Immortal Invincible (Part 3)

I have memories, as we all do, of incidents that remain pin sharp throughout life. This is the third part of a story about a car accident I had in 1976 when I was 19 years old. Part 4 to follow.

Doing Time

I am changed but don’t know where.

I come to on a long ward with thirty beds. The pain gone. Over my shoulder high windows with the blue sky right there. Even the dreariness of the traffic on the Fulham Road sounds beautiful. Left leg taped to the groin. Weights hanging off a pulley at the end of the bed. Face prickling with more than a hundred stitches. I daren’t look in the mirror. Memories of gap-toothed horror as an eleven year old, after a head in the face playing rugby.

Between the two rows of patients a gaggle of white coats. A grey-haired man with glasses leading the way. He stops at the end of my bed. The young doctors gather round Mr Kates as he introduces himself. He’s studying me carefully, judging character, looking for the right way in.

‘So, Robert, you’re nineteen years old, a sportsman. What do you do for a living?’

‘I’m having a gap year before I go up to Oxford in October,’ I say, enthusiastic as a schoolboy. ‘I’m hoping to fly to Australia after playing in the Middlesex Sevens this weekend.’

‘You’ve been told…you’ve dislocated your hip.’

‘And the surgeon’s put it back in place. I was thinking…’

‘That maybe it was a bit like a dislocated shoulder?’ he asks.

Silence.

‘It isn’t?’

‘Not quite,’ he says. ‘The impact of the crash has driven the femoral head out of the back of the acetabulum - the socket in your pelvis. A piece of that socket has broken off and the blood supply to the bone has been cut. If you walk on that leg too soon the blood supply will never recover and you’ll have arthritis, bone grinding on bone, within months.’

More silence. A judgement is about to be delivered.

‘We’re going to put you in traction to create a small gap between the femoral head and the acetabulum so that the blood supply and the socket can recover. You’re a sportsman with heavily muscled legs and this tape we’ve used isn’t strong enough. We have to operate: drill a hole through your shin, put a pin through it and hang the weights off that and hope that the blood supply returns and the acetabulum heals.’

‘How long?’ I asked, blinking.

‘Three months.’

Mum comes to see me, approaching my right hand side, tilting her head, she says: ‘You don’t look too bad, darling.’

I turn to face her and her blue eyes widen as she realises she’s been horribly had. The left hand side of my head is shaved, a cross-stitched gash runs from brow into the hairline, insect tracks seethe over my eyelids, nose, chin and cheek - black and crusted red with dried blood. A termites’ nest of a face stuck with a battered beak. She kisses me carefully as if I’m breakable.

Dad arrives, a tall, handsome man, erect and in command. He knows about hospital food and has been across the road to the Italian where they’ve given him a plate of steak, chips and salad, the food of men. It’s a cover to hide the fear of a loss I didn’t yet understand, and wouldn’t until he died four years later: that it could have happened to him all over again.

He was an Air Force officer and yet there was emotion in his face. Here’s a man who’d learned to fly in the Second World War and flew nightly bombing missions over Europe for two years. Ten years later, during the Cold War, he flew V bombers carrying armed nuclear warheads 24/7. And now, as he hands me the plate, his hand trembles, stuck as he is between tears and wrath. When he leaves he shakes me by the hand as he has done since I was six.

Dave’s in the bed opposite me, unshaven, heavy sideburns, tousled dark hair that’s rarely seen a brush. He inspects a lump on his upper arm, obsessively, as he knows it shouldn’t be there. A different geesey gaggle arrives and the nurses close the screens around them for…privacy.

There’s a moment’s silence.

‘We’re going to amputate your arm at the shoulder,’ says an authoritative voice.

‘What!’ says Dave, aghast.

‘The tumor’s large,’ says the consultant, coming straight back at him. ‘We’re very concerned the cancer will spread.’

‘NO!’ roars Dave, his fists beating the bed.

‘It’s the only thing we can do. The only chance we have of saving you.’

