Playing Dead

by Jessie Keane

  No, he wasn’t reassured. They were going to cut his foot off, that was all he was sure of.

  ‘Don’t take it off,’ he managed to mumble, feeling stupid, thick-mouthed, barely able to force the words out.

  ‘¿Qué?’ asked one of the smiling nurses.

  ‘Don’t smile at me, you cunt, just listen to what I’m saying, don’t take my foot off,’ he shouted, or at least he tried to shout, but it came out in low garbled English, and the nurse looked at him blankly, not understanding.

  ‘Don’t take off my foot,’ he was still saying when he saw the big lights, the surgeons all gowned up, rows of gleaming silver saws and hammers lined up at the ready. A mask came down over his face.

  ‘Don’t—’

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter 24

  When he came round he was by a window, and the sun was beaming through onto the bed where he lay. He was very hot. He lay there drowsily for long moments, staring out of the dusty window, seeing rooftops, chimneys, a brilliant blue sky.

  Then he remembered, and the fear clamped hold of him all over again.

  Oh Jesus, his foot.

  They’d cut it off.

  He couldn’t face it, not life as an invalid, not him.

  He whooped in a panicky breath and felt the compression of his ribs beneath their robust strapping. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t: his arm was in plaster and he couldn’t get a grip on anything. There were pulleys, ropes, things tying him to the bed.

  He daren’t look down. He couldn’t. Some things were just too fucking awful to face head-on.

  He kept his eyes on the rooftops, the blue sky. Easier to look out there. Pigeons soaring along, flying free. He envied them that. Here he was, tied to a bed, unable to move. He had a sense then that he was a very fit man in everyday life. His body was well-honed, muscular; obviously he looked after himself.

  Yeah, but who am I? he thought again.

  He didn’t know.

  Maybe he was just a miserable, stinking coward, because he couldn’t look at what they’d done to him.

  He ought to look. Whatever had been done was done, what was the point in averting his eyes?

  He steeled himself. He was going to look. He had to look.

  He looked.

  Both feet were still there.

  All the breath left him in a rush and a half-hysterical laugh burst from him as he stared at what they’d done to him in surgery. There were huge bolts through both his ankles – right through. The bolts protruded by three inches on either side of the mangled flesh of his feet. And hooked up to the bolts were pulleys, with weights attached. The weights were pulling his legs out straight, to prevent atrophy. The bed itself was sloping upwards at the end, so that his feet were higher than his head. It felt strange. And . . . there was no pain.

  After discovering he still had both his feet, that was the best part: no pain.

  He lay back, and his eyes closed. He slept.

  Brother Benito came in to visit.

  ‘My friend, you look better,’ he said in near-perfect English. Seeing the man’s confusion at the arrival of this stranger he said: ‘One of the goat boys found you on the rocks. I came with you to the hospital. Do you remember?’

  The man in the bed didn’t remember much at all. He just stared at his saviour. Brother Benito was a big man, dressed in plain, coarse monk’s robes, with a tonsured head of grey hair, bushy white eyebrows and a big-featured, almost lumpish face. It was not a patrician face by any means; in fact, the monk looked if anything like an old trooper, battle-scarred and buffeted by wars, but his clear grey eyes were astonishingly gentle and good-humoured.

  The man in the bed stretched out his one good hand. ‘Thanks.’

  Brother Benito shook it. He was surprised at the strength in the man’s fingers. Here was a grip that could crush, easily.

  ‘Who’s paying for this?’ asked the man. He hadn’t been asked for cash and he was grateful for that – he didn’t think he had any – but he was anxious that there was going to be a huge bill waiting for him upon his eventual departure from the hospital.

  And then where would he go? He had no idea where he lived or what he did in life. His mind was as clear as a blank sheet of paper. How did he earn his living? He hadn’t a clue.

  ‘The brothers are paying,’ said Brother Benito.

  ‘I can’t let you do that,’ protested the man.

