by Rob Palk
After the show, Frank had warm congratulations for the playwright. Marie and I had stood there, smiling, trying to look promising. The playwright had asked how her acting was going, without seeming too interested. We had gone on to a Turkish restaurant where I had filled up my glass once too often. There’d been an actress in the play who had very red hair and very pale skin. I thought about this actress in my sleep.
Morning came and I had the slightest of slight headaches. I could smell coffee bubbling on the hob and hear the faint sound of aquatic mammals and panpipes accompanying Marie’s yoga. I enjoyed these morning rituals. I stumbled through to the front room and smiled upon the scene, the table pushed towards the corner of the wall, panels of winter sunlight on the floor and Marie, curling, stretching, on the unfurled purple mat. It was good to wake up to these things. I let her finish, kissed her and poured myself a bowl of cereal while she got ready for work. We said goodbye and I hopped in the warm and slippery bathtub for a shower. While I showered, I thought, in a more demonstrative way, about the actress from the night before. I hopped out, dabbed at myself with a towel and decided I needed to piss.
The moment that I started, a black wave of pain passed over my sight. It travelled from right to left, shooting, inky, across my vision. As slowly as I could, I lowered myself to the floor and vomited into the bowl. There was a lot more vomit than I’d ever seen before. There was wave after bitter wave of it. When I was finally done, I closed my eyes and lay down on the cold floor. I could hear myself gasping, fast and painful gasps. I think, for a time, I slept.
When I woke my head was hurting and I needed to be sick again. Halfway through doing this, other bodily functions started clamouring for my attention, all at once. I hauled up onto the seat and emptied myself while roaring through my legs. My sweat was all leaving me and hurting in the process, needles threading my pores. When I strained great jolts of soreness knocked through my head, until I fell off the seat and back onto the floor. Everything – the light in the bathroom, the smell of my fast-departing fluids, the traffic rumbles from the road outside, the faint scent of ammonia from the litter tray in the hall – was a source of nausea and pain. I was allergic to existing. I was scared.
I’m not sure how but I managed to scrape myself across our flat and climb up into the bed. I must have left a trail of waste behind me, like a giant, ailing slug. I lay pressed against the mattress, panting and gasping for air. My body felt robbed of liquid.
Somehow I found the energy to call work and tell them I’d be in late. I don’t know if I made sense. I remember they sounded annoyed. Once I’d done with explaining I put my phone on the bedside table and blacked out.
Eight
‘Stuart.’ And again. ‘Stuart.’ I was in a paddy field, whatever that was, scything whatever you scythed there. I was a Chinese peasant in a lightshade hat. Tinkly music was playing, imitation Nyman. I was an Arab drinking coffee in a sandy backstreet bar. I was a montage of swarming humanity in a 1980s film. I was home in bed and it was dark outside and I was slick with sweat all over.
Marie reached down and touched my face. This made me scream some more. Oxygen, human contact, the feel of the sheets on my skin – everything was poisonous. I was wrenched out of my element.
‘There is sick in the hall,’ Marie said. ‘Are you okay?’ I told her I didn’t know how it got there. I could hear her cleaning it up. I lay shivering, poleaxed. ‘I don’t think you are well,’ she said. ‘You were saying you were Chinese.’
‘Was I speaking Chinese?’ I said. I was hopeful.
‘You were not speaking real Chinese. You were speaking a racist, Walt Disney version of what a Chinese person sounds like.’
‘I have a cold,’ I managed to say. ‘A bad one.’ When she switched on the light I screamed and covered my eyes.
‘I’m not sure this is a cold,’ said Marie. ‘I think this is something worse.’
Nine
A word or two about sight. I hadn’t been especially sighted since I was eight. Or at least that’s when my sightlessness was spotted. I was in the back of the car on the way to Chester Zoo, excited, as only a child can be, by the proximity of animals, and I’d cried out at the vision of a field of grazing pandas.
I’d had my eyes checked and it was discovered I needed glasses. It had bothered me sometimes, myopia. Writers are supposed to be noticers aren’t they? Alert to texture and colour, beadily in search of detail. I was never going to be like that.
