The Valley (55 page)

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Authors: Richard Benson

BOOK: The Valley
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Her mam and dad float into view, Winnie fretful, Harry weeping. They fade, and the next time it is Pauline and Gordon. Sometimes a nurse comes. Always, beside the bed, holding her hand, there is John.

When she regains full consciousness, she is in a corner of a room populated by dark-eyed, nightgowned women, all with closely shaven heads marked by thick scarring and rows of stitches. They look to Lynda as if they have recently risen from the grave. Cheerfully, in tuneful Tyneside accents, they joke about the money they will save on shampoo, and about how the hospital gowns show your bum, like a big white moon. ‘Are you with us now, pet?' one of them says to her. ‘Back in the land of the living?' She isn't sure until John explains to her that she is on the neurological ward, and most of the women are recovering from brain surgery.

Lynda's own surgery has left a long scar down her spine, but what troubles her, as she becomes more alert, is the numbness of her body. Apart from pins and needles in her legs, now covered in thick, thigh-length surgical stockings, she feels nothing below her chest. She flops when she tries to sit up, and realises it was this numbness that had taken her balance before. John helps her to get her torso at a right angle to the mattress, but she feels as if she is balancing the upper part of her body on an indifferent, wobbly pedestal of flesh.

When Mr Strong comes to see her he is courteous, but reluctant to commit himself. The cause of Lynda's paralysis, he says, is an old blood clot. The clot could be from decades ago, and the cause of its original coagulation is impossible to know. Most likely it was a forgotten wound, or a mole that had erupted unnoticed; an overlooked hurt from the past awaiting its moment. The clot has leaked and poisoned her spinal fluid. He has cut out the clot, but the poison is what is causing the pain and paralysis.

About her legs he says nothing. Perhaps the numbness and the falling over are just side-effects? Could his not mentioning them be a cause for optimism? ‘Will the feeling in my legs come back, doctor?'

The kind and understanding white-haired head moves from side to side. ‘We can't tell at the moment. We'll have to wait until the swelling and the bruising go down.'

‘And what about my balance? Because if I try to sit up, I feel as if I'm falling.'

‘The same. We'll have to wait for some time to pass before we know what sort of a recovery you'll make. At this stage, we can't actually tell.' (‘
Before we know what sort of recovery you'll make
,' she notes. Not ‘when you recover'.)

For two weeks she stays on the ward with the cheerful zombie women. Mr Strong comes to see her each day, and when she asks for a prognosis he says, ‘Let's wait and see a little longer.' Each day his voice is less optimistic and a little more procrastinatory, but then again, she reflects, so long as he doesn't rule it out, there is a chance that she will walk again.

‘I'm going to get better, you know,' she tells John. ‘I'll show these flaming legs.'

‘Tell me something I don't know,' he says.

She starts showing the flaming legs who's boss, taking all the exercises and therapies the nurses and physiotherapists offer. When the nurses ask if she'd like to sit in a chair, she sits and holds the arms to stop herself slumping; when the physiotherapist asks if she could manage the tilt table, she says, ‘Bring whatever you've got.' When she fancies some chips and a nurse says, ‘I'm afraid the café's on the other side of the building, pet,' she says, ‘Could I have a go in a wheelchair?'

As John pushes her down the long, straight corridors she feels as though she is flying. ‘Steady,' she says to him over her shoulder, ‘this feels like I'm going at a hundred miles an hour.'

‘We can do better than a hundred,' he says and pushes faster, and faster again, until he is running down the corridor and she is screaming and laughing at the same time.

*

So that she can be nearer to home, Lynda is transferred from Newcastle for Sheffield's Lodge Moor Hospital, a gloomy Victorian pile which sits on the city's western edges looking out over empty Peak District moorland. Built as an isolation hospital in the 1880s, it looks to Lynda, as she is lowered from an ambulance on a quiet September afternoon, like a workhouse. From under its pointy roofs, the narrow windows seem to squint at her with suspicious malice. She sees a similar expression on the first Lodge Moor nurse she meets. ‘You'll do it our way here,' snaps the nurse, stripping off Lynda's surgical stockings as if she were skinning an animal. ‘Flat on your back for three weeks and no moaning.' Lynda tells her that in Newcastle she exercised on tilt tables and wheelchairs, but the information is taken as an assault on the institution's authority.

‘We know what we're doing. You'll be under Dr McCraig.'

‘I was under Mr Strong at Newcastle. He was lovely.'

This is another perceived assault, all the more so because of the nurse's obvious admiration of Dr McCraig. ‘Dr McCraig is one of the best in the country. You couldn't ask for anybody better,' she says, with a firmness that says: conversation closed.

*

The journey from Highgate to Lodge Moor is fifteen miles, two hours by connecting buses, but the miners' union loans John £60 to tax and repair the family car so that he and Karl can visit Lynda more easily. On Lynda's first day there they go with Harry and Winnie. Karl has just begun the autumn term at Dearneside school, and when he comes into Lynda's two-bed room in the Spinal Injuries Unit, he says, ‘Look, Mam,' and takes off his anorak to show off his new school uniform – grey sweater, white shirt, striped tie. The white shirt sets off his honeyed summer skin and blond hair.

She looks at him but cannot speak.

‘What's up, Mam?'

She squeezes his hand. ‘Take no notice,' she says. ‘Tell me how you came on buying your uniform.'

‘Me and Grandma bought it all up Goldthorpe last week, didn't we, Grandma?'

‘Yes, love,' says Winnie. ‘We managed all right, didn't we?'

‘Thank you, Mam,' says Lynda, wondering if this is how she will now experience her son's life: horizontal, unmoving, and listening to other people's stories about him.

