The Emperor Waltz (47 page)

Dr Arsehole giggled. He sat down on the end of the bed in a jolly, conspiratorial way. I felt that I was probably only slightly older than him, and could easily have been his friend in other circumstances. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It just sort of crept up on me.’

‘It can’t be nice coming into work in the morning and finding that you’ve got to deal with something like that, after all.’

‘This?’ Dr Arsehole said, with amusement. ‘This? Oh, this is nothing. You should see some of the things we see. They’re interesting, feet, though – they really are interesting little diagnostic tools for the rest of the body. If you have problems with your feet, there’ll be a problem somewhere else, often.’

‘There’s an awful Chinese thing, isn’t there,’ I said, ‘where they tell you that your digestion is bad or you suffer from migraines by sensitive bits on your feet or something? Reflexology.’

‘Yes, well,’ Dr Arsehole said, looking long, deep and languidly into my eyes as he cut off another pad of hardened, soggy, pus-drenched skin and cast it aside. ‘There’s something in it, even if they take it too far. What do you do for a living?’

‘I’m a novelist,’ I said.

‘Ooh,’ Dr Arsehole said. ‘What sort of novels? My wife’s reading that
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Not a novel like that one, I hope.’

I hid my disappointment at the existence of Dr Arsehole’s wife, and explained the sort of novels I had been writing as briefly as was compatible with civility. As always, I felt that signed-up writers of thrillers, pony-based adventures, fantasy novels about giant insects or historical romances had this particular conversation much more easily sewn up than I did, and Dr Arsehole politely said he would look out for them. ‘But not much standing up required,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Not much standing up required in your job.’

‘Oh. No. I don’t suppose any, in fact, apart from performing at lecterns occasionally.’

‘Now I think I want to have a look at your shoes, if they’re the sort of shoes you usually wear.’

Zaved came in that afternoon, flying in from Switzerland in a concerned state. I told him about Dr Arsehole’s consultation, exaggerating parts of it for his entertainment.

‘And then Dr Arsehole said – get this – if they’re not happy about your shoes, they think they’re contributing to your poor state of foot health, then the NHS can actually have some shoes made for you. Bespoke shoes. Do you know how much that normally costs, how much if you had them made on the high street? Three thousand pounds, I reckon, minimum. So I said, I can’t believe it, I’ve really landed on my feet here, and Oliver said, Well, that’s one way of putting it, and actually, it’s cheaper for us than admitting you to hospital with infections like this one, look at it this way. So I said Oliver. Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re not going to make one of those terrible pairs of shoes for me, you know, those shoes for remedials, I couldn’t bear that, look at my shoes, the ones I’m wearing. Those cost five hundred dollars in New York. I couldn’t bear it if I had to start wearing the sort of shoes that remedials wear. But Oliver goes No, no, don’t worry, don’t panic, it’s not like that, you can get brogues, anything, all sorts, honest. And then he started talking to me about his wife reading porn all the time.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Zaved said, shaking his head. He had ten years of experience of my exaggerations in conversation. ‘There’s a terrible smell in here. What’s that smell?’

‘It’s Joe,’ I said, my voice lowered. ‘Just on the other side of the curtain. It’s worse when you go out and come back in again.’

‘My God,’ Zaved said. ‘Is that the man who shouted Nurse at me? He thought I was a nurse. How can he have thought I was a nurse? I was wearing an overcoat. Can’t you ask to be moved to a room on your own?’

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘Don’t you ask on my behalf, either. Tea! How lovely! That is kind of you! Milk and no sugar, please. How lovely! Thank you so very, very much. I hope I’m not going to get into awful trouble for having a little bunch of tulips on my bedside table, am I?’

‘Oh, well,’ the ward assistant said. ‘I think we can probably overlook it for now.’ She went away smiling.

I had won the game with Dr Arsehole, but he was only an occasional visitor to the ward. On the second day, he finished his treatment of my foot by cosily sitting down on the end of the bed and cutting my toenails, even the ones on the toes with nothing wrong with them. He went on so long that lunch arrived – a stolid mass of fish pie with carrots and peas on the side – and he said, ‘Oh, that looks delicious. It’s just a sandwich down in Pret à Manger for me,’ and went off, ignoring Joe’s urgent calls of ‘Nurse’. Ten minutes later a harassed and junior assistant, a woman with a dumpy figure and bags under her eyes, appeared at the end of my bed and rattled off my date of birth – this to prove that I was who she thought I was. ‘I’ve come to cut your toenails,’ she said.

‘You’re too late,’ I said. ‘Oliver’s just done them. He’s only just gone.’

