Cedilla (8 page)

Only one thing made me submit to a second assault, and it wasn’t actually reverence for Ansell. I had gone against her in the past, when she had devised walking aids for me that I refused outright, and I could do it again. But until the second hip was done I wouldn’t be able to adopt anything close to a conventional sitting posture. I wasn’t worried about taking tea with the Queen. I would rely on her, when the time came, to put me at my ease – isn’t that her job? But with two working hips, even in the event that one worked less well than the other – as I so confidently anticipated – learning to drive came a lot nearer. Still a long shot but not a flat impossibility.

I quite see the comedy of someone who had always resisted mechanistic accounts of the universe deciding that his life wasn’t complete without a car. On the other hand, if I didn’t grab the steering wheel with both hands, the joke would be on me for all time. I’d never be able to take charge of my own life. If I didn’t make it to the driver’s seat then I would never be more than a passenger, dependent on the
good will of others. A finite quality, as I had already understood. The people who looked after me had limited stocks of patience, and for all I knew they were more forbearing than most. I had never experienced what it was to carry a burden – and that was the whole point. My only experience of burdens was of being one, and I couldn’t claim to have unlimited patience either, in that rôle.

By the time I returned to Wexham Park for my second dose of agony I was armed with new expletives. I didn’t want to amuse the staff with amateur swearing a second time. When the pain came I would try, however distressed and disoriented, to invoke the symbolic tetrad as explained in
The Tarot
, represented in the Mysteries of Memphis and Thebes by the four aspects of the sphinx (man, eagle, lion, bull) and also by the four elements. I planned to cry out
Yod Hé
Vau Hé
, visualising the seductive shapes of the Hebrew letters in the book. I practised writing them out on the backs of envelopes and leaving them round, just to show that doctors didn’t have a monopoly on mysterious scribblings. I too could play that game.

I left
The Tarot
conspicuous by my bedside when Mr Arden the surgeon came to give me his pre-operative briefing. This was a pep talk which didn’t leave me with much pep, now that we both knew the flintiness of the material that was waiting for him beneath the veneer of skin. I remember him saying, ‘Orthopædics is a fairly brutal business.’ He was apologising in advance. He promised he would use the saw wherever he could, and only break what he must of my concrete hip. If he noticed the book he didn’t say anything. This was rather disappointing, but it’s the sad fact that high professional accomplishment doesn’t necessarily broaden the mind. The Top Man in Granny’s sense, someone who had soared so high in his medical specialty that he had transcended Dr and become mere Mr again, could still be almost mediocre, viewed in his other aspects. No doubt there were times in my teens when I was downright snooty. I was working very hard to feel superior to the man who planned to crack open one of my hips for the second time.

The pre-operative ritual had changed by the time of my second
hip-cracking. It was no longer necessary, apparently, to shave my groin ahead of time.

There was no explanation given. By then I should have realised that explanations were not available on the National Health. It seemed a bit odd, all the same. If it was such a vital procedure last time, then why not now? What had changed? Perhaps I’d gained some immunity from infection along the way. If so, how did they know?

I felt pretty silly asking why I wasn’t having this intimate service rendered – as if I was anxious to go under the barber’s blade as well as the surgeon’s. I certainly had more of a crop of pubic hair than I had had the previous year. My personal experience didn’t put me in a position to refute the old-wives’-tale that shaved hair grows back with twice the force.

There was something I thought I remembered about the anæsthetist on the first hip operation – not the time I had had the intravenous dose to which I was so disastrously allergic, but the second try with gas.

I remembered the anæsthetist having a lovely big beaky nose, a real schnozz, and he said cheerfully, ‘I’ll just make sure this mask is the right size for you!’, slipping it playfully over his own giant conk before fitting it over mine, taking a good old sniff in the process. Was I remembering right? Could that possibly be professional conduct?

Of course anæsthesia distorts perception of its very nature, and after I came round I was too busy trying to surf the waves of pain to be sure of my memories. This time I determined to notice everything, to participate in the experience to the fullest degree and forget nothing that happened, right up to the moment that the mask of consciousness slipped from my face.

