by Ben Watt
The next day my mum finally made my dad come up and see me, now that I was off ITU. He drove the two of them up in his new Mazda 323 – ‘Laguna Blue with ABS,’ he took pride in telling me. It was a Sunday. He was able to park next to the hospital. He hates coming up to town if he can’t park safely somewhere. The ward was warm and full of sunlight. Some beds were empty. The hospital tended to discharge people on Friday if it possibly could, to keep the place quiet and just ticking over until Monday morning.
My mum sat at the end of the bed. She had brought a few photos of the family and a newspaper cutting. My dad was quiet and ill at ease, but then I asked him to sit right up near me. I was in quite a lot of discomfort. I suddenly felt sick and ready to vomit again and had to slowly swing my legs out of the bed to sit on the edge and stare into the bucket on the floor. The moment passed. I felt my forehead cool and the blood beat in my face for a minute. My dad came and sat next to me. We sat together with our little legs side by side, and just started talking in quiet voices – nothing demonstrative or loaded with meaning: just odd things about the car, about jazz and the cricket. I felt like we were boys. And I realized that was how he wanted it. He didn’t really want to be my grown-up dad. He wanted to be on equal terms, conspiratorial and even-handed. Good fellas. Little musketeers. I told him I liked his shoes, and he said he would get me a pair. It was something concrete that he could do.
When I was growing up he’d always seemed more like me and less like an adult. He used to come and watch me play football for the school under-thirteens team. I’d be in goal. I don’t think he liked the company of the other parents and teachers much. He preferred to slope away from the central mass around the halfway line and would end up on his own behind the goal at my end, offering me a square of chocolate through the net. I’d have to shoo him away, because he’d be putting me off. One week he stood there right from the kickoff. I told him to move, but he wouldn’t. The opposition kicked off and fed the ball out to the winger, who beat three players, nutmegged the full-back, and chipped me from outside the box. He was only eleven. The ball floated straight over my head and into the net, while I was still half-talking to my dad over my shoulder. One–nil after fifteen seconds. I wouldn’t speak to him all day after that, even though we ended up winning 4–3.
I thought of the days he used to take me to football. Saturday afternoons. We never went to Chelsea, although they were my team. I could sense my dad felt uneasy with a big terrace crowd and it made both of us quiet and not able to enjoy ourselves. There was often violence at Chelsea too. Instead we usually took a short drive over to Fulham, where we won the Golden Goals one week. We bought a ticket that had the correct time of the opening goal of the game inside it. Two minutes and two seconds. Fulham o, Burnley I. Twenty-five quid we won, collected from the secretary’s office after the match. Not only that but we also met Brian Moore behind the stand before the game. I was in heaven. We must have sat in the new Riverside Stand that day, to try it out. Normally we’d be up at the top of the uncovered end, by the tea-bar, stamping our feet to keep warm. Behind us were the trees of Bishop’s Park, and within kicking distance the Thames. The ground is right on the river. I liked the wide sky, the sparkling surface of the water under winter sun, the flocks of starlings against the failing light, the glimpses of scullers and pleasure cruises, the wind swooping through the tall elms. I felt a part of it all but also apart from it all, as though we had been dropped in from outer space to watch the people and the players from a sealed capsule of our own.
Other days we drove all the way out to Charlton. Charlton Athletic were my dad’s team. Blackheath was where he first lived when he moved to London. The Valley was a huge ground. Sixty thousand used to go, my dad said. We’d be lucky if five thousand were there whenever we went. The wind would race viciously along the terrace that ran the length of the pitch right from the kick-off, and we’d almost always leave halfway through the second half, frozen stiff. We’d race each other along the back streets to the car, trying to be the first to spot a car with a theft-prevention bar attached to the steering-wheel, at which point whoever had got to it would shout out, ‘Krooklok! One–nil!’ I looked forward to the journeys home, darkness falling, tail-lights, thickening traffic, results on the radio, smoothing the match programme on my knee, the car heater blowing hot air on my tingling feet, my dad driving. It seemed to have nothing to do with football at all.
