Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 35
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
— Look. I know what you’re thinking, but Mum –
— Was giving you some of her diamorphine? I’m well aware of that, Natasha, but as a registered nurse I’d be risking my career as well as breaking the law. Now, if you can forget your own sickness for a moment and remember your mother, perhaps it would be a good idea if you called Mrs Elvers? And put some clothes on!
This last is mine; sensible Deirdre wouldn’t say such a thing – even to the junky daughter of a moribund patient. She must also sense that Natty is well capable of striking out. Like me, she has a hair-trigger temper; an element within her which incandesces. Not that you’d know it to look at her now, gathering herself up, limping off to the spare bedroom, her wasted buttocks looking, from the rear, like the kneecaps of a starving child. And that sweat.
Mrs Elvers – now she’s doing the mothering I think it behoves me to address her formally – arrives in good time. Why wouldn’t she? She’ll’ve been dozing lightly in their big, white bed. Their bed so big she need hardly sleep with Mr Elvers, merely in his general vicinity. There’s a lot of padding in the Elverses’ world. They sleep swaddled in linen and duck down, while propped against goose down. Charlotte’s skeleton is sheathed within her own foam rubberiness; and when she arises – moving with the spirited jiggle of the plump-yet-fit – it’s to encase it in more softness, before carting it downstairs and buckling it into the foam rubberiness of the Mercedes.
It takes Charlotte five minutes from Regent’s Park to Kentish Town. She brings the dawn with, and comes in through the double doors to my bedroom with a grey corona behind her. Funny how the light is frightening to me – the dark was better. Her rumpled sister meets her by my bed and they embrace, anxiety cancelling out enmity.
— Oh, Charlie, it’s terrible.
Natty gasps in her older sister’s hair, then they awkwardly decouple. Charlie leans down to look at me, and I have the bizarre sensation that I’m an aquarium; that my convex elder is peering in through my toughened glass eyes, to admire my lazy eels of thought.
— Her eyes are open, but she doesn’t seem conscious. Mum? Mu-um?
I’m in here, dear, dressed in a fleshy winding sheet – but still alive. I’m in here, dear, still conscious but suffering no fear. I have no volition any more, you see, there’s nothing I want, nothing I desire. The world is cold, grey Ryvita – and I’m, as ever, on a diet.
Deirdre comes through and pronounces with equestrian authority:
— The ambulance has arrived, Mrs Elvers.
Then all hell breaks loose. Two big men and one man-sized woman are in the room. They’re all wearing green nylon coveralls and stomping on the carpets so hard I can see plumes of dust explode from beneath rubber soles. They talk in very loud, workaday voices.
— In here, is she love?
— This is Ms Bloom, yes.
— Double doors no problem –
He looks at me as he says this. Looks at me where I lie twitching and spluttering. Looks at me with no more empathy than he would regard an awkward piece of furniture.
— but the vestibule is tricky, both doors open into it. We can’t get the stretcher through there. Have to be the chair. Ron! Ron! Get the chair out of the van, woodjew?
No attempt at volume control at all. He might be in a warehouse. My daughters are frozen in mid-flinch. They clearly expect their dying mother to be handled like a piece of gold leaf, blown upon and gently applied to the hospital. The other two manual workers are shifting the furniture about, shoving the sofabed, the Danish modern armchair and the recliner into a cramped ménage. Deirdre is off to one side, feeding her pasta knitting into her working-woman’s holdall. Both our shifts are over. If my body has a mind of its own, then whose mind is this one? For I’m convulsing again and the blue rhapsody of dissolution streams from my mouth. ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa …’
They all turn to goggle at the lowing, thrashing bovine in their midst. Then they all redouble their efforts: must remove this farmyard detritus from this domestic context. Get it in the van. Drive it to the abattoir. But Natty is transfixed by her own particular agony. Christ she looks ill in this cold dawn light. I can see the gross pores pitting the edge of her fine jaw. I can apprehend the agony of her jarred pelvis. I feel no compassion.