I remember the mask itself seeming to grow huge as the gas took effect, and everything becoming unreal and full of echoes. I even think I struggled, trying to kick and move my arms to fight the anæsthetist off.

But it was the earlier bit that was more interesting. This time he
didn’t say he was testing the fit of the mask, he said he was testing the flow of the gas, but yes, once again he took a good sniff on his own account before it was my turn.

Later, after I had crawled out of the trench of pain into which Mr Arden, summoning up all his professional skill, had tenderly lowered me, I asked Mum about what I had seen. She didn’t seem at all surprised. Apparently it’s a well-known professional hazard, liable to catch up with you in the long run. Anæsthetists don’t exactly fall asleep on the job, but they can’t always resist the temptation of dipping their fingers in the till of oblivion.

I think I kept to my resolution of using Mouni Sadhu’s
The Tarot
as my own personal dictionary of mystical expletives. I believe I kept ‘fucking buggers’ up my sleeve for other emergencies. The nursing staff looked at me a little strangely, which was probably no bad thing. I wanted to sound in my agony like an Adept uttering words of power rather than a schoolchild howling.

The man in the next bed when I was installed back at CRX was Mr Thatcher, a nice man who was recovering from having his gallstones out. He had been promised they would give him the stones in a jar, to take home with him when he left. He offered to let me take a look when they did. I was looking forward to it. Apparently there’s a lot of individual variation in the size, colour and texture of gallstones. ‘Some people,’ he told me, ‘have just one, but it looks like a mahogany doorknob. Other people just have a handful of gravel.’ Somehow it was immediately obvious that he was over towards the doorknob end of the gallstone spectrum.

Most of my conversations with Mr Thatcher revolved around gratifyingly adult subjects: sex, money and alcoholic drink. Because I was anæmic and underweight, Ansell prescribed me a bottle of beer every evening. She had upped the stakes from wholemilk yoghurt. Now it was up to Mackeson to build me up.

I didn’t like the beer, it was nasty stuff, but I loved having it. Ansell must have known what a thrill it was for a teenager in a-certain-amount-of-discomfort to be downing beer on doctor’s orders.
Mr Thatcher was certainly jealous of my evening prescription, the medicine which came with a bottle-opener, and a nurse to work it.

When my medicine arrived, Mr Thatcher would launch into a lip-smacking rendition of the familiar advertisement for Mackeson. ‘Looks good …’ he would say, in slow tempo and countryman’s tones, ‘tastes good … and by golly it does you good.’ Imitating in fact the tones of Bernard Miles, unforgettably frightening Long John Silver on stage and patron of the Vulcan School. Obligingly I would make a glottal-stop gurgle as I swallowed the beer, which was so peatily sweet it did indeed taste like medicine.

I think Mackeson’s was one of the first products to fall foul of the Trades Descriptions Act. For a while the company retained the script, omitting only the last four words, so that the false claim went on sounding in the ears of the faithful.

I was aware that drinking stout was a rather
Coronation Street
thing to be doing. That was something else we did, Mum and I, besides covertly reading the
Mirror
, as a way of wincing at the disgustingness of the working classes. It was certainly a different world – in those days the Northern accents were much thicker. When Mum told me with her nurse’s knowledge that ‘milk stout’, which characters like Ena Sharples always seemed to order at the Rovers’ Return, was so called because it was thought to promote lactation, I was fascinated. So that was why working-class women were so big up top! But somebody should have told Muzzie and Caroline, posh mother and older sister of my dear friend Sarah on the children’s ward, before they overindulged in the elixir and became so shamingly buxom.

Mr Thatcher had definite ideas about sex. This was at the time when the Sexual Offences Bill decriminalising certain acts between men was making its way, stage by stage, towards reality. ‘Homosexuality is a sad condition,’ said Mr Thatcher (I held my breath), ‘but what can society expect if there are schools with no girls in them? When boys from schools like that come into puberty, they’ve lost touch with their instincts. They don’t know what they’re supposed to do.’ Co-education would solve that particular problem in a generation. Satisfied, Mr Thatcher moved on to the next social issue in his newspaper.

