The Full Ridiculous (2 page)

You recall the old blue sedan, hear the trace of an accent, mid-European, and construct a picture of your assailant working herself to exhaustion in a tedious, underpaid job she’s nonetheless grateful to have and now terrified she’ll lose if she arrives late.

‘Are you okay?’ you ask and then assure her you’re going to be okay too.

How do you know this? How do you fucking know this?

You hear sirens approaching. They appear to be coming from all directions and that’s because they are. The police arrive to redirect traffic just as two ambulances pull up. You don’t see any of this—it’s purely soundscape with a running commentary by Doctor Elizabeth Marks.

An Ambo leans down to talk to you and it’s the first face you’ve seen in what seems like ages. Pale brown hair is plastered to his forehead with a combination of sweat and grease. Deep lines that once were dimples are etched either side of his mouth. He asks you questions with stale-smoke breath.

What is your name? What day is it? Do you know what happened?

He tells you he’s going to turn you over onto a board and secure you. A brace will be on your neck and it may feel very uncomfortable and he’s sorry.

You hear the count…

on three…

one,

two,

three…

and you’re flipping over. Knees, thighs, torsos appear. Then faces, all looking down at you. You can see the sky. A woman pushes towards you, someone tries to hold her back but she says, ‘I’m his wife.’

And there she is, looming over you. This face you know better than your own. You read every twitch and flicker, the slight clouding of her bright blue eyes. She is shocked, shocked to see you prone; then frightened, fighting the faint quiver in her bottom lip. Her thick brown-black hair hangs in a curtain, dangling down at you. She sweeps it behind her ears and makes a huge effort to look calm, to
be
calm, and now she looks blurry because there’s water in your eyes and it stings and you realise that once again you’re crying salty tears.

They lift you up and a woman from the house across the road tries to rescue her blanket, which is covering you. The blanket sticks to the stretcher and she tugs at it (but not hard, for fear of disturbing you) and says in a self-conscious way, ‘Doesn’t matter,’ and you know she’s feeling foolish for fussing when there are bigger things at stake. Wendy releases the blanket from the stretcher and returns it to her and you hear her thanking the woman as they carry you away. And you carry the kindness of these strangers with you and are moved by them.

2

You are in an ambulance. The brace on your neck is crushing and claustrophobic but you dare not complain. Your view is restricted to the roof of the vehicle as you race along, siren wailing. You know the route to the hospital and you try to imagine exactly where you are, a Global Tracking Patient.

Wendy follows in her car. You suddenly regret this because you want her with you in case you die. You can’t see the Ambo unless he peers directly overhead which only happens once as he checks your vital signs and asks more questions.

What is your name? What day is it? How fast was she going?

How fast was she going?
You have no idea so you say, ‘No idea,’ and he suggests, ‘About forty?’ and you think,
‘Forty! Whose side are you on?’
You can hear, close to your ear, a pen scratching on paper and you realise he’s logging all this information and you want to say, ‘A lot fucking faster than forty!’ But then a huge, horrifying wave of pain emanates from your left thigh.

The Ambo reads your situation and says you can have some morphine when you get to the hospital. This is the first time you are conscious of any pain and instantly you are overwhelmed by it. Unbearable waves ebb and flow over your body.

The ambulance stops and things slam and slide open.

You glide fast down a long corridor.

The ceiling panels are discoloured with age and intermittently stained by leakage. Every now and then a panel is missing and you catch glimpses of piping and ancient bits of insulation. It occurs to you that this is how you are going to see the world—through a small window directly above you—for quite a long time.

Countless prostrate patients must have experienced this before you and you make a mental note to share your small epiphany with your architect friend, Felipe: hospitals should be designed around their ceilings because this is what sick people see of them. This suddenly feels like a
really important
idea. You haven’t felt such conviction since you had a brilliant flash (when stoned at university) about all mankind saving the Earth from a collision with a giant meteor by travelling to one country so the displaced human mass would make the planet wobble on its axis, which would alter its orbit just enough for the meteor to whizz past into intergalactic oblivion. You can see now that your ceilings epiphany will change the way future hospitals are built and will one day be regarded as another beat in the long, slow pulse of your unfolding genius.

