With the assault on my throat after the botched anæsthetic I had thought my dolor rating, my theoretical Uppsala score, was close to the maximum, but now I had to reconsider my settings. The new sensation was off the scale. Perhaps there came a point, as with my tape recorder, when the needle flicked far into the red and the apparatus began to fail, the signal unrecognisably distorted.
Again I was told that Mum was on her way, as if that was the answer to everything, to anything. I still didn’t know what I had done to deserve this black jackpot. I was a dolor millionaire, no doubt about it, and I couldn’t help suspecting that they’d done the little man wrong all over again.
Burning spiders in the socket
I had only one consolation as I lay there, with a spouting volcano of agony newly installed in my hip, which I lacked even the power to protect by curling up around, though instinct continued to dictate that impossible reflex. At least the pain was in the right place. The intolerable signals were being broadcast from a transmitter at the proper address, where the left hip was. There was far too much of the pain, and the surgeon had sewn burning spiders into the new socket, he was a hateful monstrous illegitimate brute but at least he wasn’t incompetent. He was torturing me in the right place. The left hip was the one chosen for the first operation. The right hip had the benefit of a little movement, but the left was always a hopeless case.
People came in every now and then and spoke to me, but I couldn’t take in what they were saying. And sometimes I answered them, but I didn’t know what I was saying either. I was howling with pain, and when they gave me pain-killers they didn’t kill the pain at all, only muffled the howling. The pain shrugged off the pain-killers, the pain had been inoculated against pain-killers, but at least I wasn’t making so much noise and upsetting other patients along the corridor.
Over time I realised that Jack Juggernaut was in my room, smiling and saying something reassuring. ‘Don’t worry,’ he was saying. ‘We’ve heard it all before.’ Heard all what before? I didn’t understand.
Eventually he was able to get through to me. It turned out that when I started to come round I used every swear word I knew. I didn’t know many. I had had very little experience of using swear words, since the time at Woodlands camp when I had learned a useful word and for a few days fucked everything that fucking moved. I had no real feel for the grandeur of the expletive, and there wasn’t any artfulness involved in what I howled. I didn’t swear like a trooper, I swore like a raw recruit to the world of taboo slang, howling the same thing again and again.
My untutored combination, though, had found favour with those who witnessed my agonies. ‘“Fucking buggers!”’ said Jack Juggernaut appreciatively. ‘That’s downright catchy. Once you’ve heard it you can’t get it out of your mind. We have to watch ourselves round Sister these days. In case it slips out.’
Jack Juggernaut felt the need to reassure me about my swearing because when I wasn’t swearing I had been apologising for swearing. I’d go, ‘Fucking buggers fucking buggers,’ and then, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ And then ‘Fucking buggers fucking buggers,’ the same rough music as before. ‘I’m so sorry,’ all over again. Jack wasn’t trying to stop me from swearing, only from apologising.
Rabble of shits
What Jack Juggernaut told me showed that even when I wasn’t fully present in mind and able to control my language, I was ashamed of its foulness. It wasn’t just middle-class scruple — there was something else involved. In spite of the dominance of the pain, a part of me remembered that swearing isn’t a real recourse for the disabled. You can achieve a brutal short-term effect with foul language, you can make people reel back a bit, but you incur a great loss of prestige over time (and your prestige, however forlorn, is your trump card). It’s not remotely fair but that doesn’t stop it being true. Whatever goes for women goes twice over for the disabled. A foul mouth isn’t ladylike, and it isn’t disabledlike either. People will make way for you all right, if you bellow, ‘Fuck off and clear a path, you rabble of shits.’ The wheelchair will meet no further obstruction — but it’s not the best bargain you can strike with the world of your fellows.
Swearing is dirty, and we’re above it. That may be the mechanism. Swearing is powerful. We’re not entitled. Perhaps the two notions converge in some way I don’t see.
Mum took the bus to Slough from Bourne End. We might live on the desirable Abbotsbrook Estate, but we were like poor relations in that prosperous parish, and Mum relied on public transport unless a friend with driving skills happened to be free. She was on her own this time, but she still talked mainly about Audrey, sounding variations on the old theme of I’m-at-my-wits’-end. After Mum cut her hair short, Audrey developed a new obsession — the hairpins she had once hated so much for putting Mum’s hair out of reach. Now instead they represented what she had lost, hair that could be worn either up or down. Now hairpins became relics, almost fetishes. She exhumed rusty hairpins from where she had hidden them in the garden, and wore them herself. Finally she insisted on having her own hair cut short, and the hairpins lost their poignancy for her. This whole period of her development was just mourning after mourning — a trailing after symbols that had only ever been symbols of other symbols. This is the pathology of attachments. No wonder psychiatrists are so busy! Sensible religions set out to break attachment before it starts, to nip it in the bud.
Talking to anyone, even Mum, was like trying to concentrate on a chess problem while someone applied a soldering iron to my bones from the inside. Asking about Audrey became as much of an achievement as it would be to work out a dazzling move (RxKtch!), with the smell of burning marrow in my nostrils making me want to retch up my empty stomach to the last square inch of its lining.
My wounded hip was reluctant to heal. It was very sorry for itself, and couldn’t forgive the insults it had received. After a time it even started to weep. It cried thick tears of pus. I was put on antibiotics, but they didn’t help. Finally the command was given to wheel the bed outside, thereby exposing the damage to sunlight and air. The effect was miraculous, on the hip and the whole person. I think the crucial element was actually breeze, the movement of air. The sense that I was taking breaths from a live environment, a larger world that was going about its business without any intention of leaving me behind.
By the time I was moved back to CRX for my rehabilitation I had made a little breakthrough, discovering my own trick for fighting pain. At times when my medication was beginning to wear off, but there were still hours to wait until it was topped up, I found that by concentrating on my breathing I could get a certain amount of relief. The technique may have gone all the way back to my years of bed rest, in which case I was only dusting it off and putting it back into use.