Any Human Heart (54 page)

The old man next to me died this morning. He lay in his bed as if he had been nailed to it, immobile, an oxygen mask hissing on his face. Only his eyes were expressive and he would roll them alarmingly my way from time to time. Eventually I decided to interpret this as a signal. I swung out of bed and raised his mask.

‘You an Englishman,’ he whispered.

‘Sort of. Yes.’

His bulging eyes flicked everywhere like a chameleon’s.

‘Pull the plugs out, mate. I want to go.’

I looked around. For an insane moment I thought I might actually do it but I saw a nurse marching over to us. I put his mask back on. He died about two hours later.

Mr Singh [LMS’s upstairs neighbour] came to visit, bringing with him the accumulated weeks of post. He told me that the telephone and the electricity had been cut off in my flat. He had with him the form from the post office that would allow him to collect my unclaimed pension. Good old Subadar (I should explain; Mr Singh was briefly in the Indian Army — so I call him Subadar and he calls me Commander). He sat and chatted for a while and told me he had had a vasectomy while I had been in hospital and he had never seen anyone as happy as Mrs Singh. I sense my status in the ward has changed since his visit — now I am even more a man of mystery. I wrote cheques to cover my various outstanding bills and he took them away to post.

No-Fuss leaves today. The nurses gathered round and applauded him as he limped out of the ward. I can’t see this happening when my turn comes around. I have another terminal case beside me — he groans terribly in the night — and I’m beginning to suspect I’m being singled out.

The plaster came off my left leg today — revealing an etiolated, hairy, knobbly thing half the size of its partner. I noticed an odd kink in the shin where the broken bone has not knitted together properly and that had the surgeon frowning. The thigh and calf muscles are almost completely wasted so I am promised two hours of physiotherapy a day to build them up again. I sense an urgency to have done with me, now the physical sign of my incapacity has been removed. The feeling is mutual.

A door has been fitted to one of the lavatory stalls. A small but sweet victory.

I must note this down: something strange has happened to my eyesight. I woke this morning to see half the world — the top half — in my area of vision screened by what I can only describe as a swirling brown fog. It was as if some sort of noxious mist had descended, but as soon as I moved my head I realized the discoloration was a property of my eyesight and not the world beyond.

A doctor was summoned, a young Sinhalese woman. She asked me if I was allergic to certain foodstuffs and booked me in for an ECG test. I told her I had fractured my skull in my accident. What accident, she asked? I’ve been here so long I’m already ancient history. When I explained she thought I should see a neuro-surgeon: there was no more talk about allergies.

The mist has cleared. I was shaving this morning and suddenly realized the top half of the mirror was no longer brown. The surgeon, a Mr Guide, examined me, tested my reflexes and suggested an opthalmologist. Mr Guide was civil and seemed concerned. He was an elderly man with thick silvery hair. What do I mean ‘elderly’? He must be ten years younger than I am.

Paula gave me a St Christopher’s medal on a silver chain. Why, I asked her? It’s far too kind of you. To keep you safe on your journey through life, Mr Mountstuart. Then she said she wouldn’t be here when I leave. When I leave? Yes, she said, you’re leaving tomorrow morning and I’m on late shift. She kissed my cheek. Look after yourself, take care, watch out for post office vans. My throat thickened and my eyes stung. Dear sweet Paula. At least I’m walking out alive.

Turpentine Lane. So strange being back, looking at these possessions, these sticks of furniture with a stranger’s eyes. This is your home, Mountstuart, these are your chattels. Like boarding the
Marie Celeste.
There was a great drift, two feet deep, of handbills and free newspapers banked behind the door. Much as I hated the place, the hospital was secure, known; now I find the city clamorous and fear-inducing. And I experience my enforced solitude — which I used to relish — as disconcerting, after months of communal ward-life. I sat for half an hour this evening waiting for someone to bring me my supper. There was no food in the house so I limped down to the Cornwallis for a drink (the hospital have loaned me an aluminium walking stick). Here were the same old faces, the same steeped, beery atmosphere. The landlord nodded hello, as if I’d been in yesterday. I’m not one of his favourites — I spend too much time and not enough money in his establishment. I ordered a large Scotch and soda and two pork pies (Subadar had handed over a great wodge of backed-up pension money. I was momentarily flush) and the landlord acknowledged the fact with a rare insincere smile.

