Slow Man Read online

  What he can be altogether more definite about is that he has neither wife nor offspring. He was married once, certainly; but the partner in that enterprise is no longer part of him. She has escaped him, wholly escaped. How she managed the trick he has yet to grasp, but it is so: she has escaped into a life of her own. For all practical purposes, therefore, and certainly for the purposes of the form, he is unmarried: unmarried, single, solitary, alone.

  Family: NONE, he writes in block letters, the nurse overseeing, and draws lines through the other questions, and signs the forms, both of them. ‘Date?’ he demands of the nurse. ‘Second of July,’ she says. He writes the date. Motor functions unimpaired.

  The pills he accepts are meant to blunt the pain and make him sleep, but he does not sleep. This – this strange bed, this bare room, this smell both antiseptic and faintly urinous – this is clearly no dream, it is the real thing, as real as things get. Yet the whole of today, if it is all the same day, if time still means anything, has the feel of a dream. Certainly this thing, which now for the first time he inspects under the sheet, this monstrous object swathed in white and attached to his hip, comes straight out of the land of dreams. And what about the other thing, the thing that the young man with the madly flashing glasses spoke of with such enthusiasm – when will that make its appearance? Not in all his days has he seen a naked prosthesis. The picture that comes to mind is of a wooden shaft with a barb at its head like a harpoon and rubber suckers on its three little feet. It is out of Surrealism. It is out of Dali.

  He reaches out a hand (the three middle fingers are strapped together, he notices for the first time) and presses the thing in white. It gives back no sensation at all. It is like a block of wood. Just a dream, he says to himself, and falls into the deepest sleep.

  ‘Today we’re going to have you walking,’ says young Dr Hansen. ‘This afternoon. Not a long walk, just a few steps to give you the feel of it. Elaine and I will be there to lend a hand.’ He nods to the nurse. Nurse Elaine. ‘Elaine, can you set it up with Orthopaedics?’

  ‘I don’t want to walk today,’ he says. He is learning to talk through clenched teeth. It is not just that the jaw is bruised, the molars on that side have been loosened too, he cannot chew. ‘I don’t want to be rushed. I don’t want a prosthesis.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ says Dr Hansen. ‘It’s not a prosthesis we are talking about anyway, that is still down the line, this is just rehabilitation, the first step in rehabilitation. But we can start tomorrow or the next day. Just so you can see it isn’t the end of the world, losing a leg.’

  ‘Let me say it again: I don’t want a prosthesis.’

  Dr Hansen and Nurse Elaine exchange glances.

  ‘If you don’t want a prosthesis, what would you prefer?’

  ‘I would prefer to take care of myself.’

  ‘All right, end of subject, we won’t rush you into anything, I promise. Now can I talk to you about your leg? Can I tell you about care of the leg?’

  Care of my leg? He is smouldering with anger – can they not see it? You anaesthetised me and hacked off my leg and dropped it in the refuse for someone to collect and toss into the fire. How can you stand there talking about care of my leg?

  ‘We have brought the remaining muscle over the end of the bone,’ Dr Hansen is saying, demonstrating with cupped hands how they did it, ‘and sewn it there. Once the wound heals we want that muscle to form a pad over the bone. During the next few days, from the trauma and from the bed rest, there will be a tendency to oedema and swelling. We need to do something about that. There will also be a tendency for the muscle to retract towards the hip, like this.’ He stands sideways, pokes out his behind. ‘We counteract that by stretching. Stretching is very important. Elaine will show you some stretching exercises and help you if you need help.’

  Nurse Elaine nods.

  ‘Who did this to me?’ he says. He cannot shout because he cannot open his jaws, but that suits him, suits his teeth-grinding rage. ‘Who hit me?’ There are tears in his eyes.

  The nights are endless. He is too hot, he is too cold; the leg, closed in its swaddling, itches and cannot be reached. If he holds his breath he can hear the ghostly creeping of his assaulted flesh as it tries to knit itself together again. Outside the sealed window a cricket chants to itself. When sleep comes it is sudden and brief, as if gusts of leftover anaesthetic were coming up from his lungs to overwhelm him.

  Night or day, time drags. There is a television set facing the bed, but he has no interest in television or in the magazines some kind agency has provided (Who. Vanity Fair. Australian Homes & Gardens). He stares at his watch face, imprinting the position of the hands on his mind. Then he closes his eyes, tries to think of other things – his own breathing, his grandmother sitting at the kitchen table plucking a chicken, bees among the flowers, anything. He opens his eyes. The hands have not stirred. It is as though they have to push their way through glue.

  The clock stands still yet time does not. Even as he lies here he can feel time at work on him like a wasting disease, like the quicklime they pour on corpses. Time is gnawing away at him, devouring one by one the cells that make him up. His cells are going out like lights.

  The pills he is given every sixth hour wash away the worst of the pain, which is good, and sometimes send him to sleep, which is better; but they also confuse his mind and bring such panic and terror to his dreams that he baulks at taking them. Pain is nothing, he tells himself, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. But of course he is wrong. Pain is the real thing, it does not have to press hard to persuade him of that, it does not have to press at all, merely to send a flash or two; after which he quickly settles for the confusion, the bad dreams.

