Slow Man Read online

  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.

  He opens his eyes. Wayne is still by the bedside, sweat pearling on his upper lip. Of course! At school Wayne would have had it drummed into him that you do not leave the room until the teacher signals the session is over. What a relief it must have been to Wayne when at last he was free of school and teachers and all that, when he could put his foot down flat on the accelerator, wind down the window and feel the wind on his face, chew gum, turn up the music as loud as he liked, shout ‘Fuck you, mate!’ at old geezers as he ripped past them! And now here he is, constrained again, having to put on a dutiful face, to grope for apologetic-sounding words.

  So the puzzle resolves itself. Wayne is waiting for a signal, and he wants Wayne out of his life. ‘Good of you to come, lad,’ he says, ‘but I have a headache and I need to sleep. So goodbye.’

  Four

  The day nurse recommended by Mrs Putts is named Sheena. Sheena looks nineteen, but her papers attest she is twenty-nine. She is fat, with a hard, lardy, confident fatness, and under all questioning unshakeably good-humoured. He takes an immediate dislike to her, he does not want her, but Mrs Putts presses him. ‘It’s specialised work, private nursing,’ says Mrs Putts. ‘Sheena has worked with amputees before. You would be a fool to turn her down.’ So he yields. In turn Mrs Putts concedes that he need not engage a night nurse, as long as he registers himself with an emergency service and keeps a pager handy at all times.

  He takes care to stay on the right side of Mrs Putts because he has what he believes to be an accurate idea of Mrs Putts’s powers. Mrs Putts is part of the welfare system. Welfare means caring for people who cannot care for themselves. If, somewhere down the line, Mrs Putts were to decide that he is incapable of caring for himself, that he needs to be protected from his own incompetence, what recourse would he have? He has no allies to do battle on his behalf. He has only himself.

  It is possible, of course, that he overestimates Mrs Putts’s concern. When it comes to welfare, when it comes to care and the caring professions, he is almost certainly out of date. In the brave new world into which both he and Mrs Putts have been reborn, whose watchword is Laissez faire!, perhaps Mrs Putts regards herself as neither his keeper nor her brother’s keeper nor anyone else’s. If in this new world the crippled or the infirm or the indigent or the homeless wish to eat from rubbish bins and spread their bedroll in the nearest entranceway, let them do so: let them huddle tight, and if they wake up alive the next morning, good on them.

  When the ambulancemen bring him home, Sheena is ready and waiting. It is she who reorganises his bedroom for him, supervises the cleaning woman, instructs the handyman where to install rails, and generally takes over. She has already drafted a day-by-day schedule for the two of them covering meals, exercises, and what she calls SC, stump care, which she tapes to the wall above his head. It includes three blocks, one in mid-morning, one at noon, one in the afternoon, labelled ‘SD PRIVATE TIME’, time during which she retires to the kitchen to refresh herself. She keeps her supplies in the fridge on a shelf that she labels ‘SD PRIVATE’. So that she will not perish of boredom she keeps the radio on in the kitchen, on a station that alternates clamouring advertisements with thudding music. When he asks her to turn the sound lower she turns the sound lower; nevertheless, without straining, he can still hear it.

  The first test of his physical powers comes when, with Sheena supporting his elbow, he attempts to use the toilet. The sitting-down manoeuvre defeats him: the left leg, the leg left to him, is as weak as putty. Sheena purses her lips. ‘Back to bed at once,’ she says. ‘I’ll fetch you the potty.’

  She calls the bedpan the potty; she calls his penis his willie. Halfway through a sponge bath, before dealing with the stump, she pauses and puts on a baby voice. ‘Now if he wants Sheena to wash his willie, he must ask very nicely,’ she says. ‘Otherwise he will think Sheena is one of those naughty girls. Those naughty naughty girls.’ And she gives him a playful slap on the arm to show it is just a joke.

  He puts up with Sheena until the end of the week, then telephones Mrs Putts. ‘I am going to ask Sheena not to come back,’ he says. ‘I cannot abide her. You will have to find me someone else.’

  Getting rid of Sheena turns out to be by no means as simple as that. By the time her professional pride has been mollified he has had to fork out two months’ wages. He wonders how often in her nursing career she has brought off coups on a similar scale. Perhaps the radio was just a trick to madden him, and the baby-talk too.

  After Sheena he is tended by a succession of nurses from the agency, nurses who call themselves temps and come for a day or two at a time. ‘Can’t you find me someone regular?’ he asks Mrs Putts on the telephone. ‘I am stretched to the limit,’ says Mrs Putts. ‘There’s a huge demand for frail-care nursing. Be patient, you are on my A list.’

