Owen Marshall Selected Stories (9 page)

A
t reception I felt I belonged still to the outside world. I could breathe the exhaust fumes from the passing traffic in the street outside, and there was an undeniably healthy man in a post office smock sorting letters with one of the reception nurses. As I was taken down the corridor, however, and up the stairs, the smell closed in; a uniquely institutional fragrance of antiseptics, medication, polishes — and resignation.

I was taken to the far end of Men's Surgical Two, almost to the balcony room, and I put my case on the bed and stood awkwardly before the veterans of the ward. There was a sparrow in the balcony room, and Nurse McKerrow wanted it let out. Colin and Jimmy chased it as best they could from one side of the room to the other, but only one window would open, and the sparrow slammed instead into the closed panes, becoming more dazed and bloody. Chris was in the next bed to mine. ‘Oh, for Christ sake,' he said and he cast his yellow hair from his face impatiently. ‘Can you move about much?' he asked me. ‘Throw a towel over it then, please, and let it out.' I went into the balcony room, and the next time the sparrow struck the glass I dropped the towel over it, and then released it through the open window. The bird half fell, half fluttered the three storeys into the hospital garden below. A trim pebble garden like a cemetery, with waxy camellias in a row.

Colin and Jimmy reluctantly came back to their beds, and I got out my pyjamas and dressing-gown to change. Nurse McKerrow
said I could pull the curtain screen, but I knew the impression that would create. I had to prove my anatomy, as well as my pyjamas, to be suitably nondescript. Chris watched me, propped up on his pillows. His almost yellow hair hung limply, like a transplanted tussock. When I was in my pyjamas, Chris considered I had formally joined them, and I was introduced to those close to my bed, Jimmy, Colin, Richard and Chris himself. Throughout the afternoon those less immediate in the ward were mentioned as they brought themselves to notice by refusing to eat, having a good-looking visitor, or being on the surgery list for the next day. Each was identified by his complaint as a suffix title. Arthur Prentice spine fusion, old Mr Webster prostate. Chris himself was bowel. He said the word bowel in the tone of voice a man might use for an ex-wife. A tone of intimacy and betrayal all at once.

Colin talked most to me that first day, superficial things, of course, about the hospital routine and the All Black tour, the headlines in the paper and the difficulty of making small businesses pay. That was Colin's line, small businesses. The sort of things you would expect two strangers in bed to discuss. I was to find, however, that there wasn't any more to Colin than the first superficial contact. When I left hospital he still talked about the All Blacks and small businesses with the same conformity. Colin was the tribal New Zealander, for whom the greatest horror is to be different from what he imagines the majority to be.

Chris didn't talk much the first day, but I was aware of an aura of goodwill. In the morning, after Mr Millar had gone, and the others were having breakfast, Chris noticed me lying quietly. He told me what a good bone surgeon Mr Millar was, and how well known he was for it. I wasn't allowed to eat anything before the operation. I had trouble in my knee: bone disease in the knee cap, and cartilages to come out as well. Chris watched as Nurse McKerrow shaved and bathed my knee before the operation. When it was so smooth and pink that it shone, she gave me a jab of something. I remember Chris
saying, ‘Pentathol. My favourite magic carpet. As good as a night with Nurse McKerrow — almost.' Colin and Jimmy laughed, and Nurse McKerrow smiled with her eyes.

‘Send in the trolley,' I said extravagantly. ‘I'm ready for the trolley', and I wondered why the others laughed so hard.

The pain kept me from sleeping much the first two or three nights after the operation, despite the stuff they gave me. At night the ward was not completely dark, because of the light spilling from the sister's office. It dwindled down the ward, and didn't reach into the balcony room. But from where I was, looking back along the rows of beds towards the light, I could see pretty well once I got used to it. Old Mr Webster coughed a lot without waking up, and the radiators stood along the wall, on the lino, like piano accordions. I had plenty of time for thinking on those long nights. Lying there, looking along the beds towards the office, and with enough pain to banish any inner deceit, I had enough time for thinking all right. Chris talked to me sometimes to take my mind off the pain. I was too selfish to realise then that he was awake for the same reason. That's when he first told me about the Liberal Mythology. Never let yourself get sucked in by the Liberal Mythology, he said. He saw it in the way I talked about my best friend who came to see me shortly after the operation. I told Chris how close we were, and how I'd known him over thirty years. ‘The Liberal Mythology,' said Chris.