  But Benito only smiled serenely. ‘My son, it is our duty to help our fellow man. You needed help – you still do – and so it is an honour to provide whatever is needed.’

  ‘You say you come from the monastery,’ said the man. ‘It can’t be rich.’

  ‘It is rich enough,’ said Brother Benito.

  ‘Then thank you again.’

  The doctors were coming on their rounds, and the man asked that Brother Benito should stay and hear what they said to him. Their faces were grave this morning. But why, he wondered? They’d done the work on his shattered ankles; now it was just a case of letting them mend – wasn’t it?

  They began to speak to him in Mallorquin and he understood them. Maybe this was progress; maybe the fog in his brain was going to clear soon. He knew he was English, and that he spoke Mallorquin too.

  They asked him how he felt and told him that they had made an attempt to reassemble his ankles, but it was no more than that; he must prepare himself for the possibility that he would not walk again.

  The man exchanged looks with the doctors and with Benito.

  ‘You what?’ he asked angrily.

  They’d carved him up, turned him into something resembling Frankenstein’s bloody monster, only to tell him that it was an experiment, a gamble, and one that probably wouldn’t work?

  ‘We have to prepare you for the worst,’ said the doctor.

  He was going to be in a wheelchair. He could see it in their eyes. What had they done all this for, the money? Bastards!

  ‘Just fuck off the lot of you. Leave me alone,’ he snarled. The doctors left.

  Benito remained in his chair.

  ‘And what the fuck are you hanging around for? Piss off!’

  Benito rose and quietly left the room. The man knew he’d seen the last of Brother Benito now. He’d cursed, shocking him no doubt, and told him to get lost. Somewhere deep inside himself he knew that he wasn’t good enough for such a holy man to bother with anyway.

  He turned his face away from the sun, unable to bear the sight of the sky and the free, swooping birds, while he was in here, confined, calling for bedpans, having to pee in a bottle, having no more power or say in anything than a babe in arms; trapped within his own ailing body.

  Chapter 25

  The physiotherapist came by a month later. She was a large, brown-eyed brunette in a white uniform, and she told him that now the healing process was under way, they would devise a programme of exercises to strengthen his ankles.

  The man gazed at her with cynicism. Why were they going through the motions like this, attempting to deceive him? He knew he wasn’t going to walk again, that all he had to look forward to was a half-life: why were they tantalizing him with false hopes?

  ‘Fuck off,’ he told her.

  Her olive skin flushed brick red, and she quickly left the room.

  Next morning, the doctors came again. ‘So,’ they said, ‘you are not even going to try to help yourself get better?’

  The man gazed at them with dark, steel-blue eyes. He was an imposing man, they thought, with his blue-black hair, his piratical hook of a nose, his grim, determined mouth. He didn’t seem at all intimidated by them, as some people were.

  ‘What’s the point?’ he flung back at them. ‘You’ve told me I’m not going to walk again. What the hell’s the use of exercises to me?’

  ‘There is always hope,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Piss off out of it.’

  The doctors left. Days dragged past and turned into weeks. The man didn’t eat, he was too sick at heart for that. A
ll his meals were sent back. The nurses bathed him, attended to his needs, adjusted the weights on his ankle, but he was detached, uninterested. Then, finally, bored to tears, he saw the tall brunette physio passing by his half-open door.

  ‘Hey!’ he called out to her. ‘You!’

  She stopped and came into his room, her pretty face blank with dislike.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  For a moment she just stared at him, not speaking. Then she said, coldly: ‘Marta. Did you want something?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Show me some of these bloody exercises, Marta. I’m sick to death of lying here like a fucking invalid.’

  She showed him how to flex his ankles against the weights on the pulleys. The left was not too bad. Just about bearable, at least. But the right was agony. After the surgery, there had been no pain. Now, there was pain so intense he felt sweat break out on his brow.

  ‘Jesus!’ he complained.

  ‘A little pain, a little gain.’ She shrugged.

  The woman was obviously a sadist.

