by Rob Palk
‘I like his early weird stuff.’
‘Stuart,’ said Marie, ‘don’t lie, you loved Atonement.’
‘I was the model for the neurologist in Saturday,’ he said. ‘Ian – I call him Ian – followed me around for a few months, watching, taking notes. There’s an awful lot of me inside that book.’
‘I didn’t actually like that one.’
‘I thought it was a superlative novel. Professional and personal interest no doubt. I expect I’ve got it all wrong.’ With a last, wounded bounce, he was off along the ward.
‘I don’t think you should have said that,’ said Marie. ‘He is doing your operation after all.’
‘I don’t think he’ll get revenge and leave me brain damaged just cos I didn’t like Saturday.’ But I worried that he might. I looked across at the next bed but the binary man had been taken for his operation and wasn’t there.
Later I realised that he wasn’t coming back.
The room next to the operating theatre was close to freezing cold. I’d waved goodbye to Mum, Dad and Marie as the porters wheeled me down. I tilted my head as much as possible so I could see her as I left. Poor Marie. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a week and I was pretty sure I looked worse. But at least it was all happening to me. I wasn’t just a bystander. They pushed the bed into a giant, slow-moving lift and we trundled down to the basement. I tried hard not to feel scared. This was only the dye job after all. The gluing would come later. That was when I should be scared. Still, I knew there was a chance, even this time, that my brain would panic at the invasion, that I would pass out and wake up altogether blind or not wake up at all. I lay in the adjunct to the theatre, shivering under the bedclothes, waiting to be seen. After a while, two more porters in green overalls showed up and steered me into the theatre. There were screens and bright lights and a bustle of jovial staff. It was as though I were about to take part in a friendly but quasi-criminal fashion shoot. Everyone seemed to want to be very jaunty. I considered begging them for full anaesthetic. There was no sign of Dr Edelman. Maybe he was directing from somewhere up in the wings. My glasses were taken away. Someone lifted up my gown and started shaving my pubic hair. When they’d created a little rectangle of bare skin they applied a tingly paste to it. Unmanned is the word I’d use.
‘I should tell you,’ I said, ‘I don’t like needles. They make me go sort of funny.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ said a blurred shape in front of me. There was a sharp pain in my groin. My head filled up with blackness.
‘You fainted,’ said the blur. ‘Quickly, lower his head.’ Somewhere in the wash of mingled colours, a small hand felt for mine. I gripped it far too tight. Whoever it belonged to didn’t complain, but told me, in a gentle voice, that I would be okay. ‘Lift the legs, get his blood back.’ My body was something people did things to. Something sexless, passive. Another needle entered me and I tightened my grip on the hand.
‘You’re going to have to let go now Stuart,’ the voice said. ‘I have to go and work the machine.’ There was warmness coursing through me, the dye running along my veins.
Back on the ward there were fretful mother sounds and reassuring Marie sounds and my father’s burring breaths. I was swaddled in sleepiness. When I’d got back I’d burbled at them about the kind handholding nurse and how she was actually some kind of top level neuroscientist, pretending to be a nurse. After this, I slept. When I woke up my parents had gone and I was alone with Marie. And I realised something.
I was going to die. You know it, when it comes. Death knowledge, I had it. If they did the second operation that afternoon, as they planned to, I would die under the anaesthetic. A space outside life had been cleared for me. Marie locked her hand in mine and I had time to try and register the detail of it, its size, the damp pillows of her palms, the feel of her fingers between my own. I rubbed my thumb against her wrist until she raised my hand and squashed it to her lips. I didn’t know whether to tell her what I knew, if I ought to be saying goodbye. I was in the ante-room to death.
Around the ward, people snored or moaned or stared at the TV. The bald old black guy in the furthest bed sat up in his orange pyjamas and crooned to himself as though he didn’t think we could hear. At the end of the ward near to the nurses’ bay was a boy a bit younger than me, his head wrapped up in bandage. He was riddled with catheter wires pumping his body with whatever it needed to keep a semblance of life. When I’d been sleeping, Marie had gone over to chat to the boy’s mother, offer some scraps of sympathy. But the boy was still going to die. We were all of us going to, but my death would be soon.