‘What?'

‘All this about searching out kindred souls. It's all part of the Liberal Mythology. You have as your friends who you can get as your friends, just as you have as your wife who you can get for your wife. Don't kid yourself any other way. It doesn't make them any less precious, but it's the truth of it. Take Jimmy there: he'd like to be friends with you, and marry Nurse McKerrow. Right?' We looked across at Jimmy. He lay asleep, with one arm over his face. ‘How much choice has Jimmy really got?' said Chris. I couldn't think of any form of rebuttal, except saying that I wasn't the same as Jimmy.

‘Only a matter of degree, for you and me,' said Chris.

During the day Chris helped me with my exercises. At first he'd just tell me how far I was getting my heel off the bed, as I lay on my back and tried to lift the leg. Later he'd rest his hand gently on the top of my foot to give me more weight to lift as the knee became stronger. ‘You've got it beaten, Hugh, that's sure enough,' he'd say.

Anything that jarred my leg was the worst: knocking it with the crutch, or catching the toe on a rug, would bring an instant sweat. Hopping was out; progress was a matter of deliberate smoothness. On the fourth day I slipped while in the toilet and got wedged in the corner amid my crutches. My bad leg pressed against the lavatory bowl. I should have called out in a calm voice of suppressed pain to tell the nurse what had happened. It never occurred to me to do any such thing. I lay there, giving a very quavering and sustained squeal, like that of a girl. The sustained squeal was best, because any deep breath was enough to alter the unbearable pressure on my leg. The ward enjoyed it when I was carried back ignominiously from the toilets.

I began to get better rapidly, though. After a fortnight or so, Chris and I were able to go up to the geriatric wing and watch television at night. We weren't allowed to use the lift, so it meant a stiff climb and a rather furtive hobble along the dim corridors. The television was left on in the geriatric dayroom, right through until closedown. Sometimes Jimmy would come with us, occasionally a patient from some other ward, but usually just Chris and me. And the locals, of course. There were several geriatrics whose beds were regularly pushed into the dayroom at night, not because they liked television, but because they disturbed the others if left in the ward. Mind you, they may have enjoyed television. Chris said it's easy to be dogmatic when speaking for those who can't speak for themselves.

Puck and the Wrestler were our most consistent viewing companions. The Wrestler's skin was too large for him, and flowed around the few fixed features of his face. Only on the top of his
head was it tight. His eyes were circular, and ringed with creases like those of a parrot. The Wrestler had regressed to some time of persistent physical endeavour, and reiterated it all in a monologue of quiet despair. ‘That's a good hold, Bob. Ah yes. Ah yes. Ah Bob, Bob, that's a good hold. I'll pin your shoulders yet. But that's a good hold, Bob. Ah yes.' The Wrestler never moved, and his voice was drab in tone, but behind it somewhere was an epic of pain and fortitude, and underlying submission as if he fought with life itself. Puck provided less of a window. Most of the time he sat as primly as Whistler's mother, his hands demurely on the folded sheets. But from time to time he would give his own cry. It was the sound a contented chicken makes in the yard when the afternoon sun is hot, the dust dry and a breeze in the pines by the woolshed. Poo-ooook. You know the sound. A sound of drawling enquiry in a rising inflexion. Puck caught it perfectly. He did it most when everything was quiet: late at night when there was something subdued on the television or, even better, when it had finished. Then, as Chris and I prepared to leave, we would hear him. ‘Poo-oo-ook. Poo-oo-ook', gathering the sunshine, the dry, grey dust, and the pine trees about himself. We called him Puck because of Kipling's
Puck of Pook's Hill
. It was the most successful joke I ever made with Chris, mentioning Puck of Pook's Hill. His soft, even laugh went on and on, until he started swearing at me because I'd made his bowels hurt.

Nurse Hart was the night nurse on the geriatric ward. She seemed to feel the responsibility of it deeply. Unlike the physios and Nurse McKerrow, she wasn't immediately good-looking, and she was very quiet. She had legs, though, said Chris. Chris was quick to notice those girls who had legs. Nurse Hart's legs were long and graceful, growing more rounded to the thighs. Nurse Hart liked Chris and me to be in the dayroom watching television, in case something went wrong with her patients.

