me that the telephone and the electricity had been cut off in my flat. He had with him the form from the post office that would allow him to collect my unclaimed pension. Good old Subadar (I should explain; Mr Singh was briefly in the Indian Army—so I call him Subadar and he calls me Commander). He sat and chatted for a while and told me he had had a vasectomy while I had been in hospital and he had never seen anyone as happy as Mrs Singh. I sense my status in the ward has changed since his visit—now I am even more a man of mystery.

  I wrote cheques to cover my various outstanding bills and he took them away to post.

  §

  No-Fuss leaves today. The nurses gathered round and applauded him as he limped out of the ward. I can’t see this happening when my turn comes around. I have another terminal case beside me—he groans terribly in the night—and I’m beginning to suspect I’m being singled out.

  §

  The plaster came off my left leg today—revealing an etiolated, hairy, knobbly thing half the size of its partner. I noticed an odd kink in the shin where the broken bone has not knitted together properly and that had the surgeon frowning. The thigh and calf muscles are almost completely wasted so I am promised two hours of physiotherapy a day to build them up again. I sense an urgency to have done with me, now the physical sign of my incapacity has been removed. The feeling is mutual.

  A door has been fitted to one of the lavatory stalls. A small but sweet victory.

  Wednesday, 8 September

  I must note this down: something strange has happened to my eyesight. I woke this morning to see half the world—the top half—in my area of vision screened by what I can only describe as a swirling brown fog. It was as if some sort of noxious mist had descended, but as soon as I moved my head I realized the discoloration was a property of my eyesight and not the world beyond.

  A doctor was summoned, a young Sinhalese woman. She asked me if I was allergic to certain foodstuffs and booked me in for an EGG test. I told her I had fractured my skull in my accident. What accident, she asked? I’ve been here so long I’m already ancient history. When I explained she thought I should see a neuro-surgeon: there was no more talk about allergies.

  Thursday, 9 September

  The mist has cleared. I was shaving this morning and suddenly realized the top half of the mirror was no longer brown. The surgeon, a Mr Guide, examined me, tested my reflexes and suggested arj opthalmologist. Mr Guide was civil and seemed concerned. He was an elderly man with thick silvery hair. What do I mean ‘elderly’? He must be ten years younger man I am.

  §

  Paula gave me a St Christopher’s medal on a silver cha
in. Why, I asked her? It’s far too kind of you. To keep you safe on your journey through life, Mr Mountstuart. Then she said she wouldn’t be here when I leave. When I leave? Yes, she said, you’re leaving tomorrow morning and I’m on late shift. She kissed my cheek. Look after yourself, take care, watch out for post office vans. My throat thickened and my eyes stung. Dear sweet Paula. At least I’m walking out alive.

  Friday, 24 September

  Turpentine Lane. So strange being back, looking at these possessions, these sticks of furniture with a stranger’s eyes. This is your home, Mountstuart, these are your chattels. Like boarding the Marie Celeste. There was a great drift, two feet deep, of handbills and free newspapers banked behind the door. Much as I hated the place, the hospital was secure, known; now I find the city clamorous and fear-inducing. And I experience my enforced solitude—which I used to relish—as disconcerting, after months of communal ward-life. I sat for half an hour this evening waiting for someone to bring me my supper. There was no food in the house so I limped down to die Cornwallis for a drink (die hospital have loaned me an aluminium walking stick). Here were die same old faces, the same steeped, beery atmosphere. The landlord nodded hello, as if I’d been in yesterday. I’m not one of his favourites—1 spend too much time and not enough money in his establishment. I ordered a large Scotch and soda and two pork pies (Subadar had handed over a great wodge of backed-up pension money. I was momentarily flush) and the landlord acknowledged the fact with a rare insincere smile. I looked at the punters, the drinkers—my species-sharers—and wished them all dead.

  1977

  When I write my memoirs I will refer to this period of my life as the Dog-Food Years. My prosperity was illusory. I don’t quite know how it has come about but since the accident—if it were possible—I have become markedly poorer. Rates have gone up in Pimlico and everything seems more expensive—and it actually cost me money to have my power and telephone restored. I was so outraged I told them to disconnect the phone line again permanently—there’s a perfectly good phone box at the end of the road. I do need electricity, unfortunately.