‘Oliver?’ she said. ‘Oliver the podiatrist? They sent me to cut your toenails. I’m supposed to do that.’

‘Well, you can have a look if you like,’ I said. Oliver seemed to have done a very neat job of cutting my toenails, as the woman orderly had to agree.

‘Well, that was nice of him,’ she said huffily. ‘I wish they’d let me know that I’m not needed, though.’

‘I’m sorry if you had a wasted walk,’ I said. I was quite concerned that urgent toenail-cutting was being neglected on the other side of the hospital because of her being summoned to my bedside.

I had mastered the professionals without trouble. The nurses, however, were the ones with some control over where I could be placed, and they needed more careful handling. The doctors could be subjected to influence by worldly chatter, and not deferentially lowering my voice to address a hospital worker as ‘Doctor’. The nurses, however, did not seem to care much either way whether you addressed them as ‘Nurse’ or ‘Sophy’, and they were not to be cowed by suggestions about my social life outside the hospital. I concentrated, for the moment, on being modest, thankful, cheerful, and no trouble at all. Evilly, I waited for a time when I could introduce an object of loathing and hatred into the conversation, when I could exert some influence over them by establishing a shared pariah. The identity of the pariah was never in doubt. If I could get to the point where I could talk to them about his awfulness without sounding like a whinger, and get them to talk back, then the deal would be done, and I could move happily into a private room. It needed very careful handling.

‘Nurse,’ called Joe. ‘Nurse. Is it not fucking time for my fucking cigarette yet? You promised. You fucking promised. Ah, you cunts.’

‘Not now, Joe,’ a passing nurse said.

The infection in my toe was of such virulence that I needed regular, and at first constant, supplies of antibiotic delivered through a drip, and the nurses came to see me very frequently to change the bag, to take my blood sugar, blood pressure and temperature. On these visits, I concentrated on being meek and no trouble. But the antibiotics were of some strength, and after two or three bags, the passage of the liquid became unendurably painful and sore. Once a day at least, I had to call a nurse and say that the site of the cannula was now so painful that she would have to move it to a different place, and the cycle would begin again. I was always very apologetic about this, though there was really nothing else to be done. In fact, I noticed that the nurses were not at all impatient with this repeated request, and perhaps became more sympathetic towards me. Perhaps the confession of suffering, not overdone, reminded them of their vocation in a harmless way.

The nurses had a mode of existence that was quite different from that of the doctors. They existed between an onstage and an offstage set of indicators. Within the ward, there would be a strict restriction on personal conversation between the nurses, and when they talked, they exchanged only information about the patients, and firm instructions from senior to junior. When they were outside the small ward, at the desk where ‘paperwork’, as they called it, was carried out and where interaction with administrators might take place, they often dropped into offstage behaviour. No patients sat there; we only passed by from time to time, and there what we overheard were exchanges about private existence, about partners and husbands, about inconveniences of travel and the doings of children. When in this mode, they relaxed; their bodies slumped; they scratched their heads with fingernail and biro; they adjusted their tight uniforms and yawned; stance and expression yielded and shifted, softened, the smiles came naturally and not professionally, and they did not use each other’s names in address. We were not exactly shielded from such behaviour, or from such frank conversation, but it only seemed to be happening in spaces a patient might pass through, but not stop within.

Patients, too, behaved for the most part within onstage and offstage modes, meekly using the vocatives ‘Nurse’ and ‘Doctor’ in ways unfamiliar in the outside world – the parallels would be ‘Shop assistant, will you sell me a white shirt?’ ‘Architect, you may have forgotten to put a staircase into the building.’ They toned down their habitual diction, and assumed a facial expression of terrible sweetness when anyone professional was by. They mostly took orders, and had agreed to do everything at the time ordained for them by the hospital – I never heard a patient say, as would have been quite reasonable, ‘Actually, I’m just in the middle of a phone call – can you do Dennis first?’ Offstage, once the nurses had gone, the patients embarked on a more relaxed and habitual style of behaviour, saying ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ as they would normally do, and sharing details of their lives without any restraint.