A wave of pain turns into nausea and you think you’re going to vomit and you’re frightened you will choke on it because you can’t move your head.

A bank of fluorescents travels towards you and stops overhead, glaring like a science-fiction sun. You hear Wendy’s voice amid the hospital clatter but it’s a female police officer who peers over you and asks how it’s going.

‘Good,’ you reply (!).

The policewoman tells you she will come later to take a statement and disappears. Wendy takes her place; she’s silhouetted by the alien sun but you can see her eyes are red and puffy. She smiles and says, ‘Hi Bubba,’ and you say, ‘Hi,’ and suddenly an Indian doctor takes Wendy’s place and introduces herself and you try to hold on to her name but it’s complicated and polysyllabic and now it’s gone.

She bundles Wendy off to a waiting room and you can feel a prick in your arm and she explains in her rhythmic Hindi accent that she’s taking blood and putting a shunt in your arm in case you need a drip and/or meds. Then you hear her drop something and say, softly, ‘Oh damn,’ and she fusses for a bit and you feel another prick.

She looks into your face and smiles and offers you morphine. You say, ‘No,’ and explain that you want to be aware, stay in control. It’s only a glimmer, the slightest spasm of her facial muscles, but you can tell she thinks you’re an idiot. She asks you to move the toes on your left foot.

There is a pause while you try to locate your left foot in your head and send it a message. She asks you to move it again, a little impatiently now, but adds
please
to take the edge off.

‘I’m trying,’ you say. ‘How’s that?’

‘We’ll send you up for X-rays,’ she replies and walks away.

You feel a lurch in the pit of your stomach.

The curtains slide shut and an efficient voice announces that she’s Shirley, your nurse, here to clean you up and she’s sorry but she’s going to have to cut those clothes off you, she’s afraid. You remember that you’re still in your jogging gear—dark blue T-shirt and shorts—and are only now aware they are wet with sweat and probably blood.

Underwear.
You realise she’s going to cut off your underwear and think,

(a)
I’m wearing the black cotton shorts, a little worn but not too bad
, and

(b)
I don’t want Shirley inspecting my cock.

As if she can mind-read, Shirley places a towel over you and reaches under, cutting down your left side from hip to thigh, then your right. A gentle tug and the whole kit comes away like a disposable diaper and you’re so relieved to have held on to this shred of dignity that you don’t even notice how she removes your T-shirt.

Your arms keep slipping off the bed as she bathes you and she comments how these silly hospital trolleys are too small for a big man like you. There’s something about the way she says ‘big man’ that tells you she finds you attractive and a number of thoughts form and synthesise into something like this:
That’s not very appropriate but it’s good if she wants to have sex with you because she’ll make sure you’re alive aren’t we absurd everything comes down to sex in the end even when we’re dying does she have a nice body you’re pathetic what about Wendy who knew it was possible to feel this much pain surely childbirth couldn’t be this bad?
Only in your head, the thoughts don’t happen one after the other like they do on paper, they all happen at once; it’s like simultaneously watching five different movies but being able to understand everything.

Shirley leans over to shine a light in your eye, providing a brief opportunity to examine her with your remaining, undilated, pupil. She’s small-breasted with sad eyes and big teeth. And for some reason you form the opinion that she’s a single mother of two high-schoolers which means that you could go back to her place without being disturbed until three o’clock at least.

Frank the Helper arrives to take you up to X-rays. He’s hyper-friendly like he knows you’re dying and he’s trying to fill your last moments with warmth and bonhomie. He rattles and prattles all the way to the lift which whines in a highpitched, almost human, voice until you arrive with a clunk. Frank pushes you through transparent plastic swing doors and he’s so damn jaunty you’d swear he was rolling you into a bar for a beer. His big head bobs and jerks and guffaws and suddenly he’s gone.

You are abandoned in a tiny cubicle near the swing doors. Except for the cosmic hum of the universe, there is no sign of anything anywhere.

You are floating in a pool of pain.

Your heart beats in your head.

Where’s Wendy? Why didn’t she insist on staying with you?

You are going to die alone because she’s too polite.

You drift.

You are the drifting.