The physios were the best-looking girls in the hospital, except for Nurse McKerrow. All of us agreed the physios were the best,
though, apart from Jimmy, we couldn't think of any explanation for it. Jimmy thought it was because they liked massaging people, and we knew that was just the inevitable expression of Jimmy's mind. ‘All that rubbing and gripping,' said Jimmy slyly. ‘The good-looking ones like to do it the most.' Jimmy was in for some sort of club foot, but he wasn't very Byronic. He had a cramped, impoverished face, and acquaintance disclosed a mind of similar character. He collected magazines of nudes, and laid them on the bed when the nurses came, in what he considered a subtle declaration of intention. From the balcony one day we watched Jimmy playing with his transistor. He found a woman's voice on one channel, and lay twisting the volume knob back and forth so that it sounded as if the woman was panting.

‘Poor little bastard,' said Chris. Colin would have laughed, but Chris saw the poverty in Jimmy rather than the humour.

The Reverend Metcalf came to see us on Wednesday. Wednesday was his hospital day. I haven't anything against clergymen as such, not as such, but Chris and I disliked the Reverend Metcalf. He wore a look of infinite understanding and superiority. He had a rich, well-modulated laugh, tinged with pathos to hint at the load of revelation he bore. He would lay out his modulated laugh as a tapestry, while his eyes strayed to other beds, or the face of his digital watch. He was a vicarious vicar: a walking crucifixion, full of suffering yet having experienced no pain. I watched Chris regard the Reverend Metcalf as he left. ‘The Liberal Mythology again?' I said.

‘The Liberal Mythology.' Chris moved restlessly in his bed, stirred by the appearance once more of his old adversary. ‘Life and death are the religious divisions in the Liberal Mythology,' he said. ‘Now the reality of it, Hugh, the reality, is different.' Chris loved the word reality. The way he said it gave it weight and sheen, a soundness. ‘The reality is the cycle of growth and decay.'

‘And life after death?' I asked, because I couldn't quite see what he was getting at.

‘How can the personality survive death, when it can't always survive life? That's it, all right. Take Puck, or the Wrestler: there's not much left to gather, is there? The Liberal Mythology deals in theory, see Hugh. You have life, and you have death: you have the prime of functioning personality, you have its perpetuation in spirit. It's a very comforting thing, the Liberal Mythology and being a theory it doesn't concern itself with the complications of transition.' Chris rolled over carefully. He put a pillow beneath his groin, and hung his head over the bed in his favourite position to rid himself of flatulence. ‘There's a bit of the pattern of the lino further down that looks like a giraffe,' he said. His yellow hair drooped away from his neck, and I was dismayed to see how the bones stood out beneath the skin.

Perhaps it was because he was losing so much weight that Chris had to have another operation. You don't know with bowels, mind. Mr Millar came to see him again, and told him he was to have another operation. The rest of us on our beds looked across to him to see how he was taking it. ‘I'm having my operation Tuesday, Nurse McKerrow. Give me a kiss.' It was unashamed blackmail, and both he and Nurse McKerrow laughed. She looked quickly down the ward, then bent over Chris. She kissed him, and Chris made no attempt to encircle her with his arms, but with one finger traced a line down her side, sweeping slowly over her hip before dropping his hand to the bed again. ‘Tell Mother I died happy,' said Chris, and Jimmy cried out excitedly as we laughed, and said he wanted a kiss too. Nurse McKerrow went back up the ward. She looked as if she had received as much as she had given.

The night before his second operation, Chris came up to the geriatrics' television with me. We sat with Puck and the Wrestler, and watched a film about a donkey that talked. Chris couldn't sit still; he leant on his chair more than he sat on it, and he lay on Puck's bed with him for a while. Nurse Hart brought us coffee, and tried to share with us her fears concerning old Mrs Sanderson in the main
ward. Later, when the donkey was winning the war for the Allies, Nurse Hart came back crying, and told us that Mrs Sanderson had tried to swallow her handkerchief and choked to death. Chris and I went into the darkened ward, and pushed Mrs Sanderson out to wait for the hospital orderlies. Mrs Sanderson's wispy hair stood up from her head, as if in her death she had frightened herself as well as Nurse Hart.