When the blackness had leaked across my eyes that morning, my glasses had dropped to the floor. Two days had taken place in a salad of vision, a blur. What sight I had seemed intent on hurting me. Light and colour had turned offensive, gone hostile. I kept my eyes closed as much as I could. I rolled and I moaned and I sweated and around about every hour I would stagger to the bathroom to be sick.
On Wednesday afternoon, Marie came back early from work and said she was calling an ambulance. I rebelled at this. We lived, after all, just five minutes’ walk from a hospital. Marie pondered, said she wasn’t sure I could get there but she was happy to give it a go. She reached out and touched my brow, flinching only slightly at the-now-familiar screams.
‘You’ll have to put some clothes on,’ she said. ‘Give me a shout if you need a hand.’ I told her I would be fine.
Forty-five minutes later I had managed to get a sock on. I had lost the argument and so I grunted and passed out.
When I woke, blurred men and women were all around me, and there was an atmosphere of emergency, made worse by the softness of their voices. ‘I feel much better,’ I said.
‘He does not feel better,’ said Marie. Her voice was strained. ‘I mean, look at him.’
They all looked at me. I’d been asleep, all over the place. I’d been a pearl diver, a Bedouin, a bored girl on the checkout counter at Boots. My identity swimming into others, escaping its sore little shell.
‘Have you been drinking liquids?’ asked one of the ambulance people, as though I might have been drinking anything else. I tried to answer but my voice was a croak. Marie said that when I drank anything it came straight out again. I started to feel scared. How many fingers were they holding up? Had anything like this ever happened to me before? Had I taken anything I shouldn’t? Marie’s hand squeezed mine and this time her touch didn’t make me shrink or scream. This time her touch felt necessary. It felt a link with life.
I found myself unfussily arranged and lifted from the bed, positioned onto a stretcher and carried across the room. I could just about enjoy it, this helplessness, this happy relinquishing. I was weak and I was cared for. At the same time, I was able to feel important. I was being carried out of the flat, like an emperor in a sedan. People might see me and wonder who I was and what was wrong. They carried me smoothly, without bumps.
Marie was out of sight but kept on saying she loved me, that I would be okay. I smiled to show her I was fine, but also that I was brave. She told me I looked frightening.
‘Stuart,’ another voice said. I was out in the cold, feeling the crunch of the winter air on my skin. I wondered if people on the street were watching us, concerned. Maybe I ought to be concerned as well. Maybe this was serious. Panic, belated, started to take over. ‘Can you tell me if this was sudden or if it came on gradually?’ I told the voice it was sudden, gripping Marie’s hand. The clunk of an opening ambulance door and I was carried back into warmth. The cold seemed to have infiltrated my skin. I lay there and I shivered as the ambulance drove the two minutes to the hospital.
Ten
The accident and emergency ward in our local hospital was like a theatre in the round. The doctors and nurses had an office set up in the middle of the room with curtained beds surrounding it. The staff yelled and dashed and slammed things down as if to keep their audience entertained. The light bore into me, the noise attacked my skull.
I was still scared. We were in hospital and this was serious. Patients yelled at one another from bed to bed.
‘Stuart,
’ said Marie. ‘That bed has a police guard.’
I tried to say it was all right for some, but it came out as a croak. I tried thrashing about and moaning but it didn’t seem to help. I tried putting on my glasses for the first time since the blackness came, but they were heavy and thick-framed, like everyone’s glasses in my part of London, and they weighed down on my head. I worried that, even with them on, I couldn’t see as well as I used to. Marie offered to read aloud from the book I was reading, Herzog I think it was, but the sound of a few paragraphs made it worse.