A huge pale green machine points its blunt nose at you. It hums and tuts and grunts and then nothing. You lie alone until Frank reappears and trundles you back into the lift, through the maze of corridors and out into a different room.

A fresh-faced young woman in a nurse’s uniform says, ‘Would you like to sit up?’

Without waiting for an answer, she winds the bed up and you can see a nurses’ station and other beds and a teenage girl with a drip in her arm sitting cross-legged on a bed, poised over a bucket.

Wendy’s compact figure walks towards you. Your mate Dazza once described her (a little too lasciviously for your liking) as ‘a tidy ship’. Her symmetrical face is rescued from generic prettiness by the startling blue of her eyes and an overly full lower lip that curves to reveal a crooked bottom tooth when she smiles, which she does now. It’s one of those appealing faces that people think they know. Quite often she is accosted by beaming strangers who have mistaken her for a long-lost friend or relative. At the last minute, of course, they realise their error and babble an embarrassed explanation. Wendy, being Wendy, always defuses the situation with her gracious good humour.

Your wife reaches the bed and takes your hand. She looks like she’s been through an ordeal but there’s a lightness about her that makes you feel enormously relieved.

Enormously relieved.
Like a million fucking bucks actually.

The Indian doctor calls you
miracle man
and tells you there are no broken bones; you’ve fractured some teeth and they have to assess the extent of any internal bleeding blah blah blah and you’re looking at Wendy knowing you’re going to live and you’re going to walk and you’re floating on happiness and you start to vomit but nothing comes up.

The dry retching is probably caused by nausea which is probably caused by the pain, your Indian goddess declares in an I-told-you-so tone. Her pager beeps her off to more urgent matters and she orders the fresh-faced nurse to give you some painkillers and a shot of Somethingerol.

You’re a big baby when it comes to needles so you feel quite relieved there’s already a shunt in your arm. Wendy takes your hand as Fresh Face inserts a needle into the shunt with crisp, slightly theatrical efficiency. She smiles at you but she doesn’t see you; she sees the Patient. You realise you’re performing in a pageant, the star of which is the Fresh Faced Nurse. You’re a bit player, written in to demonstrate what a wonderful carer she is.

You avert your eyes from the needle and notice your left thigh is huge, swollen to twice its normal size.

‘It’s a
haematoma
,’ explains Fresh Face like she invented the word. ‘Your thigh muscle is filling with blood.’

You feel woozy.

‘There,’ she says, as an iciness crawls up the veins in your arm, ‘All better!’

But it’s not all better at all, at all.

Beads of cold sweat form on your forehead and your mouth dries up. You ask Wendy to get the children; you want to see them. Wendy protests. She doesn’t want to frighten them.

Declan is seventeen and in his final year at Mount Karver. He is not a steady student but thanks to his mother’s vigilance and his own gift for charming everyone he meets, he’s almost over the finish line. Rosie is living in fourteen-year-old hell, teetering on the edge of an eating disorder and permanently plugged into the vicious lyrics of dead rappers. She hates her parents, school and life, in that order.

You know Wendy is in shock and you know her first instinct is to protect the children but you want to shout, ‘For fuck’s sake! I just want to see my fucking children before I die!’ But you don’t need to say anything because Wendy knows what you are thinking and takes out her snazzy red phone.

‘You can’t use that in here!’ announces Fresh Face like Wendy’s trying to detonate a bomb.

Wendy squeezes your hand and scuttles through the blue swing doors. As you watch her go you remember you’re in the same hospital where your father died almost thirty years ago.

You’re twelve years old, kneeling in the hospital car park with your big sisters, pumping out Hail Marys, willing Holy Mary to save your dad. He didn’t come to Mass this morning because he was a bit wheezy with the asthma. Mum stayed home to keep an eye on him. Tess, who has just got her licence, drove you and Ingrid to St Agathas.

As Mass is finishing, an altar boy hands a note to Father Bourke. He scans it and asks in his thick Irish brogue that we pray for Bill O’Dell who is critically ill and being taken to hospital. Everyone looks and Ingrid shepherds you outside through a kind of blur. As you get into the car, an ambulance comes wailing past and Tess says, ‘That’s Dad.’