Michael Morpurgo - Escape from Shangri-La

We hadn’t had supper and I was hungry. I begged some change off my mother and fed the vending machine. There wasn’t much to choose from. I had a meal of Coca Cola, chocolate biscuits and two packets of cheese and onion crisps. I was feeling a bit queasy by the time the doctor finally came to see us.

She was a lot younger than I thought doctors could ever be. She wore jeans and a T-shirt under her white coat, and twiddled her dangling stethoscope around her fingers as if it was a necklace. She smiled an encouraging smile at me, and I knew then that the news was going to be good news. Popsicle was not going to die after all. I wasn’t going to lose him. I felt like whooping with joy, but I couldn’t, not in a hospital.

‘How is he?’ my mother asked.

‘Stable. We think he’s had a stroke, a mild stroke. We’d like to keep him in for a while under observation. We’ll do some tests. All being well, he can go back home in a couple of weeks or so. He’ll need a bit of looking after. He lives with you, does he?’

‘Not really,’ said my father. ‘Not exactly.’

My mother looked at him meaningfully.

‘Well,’ my father went on, ‘perhaps he does. For the moment anyway.’

The doctor was looking from one to the other in some bewilderment. ‘I’m afraid he does seem to have lost some movement in his right side. But given time that should right itself. For a man of his age I’d say he has a very strong constitution. He’s very fit. But there is one other thing. He’s got a very nasty head wound – fractured his skull in two places. We won’t know the extent of the damage – if any – for a while yet. Another reason for keeping a good eye on him.’

‘Can we see him?’ I asked.

Her bleeper went off. ‘No peace for the wicked,’ she said. ‘The nurse will show you the way.’ I watched her walk off down the corridor and decided that if I didn’t end up as a concert violinist, or a round-the-world singlehanded yachtswoman, then I’d be a doctor like her – maybe.

Popsicle was lying in a bed surrounded by a fearsome array of monitors and drips. There was a tube in his nose and another in his arm. His hair was gold against the white of the pillows. There was a wide strip of plaster across his forehead, and a dark grey bruise round his eye. He wasn’t a pretty sight, but at least the dreadful pallor had gone. He was asleep and breathing deeply, regularly, his mouth wide open. He must have sensed we were there. His eyes opened. For some moments he looked from one to the other of us. He didn’t seem to know who we were.

‘Not angryla,’ he murmured, looking around him. He was more than bewildered, he was frightened, and agitated too. ‘Not angryla.’ He wasn’t making much sense.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Cessie. It’s all right. You had an accident. You’re in hospital. It’s all right.’ At that he seemed to calm down, and a sudden smile came over his face.

He knew us. He knew me. He beckoned me closer. I bent over him. I was so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. ‘See what happens if you eat too many chocolate digestives.’

‘It was the sloe gin,’ I said, and he managed a smile.

My mother was beside me and taking his hand. ‘You’ve had a bit of a turn,’ she said. She was speaking slowly, deliberately and loudly too, as if he were deaf. ‘The doctor says you’ll be right as rain. We’ll come and see you tomorrow, shall we?’ Popsicle lifted his hand and touched his forehead. ‘You clunked your head, when you fell. You’ll have a bit of a shiner too, a black eye. You’ll be all right, Popsicle, you’ll be fine.’

Popsicle was looking up at my father, trying to lift his head, trying to say something to him. ‘Popsicle. You remember, Arthur? It’s what you used to call me when you were little. D’you remember?’

‘Yes,’ said my father.

‘And you had big ears in those days too,’

‘Did I?’

‘And you still have,’ Popsicle chuckled just once, and then drifted off to sleep. My father stood there looking down at him. He reached down, took Popsicle’s hand and laid it tenderly on the sheet. His hands so wrinkled, so ancient.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said, and he turned on his heel and walked out of the ward without another word.

By the time we got home there wasn’t much of the night left, but I spent what there was quite unable to sleep. I kept going over and over in my mind everything that had happened that day. I knew as I lay there in bed that my ordinary life was over, that from now on everything was going to be extraordinary. Popsicle had come out of nowhere, out of the blue, to be my grandfather; and nothing and no one would or could ever be the same again.

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