Patient

by Ben Watt

  A good day. It is a wonderful Sunday morning. I stand crouched by the bedroom window. It is eight o’clock. My chin rests on my hands in full warm sunshine five storeys up with birds flying below me. I am thin. Still thin, even now, but today I don’t care. I can get my hands round my thigh, thumb to thumb, little finger to little finger. I buy size small. I’m looking forward to the sales. It is always the small sizes that are left on the rail. Looking at Tracey, I know it’s all different. Life stretches beyond me like a road to the sea. I don’t want myself so much. I feel smaller. I keep my hair short. I leave things a little later than I used to, knowing that I might have a change of mind in ten minutes or so. I like my face very much. My eyes are very blue. I suit my clothes. I like my beard too. My hard, flat belly is unfamiliar. I don’t like to touch it. It is like a rocky desert – bumpy and dry. I proudly show off my scar to anyone who’ll look, but on my own it frightens me. I hate TV. I can’t watch it, except the sport. I think a lot. I follow planes across the sky in the morning. I watch the clouds blowing up behind the houses. I like sitting up in bed – sometimes in the late afternoon, letting the light go without turning the lamp on, or sometimes in the morning before Tracey is awake and the workmen have arrived at the building site, propped up in pillows and warm from a night’s sleep. I feel alone but not lonely. And then I gently lie down again, have her roll away from me – ‘Over, Rover’ – slip down the bed a little way, and curl myself in behind her, knees up, a key in a lock.

  Four weeks after I was discharged I seized up at home. I was watching the Sunday match. I’d been feeling crampy since mid-morning. I thought it might have been hunger, so I had eaten some plain toast and a little lean bacon at noon. Sitting in the chair in front of the TV, I had felt my belly tightening. I got up and could barely walk. I slumped on the stairs. Tracey called a taxi. An ambulance would have only taken me to the Royal Free, and I had been told to get down to the Westminster in any eventuality. I felt faint, hot and cold. I wanted to clear my mouth of something. I was swallowing hard. It took me five minutes to get down one flight of stairs. I felt like I had done a hundred sit-ups for the first time in my life and woken up the morning after, stiffened, tied into a corset. The ride in the cab was cruel. Pot-holes and sleeping policemen shook me up. The journey seemed to be across one long cattle-grid. I was a goods train with no shock absorbers going over and over the same set of points. I crotched in the back, gripping myself still, eyes brimming with tears, staring at the backs of the fold-up seats in front, Tracey with her hand on my back, although I didn’t want it there.

  After three days of rest and fluids, on steroids and antibiotics in my old side-room on Marie Céleste, the pains had settled down. The cause was unknown. A passing infection maybe, or a blockage caused by healing scar tissue, or maybe a spasm caused by bad communications along the lengths of damaged nerve endings in the gut itself. The Prof wanted me to go to Charing Cross for a special test to check for hidden infection. I was to go up to the twelfth floor. The Department of Nuclear Medicine.

  There was no ambulance to take me the next morning, so a local minicab was ordered. I sat in the back with Tracey, crawling through rush-hour traffic on the Cromwell Road, reading through the weeks of hospital notes I had built up. A floppy disc might have been easier to carry, but somehow the bulging folder I was taking with me seemed an appropriate expression of the sprawling size and seriousness of my illness. We pointed at the funny ink-pen sketches of my abdomen and the opinions marked by double question marks, filling the pages more like a suggestions book than a hospital file, and we laughed awkwardly at the early misdiagnoses, the endless opinions sought from department after department, the crossings out and the exclamation marks, and then we fell silent and sat staring at the cars.

  Up on the twelfth floor, blood was extracted from my arm, the white cells separated, tagged with a radioactive marker, and then injected back into my arm to see where they would go. If a hidden infection had been lurking in my belly, under a scanner the natural movements of the white cells towards the site of the infection could have been monitored on a screen – like the movements of migrating birds or whales. They sent me away for a few hours.

