I took advantage of my novel surroundings for the rest of the trip by playing ‘I Spy’ with the doctor. B is for Bus, P is for Puddle. I was growing too old for the game, really, but it would have been mad to waste this windfall panorama.
There were things I would have liked to ask Dr Duckett, things I couldn’t talk about to Mum or Dad. I had been thinking about the unchanging ‘I’ burning deep within. The body went through states of pain and ease, of nice and nasty, well and sick and sicker still, but the ‘I’ didn’t change. It was like a brown candle, or like the bulb of my sailing-boat night-light showing through the deckled parchment sails. By ‘brown’ I mean the colour you get when you close your eyes and take in the light that filters through the lids. I understood that I would still be John if I lost a finger, but did that mean I would still be ‘I’ if I lost my whole body? Yet I must have sensed that this was not truly a medical question, because I never actually raised it with dear Dr Duckett.
At the end of our rounds Dr Duckett taught me a long word and a useful exercise which wouldn’t hurt me. The word was quadriceps, which meant the muscle at the top of the leg, and the exercise involved flexing it. He put my hands on his quadriceps, so that I could feel the movement involved, and his hands on mine to see if I was imitating him. We flexed our leg muscles together. He said I should do this several times a day — whenever I was bored. Through the cloth of his trousers I could feel the edge of his pocket, warm and swollen with coins. I liked touching Dr Duckett’s leg. It made a deep impression on me. It was intoxicating, that broad leg with the power in it, at a time when I was on only the most distant terms with touch. Whenever I did my dutiful flexing, I thought of the warmth of his leg through the thickness of his trouser-cloth.
The style of exercise that he taught me that day later became generally popular under the name of isometrics. These were exercises you could do at your desk or while waiting for your bus. I never saw the appeal, for those who had the option of actually using their limbs in real life, but it was the only sort of exercise that I was allowed.
Not the king of hugs
By this time, my left hip was entirely fused, and my right hip had only the ghost of movement, though there was still muscle there. Dr Duckett’s flexing game wasn’t actually called ‘Let’s Not Get Atrophied!’, but that was very much the thinking behind it.
If I remember Dr Duckett as being tactile, I’m only recording the fact that he touched me more than Dad did. Touching the patient is a diagnostic requirement, so it doesn’t follow that Dr Duckett was an intrinsically tactile man, and it’s no sort of reproach to Dad that he was not the king of hugs. Strictly limited horse-play may have had a rôle in some boisterous, high-spirited families, in privacy, but in the 1950s, men didn’t touch their children except to smack them, ruffle their hair or carry them from burning buildings.
The first time I tried Dr Duckett’s quadriceps exercises I somehow wet myself for a second or so, until I regained control, and was terribly ashamed. I was moving the wrong mental lever, the one connected to the bladder. After that I was in control. At home I treated myself to one more round of ‘I Spy’ with Mum. I might be getting too old for the game, but that was no reason to pass up the pleasure of stumping her with Q, that rarity of an initial letter. Q for Quadriceps. A new word for something that had actually been in the room all along.
Sometimes peace broke out between my parents, when their temperaments dovetailed for once. Mum had always been a skilled and adventurous knitter, but there were times when a pattern didn’t work out. Sometimes it looked very much as if there were mistakes in the instructions, but Mum said that as a rule the pattern was right and the knitter wrong. On some evenings she and Dad would put their heads together to find out why a particular pattern was running into trouble. I loved those evenings, because Mum and Dad were likely to stay up late — past their bed-times. Finding the cause of the problem took as long as it needed to take. During the investigation, time took a back seat. There was an unwritten rule that the error must be run to ground on the day the problem was discovered. If that entailed a late night, then so be it.
I loved knitting-pattern-problem nights. Something was really happening. There was activity in the house, and a warm and busy feeling. Mum and Dad were happy without trying for it or even necessarily realising it. Their characters meshed for once and I basked in the glow. Dad became absorbed in the quest for a solution and forgot that by definition he had better things to do.
Knitting-Pattern Man
The idea occurred to me that God had sent along this problem as a way of uniting them, and I started to pursue some promising ideas about Him. When I visualised Knitting-Pattern Man I had always given him a big beard and white robes anyway. Not a badger-coloured beard like Dr Duckett’s but a proper snowy one. I knew that it would be God and not Jesus who would do this sort of thing (I could never get to grips with the Holy Ghost). God was older and knew a thing or two about the way people worked. His Son was greener and less sure of himself, more like a big brother or youthful uncle, really. He was even quite chummy, almost to the point of being a playmate, and you could talk to him about anything without being made to feel silly. He said, ‘I don’t know,’ to a lot of my questions, but always added that we would find out together, which was all part of the fun.
The usual outcome of Mum and Dad’s battle with the knitting-pattern was that though everything looked terribly wrong, it all fell into place if you just kept going and completed the design. It was difficult to tell which was the greater triumph: Mum being Right and the Pattern being Wrong, or the other way round. At first sight, it was fantastic if Mum found a flaw in the Pattern, but then Dad would say, ‘You should make your own patterns and sell ’em, m’dear!’ Which was supposed to cheer her up, but unsettled her instead. ‘Oh Dennis, don’t talk like that, please! The Pattern just can’t be Wrong. It’s probably only a slip-up at the printing stage. And I bet the Maker was absolutely furious when he found out!’
The Pattern just can’t be Wrong — The Pattern just can’t be Wrong. How close Mum was coming to a genuine mystical experience at that time. How narrowly she dodged enlightenment. She was only a step away from realising that she had been handed a key to the apparent miseries of her life. If something as simple as a knitting pattern could look wrong and yet be absolutely correct, then why shouldn’t the same be true of larger matters, of her life and mine?
One day Mum came back in floods of tears after a horrible conversation with an Indian gentleman at the bus stop. She’d been in Heather overdrive, pumping her miseries into a virgin ear at a terrific rate, when he said exactly the wrong thing. ‘Dear lady,’ he said, ‘you are so lucky. God must have a special purpose for your son.’
‘How could he be so cruel?’ — the Indian gentleman she meant, not God. Mum fed on sympathy drained from strangers and here was starvation. The last thing she wanted was to be offered a fresh perspective. She didn’t take kindly to being comforted, at the expense of her tragic prestige.
Despite her immediate distress at the time of meeting the Indian man, Mum rapidly re-jigged her attitude. She calmed down after a while and even managed half a smile. ‘Well, maybe he knew something we can’t see,’ she said. The incident even became part of her repertoire, for all the grief it had brought her when it was fresh. It gave her a way of ending the story on a wise and reconciled note. She began telling everyone that maybe this man could see something we couldn’t. There might be an Unseen Hand working, to push together this valiant mother and an enlightened Asiatic. Providence was always busy behind the scenes, wasn’t it? Mum developed a new, far-away look to accompany this new repertoire of ideas.