Derek wasn’t a physical genius in the Jack Juggernaut class, but he was still easy on the eye. He was blond even if he wasn’t tall — well, everybody’s tall (except Edith Piaf), but Derek was no taller than many of his female colleagues.
What made being ignored by Derek so wounding was that he was very thick with another young man with Still’s. David Webb. I say ‘young man’, but although at fifteen David wasn’t much younger than me he still seemed a boy. He still had a piping voice. I had to admit he looked quite cuddly — it’s only now that I see the cuddliness as a consequence of steroids, nothing more or less.
Derek always found time for David, who was blind. So the question for me was: am I too disabled to attract Derek’s attention, or not disabled enough? Perhaps it was the bonus of David’s blindness that gave him a competitive edge in the nurse-attraction business.
Understandably the question of physical repulsiveness was much on my mind at this period. I decided that simply finding my body repulsive, à la Satipatthana Sutta, was too easy to count as a mental discipline. My task was more complicated: first I had to promote my body to equal status with everyone else’s, and then despise it along with all the others in its class. I tucked away for later chewing-over a rebellious quibble: if indifference is the goal, then isn’t cultivating feelings of disgust an odd way to attain it?
When Derek was chatting to little David, it was as if he wanted everyone on the ward to know about it. He was loud about everything he did. Loudly he cultivated David, and loudly he ignored me.
Nothing he said seemed to be private. One day I heard him boasting about his knowledge of drugs. There wasn’t much he didn’t know on that subject, to hear him talk, from opium to purple hearts. You could hear him from several beds away. I was feeling very starved of his attention. I may as well admit that. So when I had finally got him cornered I told him I’d heard about this stuff called mescaline, and it sounded just the ticket for me. I tried to whisper to get a nice conspiratorial atmosphere going. I like a good conspiracy — the good ones are the ones that don’t exclude me. He was practically shouting, and couldn’t seem to catch the name of this funny drug. He wanted to know if it was written down somewhere. I said no, but I wrote it on a piece of paper for him. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can find out.’ I was certainly intrigued by Lophophora williamsii, but once I had got Derek’s attention it was mission accomplished, really.
A snail’s eyes on stalks
He came back the next day with a book in his hand and a strange alarmed look on his face. He asked, ‘How on earth did you find out about this stuff? It’s very hush-hush. Who told you about it?’ He looked at me very intently.
I said I didn’t remember. Gardening for Adventure had got me into trouble, just as Mr Menage had warned, and now I was afraid that the book itself was in danger of being confiscated. I had been silly to be so blatant about dark desires and taboo subjects. Fortunately I realised that if I snapped the book shut straight away, even supposing I could do it discreetly, I would give the game away. So I left it open and said as casually as I could that I’d heard the name somewhere — probably from one of the doctors talking.
Derek picked up Gardening for Adventure and ran his eyes over it. My heart was beating hard. The word ‘mescaline’ seemed to stand out from the page like a snail’s eyes on stalks, and still Derek didn’t see it. When he shut my book I asked if I could see his book in return. Fair dos. He said no. He wasn’t in a hurry to admit that his know ledge was every bit as second-hand as mine — but my book was better than his book. Or at least more broad-minded. His book obviously regarded poor Lophophora williamsii as a very wicked piece of vegetation indeed.
Soon after this moment of cosiness I encountered the other sort of conspiracy, the less nice, in the form of a human bubble which sealed me out and left me to suffocate.
As I practised the defective repair which was my walking I became aware of silences on the ward, zones of inhibition which blossomed as I approached. Suddenly membranes of secrets closed in front of me, opened up behind me, like parodies of the automatic doors on Star Trek.
In this way I received my birthright, my minority birthright, of paranoia. Information is always in movement and the best way to keep up with it is to move freely yourself. Gossip has a naturally fast pace, it’s a game of tag, and there’s something very artificial about being included when you can’t compete, like a child who’s not supposed to feel patronised being patted an easy ball by a grown-up.
Patients on Ward Three would be discussing things in a group but would suddenly hush up when I approached, or even if I stuck my head up from the bed to show I was listening hard. I soon found that the best way of hearing what they were saying was to keep my eye very firmly on my book — The Count of Monte Cristo — and not to look up. I felt thoroughly got at until I understood that they weren’t talking about me. The conversation was actually about Derek, and I soon realised I wasn’t the only one to be excluded from it. The group went quiet when all sorts of people were nearby. There would be quite a gaggle of patients talking about Derek, and then the ward orderly would come in to mop up. By the time he had put his bucket down there would be a pregnant hush — pregnant specifically in the manner of a viviparous fish, say a guppy. The moment the orderly moved on from the ward, that hush would spawn dozens of lively wriggling murmurs.
For two or three weeks I struggled to solve the mystery, and then at last, when two or three insiders were huddled in conspiracy, one of them called me over. He waited for me to hobble over, not letting any impatience show. ‘You don’t look as if you’re the type to grass on a fellow,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time we told you what’s what.’ He told me Derek’s secret. Derek’s career was at risk, and everyone was trying to help.
He had a creeping deafness. It had been detected when he was interviewed for nursing, and he was told that he was employable so long as it didn’t get any worse. It got worse. It was so bad now that he was all but deaf.
‘But that’s impossible!’ I said. ‘I was chatting away to him only yesterday. We talked about all sorts of things …’ Which wasn’t entirely true. The pressure to converse was entirely on my side, and I had always detected a reluctance, which now I began to understand.
‘Yes,’ came the answer. ‘He’s become very good at lip-reading. Just watch his eyes when you talk to him again. We’re all doing what we can to help him keep his job. Of course if he has to go on night duty he’s sunk …’
With my new knowledge I tested Derek by mixing up the labial consonants, asking him to bull me pack in the chair, etc. He watched my lips very intently. Perhaps one of the factors in his friendship with David Webb was that he could watch as closely as he liked and David would never notice. It was a strange idea to me, that someone could be invisibly disabled. Part of me felt that if your disability could be kept secret it wasn’t up to much. Kids’ stuff. There should be a different word for it. Perhaps that was where handicap should come in. I was disabled and Derek was only handicapped. He had to work harder to keep up, but he was still in the game.
All the same I wanted to justify the confidence I had been given, and tried my hardest to be on Derek’s side. The other nurses did their bit, but they couldn’t swap their shifts around indefinitely to help him avoid working at night. When the day (night) finally came that he couldn’t dodge a late shift, a staff nurse quietly turned up and spoke to him from behind, and that was that. He was given his cards. Obviously there had been some sort of tip-off, and one of the same people who had tried to help him had informed on him to the authorities. Everyone claimed to be shocked, but I wasn’t so sure. Were we really saying that Derek had a right to his job even if he couldn’t hear the patients in his care ringing for attention? I found myself reluctantly siding with the authorities.