  We sat in the open-plan coffee-shop on the first floor, drinking tea. Someone recognized us and came over to say hello and how she liked our albums. We didn’t know her. I was grey, pale. What did she think of me? What must she have thought I was doing there?

  A girl dressed in a theatre gown in a wheelchair next to me had no hair. It had all fallen out in clumps. Her skin was translucent like the moon, and yellowed like the pages of a book left on a shelf in the sun, but she seemed at ease and spirited. I felt momentarily close to her while all around me confused, internalized relatives ate sandwiches without a word.

  The tests showed up nothing. Back at the hospital I sat fully clothed waiting for the Prof’s evening ward round. I wanted to go home. I wanted him to think I was well enough. The pains had almost gone. He said OK – I think he thought it was pretty much all down to me now – and we slipped away into the night with no real answers. I was relieved and depressed.

  A good night. The ball is floated in. Harford reaches for it. And … no, it’s not going in. Wait … yes … it is bloody going in. Harford has gone and scored. The place erupts. We’re at the back of the middle tier. Stamford Bridge is packed. The green, dewy, phosphorescent light from the floodlights picks the players out, dancing and embracing. The evening sky is indigo and mauve. I’m on my feet, screaming. I’ve only been out of hospital five weeks. Men are clasping each other in front of me. ‘Mickey Harrrford!’ Tracey and Michelle are clapping wildly. I turn to my dad, on my left. He is still sitting down. And he is just looking up at me – looking up through his wire frames and smiling at me, with everything else going on around him.

  After the game, we walked out of the ground through the thronging crowd and he held my hand like a child. He sixty-five, me twenty-nine. He is a small, gentle man. He seems smaller to me than when I was a teenager. Thoughtful, quieter, self-absorbed. He hasn’t touched a drop since I came home. He wears little suede moccasin shoes. We pressed up towards the gate and I thought about the gulf between us in the hospital. The nights when I would say over and over to myself, ‘Why have you withdrawn? Why have you retreated from all this? What world has taken you in, away from pain and facing me? Do I mean that much? Why won’t you come? Why won’t you stay? Weren’t we once two oaks?’

  Out in the Fulham Road we stood at the top of the stairs and said goodbye to Richard and Michelle and then there we were suddenly – me, him and Tracey, the three of us – with the people streaming past us and the city night surrounding us, and I felt momentarily in the lee of some great storm that we had all weathered, and how, for a moment during the weeks and weeks, we had lost sight of each other, but now we could see each other again.

  A bad night. I find it hard to understand this bleak shaft that has been sunk into me. It is deep and dark. I extract nothing but self-pity and loneliness. The rock face is hard. I sense the seam goes on and down for miles. I quarry my own thoughts. I come up in a cage with a pounding in my head, tired and small again. I despair. I am only young. I am not even halfway through my life. I can’t eat what I want to eat. And if I eat too much of the little I am allowed I know the pains and blockages will start and an ambulance might have to come and take me back to the hospital. I wake in the mornings and instinctively push my fingers into my belly for the little signs that I have learnt to recognize. Sometimes Tracey catches me checking again during the day and I wish she hadn’t seen me. I want us to remain special. Not careworn. In these post-illness days we have been given something that eats up too much time, feeding on our concerns, blind to our fatigue, like an unexpected baby with an infancy marred by illness and an uncertain future.

  Sometimes I sit with her and describe my favourite meal with all its courses, and it is probably something I will never eat. We laughed a year ago and thought it wouldn’t be long before I
put on weight – friends always ask – but in fact I’ve lost more since I came home. And now I find I don’t like photos of myself from two years ago or more. I don’t like the fat young man I see – a fleshy boy, spoilt, clean-shaven – but nor do I like the pinched, hunched figure that stands before me in the mirror now. I know it is a man’s body, but it is a man’s body in distress. I don’t really recognize him. For twenty-nine years I was overweight, and now I’m thin. I distrust my body so I live in my head, with the central heating on because I feel the cold so badly without an ounce of on me. And I hate it with the windows closed, because the air dries out and kitchen smells hang in the downstairs rooms.