For ten days she lays and waits for a doctor to tell her about her recovery. Her ward is hot and crowded with flowers. The other bed is taken by a new mother in her twenties called Nelly, who has been paralysed by a bad reaction to an epidural. Nelly lies flat too, and so she and Lynda have to converse while looking up at ceilings, as if seeing each other's meaning in the fans and light fittings.

Nelly has warned that Dr McCraig ‘doesn't beat about the bush', and she is right. The man who comes to Lynda's bedside on the eleventh day is a stern, greying Edinburgh martinet who seems bored and somehow disappointed by infirmity. He mutters a greeting and talks to a nurse about Lynda's history. Then, without explanation, he takes from his pocket a slim box containing a set of long, sharp, metal pins. He sticks the pins into various parts of Lynda's body. Back, legs, bottom, feet: each time he sticks, he asks, ‘Sharp or blunt?'

‘Blunt,' she says the first time.

‘Sharp or blunt?'

‘Blunt.'

‘Sharp or blunt? .
.
.'

After several minutes he stops, lays the pins back in their box, and returns it to his pocket. ‘Well, Mrs Burton,' he says flatly, ‘you're never going to walk again, I can tell you that.'

The first clear thought that forms itself concerns housework. How will she bend down to put clothes in the washing machine? How will she reach high enough to peg out clothes on a line? How will she look after Karl? Will John have to do all the cooking and cleaning? She couldn't possibly expect him to do that, but then who else can do it?

Then she thinks of shopping. How will she carry the bags, or push trolleys around supermarkets, or reach up to take packets from high shelves? She comes back to John. Will he have to do that as well? What else will she have to ask of him?

‘So,' says Dr McCraig to Lynda, regarding her much as a carpenter might regard a semi-completed cabinet, ‘you'll need to tell your husband what has happened. Tell him to come and see me the next time he comes to the hospital, and I'll have a word with him. While you're in here, we'll teach you how to live life in a wheelchair.'

Lynda waits for him to go, the small squeak of his shoes on the lino, the heavy, bass lurch of the doors gradually closing out the noise from the other wards. Then she lies back on the bed, pulls the blankets over her head, and slips through thoughts of John and Karl into tears and, eventually, sleep.

*

‘Well,' says John when she tells him what the doctor said, ‘they've got that wrong, for a start.'

‘I think they know what they're talking about, John.'

He smiles and winks, trying to hide his fear. ‘So do I. And I know tha'll walk again, because that's what tha's like, always fighting things. Also, tha's got me. Come here.' He leans in over the bed and hugs her. ‘Right. Where's this doctor?'

In his office Dr McCraig invites John to sit down.

‘Mr Burton,' he says. ‘I'm sorry to tell you that your wife is not going to walk again.' Practised at this, he pauses to allow his words to settle. ‘We think –'

‘Who says so?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Who says she isn't going to walk again?'

‘I do, Mr Burton. I've carried out all the examinations I can, and there's no question of her regaining the use of her legs when the nerves are damaged to that extent. I've seen it before.'

‘I know you have,' says John. ‘But you haven't seen her, have you? My point is, you don't know her.'

‘But we know the results.'

‘But things can work different with different people, and you don't know my wife. I reckon you don't know whether she'll walk again or not.'

‘Well, I really don't believe there are any possibilities, I'm afraid.'

‘We'll see. Anyway, for now you'd better show me how to manage this wheelchair.'

Another doctor comes to Lynda with the results of another test. The news: her blood is clotting in her legs, and the clots could kill her. Nurses move Lynda to a room of her own, and stick in another canula, this one attached to an anti-coagulant drip. The skin on her legs becomes so hot that it feels as if they are logs burning in a fire. Her eyes lose focus. She feels herself float up out of the bed on a tide of painkillers, her mind released from all memories and close once again to the spirits. She listens to far voices, door swings, distant clatterings in the corridors, and she imagines what it will be like to die. The sounds seem to be those of people organising life and death. Is this how it ends, she thinks; are these the last things you hear? As the painkillers wear off the thought lingers and terrifies her. She finds herself feeling overwhelmed by all the flowers people have brought; they fill her room, flowers from the florist, flowers from the garden, flowers from God knows where. She sinks into them and they close around her, and while flowers should represent love and life, their sickly sweet scent makes her think of sickness and mortality. She thinks of Muv smelling flowers when someone she knew had died.

The little room is like a sodding chapel of rest.

‘Is there owt I can do for you, love?' asks a nurse.

‘Yes, there is as it happens,' says Lynda. ‘Get rid of these flaming flowers. All of them. I'm not dying just yet.'

As she floats near the ceiling through the late summer days and nights, she makes plans for her life in a wheelchair. She thinks hard about the practicalities. What kind of a life is John going to have with a wife in that condition? It isn't fair to him, she decides; she will have to let him go. At least they had six happy years.

When John comes next to visit by himself she says, ‘I've been thinking about us, John, and I need to tell you that you don't have to stand by me. It's not fair. You're still a young man, and you could find somebody else. I shan't mind.'

John looks at her blankly.

‘I mean .
.
. I won't be any good to you as a wife in t' physical sense, will I? Not like this. I want to set you free. It's not that I don't love you, John. It's because I do.'

‘Are you kidding?'

‘No.'

His mouth falls slightly open, and he stares down. Lynda's infusion pump beeps, emphasising the quietness of the room.

‘But I married you because I love you. Don't send me away, Lynda. Please.'

She feels as if her chest is being wrung of its air and blood. She reaches for his hand.

‘It means a lot to me, John. I'll fight it, but Dr McCraig says .
.
.'

‘We'll do more than fight it, cocker. We'll knock it into t' middle of next week. One day you're going to walk back into this hospital, I know you are.'

How does he always make her laugh, even now?

‘Is that right?'

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