In heaven there is to be no weeping, and presumably no wiping of arses. There isn’t much literature about the after-life of bottoms, but there’s enough. As Rabelais describes the virtuous dead in the Elysian Fields they’re up to the arseholes in bliss, since they enjoy the great privilege of wiping themselves on the necks of live white geese, whose softness (in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s version) imparts a sensible heat to the nockhole. Something to look forward to, unless you’re a goose.
I was moved from Vulcan School to Wexham Park Hospital, Slough, in an ambulance, which wasn’t strictly necessary. There was no emergency (this wasn’t appendicitis chapter two). If I could survive expeditions in the school’s jolting bus then I needed no special cosseting. I enjoyed the ride, though, and managed not to pester the ambulance men for treats or special attention. One of the school matrons, Mrs Buchanan, came with me, just to be a bit of company, a link from the old life to the new, and we had a rare old chat, mainly about books.
For the next year (and more) I would be studying independently, and I had no end of reading lists, including one given me by the English teacher Mr Latham. Mrs Buchanan had her own enthusiasms, and she passed them on. There’s no sweeter contagion than a recommended book. She was mad for a writer called J. D. Salinger, whose books had wonderful, ridiculous titles like For Esmé with Love and Squalor and The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger was right up her street, she said, and she thought he might be right up mine as well.
Tom Dooley
There were no white geese at Wexham Park Hospital to warm the nockholes of the patients, but there was a different sort of exotic creature, something I had rarely seen before in my career as a patient: a male nurse. He was called (can he have been called?) Jack Juggernaut, and he was from Mauritius. Perhaps it was a workplace nickname, or a warping by lazy English tongues of a name considered unpronounceable. The name conveyed his strength, but missed his delicacy. He was certainly strong. Dad was no weakling, with or without jungle training, but my standard of male power was the motorcycle policeman who had once carried me to my seat at the Royal Tournament on an expedition from Vulcan School. He was simply steel. Jack Juggernaut was not — there was a litheness and ease about him. He was also gorgeous in his white smock. Mauritius rhymes with delicious. It could have been horrible to watch that perfect body moving through the halls of the sick, but actually it was glorious. Envy was not a possible response. Wonder carried the day unchallenged. Jack Juggernaut had an enormous dark fruity voice and smelled of vanilla ice cream. Sometimes when he spoke he seemed to hit the resonating frequency of human bones — at least of bones like mine. He was on my wave-length.
Male nurses were a small minority. I assume that I was assigned one to save me the embarrassment which goes with being ministered to intimately by the sex not yours. Of course in my case it caused much more embarrassment than it saved, but in a different key. I wanked myself silly in an effort to keep my fascination with him discreet. Then I could enjoy the sensation of being bathed by this god without causing scandal.
It fell to Jack Juggernaut to shave my groin on the morning of the first operation. I thought I was well insured against arousal, but the touch of his hand summoned up an excitement from the far side of fatigue. He wasn’t at all offended by what was offered him, saying sweetly, ‘You’ve got high blood pressure, haven’t you? You’ve got the horn and no mistake. You’ve got the high blood pressure in your Tom Dooley! Never seen such high blood pressure!’
I was mortified. Mortified mainly because I had been shy and slow on the uptake. This wasn’t the first time he had used such phrases. Often enough he had said, ‘I need someone to raise my blood pressure,’ only I hadn’t caught the sexual implication. He had been flirting all along. I’d failed to pick up masses of innuendo, cubic tons of the stuff, and now I’d missed my chances. I’d taken out my frustration on poor Tom Dooley, when perhaps there had been other ways to proceed.
Too late. Now I was going to be immobilised for months while I learned to sort-of-walk all over again, and I had wasted my freedom while I had it. After the operation everything would be different. Flirting would be out of the question when I was back on bloody bed rest. It’s not that flirting necessarily leads to anything else, but the whole enterprise is a washout when there’s no possibility of going any further. I had been served up delicious Mauritius on a plate and I hadn’t even noticed. As the anæsthetics started to take hold I said goodbye to the illusion of consciousness in a state of weary bafflement, as if I was shutting the door on a stray dog that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Mystical matiness
While my blood filled up with absence I thought of the only time Jack Juggernaut had actually held me in his arms. Since anæsthetics is (let’s hope) a science and not just a series of wild guesses, my weight had to be assessed. It isn’t just boxers and jockeys who must ritually be weighed before the big event.
Ever since I had become ill this was an indirect process, since I couldn’t stand up on the scales, and supporting me would falsify the results. So now Jack Juggernaut weighed himself, then stood on the scales again with me in his arms, decorously wrapped in a sheet. My weight, of course, was the difference between the two readings.
I enjoyed the idea that my weight was a cosmic unknown, almost on a par with π, not to be apprehended directly but deducible by calculation. I savoured those few seconds in Jack’s arms, though I tried to keep my blood pressure low. The body heat blazed through the smock he wore, and I was blissfully cooked in his mystical matiness. This was a perfect moment and would have remained so, even if Jack had a fit of the Aztecs immediately afterwards, tearing my heart out with his large warm hand and throwing it down the sacrificial steps.
There’s never a photographer around when you want one, is there? I wouldn’t have minded having that moment recorded. A single radiant image to outweigh all the pictures taken of me in hospital over the years. Somewhere in the offices of CRX in Taplow there was a photographic archive documenting the scanty progress of my generation of Still’s Disease patients, effectively a rogues’ gallery, showing our every deviation from normal posture and shapeliness. We were habitual offenders, backsliders, recidivists, stubbornly attached to the mistakes our bodies made.
I don’t remember exactly what I weighed in those days. Not very much, but certainly more than Edith Piaf, since as everyone knows sparrows’ bones are hollow and extremely light. And mine are not.
To fabricate the morning
The moment I woke up after the operation I knew something was wrong. Of course, ‘waking up’ misdescribes what happens after anæsthesia, or any other condition of absence. The world disappears every time we go to sleep, and the ego has to build it from scratch every time, to fabricate the morning. But the world as I reconstituted it in a side ward after the operation wasn’t up to the usual standards of realism. Everything was askew and wired up wrong. As I became more aware of what my body was telling me, its messages made less sense rather than more. I wasn’t in ‘a certain amount of discomfort’. That wasn’t it at all. I was in stark pain, not the suburbs of agony but the main square, in carnival.
I couldn’t understand what was happening. It was wrong for me to be having pain on this scale, but that wasn’t the half of it: the pain was in the wrong place. The ‘certain amount of discomfort’ was scheduled for the left hip, but neither of my hips felt any different from the way it had before.