  I see our ever-so-slow shopping trips and mornings changing dressings, long silences and a strange new courtship where conversations drag over the same ground, trying to make sense of everything that has happened, our words worn smooth by repetition and the cycle of recounted experience, and I don’t know what to think any more.

  Four weeks after the first return to hospital I crashed again. My abdomen went into spasm. This time I tried to sleep it off, but the creeping paralysis woke me at 6 a.m. I was unable to swing my legs out of bed. I rolled out and huddled my crunched-up body into the bathroom and puked into the bowl. The trip in the taxi was bad again. I looked up and we were only on Haverstock Hill. The journey stretched ahead of me lamppost by lamppost.

  I asked the driver to pull over on Whitehall. It was dim and grey, first city light, and I remembered winter mornings as a schoolboy on the edge of the common waiting on the corner by the Red Rover for the 72 or 33 with the South Circular thundering by. I stumbled from the cab and retched almost nothing into the gutter. I was by a bus-stop. A bus stopped. People watched me from the windows. A little boy rubbed away the mist to have a closer look. I was on a double yellow line. The taxi’s hazards were strobing me like disco lights. The bus pulled away. Across the road was the Whitehall Theatre, where my godfather was an actor for years in the Whitehall farces. I leant on the taxi for a moment and felt as though my trousers could have been round my ankles and all of London was watching. And who was I to the two or three people who passed me by, and to the people on the bus? A sad drunk on his way home from all-night clubs and bars, inconsiderately throwing up at a public bus-stop like a dog? Someone not to be, anyway.

  At the hospital Tracey found a wheelchair. I felt that if I didn’t lie down I was going to pass out. I didn’t care where I lay – the corridor, on the floor of the lift. We went straight up to the ward. They found me an unmade bed. The Prof came immediately. I wanted him to cut me open there and then. I was given pethidine again within half an hour, and soon I felt myself sliding away down a stainless-steel slide again into cotton-wool clouds until it was mid-afternoon, my knees pulled up, still in the T-shirt I arrived in.

  The pattern was the same as before. Rest, fluids, drug-dulled sleep, antibiotics, steroids, no clear diagnosis, and then an improvement. I stayed in another couple of days. I’d already forgotten the feel of ward life, although the signs and little dramas all day long were familiar. I watched a girlfriend get up from the chair beside her partner’s bed and, without really looking up from her magazine, flick and disperse the air bubbles that were stopping the liquid food in his supply line. She even knew how to reset the alarm that rang when it happened. Tracey used to do the same. A nurse didn’t even bother to come over. I wondered if this was happening in all the wards. Like little car alarms all over the hospital.

  An old man was out in his chair. He looked distraught and uncomfortable.

  A young physio was talking to him. ‘Come on, Mr Mildmay. This is the road to recovery. You have to try.’

  He was upset. He must have been seventy-five, but his face was that of an eight-year-old. ‘I can’t. I can’t move.’

  ‘Come on, now. I’ll help you up.’ She took his elbow.

  ‘I can’t. I can’t.’

  There was something in the tone of his voice. Something pleading that drew everyone’s attention and sided us with him against the nurse. How could she be so cruel? Couldn’t she see the man was in pain and distressed?

  She forced him onwards. ‘Now then. Up we go.’ She got him to his feet. He was whining quietly. ‘Right. That’s good,’ she said. ‘Now then, one foot forward, Mr Mildmay.’

  Suddenly his face changed. He looked really anxious. His voice cut through the room. A voice of alarm. ‘My leg. I can’t move my leg. I can’t feel my leg. It won’t move. I can’t move it. I can’t walk.’

  I wanted to look away. What had happened to this man? This was awful. Stop her someone.

  ‘Mr Mildmay, the chair is caught on your pyjama trousers.’

  ‘What?’ He looked down.

  She lifted the leg of the chair and freed him.

  ‘Bugger me!’ he said. And without another word he broke free of her grip and started pottering across the room.