‘Please!?’ says Dave, appealing to anyone more reasonable. ‘You can’t…’

He bursts into tears and a wild-eyed junior doctor shoots out of the enclosure to find someone to restore poor Dave’s composure. The geese file out. The nurses dive in.

After an hour they remove the screens to reveal him looking incredulous at the arm that must go. The same one he waves with as they take him down to theatre and which he returns without. Now a bandaged stump he continues staring at it, perplexed, still feeling the invisible fingers that touched his mother’s face.

Finn’s Irish. He’s been up a ladder, had a stroke, fell and broke both legs. Now he lies at the lip of the tunnel of his bedclothes, humped over a cage, thin black hair scraped across his white scalp, head writhing, unable to contain the madness of his new circumstances. Every day the nurses ask him what he’d like for lunch. Liver and bacon? Chicken and leek pie? Slice of beef with Yorkshire pud? His fists clench the bars of his brain as he musters the only track left for communication.

‘Feck off yer fecking bastards! Gobshites the lot of yer!’

‘That’s as may be, Finn, but what would you like to eat?’

‘Shove it up yer fecking arse yer bunch of langers.’

‘Right, so we’ll put you down for the beans and bangers.’

On another hot afternoon, 1976 is the hottest summer on record, an ancient American arrives under huge fanfare of great family fuss having fallen down the stairs and broken his leg. They dump him and never show again. We assume they’d pushed him and, in the NHS, had found the cheapest nursing home available. His body lies emaciated under a full wave of grey hair. Eyes shut. Mouth sealed. He looks as if he’s going to be no trouble at all as the long hot afternoon slowly unwinds. Until, eyes still closed, the wizened lips gape and a stentorian voice that’s shivered many corporate timbers roars:

‘TURN ME, TURN ME, TURN ME, TURN ME, TURN ME.’

A London voice pipes up from down the ward:

‘For fuck’s sake turn him…’

The nurses gather, hoist him over, and he falls silent as a sleeping pup while we lie, our sheets stripped back, legs splayed in the heat, sipping our tea with relief.

After weeks of this we’re frazzled. He’s sitting in his chair one day, mouth slack, eyes closed, head bowed, the rest of us dozing in the crawling heat and he hollers up another of his barking chants. But this time the nurses have had enough. One grabs a biker’s helmet from a visitor, slips it over his head and smacks the visor down, rendering the Yank pianissimo so all we hear is:

‘Turn me, turn me, turn me, turn me, turn me.’

We laugh because at heart us patients are as cruel a schoolkids and the ward no more than a playground full of trussed up teasers hating to be bored.

Some say he hasn’t been for a fortnight. That’s fourteen days since Arjun last had a shit. We can believe it. His stomach’s swollen as an oak’s gall and he groans most of the night at the dried dung bung caking his colon. They’ve thrown everything at it, but no amount of coaxing, no laxative, no suppository, no enema, has worked. Then one fine day the news comes of the Defecation Diva whose reputation for being able to shift the biggest shits is right up there with the Beatles greatest hits.

We’re irrationally excited. The orderlies arrive, surround poor Arjun with screens and, grateful to be spared the obscene, we watch like hawks as the doors bang open and in she comes. The Diva, with her bag of tricks, disguised by a mask but no opera gloves, which we’d thought the minimum for such a task. A chorus of aproned nurses follow, all masked, gloved and rubber-booted. The orderlies return with a stack of buckets.

Shielded by screens we’re not party to the genius of her choreography. All we hear after some tense minutes is an orgasmic cry followed by a sudden rush of all hands on deck and a splattering flatulent clatter with shouts for more buckets, FAST!, as a catastrophic pong, fatter than all of Fulham, rises up in a toxic cloud to infiltrate every cranny of our brains where it lingers for an eternity.

The orderlies march past us with their the brimming buckets heading for the ward latrines, which immediately get blocked and they have to call a plumber to perform a more prosaic number than the poetry we have all but seen.