Doobie had a habit of rushing in, crying theatrically: ‘Who’s buzzing NOW?’ and striding crossly towards the patient with the flashing call button above their beds.
‘It’s Elsie,’ the buzzer-ringer would stammer, defensively. ‘She can’t press her buzzer.’
And we lay awake and listened to poor wee Elsie being administered to, because we had no choice. One night, when I was on a further course of antibiotics for a lung infection, I woke with an overwhelming need to vomit. I pressed my buzzer and heard for the first time the distinctive slap, slap of a footfall I would come to dread.
‘What is it?’ she said. Not kindly.
‘I’m sorry but I feel really sick,’ I gasped. I was panicking inside. This had never happened before. I didn’t even know if I could be sick.
She said nothing, but turned on her heel and disappeared. Soon she returned with a papier-mâché NHS sick bowl, the grey bowler hat of despair. Her body language was contemptuous. She thrust, almost threw, it at me, and walked away, leaving me to be sick alone. She didn’t say a word.
It was my first introduction to Nettles.
CHAPTER FOUR
I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought to be distilled into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
A catastrophe delivers you into an alien landscape, in which you must learn to survive. Paralysis takes you hostage. On the ward, interred long-term, you learn your territory, the space defined by the square of curtain rail suspended from the ceiling, delineating your tiny world of bed and bedside table. You lie and watch and familiarise, as must men behind bars, or animals in a zoo. Unbeknowst to you, you are already practising your next career as one of life’s observers, your useless fingers brushing the raised cot sides of the bed, rhythmically, plaintively, because you are not yet able to hold a book in your hands to amuse yourself. Maybe you will never be able to hold a book. You do not know yet.
As in a prisoner of war camp, your relationship with your guards becomes primary. To achieve this, you first try to grasp their names – hard in the beginning, because most ward staff do not wear name badges, nor do they introduce themselves. They are too busy, plus there is an assumption of automatic familiarity, as most of the patients are there for a long time. Then you must learn to distinguish their uniforms, and work out the caste system so that you can tell nurses from auxiliaries – the nursing assistants. And then the cleaners, in green, typically big powerful women blessed with an extraordinary capacity for hard work. The nurses are bogged down with form-filling and drug administering; the auxiliaries, the ones near enough on a minimum wage, do most of the physical work with patients. They are the ones who clean you up when your bowels burst, who bring you a bowl of cereal in the morning and your milky tea, who roll you and dress you and truss you into back brace and collar, then hoist you into your chair, ready for the day. In the beginning, before you get to know them well, you badge them only as noisy or quiet, kindly or less kind. You judge them intuitively: do they enter your bed space with the body language which says, ‘What can I do to make you as comfortable as possible?’; or do they approach with the clear intention of escaping as swiftly as they can? Soon you can read them by the way they walk, their faces, the tilt of their heads, the readiness of their smile.
Most of the auxiliaries were the biggest-hearted people on the planet; those with least tended to give the most, both in time and emotional warmth. The canteen staff were the same. Many were extroverts, performers, who saw it as their role to entertain us. In Glasgow, everyone’s got a few Billy Connolly genes: they delighted in telling funny stories, often in competition, as they gathered over our still bodies to wash us. I’d lived in Scotland for decades, but I struggled with their rapier-fast Glaswegian. It was like tuning in to snatches of soap opera on foreign TV.
‘And she goes, like, “You never!” And ah goes: “Ah did so. No way he was gonnae get away with that!”’
‘How no?’
‘Have she shown you her latest tattoo?’
‘Who’s she no’ shown it to?’
‘I wouldnae have one down there. I’m, like, “Nice! Not!”’
‘You know me, half daft!!’
‘Bodrum. Half board £49.99.’
‘Ma Jamie he’s went the same. Boggin. I’m, like, waaaaaaaah no-way!’
Defined as logs by a log-roll, we behaved accordingly, not that we had much choice; we lay and listened to the domestic dramas unfolding over our bodies, and as we gained in confidence might start to join in. I preferred that, because listening to them talk among themselves, as if I was unconscious, made me feel staggeringly isolated and lonely. With hindsight, I realise their chat, showboating, exaggerated stories, made a hard job more bearable for them. It was timeless gossip, the conversation of bedsides and parish pumps and public wash-houses for centuries, and I much preferred the colourful stuff to listening to them moan about their shifts and the weather.
They told me about the time one of the auxiliaries had answered the phone. It was someone famous asking to speak to a patient she knew.
‘Aye, fine. Who’s calling?’
‘It’s Sarah, Duchess of York … but you probably know me as Fergie.’
‘Fergie, how are you? It’s Lily here.’
Glasgow’s like that.
There was Marigold, an exuberant, friendly single mother with a loud voice and a huge heart, who often sang to us and hugged us generously when she saw we were miserable. Begonia worked nights – a cryptic former rock-chick, introverted but humorous. So many were divorced single women who had raised their families alone. Chrysanthemum worked nights too – you got paid more – and spent most of the day caring for her grandchildren so her single daughter could hold down a job. ‘Men? Useless Bs, the lot of them,’ she’d say. No one ever swore in front of patients. Elm was an interesting man who kept a Komodo fighting dragon as a pet. Amaryllis, the wonderful Amaryllis, for whom no request was too much trouble, lived in a council house near the unit and had ongoing problems with a helpless alcoholic who lived upstairs and kept flooding her flat. Clematis, a fearless blonde twenty-one-year-old with generous hips, loved to talk about how she put down men. She’d give Doobie a hard time. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she’d hiss as they rearranged my body, ‘you stink. Do something about it.’ Periwinkle, an indomitably good-hearted woman with her hair pinned in an elaborate beehive, was saving up for her and her husband’s fourth holiday of the year. Turkey, it was always Turkey. She was so sweet. On her days off she often went into the city centre for the young paralysed men in the ward, to buy the fashionable T-shirts they wanted. They adored her.
Crocus was an older woman, a gentle soul who astonished me by telling me she didn’t know how to use a tampon. Candytuft had the build of a marathon runner and was always in a hurry, as if anxious to get to her next cigarette break. Like many of the staff, she had tattoos running the inside of her arm and extending down the outside of her palm. At first,