Injury Time

by D J Enright

  High Street optician discovers cataract in one eye and glaucoma in both. Six months later, hospital ophthalmologist tells me that cataracts in both eyes are due to wear and tear, and there’s nothing to be done about them, while the glaucoma doesn’t exist. Apparently the device used by opticians looking for glaucoma – a puff of air in the eye – creates the pressure it is meant to detect. Another self-fulfilling prophecy. What interesting medical times we live in!

  Nothing to be done … Someone says, you should tell them you’re a writer, you need your eyes. (That would be asking for trouble: blind him for his bad verses.) Who doesn’t need his or her eyes? If you want personal treatment (this person is a writer, or whatever) you should make a personal payment to a professional person who operates privately. Money talks, but ‘wear and tear’ is not in its vocabulary, and that private professional will listen respectfully.

  There’s a charity that runs a factory where blind people make bookmarks. Something striking, something fine about this, a noble irony. More refined than turning out white sticks or dark glasses. The bookmark keeps reminding you how lucky you are. Probably, as the young man at the hospital said, my eyesight isn’t bad for a gent of my years.

  The National Health Service … We are too many. And yes, some patients have to wait a long time for treatment. In the old days they didn’t wait, they just died.

  Incidentally, what happened to fruit, fresh fruit? Remember it? What befell, quite recently, the Cox’s orange pippin? Now all apples are of the same colour, shape and size, and have the same flavour, i.e. none. Getting juice out of a pear is hardly more difficult than getting blood out of a stone. Oranges with inviting outsides have little inside but pith. I remember when I was a kid how …

  Ah, the glorious past! ‘Then there’s the age of Anne. What a wonderful time, Pope and Addison! So civilized, so cultivated. Their routs and their tea-parties and rapes of the lock’: Lucia in E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia, 1935. The good old days. In the late nineteenth century a respected, male novelist-to-be, a disciple of Flaubert, Turgenev and the Goncourts, earned a living for some years as the editor of Woman, ‘scribbling fashion notes under the name of “Gwendolen” and romantic idylls under the name of “Sal Volatile”’. (For this and much else, see John Gross: The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters.)

  The inglorious present! It’s difficult not to feel anger. But keep Ulrich’s thought in mind: that you can’t be angry with your own time without damage to yourself.

  If worn under a dressing-gown or overcoat, pyjamas might get by as reasonable garb for a cystoscopy, but my wife reminds me that I’m on my way to the eye clinic at Bolingbroke Hospital, not the urological day clinic at St George’s. I’ve got the dates mixed. Ought to feel relieved, but don’t. At the eye clinic my pyjamas are found out of place, and I am dressed in a pair of velvety blue trunks. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any eye specialists available. I wait, though there’s nowhere to wait. The hospital is much darker than I remember it, like a stage castle fallen into ruin. I drift into a large room, solid, comfortable, well-lit, full of armchairs, where an ophthalmologist is giving a lecture to an audience of ophthalmologists, and am firmly ejected. A kindly nurse takes me for a spin in her car to pass the time, and confides a long sad story of how her first love came to naught and she has never loved since.

  Back at the hospital, and a small, plump, dandyish man pops up, takes a cursory look at me, and mutters ‘It is not well.’ He must be a foreigner; so many are. He holds up a sheet of paper, and tells me to read off the letters. It appears to be a restaurant menu, with the names of the dishes written in convoluted and swirling script, and I can’t make out a thing. It’s not fair! I grab at the sheet …

  But I am exhausted. So exhausted that I wake up, in the usual worried sweat. Having pulled myself together, I reach for the morning paper, and read about a coffin wrapped in brown paper and bearing the inscription, ‘Return to Sender’. This makes me feel better.