  ‘Keep doing that. Fifty on each ankle,’ she said, and left him to it.

  She came the next day. His ankle had throbbed like a bastard all night, keeping him awake. He always refused sleeping pills; he hated the damned things. He felt confined, bitter, furious at the world, and even more furious with his brain, which refused to give him any information whatsoever about who he was, or how he had come to be here on this big Spanish island.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, watching him steadily.

  ‘How do you think?’ he snarled.

  ‘Do you know, there are people in here dying who are politer than you,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah? Well go and harass those poor bastards, then.’

  She left. At the door, she paused. ‘Fifty,’ she said. ‘Both feet.’

  He did a hundred, groaning and swearing and sweating through the agony of it. In the afternoon, he awoke from a restless doze and found Benito sitting at his bedside.

  ‘Oh,’ he said rudely, wincing as the pain hit him again. ‘You.’

  ‘How are you?’ asked Brother Benito.

  ‘Fucking wonderful. There’s this girl keeps coming in here saying give me fifty, and then I feel like my feet are going to drop off.’

  ‘You need to work at it, to get better.’

  The man glared at the monk. Whatever you said to this god-botherer, you couldn’t seem to shake him. ‘Look, I thought I told you to fuck off.’

  ‘So you did.’ Benito smiled. ‘Yet here I am, back again.’

  ‘So take the hint and do one.’

  ‘Is there anything I can bring you next time I call?’ asked the brother, standing up with a serene smile.

  ‘Yeah. Whisky.’

  Benito frowned. ‘I don’t want to save your feet at the expense of your liver.’

  ‘Then don’t fucking well bother,’ snapped the man, turning away.

  Benito brought the whisky. It was cheap, raw stuff, almost bitter, but it helped dull the pain. The man did the physio day after tortured day, sweating and cursing, and then drank the whisky at night so that he could sleep.

  After six months, the agony began to ease. After seven, it was manageable; he could sleep without the deadening effect of the liquor. After eight, two nurses came and said it was time for the bolts to be removed. They removed the left one okay, but the right one had fused itself to the healing bone.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said, irritated by their fluttering efforts.

  He reached down and yanked the thing. They squawked out objections. A moment of searing agony, and the bolt was out. He felt like he’d pulled out most of his flesh with it. He looked at the metal bolt lying, bloody, on the sheets, and felt a surging upswell of sickness. He fell back onto his pillows, panting.

  They cleaned the exit wounds on either side of his ankle, bandaged them, then cleared away all the paraphernalia of pulleys and levers. They cranked the bed down so that the bottom of it was no longer elevated, but flat.

  ‘Whoa,’ said the man, clinging to the edges of the thin mattress. ‘You’ve tipped it too far, I’m going to slip out the bottom.’

  ‘You’re lying flat,’ they said.

  ‘No I’m bloody not.’

  ‘Yes you are. You’ve been tipped up for so long, it just feels as if you’re tipping downwards now. You’re not.’

  After that, they left him alone.

  Next day, Marta was back.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he moaned. He’d had a rotten night again: he’d felt the whole time as if he was going to slide straight off the end of the bed; the pain had been extreme – and where the hell was Benito? He needed more whisky.

  The physio looked at him with jaded eyes. ‘Today we step it up to a hundred flexes,’ she told him. ‘And tomorrow we get you out of that bed.’

  ‘Bitch,’ he muttered, but the prospect of getting out of bed was tantalizing.

  That was, until he tried it.

  When he lowered his feet to the floor they went blue, then black, then brilliant red as the blood surged back into them. He screwed his face up and endured it as the pins and needles danced under the skin of his feet like a marauding army of soldier ants.

  ‘Shit a brick,’ winced the man, sitting on the edge of the bed and wondering what had hit him. His head spun with the shock of being semi-upright. His feet were acutely painful. His newly healed ribs throbbed. So did his left arm and his head.

  ‘Easy, yes?’ asked Marta with a teasing light in her eye. She was holding a pair of crutches.

