John Banville - Mefisto

She said nothing. A sharp breeze fingered my flayed back.

— Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow we make a start.

I remember the steely clink of instruments, the sharp, chemical smell, the cluster of faceted lights above me, like a bright sun shining through rain. I was conscious through it all, day after day. The atmosphere in this high room had a curiously neutral feel, as if the air itself had been treated with a mollifying gas. At intervals one of the nurses would remove Dr Cranitch’s spectacles and wipe the lenses, while he stood vague-eyed, his hands limply lifted. Then he would lean over me again, deft, mild, faintly abstracted, sometimes humming under his breath. His students looked on, stealthily jostling. I thought in amazement of people outside in the streets, going heedlessly about their business. So I too, before, while worlds thrashed in agony.

Grafts. Forceps. Gauze. Such words, I tremble still.

Now came a new kind of pain, pain’s big brother, it caught me in its burly grasp and pulled me this way and that, it would brook no nonsense, even my ministering angels threw up their hands before its masterful onslaught.

This was recovery.

— Yes, Dr Cranitch murmured, it’s knitting nicely.

I could not lift my left arm higher than my shoulder, my right was a hinged brown stick. I had no nipples. Half the skin of my stomach had gone to patch my legs, my back. My face now was a glazed carnival mask, with china brow and bulging cheeks, hawk nose, dead eye-sockets. Above it the skull was a tufted leathern helm, the skin taut and glassy, like dried-over slime.

— It will heal, Dr Cranitch said. As good as new, almost.

But I was different. I was someone else, someone I knew, and didn’t know. I had stepped into the mirror. I frightened myself. That mad face. Those eyes.

My first, faltering little steps. I shuffled crabwise to the door, hands flapping in fear, stood panting there, eyes shut, then in panic staggered headlong back to the bed, missed it, fell on the floor. Followed by a quaking bout on the bedpan. For a minute, though, I had forgotten the pain. It came back now, bounding and barking, and licked my livid face into flame again.

She held my hand, my elbow. Her mannish grasp. She watched my feet, in old grey felt slippers, inching along.

— Come, she said quietly, under her breath. Come along.

What a pair we must have been, this big, broad, sad woman, and I, bent and hobbling, hairless as a babe.

— Can’t. Can’t.

Stopped, stood still, would not go on, or back. She waited, saying nothing, she had seen it all before. We reached the window. She parted the venetian blinds, the crackle as the blades bent made me grind my teeth. Bright sunshine outside, a bank of barbered grass sloping away to railings and a wall, then in the distance the city shimmering in a blue haze. The city! Too much, too much. At the window-sill a fuchsia bush with wasps. Too much. I lay down on the floor and sobbed, pressing my pitted cheek to the cool rubber tiles.

— Come along, now. Come along.

Her freckles, my burns.

I began to explore my little world. There was a wooden locker beside the bed, a metal chair, a waste bin lined with a plastic bag. In an alcove there was a washbasin, and a mirror screwed to the wall. A rich, deep, silver crack ran athwart the glass, slicing my face diagonally in two from temple to jaw. The locker was empty, except for a shrivelled brown apple core and a holy medal on a pin. And the black notebook. The cover was scorched. I shut the door on it.

Miss Barr was a big blonde person with ruddy cheeks and prominent, pale blue eyes. She wore a white tunic and starched white trousers, and white ankle-boots with thick crêpe soles. Her straw-coloured hair was tied back tightly in a knot, I imagined her, first thing out of bed each morning, gathering it up and giving it a good, hard wrench, stretching the skin at her temples, making those eyes bulge. She smelled of soap, lint, liniment. I used to dream about her. My sleeping self quailed before her, weak with anticipation of exquisite harm. The first day she came into my room she rolled up her sleeves and said briskly:

— Right, my man. Physio for you.

I thought she was mad, I did not know what she was talking about. She seized my arm, my leg, peering.

— Golly, she said, you certainly made a bags of yourself. But fear not, we’ll soon set you to rights.

We heaved and hauled together, like decrepit wrestlers, groaning. She had a tendency to fart. She told me about her childhood, spent mainly among horses. At once I pictured her, a sort of centaur, flying over the greensward, snorting. Sometimes I pictured myself too, astride her, the breeze in my face, hearing the thunder of hoofs, feeling her great heart hammering under me. She put her knee in my spine, sat on my chest, bent me over her shoulder.

— Pull, pull! she shouted. Get those sinews stretched! We’ll make a new man of you yet.

The day I left my room. That was a day to remember. I sat cross-legged on the bed, with my hands in my lap, my eyes fixed on the door, then saw myself, as if it were someone else, rise and turn the handle and walk out. A long, low ward lined with beds, with figures in them, sitting up and looking at me. All those eyes! I had expected a vast emptiness, huge halls, the odd, solitary figure turning away. A small man in slippers and a sort of smock approached me. Smoked skin, sallow eyeballs, a lick of greased black hair. He greeted me with easy familiarity, grinning on one side of his sharp little face.

— Well well, he said, our mystery man.

He led me along the beds, introducing their occupants. He did not ask my name. He was a card, with a brisk line in raillery. Old chaps chortled, young ones smirked. All tried not to see me, my scabs.

— I’m for the knife, myself, he said, indicating the smock.

Some beds he passed by in silence. Bandaged skulls, wax faces, dazed, impenetrable eyes.

— Brain cases, he whispered darkly. You want to watch them.

His name was Sykes, Stokes, something like that. He offered me a plum from a bag on his locker.

— Had an accident, did you? he said.

Next day when I came out he was gone. The sheets had been stripped from his bed, the door of his locker stood open. Only a plum stone remained, stuck to the bottom of a tin ashtray. The knife had done for him. My cicerone. No, my Virgil. For this is hell, after all.

Sighs, groans. Shouts in the night. An old man puking up gouts of green stuff, leaning over the side of the bed, a young nurse holding his forehead. Slow, wet coughs, like the noise of defective suction pumps ponderously labouring. In the huge, white-tiled bathrooms, little labels exhorting patients not to spit in the handbasins. Everywhere the same thick cream paint, smooth as enamel, clammy as skin. I wore a mouse-coloured dressing-gown with faded red piping. Someone had died in it, I imagine, before it passed to me. I walked and walked, slouching along the vermiform corridors, dragging one foot. People looked away from me, visitors especially, the uninitiates. Young doctors frowned, a sort of bland grimace, as at a show of bad taste. I passed on, hauling my pain behind me.

Pain had a smell, flat, grey, faintly sweet, I imagined a mixture of scurf and faeces. It was how I recognized my fellow sufferers, the ones for whom pain was a constant presence, a sort of second, ghostly self. There was the silence too, a special kind. We would sit in what was called the recreation room, a group of us, doing nothing, not saying a word, and yet communing somehow, like participants in a seance.

There were times when I fancied I was only this ectoplasm, floating, transparent, invisible to the hale. One day I found my way on to the maternity ward, and stood at the glass wall of the nursery, gaping at the rows and rows of prune-faced mites in their plastic cots, and was for a moment baffled, an old ghost stumbling on a new world. They looked like me! I pressed my forehead to the glass, yearningly. A mother in a pink bed-jacket glanced up from her babe and shrieked, and I was led away, shaken, speechless, that one foot dragging behind me, in the grave.