Noisy at the Wrong Times (15 page)

Thursday and the doctor’s surgery took an age to arrive, and when I walked in and showed him my deformed and heavily bruised arm, he ordered I be taken to hospital immediately. Our matron at Halls House was responsible for taking me by bus to Ipswich, and she wasn’t pleased about it, marching as quickly as she could, chiding me for falling behind. She never realised that the more she displayed her annoyance, the more I sought to add to her irritation. I dragged my feet, winced at every step and generally played silly buggers. I was very put out by what seemed a total lack of sympathy, and if I could prevent her finding time to pop into her favourite shop, I would.

Matrons at Woolverstone were as varied as were the masters. Their role in the house was to arrange the laundry, take care of personal needs, injuries and minor illnesses and generally ‘mother’ the younger boys when they needed it. Our matron was not unpleasant but she was a Scot, a pragmatic, Presbyterian type of Scot at that, which meant there was little natural sympathy about her. If you know the sort of formal Scottish woman I am talking about, you will understand. She was prim, proper, neatly turned out and solved everything with a matter-of-factness that meant, for example, that any injury or ailment could be solved by soaking it in hot, then cold water. She was a mixture of Miss Jean Brodie and Mr Mackay from Porridge, just not as benevolent as either. I never thought she
liked boys much, and although she was generally kind, warmth was never the first thing to emanate from her. The last-minute demand on her personal time went down like cold sick, but I was acutely aware of her discomfort and resolved to make the day as difficult as possible, though the extent of the unease I would cause her came as something as a surprise to me too.

At the hospital, a pipe-smoking doctor nearly had his block knocked off when he insisted on twisting my arm during his examination. Why do doctors do that to injured limbs? He was gently holding my arm and feeling the limb softly with his fingertips. I was twitching and jerking with every press and palpation, but he suddenly took hold of my hand and turned it quickly. The world came to a stop, the light became blinding and the room turned as four hundred knives were thrust through my bone. I took a swipe at him with my good hand as the pain seared through me in a sudden, sickening shock. Indeed, he was lucky that the shock didn’t make me sick all over him. I was unable to scream or utter a single sound.

“Oh,” he said, “that would appear to be a bit painful young man”. He hadn’t yet bothered to look up at me to see the bulging eyes and distress etched on my face. You had to get up early to catch this fellow out, I could tell. As the wave of pain hit the summit and then subsided, I was able to muster the breath to give my opinion of his diagnosis.

“Of course it’s fucking painful! Why the fucking hell did you fucking twist it, you fucking bastard!?”

To be fair to him, he hardly flinched at the tirade, but Matron was almost choking, and she staggered backwards a little, buffeted by the force of my fulmination, as if an unseen sniper had shot her.

“Michael VOLPE!” Matron intervened, “you will NOT speak to the doctor with such FOUL language!”

“I don’t fucking CARE,” I screeched, the word ‘care’
coming out so high-pitched that it was almost inaudible to humans. “He just twisted my arm, and it fucking hurts like fucking fuck, for fuck’s
sake
!”

While Matron nearly passed out, the doctor sat quietly, sucking on his pipe. With a warm smile and a nonchalance he could only have honed from twisting lots of broken arms and seeing the reaction, he said, “Let’s get an x-ray and see what’s going on. I don’t think we’ll worry about the bad language too much.” As a nurse gently coaxed me through to the X-ray suite, I was grateful that the doctor had taken the onslaught so well, but the method of his diagnosis had returned to me the violent hurt and trauma of the moment when the injury had at first occurred. Matron’s indignation was the least of my concerns.

The episode of the broken arm was all a bit traumatic when I think about it. The three days of agony had left a deep mark on me, and I felt terribly homesick during those awful seventy-two hours, but for some reason I never once used the payphone in the hall of the neighbouring house to phone Mum. I can only deduce that I did not want to worry her. Actually, as I write, I am not sure that anyone actually informed her of my injury. It is possible I just turned up at home with my arm in the plaster, although I doubt it somehow. It created a sense of vulnerability, a feeling that my tough skin had fallen away.