  His elation at having escaped the hospital does not last long. He slumps into a bad mood, and the mood does not leave him. He does not like any of the temps – does not like being treated as a child or an idiot, does not like the bouncy, cheerful voice they put on for him. ‘How are we today?’ they say. ‘That’s good,’ they say, even when he has not bothered to reply.

  ‘When are we having our leg fitted?’ they say. ‘So much better than crutches, a new leg, it really is, once you get the hang of it. You’ll see.’

  From being irascible he becomes sullen. He wants to be left alone; he does not want to speak to anyone; he suffers fits of what he thinks of as dry weeping. If only real tears would come! he thinks. If only I could be washed away in tears! He welcomes those days when for one reason or another no one arrives to take care of him, even if it means he has to get by on biscuits and orange juice.

  He blames his gloom on the painkillers. Which is worse, the cloud of gloom in the head or the ache in the bone that keeps him awake all night? He tries doing without the pills and ignoring the pain. But the gloom does not lift. The gloom seems to have se
ttled in, to be part of the climate.

  In the old days, the days before the accident, he did not have what he would call a gloomy temperament. He might have been solitary, but only as certain male animals are solitary. There was always more than enough to keep him occupied. He took out books from the library, he went to the cinema; he cooked for himself, he even baked his own bread; he did not own a car but rode a bicycle or walked. If such a way of life made him eccentric, it was eccentricity within the mildest Australian limits. He was tall, he was rangy, he had preserved a certain wiry strength; he was the kind of man who might last into his nineties, eccentricities and all.

  Well, he may still live to be ninety, but if that happens it will not be by choice. He has lost the freedom of movement and it would be foolish to think it will ever be restored to him, with or without artificial limbs. He will never stride up Black Hill again, never pedal off to the market to do his shopping, much less come swooping on his bicycle down the curves of Montacute. The universe has contracted to this flat and the block or two around, and it will not expand again.

  A circumscribed life. What would Socrates say about that? May a life become so circumscribed that it is no longer worth living? Men come out of prison, out of years of staring at the same blank wall, without gloom taking possession of their souls. What is so special about losing a limb? A giraffe that loses a leg will surely perish; but giraffes do not have the agencies of the modern state, embodied in Mrs Putts, watching over their welfare. Why should he not settle for a modestly circumscribed life in a city that is not inhospitable to the frail aged?

  He cannot give answers to questions like these. He cannot give answers because he is not in the mood for answers. That is what it means to be gloomy: at a level far below the play and flicker of the intellect (Why not this? Why not that?) he, he, the he he calls sometimes you, sometimes I, is all too ready to embrace darkness, stillness, extinction. He: not the one whose mind used to dart this way and that but the one who aches all night.

  Of course he is not a special case. People lose limbs or the use of limbs every day. History is full of one-armed sailors and chairbound inventors; of blind poets and mad kings too. But in his case the cut seems to have marked off past from future with such uncommon cleanness that it gives new meaning to the word new. By the sign of this cut let a new life commence. If you have hitherto been a man, with a man’s life, may you henceforth be a dog, with a dog’s life. That is what the voice says, the voice out of the dark cloud.

  Has he given up? Does he want to die? Is that what it comes down to? No. The question is false. He does not want to slash his wrists, does not want to swallow down four and twenty Somnex, does not want to hurl himself off the balcony. He does not want death because he does not want anything. But if it so happens that Wayne Blight bumps into him a second time and sends him flying through the air with the greatest of ease, he will make sure he does not save himself. No rolling with the blow, no springing to his feet. If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.

  Unstrung: that is the word that comes back to him from Homer. The spear shatters the breastbone, blood spurts, the limbs are unstrung, the body topples like a wooden puppet. Well, his limbs have been unstrung and now his spirit is unstrung too. His spirit is ready to topple.

  Mrs Putts’s second full candidate is named Marijana. By origin she is Croatian, so she informs him during their interview. She left the land of her birth behind twelve years ago. Her training was done in Germany, in Bielefeld; since coming to Australia she has acquired South Australian certification. Besides private nursing she does housekeeping for, as she puts it, ‘extra money’. Her husband works in a car assembly plant; they live in Munno Para, north of Elizabeth, a half-hour drive from the city. They have a son in high school, a daughter in middle school, a third child not yet of school-going age.

  Marijana Jokić is a sallow-faced woman who, if not quite middle-aged, exhibits a thickening about the waist that is quite matronly. She wears a sky-blue uniform that he finds a relief after all the whiteness, with patches of dampness under the arms; she speaks a rapid, approximate Australian English with Slavic liquids and an uncertain command of a and the, coloured by slang she must pick up from her children, who must pick it up from their classmates. It is a variety of the language he is not familiar with; he rather likes it.