I didn’t want to die. I wanted so fiercely to live.
Twenty-One
‘Stuart? Stuart?’ I opened my eyes to see Dr Edelman again, his rump seconds from my bed. He landed, catapulting me into wakefulness. ‘Afraid we’ve got some rather frustrating news for you.’ Rocking the mattress with his buttocks, he explained there would be a delay. The embolisation would have to wait until morning. He apologised a great deal for this. He was obsequious, attentive. He was bouncy. Any huffiness about my not liking his fictional alter ego had vanished. He hoped I would forgive him the inconvenience. Rest assured that if anything happened in the meantime I was very much in the right place. With a final, flamboyant, bounce, he sprang off the bed and away. A nurse came to take my water jug and put up a nil-by-mouth sign. I rested my head on the pillow.
‘He isn’t the doctor from Saturday, you know,’ said Marie. ‘Frank looked in the acknowledgements. It was another doctor from here. It’s actually kind of weird that he would say that, don’t you think?’
I laughed. I laughed until a strange sound left me, laughter from a part of me I didn’t know existed.
I woke up. I woke up and this meant that the operation was over. Which meant I was alive.
I didn’t have my glasses but, as far as I could make out, my eyesight was unchanged.
The operation was over. I was alive. I lay there in the recovery room and slowly I came to. The radio was playing Christmas songs. It was the day before Christmas Eve and this fact was so ridiculous, and yet so very good, that I laughed from my parched bruised throat. I was euphoric. I felt life had been gifted. I felt as though I’d been awarded a toddlerish receptivity, an awareness of life’s grain. There was a sense, what with coming so close to death before dodging him, racing away, that I was almost getting younger. Getting, at any rate, further away from death.
My mum crying, while Marie comforted her. My dad having to go outside for a bit, for tears rather than a fag. I loved them all so much. I had been wrong to be so prickly about my parents in the past. And poor Marie, and all she’d been through. My friends and my family and most of all Marie. I was going nowhere. I was staying here, just for them. I giggled until I hurt. I was alive and I loved them and I knew that I always would.
Later that afternoon, Dr Edelman came back. Things hadn’t gone quite to plan. I was totally safe, for now. But there was still a risk, a slight risk, that I would have another bleed. Not immediately. Possibly not at all. But as time went on the likelihood would increase. I would need another op in about a year. They’d be in touch to arrange it. Until then, I was not to worry. I should try my best to live well. Not so very much alcohol. No smoking at all. Try not to undergo anything too stressful. Really, I mustn’t worry.
I laughed at the idea of worrying. I was alive. I was alive! It was as though I’d been given a fresh set of antennae to make up for my lack of sight and when I got home they noticed everything. The watery taste of the coldness in the air, the grease that rose in steam from our hissing pans to slick over our kitchen tiles, the faint smell of drying dribble on my pillow after a morning’s sleep. I would lie on our bed, chuckling and cooing to myself, while Malkin sat on my chest and I would register the patterned swirls of colour in his fur, the sandy underside of his chin, the terracotta of his nose, the feel of his pink belly warm against me.
I was alive. My head felt as though it were
vibrating, a struck gong, but even this didn’t feel bad. Marie had put up photos of our second date around the bed, the two of us wary, excited, risking ourselves. She had put on fresh sheets and stuck fairy lights along the wall. When we fucked it was cautious at first, as if any exertion might undo the doctor’s work. Afterwards, I lay panting, my mouth against her shoulder, surprised at the sweat coating us both.
I mostly got used to the sight loss. After a few weeks your brain adjusts and you forget what it was you were missing. I found my way around easily enough. They had given me a white stick but I didn’t ever use it. It was tiny and made me look like I was carrying a magic wand. Sometimes I would hold one arm slightly in front of me, but mostly I took what my brain saw as the whole, only remembering when I’d nudge into someone or badly negotiate a corner. Mostly I was fine. Mostly life was good. Life was incredible.