  ‘Diseases desperate grown, By desperate appliances are reliev’d.’ The cystoscope (cyst: Gk kustis bladder) is a flexible tube which bends this way and that (‘looping the loop,’ one merry operator told me), peering into every nook and cranny of the bladder. At its further end are a camera, an intense white light, a device for snipping and retrieving small removals, and (for all I know – I avert my eyes as I hear the thin hose being unwound) other Lilliputian instruments. The operator sees all through an attached monocular, and may choose to distract the patient (who needs distracting: what would happen if he started to squirm or pull away?) by displaying the glorious multicoloured turbulence on a sort of television screen above his head. All this – and the shooting down of any suspect tumour – is blessedly achieved without surgical intervention from outside. The only snag is getting the cystoscope into the bladder, and that too is remarkable, and no doubt aptly chastening, if not quite as neatly as in the case of the Earl of Gloucester and his bastard son: ‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got/ Cost him his eyes.’

  The operation has its nasty moments; only moments. Yet George Santayana proposed, ‘Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.’ And Marvell’s Soul confessed, ‘I feel, that cannot feel, the pain.’

  In a newspaper piece of 1977, Primo Levi observed (‘what everybody observes’) that our dreams can be heavy with significance for us but are plain nonsense for other people. The person who recites his dreams ‘is no less a nuisance to his listeners than the person who boasts of his aristocratic lineage, or who simply makes a great noise when he blows his nose’.

  Since coming on this harsh verdict, I have not recorded any dreams. More, I have had no dreams. Now I feel blocked up, I have become a nuisance to myself.

  (‘And what sort of interpretation of dreams is it,’ Joseph Brodsky has asked, ‘if it’s not filtered through good old Ziggy?’ True, that’s the way to make dreams more acceptable in polite society.)

  On the first occasion I’d managed with difficulty to locate the books – books I badly wanted to consult, I knew nothing about their contents, only that they were precious to me, much needed. But the bell rang, the lights dimmed, the library (sounds like the long-lost London Library) was closing. The second time, some weeks later, I knew – I remembered – which way to turn, and pushed my way through a crowd of young people drinking from cans of Coca-Cola and the like. Then I found a curtain had been drawn across the corridor; a harpsichord recital was in progress, someone motioned me away.

  The dreams are flowing again. Perhaps in a third instalment I’ll lay my hands on those books, the books that will mean so much to me.

  Christopher Leach tells me of overhearing an old lady in the market: ‘I have to get my painkillers on suspicion these days.’ Can’t say I blame her.

  ‘Please read this leaflet carefully. Keep it since you may want to read it again.’

  ‘You should not take the tablets if you are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, or breast-feeding, or have had reactions to similar medicines such as difficulty in breathing or swallowing, swelling of the hands, feet, face, lips, tongue or throat. You should consult your doctor if you have problems with your liver or kidneys, are on a low-salt diet, or are suffering from diabetes, loose bowels, vomiting, or low blood pressure (characterized by fainting and dizziness), or are receiving treatment for an allergy to bee or wasp stings. The tablets may affect your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, so you should not perform such tasks until you know whether or not you are able to do so.

  ‘Like all medicines, your tablets can have unwanted effects, among them light-headedness, dry mouth, rashes (with or without itching), psoriasis, sensitivity to sunlight, joint and muscle pains, pins and needles, abdominal bloating, ringing in the ears, diarrhoea, constipation, sleepiness, inability to sleep, strange dreams, running nose, wheezing, the production of no or less urine, black stools, heartburn, jaundice, hair loss, weight gain, larger breasts, changes in the way things taste, impotence, con
fusion, decrease in mental agility.

  ‘Do not be alarmed at this list. For more exhaustive answers to your questions concerning your condition, free booklets are available from the address given below.’

  To sum up: If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

  In connection with their antibiotic, Amoxil, SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals warn us that we should see our doctor straight away ‘if you notice your urine becoming darker or faeces (otherwise known as poo) becoming paler’. (Otherwise known as other things.) More poignantly, Asta Medica’s painkiller, Zamadol, ‘may cause feelings of sadness’.

