Malik
A shock of electricity leaps the air between them; the kind of connection that only a twin could possibly know. It makes no difference that Alex has yet to see his own reflection, this face is unmistakably his own. The fit goes beyond memory into a deeper, genetic matching. He watches his brother (Daniel, the nurse is calling him) approach the bedside and take hold of his hand. Seeing but not sensing their touch takes his mind back at once to a game from their childhood – cross the arms in front, palms together, and interlace the fingers, rotate the hands, bringing the elbows to the stomach. The other nominates a finger but makes no contact with it. Always it’s impossible at first to know which muscles to move. Such a trivial memory, but this weightless touch means everything: no more suffering alone; being lifted into the arms of family and held; clinging to a lifeline of hope. Daniel’s bullish words are the only thing stopping him from going to pieces. He wishes to hold this moment forever.
But the doctor is already pulling his brother away.
The nurse returns almost at once, before there’s been a chance to process these new twists in the story. She seems anxious about his saline drip, running her finger around the entry point, as though all that hand holding might have dislodged it. “So,” she ventures, once satisfied, “how did it feel to be with your brother again?” The final fall in her voice makes it understood that a verbal response is not expected.
But if he could reply, what would he say? What words could convey the overwhelming relief of knowing that someone out there was willing to help him through his sufferance; and not just someone: his own twin, a twin that only minutes ago he hadn’t even known existed? Except in one sense he had known, deep in bones. “He’s promised to come back tomorrow,” she continues. “We hope by then you’ll be out of here and into a proper ward where you’ll be a lot more comfortable. You’d better rest now for a bit. I’ll be in later with your supper.”
‘Supper’, she calls it, not ‘your next oral feed’. She almost makes it sound palatable. But force-feeding is force-feeding, however nicely put; still a galling reminder of his condition, like the pee now shooting along its tube, like his inability to decline her food, or to respond to her questioning.
A light sleep claims him for a while; a quieter place where he and Daniel can briefly reunite. They’re repeating the party trick with the fingers. They’re running around a bedroom and clambering onto a bunk bed. They’re in the garden playing catch. They’re on a beach kicking down sandcastles. He tries to fast-forward the dream, into their teens, into their years as young adults, but nothing materialises to bridge the gap. Only today’s Daniel comes forward, bemoaning the fact that it had been so long: that everyone had been worried sick about him. How long is so long? The dream refuses to say.
He slowly becomes aware of the nurse standing over him. He tries to focus on her face. There’s a connection somewhere there to the dream.
“Ready for a bite to eat?” she asks, raising him up. As the feeding ritual once more gets underway Alex drills deeper into her eyes in his efforts to grasp the significance that evades him. The nurse understandably misreads the signs.
“Just relax, Alex, and let your mouth do what it’s trained to do.”
All of a sudden, he knows with dreadful clarity. Whatever it was that had put him here in hospital, it had involved violence and humiliation. Through his mind flash tiny dramas; people shouting, smashing things, a woman getting hurt. But the moments are too short-lived to indentify the players, or to pinpoint his own place in the scene. By the time the nurse has finished and left the room, the fleeting insight has dissolved into nothing but a churning in his gut.
Daylight has returned to the high window by the time sleep finally reclaims him. The dream that follows only knots him up further, forging a cynical fiction around his paralysis and those unplaced scenes of brutality. In it, a figure, never seen or named, holds him captive in a filthy hovel, the unknown woman held also. Her terrified sobs reach him from the next room. Though his windows are locked his door stands ajar. The certainty of retribution is enough to keep him imprisoned
Freedom is finally granted by the summary demand to ‘Wake up!’ As Alex comes round, his liberator takes shape as the broad, surly nurse from the day before. The morning’s oral feed has arrived – not breakfast: matron has no time for such kindly euphemisms. She has him upright and jaw opened in a single sweep of the arm. But Alex now has the measure of things. He’s able to get through it without choking fits or helpless convulsions. This particular ordeal is normalising.
More than can be said of the ordeal she puts him through two hours later. Armed with the trolley-load of ferocious items she wheels in ahead of her, suddenly this psycho-nurse commands more than just ridicule. He can see plastic sheets, towels, tissues, scissors, latex gloves and something resembling a baby’s feeding bottle, only with a longer spout, the sort a farmer might use to rear an orphaned lamb. But a spout that Alex feels sure is going nowhere near his mouth.
The nurse yanks him forward and tosses aside two of the pillows, pulls back the blankets and slides him down the bed to lay him flat. She rolls him onto one side and draws up his knees. Before he quite knows it, she has his pyjama trousers around his thighs and jacket hoisted to the waist. Only then does the penny fully drop. This is not to be a bed-bath – degrading enough though that would be – but something far, far worse. The ultimate violation. After a rustle of paper at his back and some sorting of her supplies, he feels it going in: a lubricated, gloved finger. The noise and the smell tell him the rest. From time to time she moves away and returns, rustles more paper and begins again. The invasion circles his insides – spaces he never even knew about, almost touching his spine one moment, pressing against his bladder the next, each time pausing at some obstruction, hooking around it and withdrawing fresh booty. The fact that he detects something at last down there is little compensation. Just as it seems the horror can get no worse, his bowels begin to fill with a warm liquid. He fears it might be blood – maybe she’s ruptured some vital organ within him – but her baby’s feeding bottle dispels the idea curtly with its final flatulent squeeze.
“No need to be alarmed, Mr George,” he hears her say through the sound. Her voice, the first time he’s hearing it, is curt and businesslike, but not hostile. “We’ve been doing this every other day for two weeks. We call it a reflex bowel. Once your mobility returns you should be able to handle this yourself.”
A Severn bore is already discharging through his intestines towards the estuary of her waiting sheets. A foul, sour stench and then she’s wrapping up, wiping and washing his backside, drying him off and returning him to his back. But the torture he’s just been through has moved more than his guts. It has totally shifted his thinking; a red-hot resolve now pushing aside the earlier helplessness and panic. He is going to survive this living hell. He may have just surrendered his body to the will of these sadists, but he’s damned if he’ll surrender his dignity. No matter how degrading they make it, no matter where they poke and pry, there’ll be one place they can never touch, an inner fortress into which they will never break. A fortress built here, inside his head.