  Someone else has been moved into his room, a man older than himself come back from hip surgery. The man lies all day with his eyes shut. Now and again a pair of nurses close the curtains around his bed and, under cover, attend to his body’s needs.

  Two oldsters; two old fellows in the same boat. The nurses are good, they are kind and cheery, but beneath their brisk efficiency he can detect – he is not wrong, he has seen it too often in the past – a final indifference to their fate, his and his companion’s. From young Dr Hansen he feels, beneath the kindly concern, the same indifference. It is as though at some unconscious level these young people who have been assigned to care for them know they have nothing left to give to the tribe and therefore do not count. So young and yet so heartless! he cries to himself. How did I come to fall into their hands? Better for the old to tend the old, the dying the dying! And what folly to be so alone in the world!

  They talk about his future, they nag him to do the exercises that will prepare him for that future, they chivvy him out of bed; but to him there is no future, the door to the future has been closed and locked. If there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their own end – who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down the pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose their features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be any trouble. The only matter they cannot take care of is the body they leave behind, the mound of flesh that, after a day or two, will begin to stink. If only it were possible, if only it were permitted, they would take a taxi to the crematorium, set themselves down before the fatal door, swallow their dose, then before consciousness dwindles press the button that will precipitate them into the flames and allow them to emerge on the other side as nothing but a shovelful of ash, almost weightless.

  He is convinced that he would put an end to himself if he could, right now. Yet at t
he same time that he thinks this thought he knows he will do no such thing. It is only the pain, and the dragging, sleepless nights in this hospital, this zone of humiliation with no place to hide from the pitiless gaze of the young, that make him wish for death.

  The implications of being single, solitary and alone are brought home to him most pointedly at the end of the second week of his stay in the land of whiteness.

  ‘You don’t have family?’ says the night nurse, Janet, the one who allows herself banter with him. ‘You don’t have friends?’ She screws up her nose as she speaks, as though it is a joke he is playing on them all.

  ‘I have all the friends I could wish for,’ he replies. ‘I am not Robinson Crusoe. I just do not want to see any of them.’

  ‘Seeing your friends would make you feel better,’ she says. ‘Give you a lift. I am sure.’

  ‘I will receive visitors when I feel like it, thank you,’ he says.

  He is not irascible by nature, but in this place he allows himself spells of peevishness, tetchiness, choler, since that seems to make it easier for his minders to leave him alone. He’s not so bad under the surface, he imagines Janet protesting to her colleagues. That old fart! he imagines her colleagues reply, snorting with derision.

  He knows it is expected of him now that he is improving to experience gross desires towards these young women, desires which, because male patients, no matter their age, cannot help themselves, will surface at inconvenient times and must be deflected as quickly and decisively as possible.

  The truth is that he has no such desires. His heart is as pure as a babe’s. It wins him no credit among the nurses, of course, this purity of heart, nor does he expect it to. Being a lecherous old goat is part of the game, a game he is declining to play.

  If he refuses to contact friends, it is simply because he does not want to be seen in his new, curtailed, humiliating, and humiliated state. But of course, one way or another, people get to hear of what happened. They send good wishes, they even call in person. On the telephone it is easy enough to make up a story. It’s only a leg, he says, with a bitterness that he hopes does not come across on the line. I will be on crutches for a while, then on a prosthesis. In person the act is more difficult to bring off, since his detestation of the lumpish thing he will henceforth have to lug around with him is all too plainly written on his face.

  From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Magill Road to the present, he has not behaved well, has not risen to the occasion: that much is clear to him. A golden opportunity was presented to him to set an example of how one accepts with good cheer one of the bitterer blows of fate, and he has spurned it. Who did this to me?: when he recalls how he shouted at the no doubt perfectly competent though rather ordinary young Dr Hansen, seeming to mean Who drove into me? but really meaning Who had the impudence to cut off my leg?, he is suffused with shame. He is not the first person in the world to suffer an unpleasant accident, not the first old man to find himself in hospital with well-intentioned but ultimately indifferent young people going through the motions of caring for him. A leg gone: what is losing a leg, in the larger perspective? In the larger perspective, losing a leg is no more than a rehearsal for losing everything. Whom is he going to shout at when that day arrives? Whom is he going to blame?

  Margaret McCord pays a visit. The McCords are his oldest friends in Adelaide; Margaret is upset at having heard so late, and full of righteous indignation against whoever did this to him. ‘I hope you are going to sue,’ she says. ‘I have no intention of suing,’ he replies. ‘Too many openings for comedy. I want my leg back, failing which . . . I leave that side of things to the insurance people.’ ‘You are making a mistake,’ she says: ‘people who drive recklessly should be taught a lesson. I suppose they will fit you out with a prosthesis. They make such wonderful prostheses nowadays, you will soon be riding your bicycle again.’ ‘I don’t think so,’ he replies. ‘That part of my life is over.’ Margaret shakes her head. ‘What a pity!’ she says. ‘What a pity!’

  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 joll
y 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.

  Three

  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.