  ‘Language has lost the very capacity for truth, for political or personal honesty,’ George Steiner declares. He adduces the designation ‘Operation Sunshine’ for a thermonuclear detonation. Yet even its inventors – cut-price PROs? – couldn’t seriously have believed that it would conceal the truth for long or deceive anyone who wasn’t ready to be deceived. The epithet, ostensibly grandiose, breezy and self-congratulatory, carries an ironic charge, less than subtle, which the inventors let by (perhaps as a face-saver) since they assume that the common man wouldn’t recognize irony if it shone right in his face. In fact language has here prevailed, with ease, over its users and abusers.

  But talk of the dishonesty and deceptiveness of words is metaphorical: we are talking about ourselves, we are the weasels. Words in themselves are neither honest nor dishonest. It is we who, in Eliot’s phrase, slip and slide. We say that words ‘fail us’, when we don’t have the time or the patience or the inclination to lay our hand or tongue on the right word, and our thinking goes astray. Except perhaps in mystical connections, the right word or combination is generally within reach. The failure, the fault, is ours. We live with it; we are imperfect creatures; if the absolutely right word doesn’t exist it’s because we haven’t known the need for it.

  (I rather regret embarking on this subject. I fear I have failed words.)

  Yet if words can express everything, what is music, that lexiconless language, for?

  In age, they say, one’s reading becomes more selective. Untrue, in my experience. Except in this respect: one can’t reach books stacked on the top shelves, one daren’t lower oneself to those on the bottom shelves, heavy books are out of the question, as also those with small or faint print. So yes, one’s reading becomes more selective.

  ‘Ein alter Mann ist stets ein König Lear.’ In one respect at least: Would you be kind enough to undo this button?

  Books have their fates. Frank Kermode, knight, literary critic and former Professor of English, was moving house, and had boxes of books, inscribed first editions and valuable manuscripts, ready for the removal men. The three workmen to whom he showed the boxes were Cambridge dustmen called in to make a special waste clearance. Thirty boxes had been consigned to the dustcart before the mistake was realized. The dustmen declined to climb into the cart, which contained a mechanical crusher. A peculiarly cruel fate – let’s have no cheap talk of irony – cruel to the books, to their owner, and to book lovers in general.

  That hard-pressed organ, developed over a lifetime, which seeks out consolations calls to mind Patricia Beer and how, as her house was burning down, she ran inside to save a book or two and came out clutching the family cat.

  It was generally understood (see Who’s Who, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, contributors’ notes in anthologies, and so forth) that Patricia Beer was born in 1924. The obituaries, however, give 1919, which seems less likely on the face of it or of her. If they can be wrong about the date of birth, they can be wrong about the date of death. As Patricia says in the introduction to her Collected Poems, ‘a Collected Poems is a way of saying “I am not really dead.”’

  A leaflet announces a new magazine ‘for women who write’, called Mslexia. Explanations are necessary: ‘“Mslexia” means women’s writing (ms = woman, lexia = words). But its association with dyslexia is intentional. Dyslexia is a difficulty, more prevalent in men, with reading and spelling. Mslexia is a difficulty, more prevalent in women, with getting into print.’

  A clever invention, even though dyslexia is a real disability, caused by a condition of the brain. I first encountered it in Singapore, in the essays of a woman student whose grasp of the subject was sound but whose spelling was not. As if in extenuation, she confessed that she was married and had a child – but would I please keep this secret since she didn’t want to be ‘different’ or treated differently from the other girls, who were all unmarried and nominal (I’d say actual) virgins. Just possibly she was hoping to be treated a wee bit differently when it came to the exams. I had a word with her tutor.

  The launch issue of the new magazine will include, not unpredictably, a section of erotic writing (these women don’t want to be read differently from men) and an article by a bestselling novelist contending that ‘the selflessness of motherhood may be at odds with the self-absorption of the committed author’. Also promised are ‘fool-proof exercises to get the creative juices flowing’. It should be noted that the leaflet is entirely free from msprints, msspellings, msrepresentations and overt msandry.

  Women have the right to write, and many do. Whether we are men or women, when it comes to ‘getting into print’ a number of factors are involved, including the right of other people not to be dragged into print. Once we start to talk about human rights, there is no end to it. Often there ought to be, and promptly.