The chair is in the front room. It’s highly utilitarian – a kitchen stacking chair with extra foam-rubber padding and many straps. The two ages of woman: in the morning you toss your food about in a high chair; in the evening you’re trussed up and carted off in a low chair. Ron and his mate bring the thing in. They smell of diesel exhaust, bacon sandwiches, sugared tea, smokes. They clomp and stomp, their hands are square. The woman – who’s a bumpier version of her colleagues – has finished clearing the path to the door; so, without any ado, they yank off the duvet, yank me upright, get a wispy shawl around me, lift me off the bed, slam me in the chair, strap me in, lift me fore and aft, lug me out.
In quick succession, as we go, I see the following: the Yaws family silver in its box – atop a mouldering Yaws family Bible – alongside a dust brush for LPs – alongside some carpet – alongside some skirting board – underneath a wall – on which hangs a dark oily daub I bought in a flea market – up above a plug socket – over which dangles a crystal, which flashes facets of this space where I have lived into my dulling eyes. This is how you leave your home to die – with a bang and a ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa …’
In the ambulance things are getting uglier. There’s an opaque, green-tinted gloom-roof in this vehicle which would turn blood to sap. The green light makes everyone appear deathly. How comforting. Charlie looks so like Yaws, it might actually be Yaws – or his corpse, dug up and propped in this vehicle – lurching through London. Her and her sister’s faces are paralysed with nauseous shock. They can’t put their eyes on me. I must be quite a sight. I can read the disgust, though, when they glance at me, then peer to see if it’s really true: that the lights are all on, and the Old Dear is finally absent.
But I’m not. I’m hiding under the bed in the spare room of my mind, waiting for the men in the death’s-head uniforms. So foolish to have bothered to avoid the Holocaust, when it was waiting for me all the time –
— Can’t he drive a little more gently?
— We’ve got to get there, haven’t we?
— Why – are you gonna save her life?
Good. Nice sarcasm, Natty. Nice crappiness. Puts these hirelings in their place – ‘Awoo’wooo’wooo’wooooo-a’wooo’ – until they put on their siren.
— Is this strictly necessary?
Asks Charlie, giving her version of the family contempt. But the Ronette, who’s right alongside where I’m pinioned in my low chair, feels no need to reply. She’s fortified by her mission of senselessness and her professional discourtesy. Although fundamentally unchristian, she ecstatically sways as the ambulance takes the chicane over the humpback bridge at the top of St Pancras Way and barrels down towards Somers Town. The girls fatalistically lurch, like davening frummehs accompanying the remains of some great sage of the kabbala. Their faces suggest to me that they really believe things cannot get worse. And this would touch me deeply – were I not already beyond reach.
We arrive at the loading bay on Grafton Way primed for more industrial medicine. This new wing of University College Hospital – completed on the cusp of the bulbous decade – has a defiantly factory air about it. Whumph! go the front tyres on to the ramp. Crash! go the doors. Smash! goes the chair as they dump me down to the ground. Then dreedle-squeak-dreedle-squeak-dreedle-squeak – they wheel me into the low-ceilinged, yet cavernous, Casualty waiting area. It can’t be later than eight a.m. and the atmosphere reeks with last night’s violence. The air rings with a silent tintinnabulation of many heads clapping. It stinks of smoked cigarettes, their rotten corpses, their dead essences. Who cares about the fucking humans dying of cancer – what about the poor cigarettes being wilfully exterminated by humans? Cruelly sucked up, then ruthlessly stubbed out.
Whumph! Banged into a wall like a bowling ball coming to rest – but there’s none. Only the two Ronnies lifting my thrashing, groaning carcass on to a trolley, then making off again. Hairy jerks. I’m conscious of the susurrations of a conversation which is being rushed alongside me:
— This is very sudden.
— Have you got a bed for her?
— We’ll see, we’ll see … I’ve spoken to Admissions already.
— But have you got a bed for her?
— We’ll find one.
— Where? Here?
No, not here, please. Not. It’s a long, lowering, warped spine of a tunnel, which plunges beneath Grafton Way, then runs, north-south, parallel to Gower Street, connecting all the various organs of the hospital. It’s simultaneously chilly and food-odorous down here. Quite an achievement. The tunnel is green-tiled, stone-floored, strangely reminiscent of the foot tunnel beneath the Thames at Greenwich. Must be the same vintage. And like the Greenwich foot tunnel, this one feels pressurised, weighed down by the many millions of tons of water overhead. No, not water, the effluvia of disease itself. A rambunctious river of pus and gleet and ichor; a cascade of mucus and bile and gall. An impressively engineered Victorian snotqueduct. The medics here are only lock-keepers; they can check this mighty Orinoco momentarily – but never dam it.
Dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock. The trolley wheels leap and skitter over the joins in the floor. Sensible daughter is keeping pace well in her fashionable sports foot-wear; with each stride she glances at my face, as if hoping to find new life. Sick, junky daughter is doing less well. She shuffles and snuffles in our wake, all wiped-upon cuffs and bleary features. To be fair to darling Natasha it’s been quite a morning for her – she’s had to face it straight, for one thing. Now she’s sick with heroin withdrawal, and although I’ve never experienced it myself I know with certainty that it’s a lonely, silent hell of vulnerability. Poor Natty – it’s all about boo-hoo you, n’est-ce pas?
We’ve stopped half-way along the tunnel at its lowest point. The trolley splashes into a brackish puddle of tears. There’s a consultation between the Ronnies, then Dr Steel emerges from a small, glassed-in office at the side of the tunnel. He’s so well pressed – it looks to me as if he’s climbed out of a trouser press where he’s spent the short night. His face is ironed into professional impassivity.
— Hello, Mrs Elvers.
— Dr Steel.
— Natasha.
— ’Lo.
He’s got the titles correct here. He’s right to address Charlotte sensibly and Natasha indifferently. If any doctor addresses Natty with a modicum of interest, she’ll hit on them for an RX. I’m looking at the globs of Blu-Tack that have been used to gum rosters and schedules to the windows of the office. When the girls were kids they played with Silly Putty – is it that recreational stuff that has evolved into this working material? I’ve stopped groaning and thrashing. The warm breezes smelling of cabbage and boiled fish play upon my slack face. On some seats at the far side of the tunnel a small Asian family – tiny bejewelled lady, tiny suited man, tinier boy in well-ironed shorts – sit in a respectable line, as if decorum were part of their cure. The little boy has a toy metal car, a toy plastic cow and a toy plastic harmonica. As I watch he carefully balances these three objects atop his flattened thighs. He tries car on top of cow on top of harmonica, then harmonica on top of cow on top of car, as if he were investigating the possibility of new Hindu cosmologies.
— Hmm.
Steel is reading notes handed to him by Charlotte. Must be Deirdre’s report of the night’s jam session.
— I’m afraid this is it.
— It?
— The cancer appears to have metastasised into the meningeal fluid.
— Meningeal?
— Her brain – your mother’s brain. The fluid is in a column inside the spine; once cancer is present in this fluid, it will rapidly move throughout the brain.
— It’s – it’s like she isn’t there any more. Like she isn’t sentient.
— Well, who knows … but our priority is to keep your mother as comfortable as possible.
— Until she dies.
— Yes, until she dies.
I like this finality, this spade-calling. I like it well. Of course, like so many others, I had hopes of attaining the gift of perpetual old age; still, finality I like as well. But Natty doesn’t – she’d like some histrionics. She feels everyone present would benefit from an improvisation of her love.
— You’re fucking giving up!
— Natty!
— Shut up, Charlie. You – you’re fucking giving up.
— What’re you talking about?
— You aren’t even trying to help my mother – to cure my mother. You’ve given up. I thought you lot signed some fucking oath, that meant you had to try. What about a fucking transplant? They do them now – liver transplants. I read about it in the paper, why don’t you do one – or aren’t you a good enough doctor? Good enough with your fucking hands.
Disregarding the fact that Steel, of course, is not a surgeon, I still think this last shot of Natty’s is a good one. I mean to say, there’s the competence of the doctor and the sexual amour propre of the man, both nicely insinuated. If I were Steel I’d be chastened – but then I’m not, and he isn’t.
— Listen, Natasha, your mother isn’t the only person who’s dying. Not in the world, not in this hospital – not even in this corridor. Yes, they can do liver transplants. They do them in California. If you can lay your hands on the thirty thousand pounds necessary to pay, and can organise air-ambulance transportation for your mother from here to Los Angeles, then you might – just might – have a chance of saving her life. But not her brain.