Four hours after my mum and dad had gone, another litre of bile came up, and the same again at midnight. It was decided that a new naso-gastric tube should be fed into my stomach to help siphon off the build-up of liquid. The night nurses on duty were young and inexperienced, but were obliged to do the job. It was late. The ward was quiet. It was a miserable ten minutes as the thin pipe was fed up my nose and down the back of my throat and then, mistakenly, twice down into my lungs rather than my stomach, while I retched and coughed, tears streaming down my face. They gave up, pulled the tube out, and said someone else would try in the morning.
Some time later I was woken out of a sleep by the sound of people running. The man under the Bacofoil was convulsing. It was 2 a.m. I tried to sit up. Doctors and nurses were running into the ward. The urgency in their voices frightened me. I heard orders, calm, insistent. Pager alarms were going off. Someone pulled a curtain round my bed so I couldn’t see anything. A nurse raced past pushing a machine. I thought I heard them hitting his chest. Hard. Repeatedly. I sat staring at the curtain. I could see people’s feet. I wanted to go home. And then the feet stepped away and the bed was sped away. Doctors walked out after it. And then it was quiet. My curtains were pulled back. No one said anything. And it was just quiet. I knew the whole ward was awake, but no one spoke.
The next day a more experienced staff nurse made me drink continuously from a glass of weak lemon barley water while she effortlessly slid my new naso-gastric tube up and down and into place. The swallowing – a neat trick – helped the tube down into the stomach without me having to think about it, and then we all laughed as she pumped out all the lemon I had just drunk. For the next twenty-four hours, whenever I felt nauseous, a nurse would aspirate the tube, drawing the bile out with a large plastic syringe. I would watch it run down the tube from my nose. Sometimes it would be pale and yellow, like finger-bowl water. Other times it would come up thick and green and full of sediment, like pond algae or mint sauce.
I was taken to Ultrasound. I got to like the Ultrasound room, just along from X-ray, with its dim lighting and soft-carpeted floor. It always took me a couple of minutes to move out of the wheelchair and lie down on the hard bed, my knees slightly bent. The jelly that was squeezed on to my stomach was cool and thick. I knew they were looking for an obstruction that could be triggering the vomiting. The hard plastic sensor was run over my belly, digging under my ribs and into my side. On the monitor screen, a million tiny stars appeared in the darkness. As the sensor moved, they changed shape and form and my organs showed up like constellations in the night sky. There was my liver. There was a kidney. There was a big black hole where my gut once was. Another doctor arrived and pointed at the screen.
‘Blimey! Not a lot in there.’
‘Can you spot his gall-bladder? I can’t seem to find it.’
‘That’s it there. Oh no, wait a minute, that can’t be it.’
‘That’s what I thought. I think it’s moved.’
‘Well, we can’t have that. We can’t have a roaming organ.’
After twenty minutes I was wiped down with hard kitchen paper and told to put my pyjama jacket back on. They had found nothing out of the ordinary. Even so, I puked all through the next day again. All food and drink were withheld and a barium meal was booked for nine o’clock the next morning.
I am outside the barium room. It is cold in this narrow corridor. I am in a wheelchair. My dressing-grown seems thin and uncomforting. There are two cotton wheelie-bins for laundry next to me. They are both full. One is of white material, the other red. The red one is
marked for Aids patients’ laundry only. Contents to be incinerated. My gut aches. It is an early start. There is no one else in this corridor. I can hear people behind doors. I have a book to read, but I can’t concentrate. I keep seeing the red bin from the corner of my eye. It is so close I could reach out and touch its contents.
I am drinking the barium meal. It comes in a plastic cup. It is heavy and cold. It tastes like chalk-dust and lime. It is thick, undrinkable. I try to swallow it all in one go, but it is too viscous. I just want to put it down. The nurses wait till I have finished it. They stand me up. The wheelchair spins round. I stumble. They hold me up. They slip my dressing-gown off but leave one arm turned inside out and hanging from my drip-stand. The drip in my forearm stops them undressing me fully. I stoop forwards. In front of me there is a steel plate the size of a mattress on its end. I step on to the lip of it and face the room. It is dark. The windows are blacked out. A button is pressed. The steel mattress starts to flip me up slowly. I think of Virgil in Thunderbird 2. I feel the barium in my gullet. It sloops down into my stomach. The mattress stops and they take pictures. The barium shows up on a black-and-white monitor like a thin oil-slick in my digestive tract. I am cold. The doctor is Irish, getting on, I’d say – friendly but concentrated. Suddenly the lights come on. I am led over to a trolley and told to lie down. I ask for an extra blanket.
