J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Sweet of her to say so, he reflects afterwards. Poor Paul, poor dear, how difficult, what you are having to go through!: that was what she meant, what she knew he would understand her to mean. We all have to go through something of this sort, he would like to remind her, in the end.

What surprises him about the whole hospital business is how swiftly concern passes from patching up his leg ('Excellent!' says Dr Hansen, probing the stump with a handsomely manicured finger. 'It is coming together beautifully. You will soon be yourself again.') to the question of how he will (their word) cope once he is set loose in the world again.

Indecently early, or so it seems to him, a social worker, Mrs Putts or Putz, is brought into the picture. 'You're still a young man, Mr Rayment, Paul,' she informs him in the cheery manner she must have been taught to employ upon the old. 'You will want to remain independent, and of course that's good, but for quite some time you are going to need nursing, specialised nursing, which we can help to arrange. In the longer term, even once you are mobile, you are going to need someone to be there for you, to give you a hand, to do the shopping and cooking and cleaning and so forth. Is there no one?'

He thinks it over, shakes his head. 'No, there is no one,' he says; by which he means – and believes Mrs Putts understands – that there is no one who will conceive it as his or her Confucian duty to devote himself or herself to caring for his wants, his cooking and cleaning and so forth.

What interests him in the question is what it reveals about his condition as viewed by Mrs Putts, who must have had franker exchanges with the medical people than have yet been afforded him, franker and more down-to-earth. From these down-to-earth exchanges she has evidently concluded that even in the longer term he will not get by without being given a hand.

In his own vision of the longer term, the vision he has been fashioning in his more equable moments, his crippled self (stark word, but why equivocate?) will somehow, with the aid of a crutch or some other support, get by in the world, more slowly than before, perhaps, but what do slow and fast matter any more? But that does not appear to be their vision. In their vision, it would seem, he is not the kind of amputee who masters his new, changed circumstances and generally copes, but the crepuscular kind, the kind who, in the absence of professional support, will end up in an institution for the aged and infirm.

If Mrs Putts were prepared to be straight with him he would be straight with her. I have given plenty of thought to coping, he would tell her. I made my preparations long ago; even if the worst comes to the very worst, I will be able to take care of myself. But the rules of the game make it hard for either of them to be straight. If he told Mrs Putts about the cache of Somnex in the cabinet in the bathroom of his flat, for instance, she might feel bound by the rules of the game to consign him to counselling to protect him from himself.

He sighs. 'From your point of view, from a professional point of view, Mrs Putts, Dorianne,' he says, 'what steps would you suggest?'

'You will need to engage a care-giver, that's for sure,' says Mrs Putts, 'preferably a private nurse, someone with experience of frail care. Not that you are frail, of course. But until you are mobile again we would not want to take chances, would we?'

'No, we would not,' he says.

Frail care. Care of the frail. He had never thought of himself as frail until he saw the X-rays. He found it hard to believe that the spider-bones revealed in the plates could keep him upright, that he could totter around without them snapping. The taller the frailer. Too tall for his own good. I've never operated on such a tall man, Dr Hansen had said, with such long legs. And had then flushed at his gaffe.

'Do you know offhand, Paul,' says Mrs Putts, 'whether your insurance stretches to frail care?'

A nurse, yet another nurse. A woman with a little white cap and sensible shoes bustling about his flat, calling out in jolly tones, Time for your pills, Mr R! No, I do not think my insurance will run to that,' he replies.

'Well then you'll have to budget for it, won't you?' says Mrs Putts.

FRIVOLOUS. HOW HE had strained, that day on Magill Road, to attend the word of the gods, tapped out on their occult typewriter! Looking back, he can only smile. How quaint, how positively antique, to believe one will be advised, when the time comes, to put one's soul in order. What beings could possibly be left, in what corner of the universe, interested in checking all the deathbed accountings that ascend the skies, debits in the one column, credits in the other?

Yet frivolous is not a bad word to sum him up, as he was before the event and may still be. If in the course of a lifetime he has done no significant harm, he has done no good either. He will leave no trace behind, not even an heir to carry on his name. Sliding through the world: that is how, in a bygone age, they used to designate lives like his: looking after his interests, quietly prospering, attracting no attention. If none is left who will pronounce judgment on such a life, if the Great Judge of All has given up judging and withdrawn to pare his nails, then he will pronounce it himself: A wasted chance.

He had never thought he would have a good word to say for war, but here in his hospital bed, consuming time and being consumed, he seems to be revising his opinions. In the razing of cities, the pillage of treasure, the slaughter of innocents, in all that reckless destruction, he begins to detect a certain wisdom, as though at its deepest level history knows what it is doing. Down with the old, make way for the new! What could be more selfish, more miserly – this in specific is what gnaws at him – than dying childless, terminating the line, subtracting oneself from the great work of generation? Worse than miserly, in fact: unnatural.

The day before his discharge he has a surprise visitor: the boy who hit him, Wayne something-or-other, Bright or Blight. Wayne is calling to see how he is getting on, though not, it emerges, to admit to any fault. 'Thought I'd see how you are getting on, Mr Rayment,' says Wayne. 'I'm really sorry for what happened. Real bad luck.' Not an artist in words, young Wayne; yet his every utterance is carefully evasive, as though he has been told the room is bugged. And indeed, as he later learns, Wayne 's father was in the corridor throughout the visit, eavesdropping. No doubt he had coached Wayne beforehand: 'Be respectful to the old bugger, say you're sorry, but at all costs don't admit you did anything wrong.'

What son and father say to each other in private concerning the riding of pushbikes on busy streets he can imagine all too well. But the law is the law: even stupid old buggers on pushbikes have the right not to be ridden down, and Wayne and his father know that. They must be trembling at the thought of a suit, from him or his insurance company. That must be why Wayne picks his words so judiciously.

Real bad luck. There is a range of replies he can think of, starting with Nothing to do with luck, Wayne, just real bad driving. But what use is there in scoring points off a boy who does not have it in his power to fix what he has smashed? Go, and sin no more: that is the best he can think of right now. Just the kind of sententious, old-geezerish pronouncement that the Blights, father and son, would chortle over on the way home. He closes his eyes, wishing Wayne to go away.

An accident: something that befalls one, something unintended, unexpected. By that definition he, Paul Rayment, certainly had an accident. What of Wayne Blight? Did Wayne have an accident too? How did it feel to Wayne, the instant when the missile he was piloting in a haze of loud music dug into the sweet softness of human flesh? A surprise, no doubt, unexpected, unintended; yet not unpleasurable in its way. Could what occurred at the ill-starred crossroads truly be said to have befallen Wayne? If there was any befalling done, it was, in his view, Wayne who befell him.