He himself wasn’t married. ‘My needs are met by a very special
lady, John,’ he explained. ‘Known her for years. We get on very well. Of course I have to pay, but that doesn’t worry me. Just think about it for a moment. People end up having to pay for their sexual business one way or another. No exceptions. Those that get married pay most of all. And it’s good to have things settled – I don’t like going to different ladies. I keep to the same one. She knows me, y’know. Once you’re a regular, her charges are very reasonable. She likes to have things settled too, y’see. Monica says she’s fond of me, and I believe her. We have a nice chat and a cup of tea afterwards. We’ve become good friends. She tells me she wants to take me out to a meal one day, when she’s not quite so busy. I can tell you, I’m really looking forward to that!’

Mr Thatcher looked at me rather wistfully. ‘We could always meet up after we’ve both got better and left hospital. We could visit the lady I’ve been telling you about. If you were with me, and I recommended you, I dare say you’d get a discount. Especially if you’ve never done it before.’ Of course I’d ‘done it’, just not in the way Mr Thatcher meant – I’d had assignations in school lavatories and music rooms, I’d been pounced on in armchairs and fellated, without my permission though not exactly against my will.

He searched my eyes for any flicker of interest, saying, ‘You shouldn’t worry too much about the money side of it, John. In fact, why don’t you take it as a present from me?’

He really liked the idea of having me as his little pal, but I was getting a bit fed up with people offering me special rates on their prostitutes. What was it that made people think, ‘He looks a bit down in the mouth – let’s treat him to a working girl’? First Jimmy at the Vulcan School and now Mr Thatcher. I have to say that Jimmy’s Minouche, with her cute scrunched-up face, sounded more fun than Mr Thatcher’s Monica with her cups of tea and busy schedule. If a similar offer was made a third time I’d get quite shirty, particularly if the downward trend continued, towards the shabbiest drabs and doxies of Slough. Did I really look so helpless? If I’d wanted what they wanted I wouldn’t be shy about it, but it so happened that I wanted something different.

Still, the ice had been broken between us, Mr Thatcher and me. I particularly enjoyed our conversations on the subject of money. He said he’d got a tidy sum put aside, but was cagy about how much exactly. Still, when I asked if he could raise £1,000 he looked pretty smug and said he thought he could manage that. I was impressed. I had managed to amass £72 10s 5d over the years, and I liked money very much indeed. That’s why I kept it in the Guardian Bank, which had its offices in Jersey. I was a plutocrat in embryo. It was a canny decision to put my funds there, because the Guardian Bank, avoiding U.K. tax, paid 8% per annum. I kept my assets out of the taxman’s reach. My money wasn’t just saved, it was sheltered, safe from the storms of the business world. It wasn’t just in a bank, it was in a
haven
.

Then the news broke on the radio that the Guardian Bank Ltd had been taken into receivership. It was reported the next day in the
Tele
graph
, which is where Dad read about it.

I lay in the bed on Ward Three of CRX and considered my newly acquired poverty.

Was the roof over my head about to fall in? No.

Would my food now be stopped? No.

Would I stop getting medicines and nursing? No.

Why, I was even sipping beer that I didn’t have to pay for.

Along the corridor I could hear the echoes of Dr Ansell’s voice, and I knew she’d be at my bedside in a moment, checking whether I was doing my exercises. She would ask if I was enjoying my Mackesons. I was and I wasn’t, but life was good and warm, and I felt as though I was being cradled in an enormous tender hand.

Mum, though, visited in tears because of what had happened to the Guardian Bank. She was literally wringing her hands as she asked, ‘What are we going to do about your money
now
?’

I replied that I wasn’t going to do anything. Then Dad came in, stiffly formal, dressed for work. Any whiff of crisis made their incompatibility glaring. They didn’t seem anything like husband and wife – more like an unhinged widow and the military policeman detailed to inform her of her loss. While Mum went on falling apart, Dad brandished a stiff upper lip that could have knocked down walls.
He advised me to take it on the chin, saying he hoped this setback wouldn’t deter me from a future in the world of finance. He even said something about him and Mum helping out if the receiver was unable to recover my money.