* * *
He’s woken again by the approach of two nurses, one on each flank. Sleep has not returned him to his body. It hasn’t all been a dream. Waking merely throws the horror straight back in his face. His plight now takes on a darker sense of reality. For the first time he feels truly afraid. This, for all he knows, could be his lot from here on. He tries to picture a mind that could take in sight and sound, capable of understanding the world around it but with no way at all of responding. Would that be living or just being buried alive? A husk, a rotting vegetable – in everyone’s eyes barely a living creature at all. And wouldn’t they be right to think that of him, if he was never again to talk, never to move by himself, never to feel his own body, never to love or be loved, never to have sex, a family, a life? Wouldn’t he rather fall prey to some malignant illness like cancer or heart disease than be left that way? At least then he could manage the terms of his own death.
The blue coats are now upon him, the tall and wiry one from earlier and another, broad and matron-like. In a brash, singsong voice the first one asks him, “Awake now, are we? Happy to try and eat a little something? Let’s see whether we can manage that, shall we?”
The questions are as puerile as they are patently rhetorical. Before she’s even closed her mouth the other nurse has raised his upper body and slipped three extra pillows behind. The shift to his organs sends through an urgent message; ‘Warning. Bladder full to bursting’. That much at least he can detect, albeit lodged somewhere vague beneath his brain – more a craving than a physical pain. So what is he supposed to do? And what about when he needs a dump? It has to happen eventually, no matter how little they’re planning on feeding him, even if it’s only liquids. Even newborn babies crap themselves. Shit, for all he knows, he might already be in nappies, or plumbed into one of those dreadful bags.
The removal of the feeding tube has left an irritation at the back of his nose like the soreness that heralds a cold. Suddenly, as the matron bends to pick something from the trolley, he knows with absolute certainty that he won’t be able to swallow, that they’ll be stuffing his mouth full of food and he’ll be unable to tell them to stop and will simply choke to death. Her thumb is now drawing his jaw downward, her other hand pulling back his head. Inside, he wriggles and strains to free himself, but to them his alarm goes unseen. Smiley, talky nurse closes in and niftily empties her spoon into his mouth with an upward flick that wipes it clean against his top lip.
For all their abuse, he’s distracted for a moment by a startling explosion of flavour; unidentified in itself, but another bridge to the world around him, as fireworks of savoury-sweetness burst into his brain. He’s also conscious of limited physical sensations in his mouth, like a dentist’s freeze-up. A mouth that’s become a vast cave. He knows the puréed food is being coaxed backwards towards his throat, but it might as well be the nurse’s finger in there – impossible to think of this as his own tongue. At the moment of truth, choke or swallow time, the food catches at the head of the shaft, a mortified potholer peering into the abyss. His brain screams at it to jump. But the morsel remains adamant, and the command ‘swallow!’ has no effect at all. The more he tries, the worse it sticks. The down-shaft has squeezed tight; the vent to the nose is sealed, starving him of air. Not in a million years will he ever manage this. Push the stuff away again to the front of the mouth and spit it out or suffocate. And it’s only then, while his attention is suitably distracted, that the reflex takes over, abseiling the food down to some subterranean cavern, resetting the system and allowing him once more to breathe.
Too late for self-congratulation, already the next spoonful is coming. This time, the slurry gets caught in his windpipe. Again, that heart-stopping moment – no reflex to clear the airway, lifeline corked. He can tell he’s being slapped on the back but there is no sensation of touch, only of acceleration and jarred vision. And suddenly food is flying everywhere – across the sheets, coughing good and proper, bull’s-eye onto the blue uniform. A neat retaliation. By the fourth mouthful he has the technique. No more mishaps. Smiley nurse is delighted.
“Well done, Mr George! We can well and truly say goodbye now to that horrid feeding tube, can’t we?”
Matron says nothing. Perhaps she prefers the feeding tube. Cheaper laundry bills.
Before they can wander off, he must find a way of communicating his need for a leak. The only thing he can think of is to furiously eyeball each of them in turn and then his own crotch. Too bad if they take it the wrong way. But talky sister comes immediately to his aid.
“Oh, no need to worry about that, pet. You just go right ahead.” She bends closer. “You’re fitted with a catheter.” She says it like his is the only one in the hospital and others would give their right kidney to steal it. So, what, just lie back and let himself go? How curiously liberating.
But actually performing proves less than straightforward. A deep-seated instinct takes charge of his bladder. Brain and body begin arguing it out, as in a dream – where the dreamer is all set to pee onto a cushion, or into a pile of blankets in the corner of a room, in two minds as to whether it’s the right or wrong thing to do. For all he knows, he might wake from this nightmare only to find himself back home, soaking his bed. But nature demands that he act sooner or later.
So let it be sooner.
The need slowly shrinks away with a slight sensation of deflation, the bubbles rushing along the snaking yellow tube at the bedside, like someone drawing thirstily on a drinking straw. He looks away in disgust. The nurses exit, victorious.
Now propped up by pillows, he’s at last able to take in the whole room. Equipment clusters around the bed, as though drawn to him for company. Into the cold whiteness beyond flows a continuous humming and hissing, and an intermittent beeping that measures out time; a ruler against which to count his breaths. For now, these four walls delineate his whole world. Only his eyes reach beyond, to the boughs of a tree through the high window and the slowly shifting cloud cover behind. The room itself remains motionless, simply monitoring, controlling, diligently awaiting instructions, spewing wasted data into the air. For what feels like an eternity it stays this way, until a new face appears at the door.
If being delivered from the womblike state of a coma into the hands of the hospital has been a rebirth, then what follows becomes his moment of baptism. Unlike her two predecessors, the new nurse checks to see that he’s awake before entering and smiles as she approaches.
“Hello, Alex,” she says softly.
Before he has time properly to ponder the christening she draws up a chair and sits. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
More bland assurances, no doubt. He’s sorry, but soft soap is not what he needs right now. Give him something concrete, a timescale, a get well plan, anything to get things moving.
But when she speaks again, it’s not about feeding tubes or catheters; not vague promises about the temporary nature of his amnesia or loss of sensation. There is a visitor on his way; she puts the words carefully so as not to shock. In about half an hour, she says, then he’ll be here.
His twin brother.
The words are an atom bomb exploding over an ocean; a tidal wave crashing through the flimsy construct of memory he’s so far managed to assemble; each moment instantly irradiated to place her words at its heart. This is the core he’s been missing. He, this thirty-three years old, first name Alex, surname George, caller at docklands, ex-captive, victim of circumstances unknown that has left him body-broken and mind in tatters, has a twin. And that twin is on his way.