  Last year Dennis Nilsen, serving life imprisonment for the murder of twelve men, claimed in the High Court that he was the victim of discrimination and abuse of his human rights. While heterosexual soft porn circulated freely among heterosexual prisoners, his favourite homosexual magazine was banned by prison staff. Such treatment, said his barrister, was ‘inhuman and degrading’: ‘To deny the claimant expression of his sexuality because it is of a homosexual nature is cruel.’ Has the High Court nothing better to do with its time? Prison, we take it, is meant to have its inconveniences, but discrimination between sexual tastes won’t do, so the answer must be: ban all porn, whatever its complexion. One wonders what language Nilsen’s defence would have found, had circumstances differed, to deplore the violation of the human rights of the men he had killed.

  Sixteen days later, the press reported on a case equally absurd but far more cruel, apropos of which we would be almost justified in maintaining that words fail us. For the past year a ninety-three-year-old widow, living in sheltered accommodation, had been helped every morning by a female carer to wash herself. Then officials of South Gloucestershire Council phoned her to say that her usual carer was being replaced by a man. When she protested that she found this embarrassing, she was warned that she might be asked to see a psychiatrist to discuss her ‘problem with men’, and she could lose her home help altogether. A relative who interceded was told that it would be an infringement of the male worker’s human rights not to allow him to carry out the bathroom duties. Finally a spokesperson for the Council, failing to conceal her irritation, stated that social services officials were that very moment trying to resolve the dispute. One should fight one’s corner, but it’s worrying that those most energetic in pursuing their rights are quite often – and, one might think, plainly – in the wrong. But then, to see what is in front of one’s nose, George Orwell said, requires a constant struggle.

  Children and animals, the remaining simpletons, the tongue-tied, have the right to rights. (But what is happening to some of our children?) For the rest of us, there are wishes and hopes.

  Some while back, when I could still manage the walk in two stages, I paused to rest a while at the bus shelter, my halfway house. A young woman was pressing a mobile phone (they were not yet ubiquitous) to her ear, listening intently. When she turned as if watching for a bus, I noticed that the phone was an arrangement of clothes pegs clipped together. Presentably dressed in the drab garments favoured by her generation, reasonably good-looking, sober of mien, she exhibited none of the commoner signs of men
tal disorder. Perhaps she was simply keeping up with the Joneses – and well beyond the old fellow sharing the shelter, apparently immobile and going nowhere, with only an old walking-stick to boast of. Suddenly the young woman slipped the phone into a capacious pocket and bounded purposefully away. The clothes pegs must have conveyed some urgent message.

  Having reached the Chinese restaurant, I sat down comfortably to wait for a takeaway. I picked up a magazine called Elle; on the cover it promised ‘21st CENTURY SEX. Your life and loves in the next millennium’. I dropped it hastily and picked up another, Asda’s free magazine: ‘Bright Young Things’, and ‘Win a Free Trip to Florida’. I tried again. Ah, a Chinese magazine. At least I could understand some of the cartoons.

  *

  ‘Praise my soul, the King of heaven …’ This was how in those far-off days I parsed that famous opening line, wondering what cause he had to do so. I vaguely supposed (looking back, I have the impression that most things were vague suppositions) that I had something called a soul, but it didn’t strike me as notably praiseworthy. All the others in church were making the same demand or request, and with full-blooded confidence. (There were lots of people then, when I was earning 3d a month as an unskilled or makeweight choirboy on Sunday mornings.) Had I considered the matter more deeply, it might have occurred to me that since (it appeared) God had created our souls he was really praising himself. As it was, I joined in, conscientiously earning my pay. Later I was getting 6d, and had ceased to speculate on the exact meaning of what I was singing. Knowing the tune was enough. Then one of us died, the most angelic-looking, the best-behaved, and we were called on to perform at his funeral service. ‘Safely, safely gathered in, far from sorrow, far from sin.’ A small coffin, weeping parents: reality had burst into the church. Was it for me, having got the hang of the punctuation, to praise this King? – who, the story went, had saved from weary strife, in its dawn, this fresh young life. Soon afterwards my voice broke, as did some other things.