I looked at the punters, the drinkers — my species-sharers — and wished them all dead.

When I write my memoirs I will refer to this period of my life as the Dog-Food Years. My prosperity was illusory. I don’t quite know how it has come about but since the accident — if it were possible — I have become markedly poorer. Rates have gone up in Pimlico and everything seems more expensive — and it actually cost me money to have my power and telephone restored. I was so outraged I told them to disconnect the phone line again permanently — there’s a perfectly good phone box at the end of the road. I do need electricity, unfortunately.

I budget like a miser, endlessly comparing prices in the cheapest supermarkets, my life a checklist of tiny compromises and adjustments. If I washed my hair with soap, I reason, I wouldn’t need to buy shampoo; if I shaved with soap I could save on shaving cream; if I bought the cheapest soap in bulk I might have a little extra for food, and so on. I rarely stray beyond a 200-yard radius of my flat — all my requirements are within this small circle. I’ve given up smoking but refuse to abandon alcohol — and thus my life is pared down to an absolute minimum of needs.

The other day I was studying the contents of what I thought were various tins of stew, looking for one with as many vegetables in it as possible (and thus cut down my vegetable bill), when I was gastrically taken with the rubric on one tin: ‘plump chunklets of rabbit nestling in a rich dark gravy’. I turned the tin around to see that it was branded ‘Bowser’. A tin of dog-food on the wrong shelf. But then I thought that if I bought six tins of Bowser, chopped up a carrot and onion and heated the whole thing in a saucepan, I might have a hearty rabbit stew that would last me a week. I would eat it with my staple diet of rice (Mrs Singh buys my rice in 10-kilo sacks from some distant cash and carry), my nutritional and culinary requirements would be thoroughly satisfied and I would save considerably. So I did just that, and very tasty Bowser rabbit stew turned out to be, especially with the liberal addition of some tomato ketchup and a good jolt of Worcestershire sauce (these last components, I would say, are essential for all dog-foods, in my experience: there is something fundamentally
gamey
about dog-food, and the risk of a day-long lingering aftertaste — pepper is the best antidote). Now I browse the pet-food shelves, comparing prices and special offers, changing ingredients when one type of meat begins to pall: I tend to avoid beef — liver, chicken and rabbit are my favourites. My economies are substantial.

Yesterday was my seventy-first birthday and I decided to change my life. I realized I was turning into a little old man with his ingrained habits, his walking stick, his plastic zip-up purse with 68 pence of change inside, with his favourite seat in the pub and a roll-call of moans and complaints interspersed with moments of a pure, terrifying misanthropy. I was pottering my way to death.

On my way to the Cornwallis to have a celebratory half-pint I passed an old man — a wino, a derelict — who seemed stranded on the pavement’s edge, as if the road in front of him were some daunting gulf, an unnavigable ocean. I was about to cross over to help him when I realized he was calmly urinating into the gutter, muttering to himself, unconcerned by the shocked or amused glances of the passers-by (lads guffawing, mothers dragging children away). I stayed where I was, unmanned by a horrible vision of the future. That could be you, Mountstuart, I thought, that death-in-life is not as far away as you think. I had to do something.

I remembered I had seen a poster on the window of a derelict shop: ‘SPK (Socialist Patients’ Kollective). You can help. Make extra money. Join now!’ and, beneath the message, a telephone number to call. If I had a little more money, I reasoned, I might have a little more dignity.

I telephoned from a call-box. The conversation went like this:

MAN: Yeah?
ME: I’d like to join the SPK.
MAN: Do you know anything about us?
ME: I saw your poster, that’s all. But I do know about being a patient. I’ve spent months in hospitals. I hated it. I want to do something—
MAN: We have nothing to do with hospitals.
ME: Oh. (Pause) I don’t care. I just want to make some extra money. That’s what it says on your poster.
MAN: What’s your name? Your last name. I don’t want to know your Christian name.
ME: Mountstuart.
MAN: Is that double-barrelled?
ME: Absolutely not.
MAN: Are you old?
ME: Well, I’m not young.

