‘I mean, I hid money in my knickers — and put my phone inside my sock, inside my shoe … childish. You do need your money, though, and you do need the phone.
‘Or at least money. You’ll have to get away at the end.
‘I’ve no clue when this will all be done with, when a cab could be called in to pick me up, when I could stroll out, apparently unscathed, hardy … But I’m not concerned about that, I’m saying in my head that I have my little bag and I’m checking into this hotel — a big hotel that smells of bacon and gravy — there’s a lot of catering places as you go in and it’s breakfast time, powerful aroma of toast, pale toast and disinfectant and the smell of people who aren’t well. Not a great hotel. Hand-sanitising bottles all over the shop and great big metal lifts. You have to not size up the lifts and work out you could get a trolley into any one of them, or a coffin.
‘It’s really early. So no one’s about except for a few of the staff heading off for toast and coffee and the other people who are checking in with their little bags.
‘You go to the desk — not exactly a check-in desk — and you say your name and date of birth and then you sit on a chair — it’s always chairs and waiting — and I had a book with me in my little bag, one about polar explorers, because those bastards had it worse than anyone. Their teeth shattered in the cold — that doesn’t seem fair. The frostbite and starving and snow blindness and all that is horrible, but it’s not — I’m saying this is my opinion — it’s not unexpected. Walking along in a snowstorm and dealing with that and then having no bloody teeth, that’s fucking unreasonable.
‘And I’m sitting on the chair and being outraged about these fuckers in the snow with no teeth and that’s cheering. I reckon I’ve made a wise choice with the reading material. I like finding out about the suffering and the sledges and mittens and portable stoves and tents. It’s letting me feel comfortable. They made it back, this particular team, so that keeps it calm and not depressing.
‘So, after a while, you’ve just about persuaded yourself that you’re in a hotel for real, on a holiday in this place that reeks of dead people and pies — you’re ignoring that — but you’re breathing in faith, or frost, or adventure — something that’s bearable — and you’re being thankful that you’ve got your little bag and that you still have access to health care, that you don’t have to pay extra for it when you’ve already paid for the NHS — even though you shouldn’t be thinking of health, because this is meant to be a hotel — but then a nurse appears — makes the hotel vanish — and she’s got a list of names and there’s something about a list of names which is a bit … It’s never good, is it? You never can tell …
‘She wants you and all the other little bag people to follow her and — like mugs, like a bunch of mugs — you just do tag along. You go along these corridors that you’d never find your way out of and they seem kind of yellowy-faded and not quite … You’d want them cleaner … And then — which is a surprise — you’re round a corner and here are the beds. Not a ward, precisely, just in a fat bit of corridor where there are beds. There are no swing doors you have to go through. You maybe wanted swing doors.
‘And the nurse with the list sends you off to your bed — the number of the bed is on the list, too — and your position is right by the wall, this whole wall which is just radiating coldness. It is colder than the weather was outside, which isn’t fair.
‘And then you end up sitting on another chair which is beside a bed and you’re reading about the sledges again and waiting and pretending that you’re a well and normal person visiting someone, because that’s what people in their everyday clothes are doing if they’re sitting on a chair beside a hospital bed.
‘But another nurse comes by and says you should take off your clothes and put on the gown she gives you and your dressing gown, which you have because it was on the list of things to put in your little bag.
‘So you pull round the curtain that hangs down from a track in the ceiling which circles the bed and doing this makes that chattering sound and that swish that it always does in films and soap operas — so you can be glad about that. You can be a film star, or just someone in a television series. Then you undress and put on the gown which isn’t yours and then the dressing gown which is.
‘You can be glad of the dressing gown because it keeps in a bit of heat — the hospital gown is hardly there, it’s just this shapeless, odd shroud of a thing, designed for the convenience of others, made out of cloth you’d imagine using to polish your car and then throwing away. You do wonder if it’s meant to be disposable and if the fact that clearly it’s quite old and has been washed often means that corners are being cut. You worry. Not about the operation — just about the gown and the missing corners.
‘You’re also glad of the slippers you’ve brought — they were on the little bag list, too — the slippers which make a small place under each of your feet belong to you and your home and not to where you are, which now does not smell of death or gravy, but of other things you can’t identify and don’t exactly take to. One of the smells makes you think of embalming.
‘And even though you’re glad of the comforting things, you’re also thinking that hospitals are full of really ill people. And the ward is full of probably slightly ill people who are also pulling their curtains and changing themselves into patients — strangers in dressing gowns with bare shins. They all look much iller than when they came in as soon as they’ve undressed. You suppose that you do, too, if it comes to that. And you’re wondering if your dressing gown and your slippers aren’t getting covered in illness and strangeness and if you won’t have to throw them away once you’re back home. And you liked your dressing gown.
‘And you’re getting colder and colder. Beyond the wall, you could swear there are ice fields and white bears and unrusted ancient cans of meat. There are penguins with sloped shoulders waddling across these pale spaces like patients in contagious slippers and they’re shaking their heads.
‘You’re shivering.
‘Another nurse asks you again who you are and when you were born and where you live. And it makes you feel doubtful — this is the third or fourth time you’ve been asked. You want to imagine that they’re being extra careful, but you end up being sure they can’t keep hold of information and can’t guarantee to remember what patients they have from one minute to the next.
‘Would you want them to cut you or burn you, or do what they have to do when they can’t keep safe hold on an address?
‘You talk to your anaesthetist for a long time. He checks who you are again and your address and that stuff, and you don’t care if he knows who you are, or could come round to where you live with a fucking Christmas card, you just want to be sure that he knows you’re the alcoholic. You’re the alcoholic who doesn’t drink and who never wants to feel as if you have and that means no sedative. No feeling out of it, no recovery from feeling out of it — no chemical ripping about in your blood.
‘The specialist said this was possible and that the pain wouldn’t be too bad and you could get injections and this topical cream as well, which can be a bit of a joke when you say it to yourself — like the cream is keeping up with the news … You would like to trust the specialist. She visits you next and doesn’t check who you are, or where you live, or how long you’ve been alive and this seems slapdash. But she does remember that you’ll have no anaesthetic. You can see she’s thinking hospitals aren’t arranged to deal with conscious people.