Melanie Reid - The World I Fell Out Of

‘If he was any good I’d be dead, wouldn’t I?’

As he lay on the ground, fully conscious, he remembers bantering with his fellow soldiers. He thought he was dying, but decided he might as well go with a smile on his face. His mates told him what soldiers always tell their dying comrades – that he’d be all right; that he’d be in the pub in no time. He was helicoptered to Camp Bastion, thence to Birmingham, and soon to the spinal injuries unit in Glasgow, to be nearer his family. The six-foot-four, fifteen-stone soldier morphed into a skinny, laconic, blue-eyed tetraplegic playboy, soon well enough to dance around the gym on the back wheels of his wheelchair like a trick cyclist, chatting up all the girls, amusing everyone with his antics. Either that, or he indulged in a soldier’s favourite game of mooching, fag in hand, at the door, trading profane insults with anyone brave enough to take him on.

During the Pope’s visit to Glasgow in 2010, Snafu appeared at one end of the ward, as if in a vision, a mitre fashioned from a pillowcase stuffed with cardboard upon his head, his body draped in a white blanket, a giant crucifix round his neck. He carried an aluminium brush handle as a staff and glided regally up the ward in his chair handing out fragments of sliced white bread to the occupant of every bed. In Glasgow, a city riven by religious divide, the comedy was especially edgy, of course, because he was a Protestant; a Rangers football team supporter.

‘Bless you my child,’ he said at every bedside.

And to the women and the female nurses, his eyes dancing sardonically: ‘Kiss my ring.’

Several years have passed, but I can still remember the sustained gale of laughter following him up the corridor that day. People laughed and then kept on laughing and then laughed some more. You simply don’t hear that in hospital. He provoked a similar outbreak of mirth in the gym when, bored and restless as he often was, he wheeled around asking all the women present how much they would charge to lap-dance for him.

The physios gathered their professional dignity and tried not to join in.

‘Get lost, Snafu.’

‘Go away! Aren’t you supposed to be on the triceps press?’

He was utterly persistent. ‘No, you have to tell me. How much?’

Eventually, casting their eyes around to make sure no NHS suits with clipboards were lurking, the physios played his game.

‘Four million,’ said one.

‘At least. Because my career would be finished if I was found out.’

‘Six million.’

‘I wouldn’t do it.’ A humourless junior physiotherapist on rotation in spinal.

His eyes lighted wickedly on me, purple-faced, toppled helplessly over my own knees. ‘Hey Mel, what would you charge?’

I was flattered to be asked. He tolerated me, just about, as a mate, although his banter was brutal – I was as old as his granny, plus he’d decided I was officer class. I’d been a horse rider, after all, and he’d found out my house had an orchard – so in the gym he loudly dubbed me a caviar-eating snob. In private, when he found me in tears, he was kindness itself. He was a year younger than my own son.

‘Half a million,’ I said. ‘Because my freak value doesn’t outweigh the fact I’m too old.’

‘Nah,’ he agreed.

Snafu got particularly bored at weekends, when there was no gym. One Sunday evening, the place packed with visitors, his terrible screams echoed down the ward: ‘Aaaaargh!! Nurse!!!! Come quick!!!! I can’t feel my legs!!!’ For amusement, he regularly soaked the auxiliaries when they helped him shower, or when the fire alarm went off, as it did often, he sped up the ward screaming, ‘Fire! Everyone out! This one’s for real.’ It was Snafu who yelled triumphantly across the gym, ‘Susaaaaan! Ah’ve pished masel’!’ when his catheter tube became disconnected from his leg bag; who invented wheelbarrow races for the paralysed; who decided to practise commando crawl across the gym, dragging his legs behind him, and of course wriggled straight out of his tracksuit bottoms, exposing himself to the world, and leaving the physiotherapists initially too helpless with laughter to cover him up; and it was Snafu who, despite his impaired hands, beat everyone in the target-shooting competition one Wednesday afternoon, part of our weekly games session. As a flourish, to demonstrate he was in the company of amateurs, he also shot the clock on the gym wall: the holes remain in the glass to this day. He had wanted to be a soldier since he was four and before he was paralysed he’d been in line for specialist sniper training and promotion. A man-child: incorrigible, charismatic, vulgar, cynical, careless, self-destructive, heroic, vulnerable, shrewd. Of all the people I encountered in the tiny, little-understood world of spinal injury, he was the one that made me the most sad.

Approaching bedtime on the rehab ward was the worst. The conveyor-belt sequence kicked in again, in reverse, and we sat by our beds, queueing for the team of two nurses to come and hoist us out of our chairs onto the sheets and attach our overnight urine bags. Then we waited for the final drugs trolley. Long-term incarceration in hospital teaches you tolerance, patience and the knowledge that we are all very, very human. Even now, years later, when I close my eyes I can hear the banter of Rosebud in the distance and the squeak and rattle of the night-time trolley she is pushing. And around me I can sense some of my fellow patients starting to flutter and jangle. Respectable middle-aged women, with husbands and flowerbeds and Vauxhall Astras, but now hungry for whatever opiate or benzodiazepine they needed to soothe the mental anguish of their state, their personal paradise lost. They hungered, bodies paralysed but writhing inside for medication, just as mine had writhed in the high-dependency ward. When was the trolley coming? One woman would press her buzzer anxiously and then others would follow. The drone of multiple alarms would sound down the long ward.

‘What kept you?’ Mrs Bennett would cry.

Rosebud, ever insouciant, was having none of it.

‘What do you think this is? BUPA?’ she cried. ‘I tell you, you’re lucky it isn’t. I’ve worked in private hospitals and they bill you for every single pill you take. Even a paracetamol. Youse are lucky youse are here and not there.’

Apart from when the staff came to turn us onto the other hip on a four-hourly rota, we were then undisturbed until the morning. That was the theory. Nights change when you are in hospital. In fact, as I was to learn, nights change forever when you are paralysed. Any joy went. Your favourite sleeping positions ceased to exist, partly because you could not feel them and partly because you could not achieve them on your own. You adopted the protocol position you were put into – on one hip or the other, pillow wedged into your back, another under the upper knee, more pillows stuffed into the bottom of the bed blocking your feet from going into a flexor spasm downwards. Thus comfort was outsourced: someone else arranged your limbs and your torso in a way which was safe for your skin and for your tubes to survive unblocked. Your frozen hands were put into customised splints, the fingers strapped flat against the formed plastic so they could not contract, and all autonomy was removed. You could no longer scratch your nose, let alone pick it. The private geometry of your night, your ability to cuddle into shapes practised from childhood, was gone for ever: a very personal autonomy to lose. Meanwhile, the hour hands stuck, as if glued, to the face of the clock – T.S. Eliot’s ‘Only through time time is conquered.’ Peace was as lost as paradise. The nurses’ station on night shift was notoriously noisy; there were a handful of the staff who seemed unable, or disinclined, to lower their voices as they sat chatting. When buzzers rang, they would push back their chairs, the metal legs screeching on the floor. Weirdly, my paralysed bladder used to spasm at that noise: a peculiar sensation – somewhere deep inside an insensate body, in a dormant vital organ which contained a foreign body, a catheter, there was a horrid jump of indignation at the discordant pitch. Imagine. I could hear with my bladder! Was it transmitted via my ears, down some remaining nerve pathways, or was it a vibration in the air that affected my bladder alone, its catheter acting as a misplaced aerial?