I asked Marie to marry me. Because I was alive, because I loved her. We were at London Zoo, one of her favourite places, and she was helping me walk along, hand on my arm. I was still weak, at this stage, and I had to stop and sit on every bench. A gorilla was right in front of me and it kept picking up sand in its leathery mitt and watching it spill on the floor. I looked it in the eye. I was entranced. We were both of us alive. I’d never felt a connection with an animal before, not like that I hadn’t. Never felt life to be a miracle. I started blathering to Marie about my gratitude, my love and my delight. ‘Marie, my god, Marie,’ I said. ‘You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to become a vegetarian. I’m going to join you in that.’ She smiled at me, eyes widening. The next thing I knew I had asked her, babbled the question out. We went on to a pizza place and I kept laughing and holding her close. ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I’m so happy to be alive.’ I wished I could have pepperoni. The veg pizza wasn’t as good.
A couple of weeks later I fainted in the bathroom. My tooth banged so hard against my chin it punctured my flesh. A month after that I woke up and it was as though my antennae had switched off. I felt normal. I felt myself again. I felt glum. The euphoria had passed and everything was flat. The vibrations in my skull were slowing down, rattling, approaching stillness. And somewhere behind this, panic. No one had warned me of this. I would have to go back to work soon, in the new job they had found for me, to ‘give you some less stress’. That wasn’t great but it wasn’t what was worrying me. I didn’t know what was. Outside the sun shone just the same. The cat still purred on the end of the duvet, shedding fur, licking his paws. Marie in the next room with a ring on her left finger. And I was on my own, on my own with all this dread.
Twenty-Two
It all seemed a long time ago, the joy of it and the fear. We were heading to a car park by the sports centre, to meet the Badger Patrol. We went down the high street, eyed by smoking groups outside the pubs. It was still light and balmy for autumn and if I tried hard I could think of the night ahead as sporting, an adventure. Marie was raring, quick paced, and I tried hard to keep up. The car park was empty apart from a few vehicles, loitering in one corner. A crowd stood by a camper van, looking more like a guided tour than a militia. These were our comrades then. We headed across the tarmac.
A tall woman, in what I guessed were her early sixties, detached herself from the group and set out towards us with a soldierly strut. ‘Margaret Clifton,’ she said, offering a dry and bruising handshake. ‘You must be Marie. And this is?’
‘Stuart,’ said Marie. ‘My husband. He’s decided to come as well.’
‘Very good. Very good. We need all the help we can get.’ Margaret closed this sentence with an unexpected grin as though she’d become aware of something wicked. Whatever it was, she didn’t feel any need to share it. ‘All the help we can get.’ She sounded like a headmistress talking through a tannoy and was dressed with magnificent sturdiness. Most of her bulk was wrapped in mustard tweeds and bracken-coloured wools finished off with a solid pair of boots.
Margaret introduced us to the others. Irene was Brueghel-ish, moribund and northern. She looked as though she were about to burst into tears and it was only later I realised she always looked like that. Maybe she always was about to burst into tears. Brian was the thinnest, driest looking man I had ever seen, as though he’d been folded and left inside a book. He had an Adam’s apple like a snake eating a globe and skin that looked like it would scuff you at the touch. Kerry was around our age or younger and had a look of half-hidden embarrassment I found I could relate to. She had a nose-stud and cropped dyed hair, of a blonde so bright as to be approaching green. I noticed she didn’t seem to have been dragged here by anyone else.
‘Well,’ said Margaret. ‘Now that we’re all here. Is this everyone? I think it is. Brian, keep quiet now, I know you know what you’re doing but we do have some new ones here.’
Brian, who had been telling Kerry about factory farming, information she was presumably familiar with, made a zip gesture across his mouth and showed a row of thinning teeth. He had a look of having been gnawed on and spat out by various countercultures. An old punk, an old raver, the point on the old Criminal Justice Bill where the frowned-upon cultures meet. The look, also, of a truly world class bore.
