The doctors told me that if he had tried to haul me up onto the jetty, he would have completely dislocated my pelvis.
Smashed up in an accident, half drowned in the Seine, saved by a rent boy and a bunch of dustmen.
I’ll say one thing, it never gets boring: my destiny is the gift that just keeps on giving.
THE GOOD THING about hospitals is their total respect for your personal space.
I’ve already asked the nurses and the aides a hundred times to close the door when they leave the room. When I’m awake I have no trouble enforcing my wishes: I inherited my father’s voice. But if I should nod off, I wake up to find the door open—wide open, half open or slightly ajar, depending on the laziness of whoever was last to leave, or the level of animosity they feel towards me.
That said, in general, the people here are reasonably discreet. Mostly, they just pop their heads round the door and when they see me on my sickbed hammering away on the laptop, or snoring noisily, or taking zero pleasure eating a meal that has zero flavour, they turn away out of a sense of propriety. They leave me to it.
All except the snot-nosed brat.
A short, tubby girl with terrible hair who’s thirteen, maybe fourteen, I’m no expert in spotty teenagers. Ever since they moved me up to orthopaedic surgery, I feel like I see her at least ten times a day. And every time she gives me this strange look. I can’t help wondering what the hell she’s doing on this ward. No plaster cast, no crutches, no walking frame. No sign of an arm in a sling or even a minor limp. Just a sizeable excess of flab that accentuates her bulldog charm.
Today, like most days, I find myself exposed to the prying eyes of anyone walking around the corridors. And then she shows up again. She slows down, stares at me. Takes her time.
If I gave in to my baser instincts, I’d lift the sheet and give her a quick flash of my balls—I can’t flash my arse since I’m flat on my back. But given her age, I worry people might get the wrong impression. I’m no paedophile. And then there are aesthetic considerations: they’ve catheterized my pocket rocket because I suffered urethral trauma, so what with the oedema in my bollocks, I look like I’ve had a set of bagpipes grafted onto me.
In any case, flashing the family jewels would just be a creative way of letting her know she’s busting my balls, constantly coming round to check out the décor and stare at me, freshly plastered and nailed to the bed.
There’s probably not much in the way of entertainment, I can understand that, but I’m not some unpaid clown, I just want everyone to bugger off and leave me alone.
THE ADVANTAGE of being a childless widower is that you’re not mobbed by visitors.
Not that this seems to stop people popping in and out as though the place has a revolving door: honestly, I haven’t seen so many people in years. Only people involved in caring for me. Nurses, auxiliaries, doctors of various kinds and—the God among Gods in this white-coated Olympus—my surgeon, who is my favourite.
He’s a gruff little man with an icy stare who talks at me as he scans the patient file and makes all the nurses jumpy as fleas.
He is precise, concise. Maybe it’s the fact that he spends his time cutting away the superfluous, but in conversation he sticks to the basics. And even then, he’s unforthcoming. He speaks in simple sentences: subject-verb-object. On his very first visit, he reeled off an inventory of my injuries in a tone that sounded as though he were bored rigid.
Pelvic fracture: stable.
Fractures of tibia and fibula, reduced: metal plate here, two screw fixations there.
I felt like a horse with a farrier examining his shoes.
Then he graced me with a forced smile as he explained that—in the end—I had not required arthrodesis. He was so obviously piqued at not being able to perform this procedure that I did not dare ask what it meant. I just gave him a chagrined smile and resolved to Google “arthrodesis” as soon as he left. It is a surgical procedure that entails permanently fusing the bones of a joint. I feel bad for disappointing him.
Since then, I see him Tuesdays and Thursdays, late in the morning.
According to his latest status report, hot off the press this morning (always assuming I understood it correctly): I’m doing well—everything is going well—he’s happy—I’m happy that he’s happy.
He is pleased with me (translation: with his results).
In two to three weeks I will be able to start walking with crutches, and gradually putting weight on my left foot. If there are no complications.
Not that there’s any reason to assume there will be.
Although…
For the time being, however, I have to lie flat on my back.
In four or five days, a nurse will come to elevate me thirty degrees. I almost said that was more than I could hope for, at my age. But I bit my tongue. No need to risk reprisals for my pathetic sense of humour.
Although…
Finally, with a harried air, as though eager to be done with me, he said:
“Any questions, Monsieur Fabre?”
“No… No, thank you, but for now, I don’t see wh—”
“… in that case everything’s perfect!”
Perfect.
There you go.
Perfect.
Just the word I was looking for.
I’M HOPING to carry on with this occupation of mine, this writing. Though it would be helpful if things came back to me in order. But memory is a weathervane, the slightest breeze sets it spinning.
A little while ago, on the news, a weary worker was being interviewed by a reporter outside the gates of a striking factory. She was fifty-something, her delicate features just beginning to fade, her face was drawn, her eyes pale, she had a look of quiet dignity and that bitter little crease at the corner of the lips carved by a lifetime of constant setbacks.
She looked just as I remember Annie.
Ever since, I’ve been thinking about her.