There was another pause and then he gave me an address in Stockwell and told me to be there at 5.00 p.m.

The address was Napier Street. Another Napier in my life: the last one had done me some good — so it seemed an acceptable omen. The house was large and semi-detached, in bad repair with crumbling stucco. Sheets and newspapers hanging in the windows acted as curtains. At the last moment before ringing the bell I removed my tie. I was wearing a suit (as I always did — I only had suits to wear). The door was opened by a young woman with a sharp face and a weak chin, with round wire-rimmed spectacles and with her hair in loose, lumpy braids. ‘Yeah?’ she said suspiciously. ‘I’m Mountstuart — I was told to come here at 5.00.’ She almost closed the door. ‘John?’ she shouted into the house, ‘there’s an old bloke here says his name’s Mountstuart.’ ‘How old?’ a man’s voice answered. ‘Really pretty old,’ she said. ‘Send him in.’

She led me through to a large room on the ground floor. Decorators’ trestle tables with Anglepoise lamps on them lined two walls. A quilt was hung at the bow window to block the view to the street and three mattresses were set in a ring around the fireplace. Here and there were rucksacks and carrier bags, piles of magazines and newspapers, opened tins of food, plastic cola bottles. It reminded me somewhat of Lionel’s apartment in the Village. On the tables were layout pages for a newspaper and all the attendant paraphernalia — spray-glue, Letraset, Tippex bottles and a couple of electric, golfball typewriters. Apart from the girl who had welcomed me at the door there were three other people present. I was introduced to them. The sharp-faced girl was Brownwell; a pretty girl with dark hair and fringe that fell to her eyelashes was named Roth. There was a man with a poor beard (it looked as if tufts had been pulled out, leaving random bare patches) said his name was Halliday; and, finally, a tall, lean handsome fellow (who looked older than the others, in his thirties, I would say) with long hair to his shoulders parted in the middle said, ‘And I’m John.’

They found a chair and placed it in the middle of the room and asked me to sit down. And then began a form of gentle interrogation. John asked me why I had elected to join the SPK. Thinking this might be what he wanted to hear, I told him that I had been shocked, not to say traumatized, by my lengthy stay in St Botolph’s and that I had wanted to do something about patients’ rights. I had imagined that something calling itself the Socialist Patients’ Kollective might be exactly the sort of left-of-centre pressure group I was looking for. I wanted to help, I wanted to do anything I could — if they only knew the conditions in today’s hospitals, the geriatric wards, the almost totalitarian—

John held up his hand to stop me; I noticed they were all grinning, a little patronizingly. I told you, John said, this is not a movement designed to reform the National Health Service. I said I didn’t care, I simply wanted to do something — I wasn’t just going to sit around and complain any more, I wanted to do something active. And, I confessed, a little extra money would help. After a lifetime of hard work and modest success I now found myself scratching a living way below the poverty line. I owed the very roof over my head to the selflessness and generosity of an Icelander, otherwise I’d be homeless. Then I asked the next question: if you’re nothing to do with hospitals and patients’ rights what are you?

ROTH: We’re anti-fascist.
ME: So am I, as it happens.
JOHN: Do the names Debord and Vaneigam mean anything to you?
ME: No.
JOHN: Have you ever heard of the Situationists?
ME: No.
JOHN: Ulrike Meinhof? Nanterre 1968?
ME: I was in Nigeria in 1968, I’m afraid.
JOHN: Anything to do with Biafra?
ME: I went there, right at the end of the war. Trying to get someone out.
HALLIDAY: Good for you, mate.
BROWN WELL: Right on.

There were more questions: had I heard of the Red Army Faction? I said I had. Brownwell asked me what I thought of ‘High pigs, judges, centralism and property’. I said I didn’t know about all that, I just wanted to help in some way, just to feel I was not simply taking it all lying down. My life was drifting by and I didn’t want to be a pathetic, passive old man. After my St Botolph’s experiences I realized I felt aggrieved and angry at the way people were simply dominated by institutions and authority figures — I wanted to help people stand up for themselves more. I don’t know what it was but these four attentive young people made me more articulate and passionate — it was the first chance I’d had to air my feelings and I welcomed it.