How was your journey?
Are you staying locally?
And the family, how are they taking it?
Christmas plans, at all?
What a relief it was. Does the mutton roast want to be asked about its native pastures by the man with the whetstone and the blade?
We took against him for about two minutes each and then without knowing it we turned him into a hero. I suppose he had been auditioning us too. Luckily Annabel is a doctor’s daughter and managed a direct question.
Would it hurt for a long time afterwards?
I, sitting down, am about up to his chest when he is standing. He is nonetheless a formidable presence. His words come out at the speed of a lizard’s tongue, where the fly is your attention. Only much later do you realise what’s happened or been said. He smiles when he says the worst things, but not unkindly, at all. More like a true wit. I think he may be one. My guess is that he will not linger because what he does is of such intense moment. You can with ease imagine him seeing off death, around which he is often, as he is around the dark of blindness. His specialism is cancer of the eyes. He clicks and pops like an indoor firework.
What he told us was that I had one of the two worst cases of blepharospasm he had seen, and that I was lucky, as twenty years ago I would’ve been sectioned, that if I disliked him now I would hate him after the first operation, after the second it would be curtains for us, it would hurt so much.
Annabel and I returned south through the snow with a new person to develop inside the story. We each kept remembering delightfully, in a slow conventional world, rude, actually terrific, things he had said.
We started inventing them.
That leg’ll have to come off too; no point holding on to a duff limb.
Prepare yourself for complete failure; no operation is more than a good try.
Only one thing’s ever certain.
We imagined him paying compliments:
That hat has got to come off.
Ordering a meaclass="underline"
Where’s the bill?
Proposing:
It’s shortly our tenth anniversary.
We liked Mr Foss.
For my first operation, it was again Annabel who took me. We tried to imagine, in hospital that January morning before I went down to the theatre, what he might say when he came on his visit to me before I was knocked out and wheeled in for his attention.
Mr Foss came into the clean little hospital room where I was too big for everything, chairs, bed, gown, slippers, paper knickers.
He had a form.
We’d been surmising and practising reassuringly feel-bad things he might be moved, or, admit it, induced, to say.
Annabel was in the lead with, ‘I’m dispensing with time-wasting anaesthesia.’
She had also scored highly with, ‘Look here, I’m busy today.’
He raced through the form. It was the usual. Next of kin, religion, etc.
He filled in the name of the operation: Crawford Brow Suspension.
Then he spluttered boyishly, ‘Benefits of operation?’
We waited. It was, after all, his field.
‘None. No benefits. None at all. Not that I can honestly say,’ he said, and was gone, leaving us in the highest possible spirits. That man could be a general. One would lose a limb for him with his surgical high spirits.
There used to be a phrase, used of certain drinks, ‘A meal in itself’.
Mr Foss is the life force in itself.
This is not in my experience true of most doctors.
Annabel set off for the South; she drives with mettle. She is the sort of ladylike quiet person with quick reactions whom you will find calmly running things when flashier ones have decamped. Accomplished, brave, capable, dutiful, her alphabet might begin. She can name most popular music tracks of the last forty years, and keep a poker face.
It’s odd. I am afraid of blue eyes, yet both Annabel and Claudia have them, markedly so, each in her way. Annabel’s are pale blue, really like aquamarines, and give you a shiver with their bright chill and almost pure colour, no black but for a pierced dot. If she weren’t smiling below them, they would be icy, and can look uninhabited. Claudia’s too can alarm because they inhabit a face that will not play along with anything that discomfits.
Both Annabel and Claudia have a gaze of pinning intentness. Each is a contact-lens wearer of long standing, and short-sighted. Both shake themselves when their eyes are tired, as though to refocus. Each pushes her fringe up with a hand to catch and ingest light through her pair of blue irises.
My own pair of green eyes woke up in the afternoon that January with bloody blinkers made of gauze strapped over them. My whole face, when I patted it, was strapped, like a mummy in a horror film.
I was ridiculously anxious that no nurse should think that I had had a cosmetic procedure. I knew these were going on around me in that hospital.
When I came round in the post-operative room, a nice young male anaesthetist asked, ‘Are you married?’
I replied that I was but that as I understood it, it was complicated and the terms hadn’t been invented yet and that my husband lived with someone else whom I was fond of.
I thought that this was a good opportunity to start as I meant to go on, naming things as I awoke into this new post-operative world.
Poor young man. He probably wanted only to see if I was sufficiently unwoozy to recall elementary facts, like the name of the Prime Minister. He got an essay. I don’t even know how to fill in forms. I alternate between ‘Married’ and ‘Separated’. I think I want to put what our son wants me to put. I must ask him.
I asked the young man his own marital status. He had a wife, he said, from Edinburgh, actually, away at the moment with his brother’s wife, also from that city, also a nurse. You couldn’t keep those Edinburgh girls away from home, he said. At least he supposed they were going home because they were homesick and it was nothing worse.
He spoke with healthy confidence.
‘I’m getting so I miss the place too, actually,’ he said, and patted me in an encouraging way. ‘You should go there one time when your eyes are better. It’s gorgeous.’
Later in that day with my stitched eyes behind their blinkers, there was another conversation that pushed plausibility to its limits.
As far as I could tell, it was evening. A woman’s voice, South African, almost social in its willingness to interact, reached me, enquiring about various practical matters. I replied.
I had had supper, insofar as I wanted it. I had found the toilet. Yes, I was used to finding my way by feel around the place, it was one of the upsides of not having been able to see that much before. Might I have a sleeping pill?
I might indeed not have a sleeping pill. I had just had a general anaesthetic. Did I know the inadvisability of risking it?
Silly me. I’m sorry.
Do you usually have sleeping pills? Are you aware of the dangers of dependency on prescription drugs?
Yup, I bullyingly said from inside my bandages, I’m a twelve-stepped alcoholic committed to rooting out addiction wherever I encounter it day and night.
How many years’ sobriety?
Oh God, she had the lingo. Medical people on the whole absolutely do not speak AA talk, unless they are ‘in the Fellowship’.
Oh, what had I done? Were we going to swap drunkalogues, as they are chattily known, deep into the hospital night?
But it didn’t go that way.
I said, modestly, or rudely, ‘A few’, which is a sort of signal to be released that only the sensitive take in. It means, ‘I haven’t had a drink for quite a long time. Years, probably nearer ten than five.’