I am in another room along the corridor. I am half lying on my side. I don’t want to be, but I have to stay this way for an hour, to let the barium move down into my gut, when they will take more pictures. The trolley is hard. No one would hear if I called. Harsh Tannoy messages blurt into the room, paging doctors, asking technicians to report to other rooms. It is even less human in here. I think of hamsters and mice and laboratories.
I get on to another revolving board and have more pictures taken. I watch the barium on the monitor. On the screen, in negative imaging, my tiny gut is like a baggy, translucent air duct, fluid, gently moving like a tired muscle, and in it, showing up black again, are sumps and puddles of barium. They think there is some kind of obstruction. I will have to go to theatre again. Maybe Thursday or Friday. Another operation.
I am defeated.
I went to theatre a couple of days later. I was still vomiting. Scar tissue and temporary adhesions in my healing intestine were suspected, stopping the passage of food. The nurses and staff up on the theatre floors were getting to know me well. As the lift doors opened and my trolley was wheeled into the corridor, it was like returning to a familiar hotel.
‘Hello, Ben.’
‘Are you back again? We can’t keep you away.’
‘Same room as before, sir?’
When I came round later on that evening I was back on ITU. It was dark outside. I couldn’t focus my eyes. I had another catheter in, which I resented. It made me feel old, incapable, incontinent. I had another epidural too. I thought that was serious. The drug was loaded in its syringe case, mounted on a drip-stand beside me. There was an immense stabbing pain in my lower right-hand side every time I moved – very sharp, and unlike any other pain until then. Tracey was already by my bed.
‘They found a huge abscess. Near your bowel,’ she said. ‘They’ve drained most of it off, but it was too big and they said you were tiring. That’s why you’re here.’
I had a drain still in place, a plastic tube running from the site inside, like the straw from a lidded soft-drink beaker, out into a plastic bag lying in the bed. The tube was held in place by a dressing and a thick thread stitched into my belly. My mum was there. The light had gone from outside. Nick Law arrived.
‘Well, we didn’t expect this,’ he said. ‘Can’t trust those Ultrasound people. Don’t know how they missed it. Now we’re not sure if it was the cause of all the vomiting or whether another obstruction is still hiding in there, but we thought we’d leave you be for a night. You’ve been through enough again.’
‘Then what?’ I asked.
‘Well, we can’t guarantee that we won’t have to go in again, but your bowel is still in a bit of mess from the last time. A bit unstable. Don’t want to tamper around too much.’
‘What about the drain?’
‘Yes, sorry about that. Needed to siphon off the excess. I should tell you, though, it was probably the biggest, smelliest abscess I have ever known.’
‘Really?’
‘Yup. Size of a cricket-ball.’
After he’d gone, I lay back confused. There was too much new information. So much work undone. I could only think of the days it had set me back. How much longer now? More weeks?
In the first few days on ITU I had kept on asking the doctors and surgeons how much longer. ‘A few more days?’ I’d say stupidly. ‘Surely, no more?’ They were patient with me. Tracey knew, I’m sure, that it was going to be a long road. I could only think of getting out. I couldn’t register the fact that my life was being threatened, or that I had barely survived the week-long surgery, or that a sweeping infection could strike me down at any moment, or that all the people closest to me were still reeling from the shock of my nearly dying. The future had no complications either: no drips, or tests; no diarrhoea or vomiting; no nausea; no grey-faced pain; no weight-loss or night sweats; no depression, temperature spikes or ambulances; no creeping return of abnormal blood counts, chest pains, aching joints – just a simple rehabilitation and a return to normal.