Onstage and offstage behaviour differs greatly between professions and occupations. A contrary set of offstage indicators was made apparent to me some time after this stay in hospital, when we went on holiday to Mykonos, the predominantly gay Greek island. The beaches on Mykonos are filled with sunbeds under umbrellas, tended by extraordinarily beautiful men in skimpy shorts who bring drinks and refreshments at some expense. These men had a distinctive onstage behaviour. With the customers, they were openly flirtatious, even somewhat lewd, telling us that we had a ‘nice bum’ or they bet we were going to go off for a ‘nice naughty walk’ later, meaning that we were going to go and have sex with strangers in the dunes. This manner was formally assumed, and not very natural. When the beach boys were talking among themselves, they dropped into a natural, offstage manner; their voices grew harsh and direct and complaining; they lit cigarettes in a tough-guy mode; their stance grew less servile. Though their conversation was in Greek, it was easy to guess its content: how much money each of them had made, a subject unalluded to in onstage behaviour. It was not about sex, and certainly admitted nothing of flirtation in it; their behaviour grew direct and complaining. Although the content of their onstage and offstage behaviour was quite different from that in other professions, for instance that in the hospital, the clear division operated in precisely the same way. There was even the same useful physical indicator of the rows of beds – of patients and of sunbathers – in both cases.

The divisions of offstage and onstage behaviour between both patients and nurses was not enforced by the other group’s presence, merely encouraged by it. Sometimes, late at night or at quiet times, a nurse or a patient would slip into offstage mode with each other, and the nurse would sit down on the bed and talk quite happily about informal matters, if she liked the patient enough. The patient’s offstage manner was more flaunted, less rationed; he often tried to reel the nurse in with offstage confidences and even an offstage style. It seemed to me that no sharing of ideas, no persuasion could take place while either patient or nurse was in onstage mood. The only thing that could occur would be the successful appeal to aspects of the nurse’s professional, onstage, duties. Only when the nurses gathered together at the administration desk of the ward could one tell another that she had seen
Django Unchained
last night, and it had been gory but very entertaining, and she recommended it; if a patient, walking past in a parallel offstage manner, had interrupted to say that he, too, had seen it and enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a patch on
Jackie Brown
, which was the most underrated of all Tarantino’s films, then the offstage nurses would have reacted with surprise, would have turned back into efficient, professionally kindly figures, would perhaps have seen the off-duty cinephile patient back to his bed by holding his elbow and pulling him firmly along with coos and amicable sounds of encouragement. In no case would they have admitted to enjoying the same film, in the limitless space outside the hospital’s decreed tasks.

The offstage space was a dangerous one, and both nurses and patients were vulnerable to it. Its looming prospect, in anything other than well-defined areas, secured from intrusion or onstage performers like Joe, appealing for sympathy and a cigarette in accordance with agreed structures of behaviour, persuaded the nurses to retreat sharply, and take up a formal position, one arm raised in pity and sorrow like Sir Joshua Reynolds’s
Tragedy
. Joe and his Irish friend failed in almost every attempt to persuade the nurses to do what they wanted them to do, because they had no means of bringing them into an offstage space. Their informalities only created a responding chilly formality, and the target replied by using the patient’s name: ‘I’ve told you before, Joe …’ The only people with whom they could share an offstage space was, it appeared, each other, and they could not do each other any favours whatsoever. The dropping into a formal offstage mode, as Joe and his friend should have discovered by now, would not by itself create a reciprocal offstage mode in the interlocutor. It would be just as likely to push the target into a more rigid onstage manner.

I noticed, however, that though this was true of the nurses, the same could not be said for the doctors. I wondered if it was a function of power within the social structure. Doctors would enter the ward, still chatting to each other about the holiday they had just booked in Mali, and would discuss the patients loudly while at the end of the beds, not troubling to keep any professional, important, backstage discussions to their own space. The grander the doctor was, the more readily he would engage with a cheerful conversation about wives, husbands, bus routes, books that had just been read, films that had just opened, and other social strategies. Sometimes this clearly fell into the category of ‘good bedside manner’. Sometimes, however, this was not an attempt at a good bedside manner, but simply a superior disregard for professional demands of onstage and offstage behaviour, which not only occurred within the earshot of the patient – ‘Ah, Charles,’ one consultant said, standing at the end of my bed, ‘let’s see if you can make yet another hash of this, then. How’s Rebecca?’ – but sometimes actually engaged him in the break from the onstage stance. This, I believed, was why it was in fact easier to influence and gain meaningful contact with the doctors. Their superior conviction that there was no need to maintain a rigid and performed onstage mode once through the ward doors left them wide open to the exercise of influence, and fertile ground for the spreading of principles. The nurses, on the other hand, were much harder to reach and to influence. Their rigid sense of onstage and offstage moments left them invulnerable to the spread of thought, and it was hard to plant a seed of consideration in this stony ground. You had to get them sitting on the edge of the bed. I concluded that the way into their thoughts was not to try to spread an idea, but to act as a calm, offstage recipient for whatever ideas and principles they wanted to spread. I waited, and I understood why they were called ‘patients’.