Noisy at the Wrong Times (16 page)

And so I did. I whispered in his ear, in the darkened ward, accompanied by a symphony of bleeps and quiet alarms, and sat with him all through the night, sustained by tea, made for me by his nurse. At 7am, I returned home, and Matteo had made it through the night.

Later at midday of Thursday I returned to the ward to be told that his other pupil had blown and that there really was no hope. The
neurological teams had assessed him again too, and their view was the same. So we retired to a private room with two doctors and the head of nursing, a new face. Nicky and I fired questions, and the doctors deflected any that required a definitive timescale or which might offer hope. They handled it beautifully. The head of nursing was also the transplant coordinator for the hospital, and he asked if we would consider donating Matteo’s kidneys. A burst of something resembling joy filled me; yes, that would be something wonderful for Matteo. It would take twelve hours to identify potential recipients, to line up the processes and they explained how it worked, how Matt would be taken to theatre, how in the anaesthetic room next door his support would be withdrawn. After death, five minutes would be allowed to elapse before going into theatre to harvest the organs. The twelve-hour timescale meant 2am for this to happen but Nicky was adamant he would not die during the night because since his aneurism operation, he had become afraid of the dark. Graciously they all agreed this would be fine, and we bartered about whether it should be 8am or 9am. We went for 9am.

I returned to the ward and saw his nurse attaching a bottle of something brown and milky to one of the tubes leading to Matt’s nose. It was his feed, and I at first wondered what the point was, given the conversation I’d had a few moments before. And then I understood.

Matt needed to hold on now so those kidneys could be given to someone. Some family members visited that evening to say goodbye to him and I went home to try to sleep, my appointment with my brother’s death made. Sleep didn’t come easily, but when it arrived, it bludgeoned me, the previous night’s vigil having taken a toll. The meeting with Nicky at 8.30am for coffee was as normal and as benign as any ordinary day but played out with a surreal soundtrack, a numbness and clinical monotone. We went to Matt’s bedside, to be told the two potential recipients had been tested but that tissue typing had revealed there could not be any organ donation. They were sorry, and we were crushed. We resolved that it was “not to be” and proceeded to ask more questions about the mechanics of Matteo’s death.

We were asked if we would like to be with him at the moment of passing, but after some thought decided against it. Will he suffer? No. He was requiring ever-increasing levels of support and it would be swift. Would they give him some morphine just in case? “Yes,” said the doctor, “I promise, I will do it myself.” I stroked Matt’s head and said, “See you later, Matt.”

And then we went for a coffee. After twenty minutes I telephoned the ward and asked if Matteo had died. “Yes, he passed and we are giving last offices, you can come back.”

And so we returned to be with Matt for the last time, only now with no tubes, sallow of cheek, quiet and the machines weren’t purring and chattering, their screens dark. He went very quickly, they said, within five minutes, peacefully, with no struggle. He just stopped living. I can’t yet articulate what I felt on seeing him then, I simply don’t have the words, but it is in my mind’s eye constantly still.

With our NHS under threat, it takes an episode like this to realise what we have. Those doctors and nurses fought for Matt, even though they held little hope of a positive outcome. The treatment would have cost a great deal of money, and during one of my many conversations with doctors, a consultant had said she had only seen one patient with a bleed this extensive leave the ICU alive. With those odds, how many beancounters might balk at the efforts made to improve on that solitary statistic?

The medical team gave him a dignity it is hard to fathom and harder to describe, unless you have seen it given. In all truth, Matt left us on that first Saturday, but had he simply died then, I would not have been there to walk him to his end, to see him living and fighting and being given that chance. And we were, I suppose, more gently introduced to the notion of his passing, spared the suddenness and shock. Hospitals are there to save lives, but they can also help people like Matt to their end whilst performing heroically to try to prevent it. The great monument to our civilised values that the NHS represents is perhaps even more evident in their “failures” and their vainglorious attempts than in their successes.
And that is a thing of great distinction that cannot be qualified by cost nor visualised in profit terms.