‘My vision isn’t right,’ I managed to say. A large part of the world had been cordoned off. As though I were watching a play and the curtain on my right side hadn’t been fully drawn, the stage lights not quite turned up. I took the glasses off. Crashes and thuds of activity all around. A nurse came over and handed me a tiny hexagonal cardboard gourd with a Paracetamol inside. I gobbled down the pill with a sip of water and was surprised how much better I felt. I was still sweating though, alternately hot and cold. Every so often I would blink or shake my head and this sent pain echoes sounding through me. Another nurse arrived and asked if I knew who I was, or the name of the prime minister. I answered with a groan, which she accepted as close enough. She asked me to press on her upturned hands then quizzed me on how many fingers she had held up. I obeyed, uncomprehending. All around me patients kept up a chorus of complaints.
Dave, right, my Dave he got chucked out didn’t he? Only he doesn’t listen does he, he comes straight back with a blade? Only these guys, these guys, they’ve got fucking hardware, like they’re properly kitted out and all Dave’s doing is waving his little blade around like a fucking sparkler. They’ve got crowbars and shit. Fucking hammers. Take him round the back and they dislocate everything, like there’s nothing left to lo-cate.
Dalek. Dalek. I hear you. I hear your suffering, dalek and I’d love to soothe away your cares. I’m an old man dalek but I still got it in me. I can melt away your frustrations, worse comes to the worse.
I don’t want your consolation. I want my Dave to get well again.
He’s dead you daft cunt.
You can’t say that. You cannot. fucking. say. that.
I put my glasses back on. An orthodox Jewish family walked through the ward with careful, birdy steps, blinking in curious disbelief. The bed across from mine had nine or ten visitors around it, all wearing sports gear and eating pizza. The man in the bed had a bandaged torso with a maroon stain showing through. He had a satisfied look on his face.
If someone shows you the blade, his friend said, then you ain’t getting proper shanked. It show-shanking is that. Not serious.
‘Doesn’t seem much point in trying to read,’ said Marie. I could tell she was uncomfortable. She was receptive to the pain of others, she caught it off them. Closed her eyes at the violent parts of films. We lived across from a patch of grass near to this hospital and she’d sometimes stare through the window at the people sat on the benches. She said she was wondering what bad news they’d had, to make them want to sit there on their own, with dazed faces, ignoring the cold. I’d said they were probably addicts. She’d sit at the window gazing at the loners nodding out, feeling a sorrow towards them they couldn’t feel themselves. I sometimes used to worry that she’d one day invite them all in.
The doctor, when he turned up, was a flushed young man who looked as if he’d just jumped off a horse. The look of a duellist contemplating his felled opponent. ‘So then, Stuart. Block, is it? What’s the matter with you then?’
Marie leant forward and told him what was wrong. The doctor nodded at her several times as though memorising directions to a country pub, before getting a nurse to check my pulse rate. He bent his face close to mine until I could smell toothpaste and coffee. ‘We’re going to get some fluids into you. You’re very dehydrated. After that we’ll take another look.’
There was a moan from a neighbouring bed. Marie scratched at her knees. She’d been doing that a lot lately, scratching parts of herself, pulling at her fringe. Sometimes there were red patches on her arms, from all her scratching. I warmed to them, the blisters empathy gave her. ‘This place,’ she said, closing her eyes. The doctor brandished a hypodermic and took hold of my arm.
Not long after the needle entered my vein, my body started to tremor. My teeth chattered, until I shook the bed. Marie stood and ran for help. He’s dying, somebody come. They told her my reaction was normal. ‘If it’s normal, why did no one say? If it’s normal why didn’t you warn us?’ Even shaking, I could savour it, that wonderful us. We were a team, Marie and I.
My convulsions slowed down to a hardly discernible twitch. My panting began to subside. My headache mellowed into a dulled throb, like the sound of distant reggae. I was starting to feel like a person again. But my eyes still didn’t seem right.
‘S’flu,’ said the doctor when he returned. He stood with his hands behind his back and his legs apart, as though warming himself by a fire. ‘Nothing but flu. You can go home.’
I felt, through the sickness, the thrill of triumph. ‘Told you I was okay,’ I said to Marie. I leaned on her in my dressing gown, walking back home in the dark. I was relieved. The worst was over. I was going to be okay.