I met Annie when I was twenty-six. She was cheerful, loving and five years younger than me. I found her beautiful, she found me handsome, sound reasons to keep her for yours truly. We married six months later, and we were together for thirty-one years, until her accident. Falling from a bike on wet cobblestones on her way to the post office. What people call a senseless way to die.
I don’t know any sensible ways.
She was fifty-two, I was fifty-seven. We’d tried our best to have kids, her and me, but nothing doing. Or nothing that would bring them to term. After the third miscarriage, Annie gave up. The difference between us was that I never had a child, whereas she had carried three.
I don’t know whether it’s about something to do with being a man, a moron, or both, but I’ve never considered a foetus to be a child in its own right. I was barely getting to grips with the difference it might make to my life when it was all over.
Nothing had moved in my belly. She had felt the tentative little stirrings.
Annie lost her babies around the fourth month. I was sad, obviously, but I wasn’t devastated. The first time, I think I might even have felt a bit relieved for a minute. I was scared of the idea of a baby coming between us. I was scared of losing my freedom, of no longer being able to do exactly what I wanted. I was a selfish, immature arsehole.
These are the terrible things you can finally face up to when you’re pushing sixty. You’ve nothing left to hide any more. You’ve learnt not to judge yourself too harshly.
But I remember, a few years later, being horrified that I could ever have thought such a thing.
After the first miscarriage, I tried to console her, saying:
“It’ll be fine next time.”
After the second, I didn’t know what to say to her. I listened to her sobbing in the bathroom for nights on end, not daring to say anything, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find the right words.
I would have been better off saying something, even if it meant saying something dumb. A sincere mistake is easier to forgive than a comfortable silence. I
t is more quickly forgotten, too.
Annie visited every specialist possible, the one with bronze plaques on well-heeled, tree-lined avenues, with art prints and potted plants, even those specialists whose fees were not covered by the Sécurité sociale. She consulted psychics, gurus, magnetic healers; she had healing crystals laid on her belly, chakras unblocked, needles jabbed along her meridians; she had blood tests, X-rays, ultrasounds; she intoned mantras; she swallowed pills, gel capsules, and promises that, as everyone knows, are binding only for those who believe.
Over a period of seven or eight years she spent a fortune in time, in money, in vain hope, in shattered dreams. A thousand times she was told that she had to hope, that hope would keep her alive.
Hope mostly keeps alive those who profit from it.
I HAVE BEEN very lucky: I love my job.
My jobs would be more exact, since I have held various different positions.
The six-year-old who desperately longed to go aboard a scaffle ended up spending thirty-five years working in the merchant navy. I’ve seen my fair share of freighters, ferries, tankers, cargo ships of every kind, grain, coal, cement and mineral ore. Each time I signed up was an adventure, each time I docked in France a well-deserved rest, a welcome respite, just as long as it did not last too long.
I can’t help it, I’ve got a workhorse mentality, I need to pull my plough, to sweat and toil to feel alive. I need fresh air, wide open spaces. And something to keep me busy.
Three weeks at home, and I would be standing at the window, pawing the ground, or out in the garden, hocks tensed, wild-eyed, nostrils flaring in the breeze.
“I can tell you’re bored stiff,” Annie would say.
And immediately afterwards:
“When do you ship out again?”
MORNINGS ARE pretty dismal. I don’t sleep much. Too uncomfortable.
That, and a touch of depression at the thought that I’ll have to stay here for at least another month, if there are no complications. Not that there’s any reason to assume there will be. Although…
They reassure me with caring voices as though talking to a child. Now, now, we need to be a patient. Monsieur is comfortable here, isn’t he.
Nope. No, no, no. “Monsieur” is not remotely comfortable, if you want to know.
During the day, I’m bored shitless. At night it’s worse. There are noises in the corridors, nurses laughing and joking, alarms going off and a background hum of television sets. Then, everything melds into an oppressive silence punctuated by phlegmy coughs and muffled whimpers.
The plaster cast makes it almost impossible to sleep. I’m too hot, the dank sheets cling to me.
Pains constantly breed and multiply, not just mine but those of every other patient. They burrow inside me, or spread their wings to invade the adjoining wards, bloodthirsty vampires fluttering in the darkness.
Aches and pains come in an astonishing variety of forms; the hospital supplies them wholesale or retail. There are those that gnaw and those that stab, those that constrict and those that crush. There is the piercing pain that will not let you be, the creeping pain that stealthily grows, silently setting up its equipment before exploding in a wail of bass drums and brass. There is the pain that throbs in your fingertips. The one that has you doubled over in agony. There are those that come armed like the Inquisition, here an axe, there a saw, hold the knife for me, I’ll just grab the pincers.
There are the vicious pains that wake you in the middle of the night and stay with you until daybreak. The nagging aches in the bones. There is the familiar pain that has been coming and going for so long you greet it like a regular guest: the table set, the bed made up. There are those that invariably turn up with a friend, trailing bouts of nausea, breathlessness, a feeling of suffocation, dizziness, shudders.