  For want of any clear evidence, healing scar tissue causing the uneven passage of food in the bowel became the favoured diagnosis for my latest, and also probably the previous, breakdown. Either that or gridlock from a gut temporarily stalled by bad nerve-ending communications or simply too much food to process. At least the problem seemed plainly mechanical, not disease-related, not the return of the dangerous vasculitic stage of my illness; more a result of the fundamental problem of living with such a short intestine. Within three days I was going home again.

  My mum remained anxious for months. Every time I called I could hear her heart beating in her voice in her opening words, as though I was calling to say another ambulance was on its way for me. It stopped me from calling some days, even when I only had a good piece of news about nothing in particular. I couldn’t bear to hear her anxiety. It was like listening to a creaking fault-line or earth tremors. I could hear her thoughts like tectonic plates shifting back and forth. The surgery and the damage to my gut were comprehensible to her, but the idea of self-mutilation from one’s own immune system triggered by something as seemingly insignificant as an allergy was hard to fully understand. I’m sure now back at home she felt suddenly exiled and cut adrift. She fought to understand my new enforced diet, but I think she secretly hoped like everyone else around me that it was only going to be temporary and that soon I’d be eating like a horse and putting on weight. After all, everyone loses weight in hospital. She carries a sketch of my new resected gut in her handbag along with a picture of an unaffected gut and shows people when they ask about me.

  I stayed over at their house on New Year’s Eve. I sat at the top of the stairs in a vest and pants, waiting for my dad to finish in the bathroom, and she saw me and had to go outside, and I saw her crying on the towpath. She said she’d come on to the landing below and unexpectedly seen me like it was twenty years ago – I looked like her little boy again.

  Some days I try to sit down and tell her everything, but I hear myself using a detailed scientific language that gets in the way, so other days I just put my arms around her without saying anything, as we stand in a doorway somewhere, and I tell myself; ‘She was there. She saw it. Maybe that is enough.’

  A week later my new car arrived. I saw it come down the street. A little red, gleaming Alfa Spyder. Two-seater. Right-hand drive. I had a stick to walk with. The young man from the dealer didn’t look happy handing over the keys to someone looking so ill. He left casting a last look over his shoulder. The car seemed strange. An idea from another life. I had ordered it back in May, to be ready after our US tour, but within weeks I’d been admitted to hospital. Tracey had to pay the balance on it while I was sedated on ITU. There’s faith for you. It looked like a toy out there among the Fords and the Volvos.

  I stood looking at it out in the street from the kitchen window on and off for a little while, and then I said I wanted to drive it. Tracey said, ‘You must be joking!’ I said I only had to sit down behind the wheel. It wouldn’t be too strenuous. Round the block or something.

  Outside, the car was still ticking and clicking. I
lowered myself in. It smelt leathery and plasticky. The suede inlay on the seats was buffed up to a buttery yellow, like clean chamois. There were still traces of clingfilm round the keyhole and on the levers of the quarter-lights. The carpets were unmarked, and droplets of water clung to the wing mirrors.

  Fifteen minutes later we were at the foot of the MI at Staples Corner, and without hesitating I pulled the car round past the Edgware Road turn-off, past the hitchhikers on the first corner of the hard shoulder, and, pressing my right foot richly into the floor, let the car accelerate up into the middle lane of the motorway. Tracey was speechless. I eased the car over the first incline and, as we levelled out, settled into a 65 m.p.h. slipstream behind a 5-series BMW, staying in fourth to hear the high, tense growl in the engine. I thought of a cranked-up Fender Vibrolux, 2 × 12, in brown Tolex with swell control, its valves rich and warm.

  ‘What are you doing!’ Tracey was popping and spluttering like a Roman candle.

  ‘Just up to Scratchwood and back. Don’t worry.’ I could see her holding on to her seat.

  A few minutes later I slowed into the slip-road and took the road round the outside of the service station, back over the motorway, with views over the Hertfordshire fields, past two police patrol cars and down the other side.