Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Softening agent

Sister Heel herself was perhaps less flinty than she had been, the agent of softening being Charlie. Love had transformed her routine. She came on duty as promptly as ever, but after a quick riffle through the paperwork in her office she would slip out into the grounds. We could see her through the ward windows picking the groundsel which grew in such quantities as a weed on the Cliveden estate. Heel had become a budgie expert in her own right. Nurses would be given lectures on the digestive systems of budgies, not strictly part of their medical training, I suppose, but good for their general knowledge. Only Heel was allowed to give him greens. She cleaned his cage on a regular basis, scrubbing tirelessly away, as if she was one of the cleaning ladies on her own ward. She replaced his sand-paper and brought him cuttlefish out of her own pocket. Cuttlefish and the finest millet money could buy.

She talked to him constantly and taught him many new things. As soon as she opened his cage door, he was on her shoulder talking to her. He gave her love-nibbles on the lips, and told her deeper secrets than he had ever told me. Soon he was putting his head right inside her mouth, to retrieve a tasty bud of groundsel coated in saliva. For a bird who had been rejected from the egg and never known a mum of his own species, of his own family or even his order, I have to assume that this smother love was budgie Heaven.

Birds know nothing of the womb. They can hardly want to return to a place where they have never been, unless somehow they remember being processed into life by the mammal machine, in lives gone by, suckled and weaned, licked clean by a rough tongue. That was what Heel was offering Charlie when she opened her mouth so invitingly — a womb to be returned to, a warm dark cave of belonging, wet with seeds and endearments.

The time came when Heel had a week’s leave. She left instructions that Charlie was not to be allowed out of his cage while she was away. One day she even turned up out of uniform, just to make sure he was all right, and that her edicts carried weight in her absence.

Charlie’s cage was waiting in her office on her first morning back. She said, ‘Good morning, Charlie,’ and he chirped back, ‘God, you’re a dirty bugger!’ If her face hadn’t been shoe-leather brown, it would have turned scarlet. She muttered, ‘I’ll give him what for.’ A trail led straight to the culprit — Charlie imitated his intonations all too well.

We on the ward had known all about Dr Benny’s small revenge on Sister Heel, not a personal settling of scores, I don’t think, just an attempt to bring the dragon down a peg or two. We knew what Charlie had been learning during his private lessons. His vocabulary had always been large, but now it was being expanded into unknown regions. We were amazed that any doctor could imagine he would have the last word in a confrontation with Heel, but nobody listened to us.

In CRX the pecking order was strict. Even the lowest doctor ranked higher than the highest sister, but that was only the theory. On Ward One, even registrars quailed before Heel. We counted down the hours till Dr Benny’s next shift and his fatal rendezvous with Heel’s ‘what for’. A cadet nurse, almost as thrilled and alarmed as we were, tipped us off about his hours.

Heel laid no blame on the innocent bird. Her love for Charlie was now close to obsessive. It was hard to think of anything he could do that wouldn’t instantly be forgiven. More love grated out of her mouth than ever before. Even deeper secrets were exchanged, while his beak dabbled in her mouth to retrieve the seeds of love.

By the time Dr Benny came on duty we felt thoroughly sorry for him. He put on a brave face at first, pretending not to notice Heel’s basilisk stare, sweeping past her to attend to a patient immediately. Did he think she would hesitate to use the Tannoy? It wasn’t long before her voice crackled over the system like a whip to summon him to her office. Ten minutes later a bedraggled and crestfallen man stumbled out. He crept off to a little side room to stitch together the rags of his composure. Someone said he had been crying.

Soon Charlie was spending more time alone with Sister Heel in her office, and less with us in the ward. He was learning to concentrate on genteel topics and a seemly vocabulary. He was still my bird, but that was becoming a technicality. If Heel and I had been at opposite ends of the ward, and Charlie had been let out of his cage in the middle, I was no longer sure which way he would have flown.

Sometimes Charlie gave our hands a peck, but Sister was always able to make out it was the child’s fault, which suited us fine. And Charlie knew better than to peck her. I prayed a little tearfully to God about Charlie’s transfer of affections, and God simply said, ‘When Charlie flew out of the cage, your main wish was that he should be all right. Remember? So tell me, is he happy now or not?’ God had a point. I had to face the fact that Charlie was very happy indeed.

When I started to have solo sessions in the hydrotherapy pool with Miss Krüger, I began to understand more about her approach to her work. She would hold me so that my face was just on a level with the surface of the water, and then she would tip me gently back, so that I was just under it. She would hold a position that let the water just begin to trickle into my nostrils. It’s possible to shut your mouth and hold your breath, but it’s not possible to close your nose in the same definite way. Sooner or later you have to let your breath out in any case.

When I started to choke and splutter she would push me under a little deeper and then bring me up to the surface, coughing and spluttering. Not close to the fact of drowning but brought up close to the idea of it. Nothing about her face gave away what was happening — that she was claiming the power of life and death over me.

There was no therapeutic basis to the group sessions on dry land, when she made us walk without the support of our shoes, but she didn’t want us to know what she was doing. Here in this more private setting she wanted me to be in on it. She was making it very clear how fine was the line separating life and death. She could see that I didn’t want to cross over just then. She never said anything. She never murmured, ‘It didn’t happen that time … but next time, who knows?’ She didn’t need to.

While the jaws grind shut

The first time Miss Krüger held me under the water, I shut my eyes. The second time, I kept them open and tried to read her expression, hoping to see something recognisably human. I imagine people being bitten in half by a shark have the same need to look in the creature’s eyes while the jaws grind shut, simply hoping to see a feeling on that face that they can imagine sharing. Wanting the reassurance of knowing that for the shark, too, this is an emotional experience.

In this respect Miss Krüger had more to offer than a shark would. She smiled — her face was quite lively. She even wrinkled her nose in a way which on someone else I might have found adorable. I think she must have liked her victims to keep their eyes open. It made the experience more intense for her, though there was nothing that she let show. I say ‘her victims’ although I don’t know in a definite way that I wasn’t the only one to get that treatment in the hydrotherapy pool. But I don’t flatter myself. I wasn’t special. I didn’t talk about it, and I didn’t ask anyone else, but I’m sure my case was not isolated.

Assuming that I wasn’t singled out in the pool, then perhaps it was part of Miss Krüger’s pleasure that our group should both know and not know what was going on. The child being smiled down on in the pool, fighting the urge to thrash in a way that would do no good and be painful in its own right, could be in no doubt about the nature of what was happening. The children in the walking group, going up on pointes one after the other — ‘Ups-a-daisy, try again’ — knew how much it hurt, but not that it was the opposite of therapy. After all, the occupational therapist wasn’t feeding off our pain when she told us that remedial shoes had to hurt if they were to do us any good (I give her the benefit of the doubt). Miss Krüger was something else entirely. Individually, in the pool, we all knew we were being tortured. As a group, made to walk without support on chronically inflamed joints, we had no idea. Walking was the fetish and watch-word of the place. It always hurt. Miss Krüger’s exercises didn’t seem as obviously insane as they should have.