Did I feel sorry for myself? I honestly don’t think I did. I was in too much genuine pain and felt too dreadful for that, but I cried quietly into my pillow every single night as the pain intensified with darkness and the loneliness I felt in my bunk. I thought about my friend in the plaster of Paris trousers and how he suffered pain every night, and I tried to draw some strength of character from his memory but, it never worked. Only Rob would drop from his bunk to see how I was. Empathy is a quality Rob has always possessed, and he had it even at eleven. Some years ago, he and I went skiing in Italy,
where one morning I slipped on ice and crashed to the ground, wailing as I tore several ligaments in my ankle, but Rob’s discomfort and trauma was greater than my own. I don’t think he felt quite the same way in 1977, but he was sensitive enough to appreciate what I might have been feeling and he would look genuinely troubled when he saw my pain. But in my memory, at least, he was the
only
one.

Maybe it was no more than I deserved.

It occurs to me that maybe the tough guy persona I had been cultivating since I had arrived was now coming back to haunt me; either my other pals were too uncomfortable to show sympathy or they quietly relished my suffering, but I’ll never know. I haven’t yet decided whether Woolverstone’s hard-nosed approach to injury and self-preservation was a good or bad thing. No doubt, its effect differed from character to character, yet, as odd as it sounds, to cry in public, even at so tender an age, was not advisable at Woolverstone. I mean, I might have shed a tear when screaming obscenities at the maths master who booted me from my chair, and I certainly sprung a leak when the doctor performed origami on my forearm, but I never just whimpered or wept at the pure undiluted pain of it all. For the three days before seeing the doctor, I wandered around with a fixed expression of misery and a substantial element of grumpiness too. I don’t think I invited sympathy, and I’m not sure I wanted it anyway, but I never bawled.

It turned out that I had a serious fracture and was put in plaster up to my shoulder, which drew the curtain on my rugby for the year. But it did not put a stop to my British Bulldog career, which continued with renewed vigour now that I had a weapon. The vulnerability I had felt needed exorcising, so I crowned many people foolish enough to try and halt my passage across the lawn and shattered the plaster
twice. When I broke the cast, Matron had to take me to Ipswich. On neither occasion did she make it to her favourite shop. That says something about me, but I think it says more about her.

TOP OF THE SLOPE

L
ife back at home for Mum was marginally improved by not having to worry too greatly about Serge or me. Matteo was his usual self, though, his banditry wasn’t getting any better and one drama or another frequently blemished holidays. He was sixteen by then, was still into girls but had begun to dabble in harder drugs. A policeman kicking the door down at dawn was becoming a frequent event, as were visits by Mum, with Serge and me during school holidays, to various borstals and detention centres. Lou was a photographer’s assistant to Rodney Wright-Watson, a famous art photographer who catalogued the great collections in museums and large private homes, including those of Her Majesty. The job also meant Lou got to use the big saloon that Rodney owned and would occasionally drive Mum up to Woolvo to visit. I never told anybody that he did not own the car.

When I ponder those days, when my brothers were all teenagers, it strikes me how different we all were and still are. Lou was the quietest and most shy, although he wasn’t an angel, being a persistent truant, but he generally kept himself to himself, never wanted to be the centre of attention and could not have been more the opposite of my demonstrative, attention-seeking incarnation. He is probably also the brightest of all of us. Serge was more like me: he too was a show-off, a performer, and was quickly developing a Woolverstone ‘face’ and a fiery temper, more fiery, even, than mine, but he had a better attitude to academia than I did.

Matt had his own problems but was a bit of a cad, a real London boy. I think I would probably have turned out most like him had Woolverstone not intervened. Matt was effusively attached to Mum, though his ‘issues’ were to be a lifelong burden for her, yet she never gave up on him. She once recounted to me that when Matt was born, she and my father had been desperate for a girl that they could name after my nonna (Lou is really Luigi, named after my grandfather). Matt appeared and there was, she said, a sense of disappointment. She carried the guilt of that reaction and blamed herself for how he was appearing to turn out. She certainly paid her dues in that respect; I remember the telephone ringing late one night and hearing Mum erupt into hysteria. Matt was in prison at the time, and the caller, claiming to be an officer of that establishment, was regrettably having to inform her that Matt had died in his cell that evening. I took the phone and the person hung up, but a few calls to the prison established that Matt was fine, and the call had been a hoax. I have no doubt that such episodes (and there were many) ate away at Mum’s spirit relentlessly. In reality, at the age of 52, in May 2013, Matteo would actually die of a sudden cerebral event, but it is hard to discount his life of excess as a factor. He was complex, troubled but enormously good-hearted until the end, and his death was a real blow. When he died, I wrote about the events of a week that still haunt me, and I reproduce it here because I can’t go through writing about it afresh.