But I was not okay. As the rest of the week went on it became harder to ignore that some of my eyesight was missing. Areas of vision were denied me, only noticeable when, say, Marie would pad over and tap me on the arm and it would shock me like an ambush. It was as if my world were being slowly hemmed in by sightlessness. Fear, that I’d managed to ignore when the pain was at its worst, nudged at my consciousness, waking me up at night. I told myself the sight problem was a temporary thing, a side effect of the flu. Flu can do that, can’t it, cause some temporary blindness? And they are temporary, aren’t they; the visual scars that flu leaves you? So in a few short days I’d be healthy and vigorous, healthy and vigorous and seeing?
Eleven
On the first Monday after I’d collapsed, I set off to work. I said goodbye to Marie and stood outside our building, adjusting to the wintry air. It was five minutes’ walk to the station.
Except I hadn’t accounted for the tiredness in my bones. I hadn’t accounted for my sight. I had to walk forward very slowly, one arm half outstretched like a bashful fascist. I sloped, one step at a time, along the more characterful end of our neighbourhood. Kids on bicycles and old ladies walking dogs would appear out of the dark at me, as though I were riding a social-realist ghost train. ‘Mind where you’re fucking going,’ they said.
It was easier to stand still. So long as I stayed rooted in the middle of the pavement no one bumped into me at all. That said, it wasn’t much help in getting to work. Carefully I let myself budge forward, my arm a little more outstretched. I kept on going until I got to the end of the street. Here was a road. It was the sort of road where they speed up when they see you coming and it had been hard enough crossing it back when I could see.
What would it mean, to go blind? I hadn’t really thought about that. I’d be poorer, chances were. I would cut myself while shaving. I would have to listen to a lot of audiobooks and the unabridged versions would be hard to get and expensive. I might, I thought, go under. People did. The area where I lived was home to a thriving community of the unwell. They circled the hospital for knocked-off painkillers, they sat out, alone or in messy congregations, spitting, staring at the air. One woman wore a homemade radiation-proof hat. The old man who stumbled in his dressing gown, blue-shinned, gesticulating. They all of them started off somewhere. I’d be the man who keeps bumping into things as he nervously goosesteps to the station. You could go under these days, the net was being cut. The jaws of the world could open underneath you.
While I’d been worrying about this, the traffic hadn’t slowed. The cars seemed jammed and speeding both at once. There was a fresh white bicycle tied to a lamppost by the road, a bleached memorial to someone careless or unlucky. Not having a bike, I would have to make do with a wreath.
I waited and I waited. Eventually I decided there was nothing for it but to put my fate to the gods. It had worked so far, more or less. I closed my eyes, crossed my fingers and stepped out, reaching the other side with a renewed headache and a pounding heart. Evidently this approach was unsustainable.
My options felt foreshortened. Maybe if I kept up this lurching and arm-waving, someone would photograph me for an art project on blind people and I wouldn’t even see it, because I was blind.
I carried on, slowly pacing, down towards the station. Everyone around me seemed speeded up and zooming. Hectic nurses galloped to the hospital, packs of children charged at breakneck speed for school. I trudged along the pavement, unsure if they knew I was there. Two trains whizzed over the bridge in the time it took to get to the station. I spent a few minutes finding my Oyster card and I set off up the ramp to the platform. Normally I climbed the stairs, but today was not a normal day. It might not be a normal life. A train came when I was halfway up the ramp. I managed to get on the next one, clinging to the rubber handhold, feeling weak. It was already 9.30 and I had another train to catch.
The next train wasn’t too crowded. It got to my stop around quarter past ten. Once I’d got this far, I only had to make it down a few streets until I was safe at my desk. I had a few short breaks but I made it in twenty minutes or so.
I reached my office, triumphant and sat down. I was a couple of hours late. I switched on my computer and found I was squinting at the screen.
Twelve
‘I think you need to get a second opinion.’ Marie dropped the coffee-browned script she was reading, jumped off our salmon-coloured sofa and ran to fuss over my hand. ‘I don’t think you can put off doing that.’