We asked those mourning at his funeral that donations should be made to the Friends of Charing Cross. They had performed miracles twice before for Matt, but in the process of not doing it a third time, they – and society – had possibly made their greatest gift to him

* * *

My life at the school was settled. I always bemoaned the return from holiday, but I was drifting away from friends at home anyway, so it was nice to get back to what had become my first-choice gang. I liked the sport at school, too, and was forever keen to get back into it. Autumn term was the time for normal fifteen-a-side rugby, spring term was for sevens and summer was for cricket. Amid the sporting endeavour, it had not really dawned on me that Woolverstone was, above all else, a scholastic enterprise. I
knew
why I was there, but the hours of sport were when I felt most at home, and to academia I found it hard to apply myself for more than the bare minimum of time. I knew what I was good at and paid more attention to that, but I was insufferably difficult to reach. I did not find the work difficult; I just had a lot of chips on my shoulder and was busy establishing whatever reputation I believed would deliver the status I deserved. It never occurred to me that masters had seen it all before, and I sensed they were not unduly worried. In any case, I was unused to people showing any sort of concern for my welfare beyond that of my brothers and mother, so I probably liked the negative attention I would frequently provoke.

It is easy to see from here that I was an angry boy with an inflated sense of what was right and what was wrong. My being in charge was right; anyone telling me what to do was unequivocally, indisputably wrong. We were still settling into
the routines of daily life, working our way through the system, absorbing the constant expectation and trying, ever trying, to rise up to the required level, and occasionally failing to do so wasn’t held against us too fiercely at that stage. Egos are not supposed to amount to much in young boys but mine could have floated one of those cargo tankers on the Orwell.

The school day at Woolverstone was long, finishing at 5.30pm with the end of the final double period of one subject or another. Lunch would be at 12.30pm, and after that it was either a couple of hours free or, if a Tuesday or Thursday, two hours of rugby training, which meant no late lesson. It would all begin with an assembly that took the form of most school assemblies; masters on stage, announcements, hymns and occasional ‘thought for the day’-type pronouncements from Paddy. Assembly was always the place a feud of one kind or another might get resolved as all protagonists came together in one place, and it was common to see a good scrap in the hallway after assembly. It was also the birthday boy’s misery, because the swimming pool was next to the assembly hall and getting thrown into that was never a seasonal event. A celebrant broke ice on his way in once.

Hymn singing I always remember as being full-blooded and actually very accomplished. All the old favourites were there’ but in common with almost all schools, it seems,
Jerusalem
was the big stirring number.
Bread of Heaven
was a favourite too, the “Feed me ‘til I want no more” chorus being fully rendered in harmony and voice section. It was terribly showy. Sunday assemblies were more formal, and we had to wear blazers and ties for these. Guest speakers would appear, or musical guests, most notably
Cantabile
, a vocal group featuring an old Woolverstonian that had found some fame and success, who would give a short concert. Our speakers could be fantastically interesting, apparently, and sometimes they were announced
with the sort of fanfare that suggested we were in the presence of greatness, but I cannot remember a single one of them by name, or of what they spoke. On particular festivals such as Easter and Christmas, Sunday assembly was in St Michael’s Church, and I was frequently asked to do a reading. I’m not sure why at that stage they had decided I was a performer of some fashion, but it always seemed to be me. A few verses from the Bible were the normal way of things and I loved seeing my name printed in the Order of Service:

Reading

by Michael Volpe, Halls House

15:7 Benevolence

The power of print began there for me, the reading I would scarcely acknowledge, meaning and reason flying over my head. As I took my place at the dais to read the selected verses, I was only relishing my fame, smug and trussed up in blazer and tie.

I might not have been paying attention to the sentiments of the New Testament, but I was able to bring nuance and emphasis to the moments that required it. Or at least the moments I thought needed it. I understood emphasis. I was
always
insufferably, voluminously
emphatic
.

