“We’re going to try something,” he said.
I was barely listening, could barely hear him, for the pain. “Anything. Try anything. Try cutting my head off, Doc, if that would help.” I was feeling pretty bloody sorry for myself, lying pinned to my bed by the huge rock on my forehead.
“We’re going to give you some EST.”
“Fine.”
“Electric Shock Therapy. A new treatment from Italy. We’ll put some mild current through you to see if that alleviates the pain.”
I screwed open my eyelids. “Are you just guessing?”
“The results have been very good. It’s worked for other head injuries. And people with trauma.”
“But you don’t know?”
“We can’t give you any more medication. As it is, you’re at the limit. Look, there’s no harm trying this. It’s perfectly safe. Been used scores of times to good effect.”
I’d heard. My mother told me of a neighbour who went doolally at times and had to go in for some wee shocks, as she put it. I remember the neighbour, always drooling. But hell, she seemed happy in her own wee world. What choice was there?
They wheeled me into the room and helped me climb on to the bed. There were three people tending me – stopping me running away – all in white coats and – conspicuously and bizarrely – wearing Wellingtons. The bed was covered in a thick rubber sheet. It felt icy and silky and smelled of old petrol.
They fastened my arms and legs with thick straps and I began to think I preferred the headaches. I felt the helplessness overwhelm me. The same feeling I had just before the guards hit me. I started to struggle.
“It’s all right, Danny. You’ll be all right.” The Doc made it all right by sticking a needle in my arm and filling it with happy juice. I settled down and let them wheel the machine over next to my bed. I let them wet my forehead with jelly of some sort – it was chilly and greasy. Then they clamped two metal pads on the same patches and put what looked like a scrum cap on my head to hold them in place. The Doc held up a rubber mouthpiece, like you get when you go to the dentist to keep your teeth open. I hated dentists.
“Stops you biting your tongue,” he explained.
He prised my jaw open and jammed it in. It tasted of cold rubber and meths. I thought I would choke and fought back the panic. My chest was heaving. Doc smiled at me to make me brave. It didn’t work.
“We’ll start with some low level current to see how it affects you, Danny. All right?”
Even if I could speak, what could I say? He didn’t really care anyway.
“Stand well clear, please.”
So they didn’t want to get electrocuted as well. I heard a click and felt a tickle, then a jolt. My head and body twitched like a frog’s leg in the science lab. That’s what I’d become. They did more, lots more, and increased the level.
I don’t remember going back to the ward after that. In fact I don’t remember much about the next few days. The pain was less but so was everything else. Just a kind of numbness, as though they’d cut something out of my head.
They gave me four more sessions over the next two weeks. Then they let me vegetate. Most days when it was fine, they’d wheel me into the sun and park me under a tree. I’d sit there and gaze at the early summer flowers. Or maybe the flowers were gazing at me; we seemed to share the same level of sentience. I didn’t have many visitors. Couple of army types. I even think Caldwell showed up once but I couldn’t be sure.
I know my mother came. She came every day for a week. She’d got lodgings nearby in Warwick and got a bus over to the hospital every day. Once she got past the crying stage she just sat and held my hand. We didn’t talk much. We were never great talkers. But on the second day she brought out a book from her shopping bag – Ivanhoe, one of my favourites – and began reading it to me. Reading till I fell asleep in the sun listening to her quiet Ayrshire burr recounting tales of glory and struggle. I suppose she was trying to tell me something.
I missed her when she went. But already I was feeling better. The pain would come down like a tempest a couple of times a week, but mostly I was free of it.
The dreams started, and the memories began to erupt, like waking up with a jolt in a cinema just as the hero is getting a pasting.
I was there through that glorious summer, growing stronger – outwardly – every day. I began to do my own reading; this was the second time in my life my mother had got me going. We’d been the only family in the street of red sandstone tenements that borrowed library books from the big Victorian pile across the other side of town. And my folks kept me on at the Academy with the unheard-of goal of university, not apprenticed to a good trade like my pals. It caused pursed lips from the gossips hanging over the fences, their Friday hair in curlers and their fat arms folded. “An’ him only a miner. An’ as for her, wi’ her airs and graces…”
But the simple reason was that my mother – whose only air was worry and whose only grace was kindness – clenched her jaw and wouldn’t let me follow my dad down the pits, like his dad and his dad’s dad. Especially after what happened.
So I broke the dynasty. I was going places. Then a bloody wee Austrian with big ideas decided to screw up my life – and here I was.
I began doing exercises, the ones they’d taught me at SOE. They came damned hard at first and left me breathless and dizzy. But they worked; I left the hospital, on my own two legs, freckled and fit in late August. The Doc said he could have got me fixed up as partially disabled and I’d get 11 bob a week. I declined. At that rate, with ciggies in civvy street at two and fourpence a packet, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker at twenty-five bob, I could have got drunk maybe once a year.
Besides, I’d found Raymond Chandler in the library, and his books had pointed the way to fame and fortune. I had the training, did I not? I was ready to face the world and raring to go. All I needed were some juicy cases. And the right hat.
SEVEN
I picked up the bottle, examined it and pushed the cork firmly in. It would be too easy. But then I’d lose another day. I touched the lines Val wrote and took heart. Someone cared. I shook myself, shaved, and washed as best I could in the basin – I have a little gas immerser that gives me enough hot water to keep myself decent. Once a week I go down to the slipper baths at Camberwell and soak until my fingers and toes wrinkle and my skin turns the colour of boiled prawns.
I was still shaky but hungry now, with a great empty place inside my body and head. I made some toast and jam. It filled my stomach but made no impression on my head. But at least I’d added another couple of memories. They were rotten ones but I could cope better knowing than not knowing. Assuming they were real of course.
I put on the wireless. I like the Home Service in the afternoon. I was in time for Music While You Work. Jimmy Dorsey’s big band filled the room, then Dinah Shore sang Cole Porter. Music lifts me. I’m a great reader but I don’t understand classical music. I reckon I could if someone explained it to me; it can’t be that far from something like Moonlight Serenade. I mean they’re all tunes, aren’t they, though they seem to use more violins than Dorsey.
I stepped out the building humming Star Dust, filled with new determination. I had one lead. Kate mentioned a club that Caldwell belonged to over in Jermyn Street. Truth is I’d thought of that, too. But there were simply so many in London that I hadn’t had the heart to trek round them all. To be even more truthful, I don’t like them. I don’t feel comfortable in their plush entrance halls, trying to get past the flunky. I’d been made an officer but I was a long way from feeling like a gentleman.
I hopped on a bus up to the Elephant and then caught another over the new bridge at Waterloo and down the Strand. I watched the young ticket collector swinging from the pole and jumping up and down the stairs. He seemed happy in his work, chatting to the old girls who cheeked him back. Chatting up the young birds who flushed and stammered. Maybe I should try a different profession?