‘These are the rules,’ Margaret said. ‘We stick together. We look for injured badgers. We keep to the path. For those of you who got here from London I should point out this is not the same as walking on a pavement so I hope you’ve all brought sensible shoes.’ She glanced down at her own boots, which looked like you could keep your savings in them. ‘If we see an injured badger we call the vet. We aren’t allowed to trespass.’ Here, the unexpected grin returned to her face, so that she looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy with a secret. ‘And we aren’t allowed to disrupt a shoot. On the other hand, they aren’t allowed to shoot if we’re near them, so we aren’t entirely hopeless. It may be that—’ she grinned especially hard and let out a long hiss of amusement, ‘—from time to time word gets to the sabs. I don’t know how but it does. I like to say it travels through the trees. And, oh, look who it is.’ Her skin turned confectionary pink. Something pleasant this way came.
I turned and saw a giant approaching. Only it was a vegan giant, exuding tofu-fed wholesomeness. He was taller than the rest of us by at least a head, and looked as though the god Thor had ditched lightning and discovered sustainable energy. He had a beard like a thatched roof. He must have been pushing forty but seemed absurdly healthy and strong. Next to him was a young man whose shoulders slumped and whose skin was pining for vegetables. I didn’t like this young man. I’m not sure I much liked either of them.
‘Henry, good to see you,’ said Margaret Clifton. ‘George.’ Her bark had a purr running under it, like the sound of a happy quad bike. I guessed this was for Henry. Her grin looked like it wanted to take off from her face. And when Henry returned it, his own smile made all of our smiles – and, yes, there were a lot of them, answering helpless grins – seem sub-smiles, snag toothed, crooked and defunct. He was a healthy-looking guy, was Henry.
‘Sorry, I’m late, I told Bri. We had a kitten in, last minute.’
‘Forgot,’ said Brian. ‘Went right out of my head. He volunteers,’ he said. ‘At the sanctuary, with me. I know I said I’d mention it but by the time I’d got home it had gone. My memory. I’m going to start getting stuff tattooed, remind me. What’s that on your wrist? Oh, it says Henry’s working late.’ No one was listening to Brian. Instead attentive faces gazed at Henry while he talked us through the kitten’s progress. Apparently it had been touch and go but the little feller had pulled through. Margaret looked like a melting ice cap. It was shocking, seeing her touch her curls and simper. I felt how Catholics must have when they abandoned Latin Mass. Something dependable had gone awry.
‘I was there too?’ said George, the boy. He could not have been more than twenty. His voice was one of those youthful chewy ones that sound as though they’re coming through a sock. When he spoke, he scratched at his blond fringe, as though he resented it for looking so angelic. T
here was something distressing about him. ‘At the sanctuary? That’s why I’m late.’ He glared. No one had asked him. He moved to stand as close as he could to Henry.
‘We ready to save some badgers?’ said Henry. His voice was a lulling monotone, as though vocal inflections were for sell-outs. I looked over at Kerry, who was standing near to me. Her pupils looked like frisbees. Fancies him, I thought. Of course she does. I couldn’t see Marie’s face from where I stood and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Henry seemed a hard man to dislike but I thought I would make the effort. If anyone fell over and hurt their ankle he’d probably know how to fix it. I would probably fall over and hurt my ankle and I’d just have to lie there and thank him.
Across the car park a policewoman trotted towards us, and we all involuntarily stiffened our shoulders. Marie looked as though she might spit. Recently she’d got like that with girls who wore fur on the tube.
The policewoman reached us and smiled with well-meaning unease, a supply teacher who hadn’t been told quite how disabled we were.
‘Evening,’ said Margaret, stealing the policewoman’s line. ‘Can we be of assistance?’ The policewoman seemed quelled by this. She leaned her weight from one foot to another and didn’t meet our eyes.
‘You here for the badgers?’ she said, sounding slightly ashamed.
‘We are,’ said Margaret, the grin erupting onto her face again. ‘As we have every right to be, Officer.’ A shower of spittle when she hit a consonant.
‘Of course,’ said the policewoman. I began to feel rather sorry for her. ‘How long do you think you’ll be out for?’
‘We’ll be out as long as it takes, thank you,’ said Margaret. The policewoman hid, unsuccessfully, a wince. A speck of saliva had hit her somewhere unwanted.