Ten minutes later my teeth started chattering. I wasn’t cold, but the chattering was uncontrollable. It shook my body. The pain in my side was aggravated by every tiny movement. It burned fiercely. I thought of branded cattle. An anaesthetist was called, and he told me it was the effect of the anaesthetic wearing off. It could last several hours. It frightened my mum. He left. I gripped my jaws together, but my torso would shake and sweat. I tried to speak, but the words came out all chopped up and stuttered. An hour later the shaking and chattering stopped. It was like a wind dropping suddenly, and I felt I was looking out over slack fields and damp, leafless trees. It was late. Tracey had to go.
After she left the hospital was quiet. I so wanted to be able to lie on my side, to curl up like a winter animal in its leaves and twigs, somewhere below the earth, to close my eyes and wait till morning, but I couldn’t twist at all, and when the nurses tried to lower my bed and lay me flat I had to be sat up again. And that night was perhaps the worst of all: upright, immobile, exhausted, too tired to sleep, the long road up ahead now disappearing into the darkness, and I felt like I was driving all night on an empty single carriageway, nothing in my mirror, the headlights making little impression on the infinite world.
I was stoked up again with steroids and antibiotics. In the morning, Nick Law came round to see me. He was chatty and optimistic. By late afternoon it was decided I should go back up to the ward. I wanted to stay. I still couldn’t move without excessive pain and I wanted the extra attention I was getting on ITU, but the doctors were concerned I was vulnerable to infection again and that the ward would be safer, as they had a contagious case on the unit. The epidural was removed and I was taken up that night to St Mark’s, to a different bed. I had Voltarol injections in my thigh to kill the pain. I wanted familiarity, but there was none. It was stuffy. The air was like padding. I had the window opened, but the man next to me had it closed again. I slept fitfully, listening out for myself, like a mother anxiously listens out for her baby. In the night I had a shit into a bedpan. Nick Law was thrilled in the morning.
Four
There is a red dinosaur on my bedside table. It’s a present from Debbie’s little kids, James and Richard. They are seven and four, Tracey’s nephews. Debbie is Tracey’s older sister. They are only two years apart. All four of them have just been to the dinosaur exhibition at the Natural History Museum. I am sitting up in bed. The Prof has returned and put me back to Nil By Mouth. I have a nano gastric tube back in, but I’ve got my old bed back again. James and Richard look serious and wide-eyed, a little shocked and quiet and still. They are only young.
They have superb thick blond hair and faultless faces. I think of how I must look to them – ancient, drawn, dry and strange. They each have Mutant Ninja Turtle rucksacks. James rummages in his and brings out another present for me – a programme from the England versus Pakistan Lord’s test match. He asks me who my favourite player is. Richard keeps looking at the tube in my nose. He is terribly quiet. He offers me a jelly snake. In my croaking voice. I have to tell him I can’t eat jelly snakes, and that in fact I can’t eat anything just at the moment.
James pipes up. ‘Ben, what happened to you?’
I think and try to be concise. ‘An illness has attacked my tummy and I have had to have a lot of it removed, but I’m getting better now,’ I say.
‘Oh.’ There is a pause. Then he asks, ‘Have you had your lungs removed?’
Tracey and Debbie laugh. They look so alike sometimes.
Ten minutes later Richard is about to offer me another jelly snake, and then I see him remember and he stops himself.
An hour and a half has passed. The four of them have been out and come back. They’ve been out looking for a riverboat on the Thames. I’ve been dozing. Richard kept wanting to come back and see that I was all right. He wanted to know if the tube in my nose was hurting me.
In the opposite bed to me was Arnold for a while. He must have been seventy or eighty. He had had a stroke and was suffering prostate trouble. He was unbearably gentle and touching in his manner. He struggled to form words, and was incapable of saying anything except ‘Oh, I say!’ This was used for all occasions – to express surprise at being hoisted out of bed by hospital porters, delight at the arrival of apple crumble and custard, as a ‘Good morning’ when I would wave to him after the first ward round of the day. Often the exclamation was combined with a beam and an optimistic thumbs-up. His presence was strangely life-affirming, in spite of the obvious gravity of his condition. It was like having Dan Maskell in the bed opposite.