— Jesus! Wha’kinduvafuckin’monster’reyou? Oh – h’h’-hoh! Those ambulance fuckers smashed her all about, an’ now you’re gonna put her on a fucking drip in this fucking tunnel and leave her to die. National-fucking-death-service – that’s what you are.
— The ambulance crew did their level best to get your mother here as quickly and as smoothly as possible. We will do our best to care for her now she’s here. If, Natasha, you cannot control yourself, I will have to ask you to leave. If you then won’t leave, I’ll have you removed. Now, Mrs Elvers, we have a bed for your mother in the Royal Ear Hospital. It’s not available yet, but she shouldn’t have to wait here for too long.
Steely Steel. Now that’s telling Natty. I don’t imagine many men still capable of maintaining an erection would’ve dared to tick her off that severely, but then Natty’s junky allure is totally lost on him. He looks upon her – quite rightly – as another of the diseased. And she self-pityingly leaks, dabs black cuff to bruised eye, shuffles off to one side, into the shadows of a temporary oblivion.
Chapter Six
We’re rolling again. Dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwockdreedle-thwock-crash! That was a corner. The Rons have long gone, and in their place there’s an authentic porter; a neanderthal shvartzer, whose brows beetle all over the place as we squeak forward. Charlotte marches in step with him, looking down at me now as if I were a vast dog turd which has to be removed. The Royal Ear … mmm. How suitable, when it’s my hearing that looks like being the last thing to go. My ears … mmm. So curiously hand-moulded – like all the rest of the human clay. My ears – the last part of me that will feel the claw of cancer.
The trolley has assistance – or are they assistants? Anyway, along either side, like oars thrust through the gunwales of a galley, are many many legs. Fat legs, thin legs, hairy legs, smooth legs, waxen legs, dusky legs. They have nothing in common with one another save for being dead. Dead legs. Dead legs streaked with the miasma of gangrene, or swollen with purulence, or shattered by impact. They’re severed and stuck along the trolley’s sides, so they may bend and push, walking with me to eternity.
They are – I realise this joyfully – the leftover limbs of amputees. This hospital is famous for its amputations – the first ones ever conducted using ether. I read it in a helpful historical handbook before I was past caring. These must be the ghostly legs themselves; left to hop for ever along the strip-lit cloisters of this mundane monastery.
The Royal Ear Hospital – it has a ring to it. I can imagine one periwigged courtier saying to another, ‘I have the Royal Ear.’ And the other replying, ‘But I understand it’s in the hospital.’ Where do they keep the Royal Ear, I wonder? I think of it as very large – as big as a dinner tray – and very red, angrily red. They probably keep it in an incubator in the sub-basement of the hospital, where it’s tended by a succession of pasty-faced flunkeys, who rub saline solutions containing royal jelly into its swollen lobes. De temps en temps a minister will arrive from the Palace to impart matters of state to the Ear. He’ll sit on a folding chair and mutter into the fleshy toilet bowl. Naturally, the Ear will be unable to respond, so in due course the Minister will repair to the Royal Mouth Hospital, where he’ll learn the royal edict.
They’re removing the imperial dentures from my royal mouth. O well-formed acrylic, fare ye well! You never required additional grip or adhesive. I bathed you in Steradent so you never rotted or stank. I handled you with the utmost gentility so you never chipped or broke. You cleaved unto me and I cleaved unto you – we were as one, snugly snogging each other for a quarter of a century. You two plates and I – we were the true and loving trinity.
— Blood pressure forty over seventy.
— Have you brought a bag for her?
— Sister, could you find me a seven-gauge one of these?
— Would you take five cc and take it to Bloods?
— I’ll need saline, sucrose and diamorphine.
Ssshk-ssshk-ssshk-shk.
They’ve shucked the nylon curtains and screened me from the incurious eyes of my fellow mothers. We all know what’s in store for us, so why bother to act in this coy fashion? Still, what can you expect from a medical staff who have the bodies of humans and the heads of pussy cats? It’s true that their paws are surprisingly deft when it comes to putting in catheters, arranging feed lines and filling in charts. But I can’t help suspecting that their chimerical nature has contributed to their failure to treat me properly. To save at least one of my nine lives.