  The agreement arrived at between himself and Mrs Jokić, Mrs Putts mediating, is that she will attend him six days of the week, Monday to Saturday, deploying upon him for those days the full range of her caring skills. On Sundays he will fall back on the emergency service. For as long as his powers of ambulation remain restricted, she will not only nurse him but attend to his everyday needs, that is to say, shop for him, cook his meals, and do the lighter cleaning.

  After the misadventure of Sheena he has no great hopes for the lady from the Balkans. In the days that follow, however, he finds himself grudgingly thankful for her advent. Mrs Jokić – Marijana – seems able to intuit what he is ready for and what he is not. She treats him not as a doddering old fool but as a man hampered in his movements by injury. Patiently, without baby-talk, she helps him through his ablutions. When he tells her he wants to be left alone, she absents herself.

  He reclines; she unwraps the thing, the stump, and runs a finger along its naked face. ‘Nice sutures,’ she says. ‘Who put in sutures?’

  ‘Dr Hansen.’

  ‘Hansen. Don’t know Hansen. But is good. Good surgeon.’ She hefts the stump judiciously in one hand, as if it were a watermelon. ‘Good job.’

  She soaps it, washes it. The warm water brings out a pink-and-white flush. It begins to look less like a cured ham than like some sightless deep-water fish; he averts his eyes.

  ‘Do you see many bad jobs?’ he asks.

  She puckers her lips, draws her hands apart in a gesture that reminds him of his mother. Maybe, says the gesture; it depends.

  ‘Do you see many of . . . these?’ With the lightest of fingertips he touches himself.

  ‘Sure.’

  He is interested to note how devoid of double entendre the exchange is.

  To himself he does not call it a stump. He would like not to call it anything; he would like not to think about it, but that is not possible. If he has a name for it, it is le jambon. Le jambon keeps it at a nice, contemptuous distance.

  He divides people with whom he has contact into two classes: those few who have seen it, and the rest, those who thankfully never will. It strikes him as a pity that Marijana should fall so early and so decisively into the first class.

  ‘I have never understood why they could not leave the knee,’ he complains to her. ‘Bone grows together. Even if the joint was shattered, they could have made an attempt to reconstruct it. If I had known what a difference losing a knee makes I would never have consented. They told me nothing.’

  Marijana shakes her head. ‘Reconstruction,’ she says, ‘very difficult surgery, very difficult. For years, in and out hospital. For, you know, old patients they don’t like it to make reconstruction. Only for young. What’s the point, eh? What’s the point?’

  She puts him among the old, those whom there is no point in saving – saving the knee-joint, saving the life. Where, he wonders, would she put herself: among the young? the not-old? the neither young nor old? the never-to-be-old?

  Rarely has he seen anyone throw herself as fully into her duties as Marijana does. The list with which she goes off to the shops comes back with the till receipts clipped to it, each item ticked off or, where she has had to vary it, annotated in her neat old-world hand with its barbed 1s and crossed 7s and looped 9s. From the tempests of her cooking emerge meals that are unfailingly appetising.

  To friends who telephone to ask how he is getting on, he refers to Marijana simply as the day nurse. ‘I have hired a very competent day nurse,’ he says. ‘She does the
shopping and the cooking too.’ He does not refer to her as Marijana in case it sounds too familiar; in conversation with her, he continues to call her Mrs Jokić, as she calls him Mr Rayment. But to himself he has no reservation about calling her Marijana. He likes the name, with its four full, uncompromising syllables. Marijana will be here in the morning, he tells himself when he feels the cloud of gloom descending again. Pull yourself together!

  Whether he likes Marijana the woman as much as he likes her name he does not yet know. Objectively she is not unattractive. But in his company she seems to have the ability to annul sex. She is brisk, she is efficient, she is cheerful: that is the face she presents to him, her employer, that is the face he pays for and must be content with. So he gives up being irascible and takes pains to meet her with a smile. He would like her to think he bears his mishap gamely; he would like her to think well of him in all respects. If she does not flirt, he does not mind. It is better than coy talk about his willie.

  Some mornings she brings her youngest child with her, the one who is not yet at school. Though born in Australia, the child’s name is Ljuba, Ljubica. He likes the name, approves of it. In Russian, if he is not mistaken, lyubov means love. It is like calling a girl Aimée or, even better, Amour.

  Her son and first-born has, she informs him, just turned sixteen. Sixteen: she must have married young. He is in the process of revising his estimate of her. More than not unattractive, she is on occasion a positively handsome woman, well built, sturdy, with nut-brown hair, dark eyes, a complexion olive rather than sallow; a woman who carries herself well, shoulders squared, breasts thrust forward. Prideful, he thinks, hunting for an English word that will capture her. Her teeth, stained yellow with nicotine, are the only objective flaw. She smokes in an unreconstructed old-European way, though for his sake she retires to the balcony.