* * *

It was a late Saturday afternoon when the hospital called me. My brother Matteo, the voice said, was in intensive care after a bleed on his brain, and his wife, Nicky, had asked them to contact me. “He has had a very significant haemorrhage, Mr Volpe. It’s very grave and we can only offer
palliative care,” she said, with a professional sweetness I still find remarkable. She had done this before.

Having rushed to Charing Cross hospital, just two hundred yards from my house, I felt in familiar surroundings, because Matteo had been in their intensive care unit twice within the past four years; an aneurism and, later, septicaemia. But whilst he had reason to thank his lucky stars for surviving both, this time it felt different. I met with a stern but gentle consultant who showed me the CT scan they had done of Matt’s head. Even I could tell that the bloom of brightness that permeated most of the left half of his brain equated to a colossal event that, if he survived, would render him seriously disabled at best. “Have you ever seen anybody live through something this big?” I asked. After a long, thoughtful silence, she replied, “Yes”, but she was offering no solace, just stating a fact, and her pause was designed to test my intuition. My intuition passed, telling me everything I needed to know.

If A&E is the “poor bloody infantry”, then ICU is where the SAS reside. In a dazzlingly equipped ward of just four patients, Matteo, in a coma, was tended constantly by a nurse in scrubs, testing, examining, watching and entering figures onto a metre-wide chart of bewildering complexity. Matteo was taking his own breaths, but a ventilator was helping him. A good sign? Automated syringes pumped constant streams of powerful sedatives into him to keep him asleep; their withdrawal would be the first big test for him. I was a constant source of questions, wanting to understand every drug, every machine, every bright, flashing and multicoloured reading on the screens. I would look at the charts, trying to work out the meaning of the vast matrix of measurements, vital signs, blood and chemical analysis. And not once did a professional in that ward prevaricate, nor did they lose patience or turn their eyes heavenwards. In the past, I have always found doctors and nurses to be reluctant to engage in anything more than rudimentary, patronising chitchat. This time they indulged, offered more than was asked for, and I knew, deep down, that they were sorry for us, pitying us, perhaps knew that this was all a short road to the inevitable.

Matteo had gotten through the first 24 hours. He was taken off the sedative for the first time on Monday, but a while later it was reintroduced as he showed no sign of awakening and his blood pressure began to fluctuate dangerously. He had reacted to a pinch: a natural reflex, but still a small sign of hope. My conversations with the doctors took on a slowly increasing clinical quality because I wanted to understand and I had to report developments to my brothers in Scotland and the USA. I needed information and wanted to know outcomes. I was in and out of the ward several times daily and I got to know the nurses and doctors. By Tuesday they tried to withdraw sedation again; this time he lasted an hour before destabilising. Still the doctors indulged me, still they answered my questions. By now I was discussing the options with my brothers by email or Skype. Along with Nicky, we had to make decisions on resuscitation, on what criteria we would base a decision to withdraw Matt’s life support; a sense of conscious thought being present, even if seriously disabled? Nicky said cremation had always been Matt’s choice, and I found myself thinking about music for his funeral. I called a soprano friend to ask if she would perform.

At midnight on Wednesday night a doctor I had come to know well telephoned me. Since Saturday I had been waiting for a call to say that Matteo had given up his fight, but this wasn’t quite as dramatic – yet it was the first, painful step. Matt had “blown a pupil” and his blood pressure had crashed. This was the first sign that the bleed was affecting his brain stem, from which there was no return. I sent emails to my brothers. One wrote back, “Go and sit with him, talk to him, tell him we love him, that it is going to be OK, that we are all with him and not to be scared.”