The train was still stuck in the darkness. My fellow passengers were becoming anxious but I was thinking about how, when I contracted athlete’s foot recently, my various skin disorders became so intermingled it was difficult to say which bits of the body were suffering from which ailments. I contracted athlete’s foot, that much is clear. I then began to suffer from a mild itchiness between my fingers, an itchiness so similar to the itchiness between my toes that it seemed to me that I was suffering from athlete’s hand. Logically enough I began to treat my athlete’s hand with my athlete’s foot cream — only to find, or so my doctor explained, that the athlete’s foot cream set off a terrible reaction in my hand which led to the original itchiness being consumed by an appalling outbreak of eczema.
‘Let me make sure I understand this,’ I said to the doctor who outlined the origins of this sudden rash of skin trouble. ‘What you are saying, effectively, is that I am allergic to athlete’s foot.’
‘Effectively, yes,’ said the doctor.
Then there are my knees. Oh, don’t get me on my knees. What’s wrong with my knee? Everything. Everything that can go wrong with a knee has gone wrong with mine. Muscle, bone, cartilage, tendon. My knee exists in a bewildering variety of hurt: the pain is throbbing, aching, stabbing, dull, acute. Where does it hurt? Above the knee-cap, to the side of it, below it, and in the knee-cap. Oh my poor knee. Knees, I should say. Plural. Both knees are in bad shape but it’s the right that takes the biscuit. I waited for years to have something done about it, about them, because with all of this moving around I was doing I was never in a position to seek sustained medical treatment. In New Orleans I happened to make the acquaintance of a knee specialist who diagnosed chrondo malacia of the patella. He recommended strength-building exercises which I did for two days and then gave up. Since then I’ve been waiting for my life to stabilise sufficiently to seek serious, sustained medical treatment. As soon as I moved to Dullford I registered with a doctor who made an appointment with the knee specialist. Six months later, the big day: my meeting with the knee specialist, a tall man with a perceptible limp. I’m sure it comes from having played too much squash in my late twenties and early thirties, I said. I played squash for eight or ten hours a week and it was too much. No, said the doctor, the knee-cap, the patella, is misaligned, it’s not tracking properly. When my legs straightened out as an adolescent or a boy or whenever it was, my knee got left behind, apparently. It’s turned inward. Invasive surgery was not required, said the doctor. I was surprised, a little disappointed. I wanted a new knee. Instead I was sent to see the physio who told me to do the same strength-building exercises suggested by the knee specialist in New Orleans. These simple exercises, she said, would help to pull the knee back into place. And yet, incredibly, after waiting all these years to have my knee sorted out I am not doing the exercises. I have waited three years to get my knees repaired, I thought to myself as the train tugged itself into motion once more, and I am not doing the exercises, the simple, strength-building exercises which are necessary to prevent my knee causing me untold and probably intolerable pain in the future. These exercises are intended not just to repair my knee; they are intended to save my knee — and I am not doing them. For the first two weeks I turned up with feeble excuses about why I had not done my exercises. Then, on the phone, I made feeble excuses about why I had not turned up to my appointments; then I stopped phoning and made feeble excuses to myself. Instead I stay at home with my knee, my aching knee, asking myself why I can’t do the exercises. In a fraction of the time spent sitting here thinking about my knee and how much it hurts I could get on with the exercises which would eliminate the pain in my knee, I thought to myself as the train gathered speed, but instead of doing the exercises I sit here thinking about how I should be doing them. And I shouldn’t be thinking about my knee or the exercises, of course; I should be getting on with my book about D. H. Lawrence, instead of which I am fretting about my aches and pains. My knee is not the problem, that’s for sure: it’s a symptom of this larger disease, this inability to carry on with anything, this rheumatism of the will, this chronic inability to see anything through.
That’s the big problem but there are lots of minor ones too. Like the way I keep pulling muscles in my lower back. Being tall and weak and narrow-shouldered I am always waiting for my back to ‘go’, as they say. I avoid lifting things because I am terrified — especially after the moped crash on Alonissos — of a slipped disc. As for my neck, I don’t even wait for that to ‘go’. It’s always about to ‘go’. Either it is about to ‘go’ or it has just ‘gone’. Cricked neck: a quaint term for an agonising near-paralysis which, fortunately, only lasts for a day or two and which, unfortunately, only mends for a day or two before it ‘goes’ again.
I was getting in a terrible state on the train, thinking about all my ailments, but I was also aware that my ailments were taking my mind off the woman with flu who had taken my mind off the fact that the train was running late and would be running even later after the unscheduled pause in the countryside. .
Oh, and there’s my alopecia: my beard has stopped growing in two patches. This has happened twice before: on each occasion — if the word occasion can embrace periods lasting for a minimum of eighteen months — my beard stopped growing in two 50p-sized patches on either side of my jaw. If I don’t shave I look like a mangy dog and so I have to shave every day which makes my sensitive skin come out in a rash. The doctor did not recommend a specialist for alopecia because it is only a cosmetic problem — a cosmetic problem which, of course, has deep-rooted psychological causes and consequences (I can never grow a Lawrentian beard to hide behind). Alopecia is a nervous affliction, apparently, a sign of inner malaise. The best cure is not to think about it but one of the symptoms of alopecia is that you think about it every time you look in a mirror. Every time you think ‘I wonder if my alopecia is getting better’ you postpone your recovery by a month. Since I wonder about my alopecia between ten and twenty times a day I would need to live to over two hundred in order to stand a chance of recovery from my current bout of alopecia.
The prognosis for my nose had been much better. Shortly after I went to the doctor about my knees and just before I sought his advice about my alopecia I was there asking about another much-needed repair. I’d been getting nose-bleeds for over twenty years, I explained, ever since I was hit in the face during that fight with Paul Hynes in the school playground, but in recent years it had been bleeding more. Having arranged for me to see the knee specialist, the doctor arranged for me to see the nose specialist. It was all part of my project to repair the ravages of what I like to think of as the wandering years, the savage pilgrimage whose Mecca has turned out to be Dullford, England. The nose specialist examined the tubes behind my nose by peering into them with a very thin telescope that made my eyes water. Everything was okay, he said, to my great relief; all he needed to do was cauterise the nose. Fine, I said. If it was okay by me, the doctor said, a student doctor would do the actual cauterising. Fine, I said. When the student doctor had finished jabbing around the regular doctor had a bash too. Oh well, I thought as I walked home, a wad of Kleenex pressed to my numbly traumatised nose, at least I won’t have to worry about my nose bleeding every couple of days. No, now it bleeds every couple of hours. If my experience is anything to go by having your nose cauterised to stop it bleeding means that your nose will bleed all the time. It will bleed more often and it will bleed more heavily, for longer periods of time. What to do? Go back and get it re-cauterised? Then what? Then it will bleed ten or twenty times a day; perhaps it will never not be bleeding.