James Kelman - If it is your life

I dont believe it, I really dont believe it. Yes. Yes.

But she wore the uniform just right. Appositely. And nothing under it bar skimpy stockings and all of that and when she leaned over to make the bed oh my dear her legs, they went right up her body, as far as her, well now, well now indeed.

What shit. Pathetic.

But true, true. And women also appreciated Nurse Liddell because what an appetite for life this lassie had. This lassie had it definitely. Even her shoes! I liked her shoes. They were maybe uniform shoes but somehow, what the hell had she done? it was like she had acquired the design of the basic uniform shoe and embellished it in some way connected to the design itself, the very lines of a shoe, of any shoe, the leather surface. Leather is skin and skin is surface.

Babble babble. I babbled, babble babble.

Yakking to her colleague and pal; that old saying, nineteen to the dozen. And her colleague and pal delighting in Nurse Liddell’s yarn, acutely aware of how lucky she was, oh how lucky, to be here in Europe instead of back home amid the dust and food shortages, disease and corruption, the political jiggery-pokery. It would have killed me.

Had I been African I would not have sought asylum, I would not have left my country. I would have remained and fought until the last gasp expired from my body.

Why did people not fight? It was the same in Scotland. People didnt fight, not like in the old days. Scots wha hae. Nowadays it was just like whatever it was, acceptance, submission, grovellation, to a bunch of corrupt administrators, lawyers and bureaucrats whose debased self-interest enabled the undead not to colonize the world, but to enslave it. Well not me. Oh no, I would fight. I certainly would fight. I did fight. I still did fight and would fight and continue to do so, indeed I would, though the pain wracked, dried and drained my very soul, aarghh, the last gasp from my spent frame.

There are many ways to fight. Yes there are weapons but also there are penises. Penises! I mean pens, pens. And applied in the correct way there is nothing more powerful than a dame than a pen. Take your sword and shove it, give me a pen.

But the rape and attempted murder of an entire continent, a continent so huge that an airflight across one country takes five hours. Way up north, deserts and nothing: nomad hunters and shimmering shifting sands. I heard an African writer declare on radio that Europe would not be satisfied until the extermination of the last African. Europe demanded Africa. And when I said Europe was I including America? Why certainly. And Australia, and Israel. And the part of Africa that was Europe, what about it? Why, my dear fellow, concealed from the argument. Europe demanded Africa. Its minerals and markets, its coast and sandy beaches, strategic primacy, safari parks, the sun going down and the servant brings one a cocktail, one reclines on a hammock, meek docility, she wears a sarong tied loosely, her hair piled high on her head, she may smile, mysteriously — at her husband who is out of view, hiding to the side of the thatched hut, eyes dead in your direction, well you may tense.

But the word ‘boobs’ is ludicrous. ‘Boobs’.

One charts the mind of a human being, one discovers the absurdity therein. The absurdity of existence as contained within one human frame. Of one human being; examine one and you find absurdity.

Nurse Liddell and colleague moved toward the patient directly across from me. I knew the fellow’s name but could not remember it — old Mister Somebody. He was on his last legs. Middle-aged persons came a-visiting and the young, the grandchildren. They stood beside the bed, trying not to touch the covers lest they too contracted the disease. Joe Smith had visited him regularly. Joe.

Where was Joe? What had happened to Joe? Where the hell was he who forswore his own illness for the good of the hospital?

Actually Joe was a good man and there is no point me being facetious about this. He walked about ‘cheering’ everybody up. Such people exist. Joe was one of them. Some people who do that are horrible evangelical patronizing fucking egotistical bastards. Not Joe. Joe is or was genuine. Probably he had dropped dead.

Hell’s bells.

The notepad and pencil rested between my left leg and the edge of the bed.

I had lain them to rest. Were one to shift position they might tumble to the floor.

Fraught!

I refer to one’s life. Even here, within the confines of the hospital bed, one experienced the existential nightmare of that which we know as the day-to-day.

Nurse Liddell speaking to her colleague, and quietly, the patient might have heard had he not been snoozing, old Mister Somebody, bereft of consciousness. He could not hear, alas. Nineteen twentieths of the old fellow’s life passed in sleep. His body was drained, his lifeforce spent, in defence against the cancer entity. I saw it as a war; a small and well-drilled army takes on a huge, densely populated country. Sooner or later one or more limbs of the well-drilled army will fail. They cannot continue indefinitely

unequal struggle

Compos mentis, however. I remained so, alert. Why then had I sighed? I had sighed. Why had I sighed and so damnably tired so damnably damnably tired so tired so tired

The notepad and pencil, and close to the edge. When had I laid them to rest?

No major event. Nothing was. The nurses were young women. The men they liked were so much younger than me, much younger, very much younger. One saw them on television. Confident young males, they all were confident and boyish. Boyish! They were all so fucking boyish, it made one grue, at their so-called charms, stylish in their disarray. But still the girls smiled upon them. No doubt

No doubt. I had tacked on the ‘no doubt’ as a form of reassurance. The typically pathetic manoeuvre of the older male, pretending a righteous displeasure at the antics of the young, when it was nothing more than the deepest most god-awful jealousy, and bitterness. I could have killed, and I would have, these fuckers.

Whence the anger?

I was not beyond the pale. The nurses were in their mid-twenties, so that made how many years of a difference? countless and countless were a lot, a lot of years, as they say, a vast pressure of water rushing beneath the bridge.

And propped up on all these pillows; this is what the vast pressure of water had done to me. Swimming against the tide, or with the tide, it made no difference. The exhaustion was one. An unimaginable

the thought itself unimaginable. And as I began reaching for the notepad even my god my arms, even them, as though aching. Arms ached, but I pushed forwards one, my right, oh god, groaning aloud, and in the next bed the man moved his feet.

This man had been asleep and seemed always to be so but now was awake.

Because I had groaned! Yes!

I held my breath, looking to the mound wherein lay my belly beneath the sheets. Better the devil one knows than the unknown evil thing lurking in the dark, enabled to perform its malevolence. I looked for the nurses, their voices no longer audible.

They had gone.

My pillows were stuffed together! They propped me up! They had been plumped! My pillows. Someone had done the plumping chore. While I was not looking. Was that possible!

So there we are. One is reduced

What time now?

But who had plumped up the damn pillows? God damn.

The smell of food.

I was to receive food and the sense of it was to the fore. What might it be? No matter, I would savour it. I always did. My wife derided me for that. My sons didnt. It was a gender issue. And I hailed from a large family. Members of large families savour food. They fight for food. They die, die for food

however

No however, howevers. The food would come to me and the auxiliary staff person would not see me while serving.