A day of lessons was long, to be sure, longer than we would ever have expected at an ordinary London school, which we knew finished at about 3pm, but academic activity was most attentively observed during prep. For prep, all boys in the
school were either closeted together in their house dining room or in their small dorms and rooms for the older boys. It was two hours every night for us first formers, and we would sit with twenty others from the second and third forms doing our homework. A sixth former would supervise the prep, and talking or any kind of communication was forbidden. Most sixth formers had their own work to do and would look up occasionally when some misdemeanour was committed, in which case, the miscreant was put into prefect’s detention. The head boy would read out the names at Friday assembly, and we would always hold our breath, hoping that the senior who had threatened us with PD had forgotten to put our name down. Usually, the bugger remembered. There was no email or mobile phones back then, so a prefect had to make a bit of an effort to lodge your name with the head boy.

Prep was among the greatest cultural shocks Woolverstone presented. At home, after school, I would normally have been straight out into the estate to muck about or get up to no good. It was my time, and I recall no homework being given to me at primary school. A long day in lessons followed by hours doing prep was something of an outrageous new development for most of us.

Some of the sixth formers who supervised prep saw it as a wonderful opportunity to torment us because they simply had nothing better to do. Ask to go to the toilet and you would be made to sit in front of the senior as he poured water from one jug to another. If you looked away, you would get a “head dot”, which was when the knuckles of the clenched fist would be brought down sharply onto your skull. For really serious fuckups, you would get a “bowler”. This was when you got a head dot, but only after the sixth former had run the length of the dining room and performed a bowling action as you stood, head bowed, waiting for the crack.

When prep was peaceful, I managed to get lots of work done, but I was choosy about what I paid most attention to, lavishing loving care on biology, for example, underlining headings in red and taking ages over technical drawings of cells and pictures of stamens. For this purpose, I had a full case with tools and coloured pencils. I loved exercise books – still do – fat and crisp and clean at the start of term and becoming more ruffled and grimy as the weeks progressed. My writing was quite neat, but my hand was heavy and would put a thousand tiny creases in the paper, making each page dimpled and crunchy. But there were boys whose elegant hand flowed across the page delicately and cleanly, and their books were filled with even, fluid text, punctuated by neat, forensically accurate and monotone diagrams. Not a superfluous underlining or piece of colour would be found anywhere, and the pages of their books never became crinkled or crusty. I envied their effortless precision and intelligence – I still do.

I treated English prep with a certain reverence, but maths and most other subjects got short shrift. We were studying interesting books in first-year English, most memorably for me,
The Catcher in the Rye,
a book I suspect many of us identified with closely. Holden Caulfield’s rage and angst was a challenging subject for eleven-year-olds, but I recall agreeing with lots of what he said, despite thinking him a bit of a whinger. Indeed, assigning the book to eleven-year-olds is an indicator of Woolverstone’s ambition for us, and I doubt the school thought any of us would go on to assassinate a pop star. I greatly enjoyed essays and reviews since I had a chance to vent spleen or offer an opinion that I had probably already presented loudly in class. Essays would begin well, my hand would be scrupulously tidy, my analysis thorough. By the second or third page, both calligraphy and scrutiny were going south.

Maintaining a patient approach to argument, contemplation,
vocabulary or writing style had always been difficult for me. Often it was because my thoughts would race ahead and I’d be trying to articulate them from their slipstream, as they disappeared off into the distance. Invariably and inevitably, I would struggle to make out their full form as they drifted away, but no matter, some new ones would be along in a minute and maybe I would keep up with
them
. It is why my work was always only two thirds finished. If I was lucky, what I managed to get down on paper would roughly approximate the point I had set out to make (as long as you could read the handwriting, of course). Usually, the relevant master would be able to mark me well enough to convince me it had not all been a total waste of time and if astute enough, he would decipher for himself the point I was trying to make. Brilliant teachers can do that, and I was fortunate to have many of those.