  ‘Piece of piss,’ he said, sweating with the pain of it. Still, he almost smiled back at the bossy cow. She wasn’t so bad after all. And she had a terrific arse on her.

  ‘Now, you walk,’ she said, and held out the crutches.

  But they’d said he wouldn’t walk again.

  He looked at the crutches. He reached out and took them from her, tucked them under his arms. ‘This is a waste of time,’ he told her.

  ‘Walk,’ she repeated firmly.

  He levered himself to his feet. Felt instantly giddy, unreal. The weight hit his feet and they throbbed out a hot, heavy complaint. He gasped and stood there, supported by the crutches, swaying a little, wondering if he was going to pass out.

  ‘Walk,’ she said again.

  ‘Oh hell, all right,’ he muttered, and gingerly put one foot in front of the other. It hurt. He stepped forward again, and again. The pain was excruciating. ‘Fuck that,’ he shouted, and threw the crutches aside in sudden, impotent fury. Having done that, he collapsed to the floor in an ungainly heap.

  ‘Shit!’ he bellowed.

  He wasn’t going to be able to walk again, what the hell was she tormenting him like this for?

  ‘Patience,’ said Marta, bending and putting his arm across her robust shoulders. She started to haul him upright again. With her help, he was able to flop back onto the bed. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’

  Chapter 26

  They tried the crutches again the following day, and the day after that. On the fourth day he fell sprawling to the floor, every cramped and aching muscle screaming a protest. The physio simply helped him up and said: ‘Again.’

  Within a fortnight he was able to make it to the door. For the next two months he stomped along the hospital corridors. Brother Benito came back several times, bringing whisky and that benign, infinitely tolerant smile.

  ‘Didn’t I already tell you to fuck off?’ asked the man.

  ‘I believe you did,’ said Brother Benito. ‘But you didn’t mean it,’ he added, and sat in the chair in the man’s room with almost Buddha-like patience, until the man had completed his physio for the day and returned to his bed to rest.

  ‘That bitch,’ complained the man when Marta had left, promising more torment tomorrow. ‘What the hell’s the point of all this? I’m never going to walk, the doctors said so.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Brother Benito, and handed him the whisky.

  A mo
nth after that, she presented him with a flat circular board about two feet in diameter, with a six-inch plastic ball set in the centre.

  He was walking with two sticks now. It was painful, laborious, but he no longer needed the crutches. He stared at the board with extreme suspicion. Marta had no doubt contrived yet another way to torture him.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, as she sat on the side of the bed next to him.

  ‘Balance board,’ she said. ‘It’s going to strengthen your ankles.’

  It did. It hurt like hell, but it did. Now he was down to one stick, stomping along the corridors with the physio at his side, saying, faster, come on, faster.

  It was a relief to get back to his room, back to his bed, sip some of Brother Benito’s whisky, and rest.

  ‘You’re a slave driver,’ he complained, flopping back onto the pillows while Marta put his sticks neatly in the corner by the door.

  He watched her. She had a slender waist and good breasts beneath the unflattering concealment of the white uniform. Her thick dark hair was neatly tied back into a ponytail. She turned, caught him staring at her arse and went red.

  She came over to the bed where he was sprawled out. ‘How’s your memory coming along?’

  ‘Badly,’ he said, his half-smile dying on his lips. He still could remember nothing. And it worried him. How was he ever going to get back into the world if he didn’t know who he was? The doctors had said there was no neurological reason for this blankness where his memory should be; their suggestion was that some psychological rather than physical trauma – maybe the shock of the fall? – had triggered the loss of his memory.

  ‘It will come back,’ she said. ‘When it’s ready.’

  She touched his hand. He grasped her fingers, twined his into hers. She didn’t pull away.

  ‘Shut the door and come and sit down here, Marta,’ he said.

  Marta went and closed the door and came and sat on the side of the bed. The man leaned forward, grasped the back of her glossy dark head, and kissed her, snaking his tongue into her mouth.