There are those that arrive with the fanfare and fireworks of Bastille Day, a tumultuous commotion coursing through the body, and damp squibs in the belly and the stomach. There are the heavy pains, like a cannonball dropped from the fourth floor. The brutal twinges that wrench you apart. The vicious little pains that play the innocent but wreak havoc with your nerves. They drill through you, set your teeth on edge, buzzing inside you like a blowfly circling your head.
After a certain point, a certain threshold, you are merely a body in pain.
There are no thoughts, no patience, no desire to laugh.
When you are truly in pain, you no longer even have a place where you can seek refuge.
You are a territory under enemy control.
I AM PSYCHOLOGICALLY preparing myself to make a start on my meal when there is a knock at the door. This is a sufficiently unusual event that it piques my interest and I look up.
In the doorway stands a pretty creature with a tight-fitting sweater, shoulder-length hair, a slim figure and undulating hips. In a mellifluous voice she asks if she can come in, and I give her a studied growl, “Yesss”. She has to come quite close before I realize my mistake. The backlighting and my traitorous myopia are to blame. The sylph is a boy.
The light in my eyes goes out.
He bats his eyelids hard enough to flutter the sheets and, cooing like a dove, he asks:
“Are you the gentleman who fell into the Seine?”
I reply in a distant tone, priggish and reserved.
“The very same. To whom do I have the honour of speaking?”
“My name is Camille. I was the one who fished you out, I don’t know if they told you…”
Oh, so this is my handsome saviour! I give him a broad smile.
He carries on, polite, a little shy.
“I just came to see how you are. But I can see I’m disturbing you, you were about to have lunch…”
On the rectangular plastic tray is a feast for the taste buds: limp beetroot, grey minced beef, soggy cauliflower, a custard tart devoid of soul and of custard.
“The banquet can wait…” I say.
I gesture for him to sit, and he perches one buttock on the chair.
“So, from what I’ve heard, I owe you my life?”
He mutters No, no, no. I whisper Yes, yes, yes.
He relaxes a little. I continue:
“To tell you the truth, I don’t remember anything, it’s a complete blank. So, could you tell me what happened?”
This is just what he was waiting for.
He tells me he heard a brutal shriek of brakes up on the bridge, and immediately afterwards he saw me drop into the water like a stone. Fortunately, there was a boat hook lying on the jetty, so he was able to harpoon my parka and drag me to the bank.
“You gave me such a fright! You were so pale and your eyes had rolled back in your head, I really thought you were dead.”
I can tell he is still in shock. I try to imagine myself floating on the surface of the water like a huge jellyfish, drifting with the current, white as a Pierrot clown.
Which reminds me, in my family they called me Pierrot, or sometimes Pierrot Gourmand—after the lollipops I consumed by the boxful—a nickname I was stuck with until I finally left home. Adults can be so sensitive, sometimes, when it comes to kids.
Little Camille gazes at me with a tender, maternal air. He seems to like me. We tend to like people we have helped.
He seems nice, he has an eager look about him, his gestures are graceful, feminine, his face round and his eyes blue as the sky. High cheekbones. Dazzling white teeth—though they’re a little crooked. How old is he, this boy? Not even old enough to vote, possibly.
When I was a teenager, there were boys like him in the neighbourhood. A blond lad with a bubble butt whose parents had had the brilliant idea of naming him Jean-Marc, the sort of butch French name that is tough to pull off when you like borrowing your mum’s dresses and singing François Deguelt in a shrill soprano.
He got called every name under the sun. Fairy, bumboy, pansy and poof were among the most urbane and flattering.
His father was a truck driver who beat him every Sunday to cure
him of his inclinations. His mother would comfort him and call him “my little baby”. He was mercilessly teased by every arsehole my age.
His life was a bile sandwich on mouldy bread.
After one weekend that proved too long, he threw himself off the roof of his house. No doubt disillusioned by the sheer magnitude of human stupidity. He botched the high dive and ended up paraplegic.
He had just turned fifteen.
When I found out what happened, I felt shitty, even though I wasn’t personally responsible—or no more personally than anyone else. I had never even spoken to him. But I think maybe sidelong glances, sniggers and winks can just as surely push someone over the edge. So, there were a bunch of us who pushed him off the roof that night. His father, first and foremost, with the rest of us cheering him on. All of us, the real men.
By the time you get to my age, unless you’ve understood nothing at all about life, you don’t give a shit about other people’s choices. Some people are straight, some people are gay. Some people have multiple loyalty cards. Some are undecided. We don’t get to choose what makes us horny any more than we get to choose to be left-handed, or to have curly hair or green eyes.
No merit, no shame.
But with young Camille, the issue isn’t being gay. He’s a prostitute, that’s very different. And he’s only a kid, with doe eyes and downy cheeks.
He should be making the most of life, snogging his boyfriend, shopping at the local Ikea to furnish their studio flat instead of turning tricks under a bridge looking like a star pupil dressed up as Slutty Barbie at some Christmas charity bazaar.
Get Well Soon Page 3