A square, pale room, seven stories up. From the generous windows, we could see the bow-fronted stucco villas of Headington, with gardens for childhood. In the room were four old women and four beds. One sat completely silent and still, hunched in her wheelchair, for the whole visit. Next to her was an older, thinner creature, with dark hair and dark patches all along her arm. One arm rested on a pillow on the table in front of her. The other fell straight down by her side and seemed to drag her body after it. “Help me!”, she said, in a flat grating voice. “Help me. Help me, Pat”. No one took any notice. The hand on the pillow dragged slightly to one side. The other window bed had a rosy-cheeked old lady sitting beside it who would smile encouragingly when I caught her eye, but said nothing at all.
Joan fitted into her wheelchair like a bag of semolina but she was no longer fat, just paraplegic. Her face had once been round and jolly. Now her complexion was clear, but for one spot on her nose, and he expression seemed abstracted. her jaw was long and pointed. She looked as if she had had a hard life for her age ? she?s 45 ? but not as if she were struggling now. Her mouth was slightly open: the teeth on her lower jaw were firm, crooked and yellowed. Her head was upright, propped between two towels and the headrest of her wheelchair. A large, conspicuous stand held a blue bag of nutrients from which a tube ran under her blanket: she is being fed directly into her stomach now. A smaller bag half full of piss hung at the side of her wheelchair. Her eyes were shut and had been since Sunday. She has been in the hospital for nearly three months now.
Julian stroked her arm. “She responds well to male voices” he said. “But not to my asthmatic wheeze”. “Hello, Joan; hello Miss Kent. Look who we’ve brought. We’ve brought Andrew. I don’t think you’ve ever seen him sober before, so it’s worth waking up for. Joanie: you’re looking really good today. Go on Andrew, you talk. She may like your voice.”
So I stood over her, and stroked the warm and spongy flesh of her arm. I didn’t know what to say. I’d never known what to say to her. She had taken violent offence at something I had written nearly twenty years ago, when her disease was just starting to show itself, and she had spoken to me as little as possible, through all the subsequent years, as the white matter rotted in her brain, and the paralysis crept from her feet up, though she hasn’t been able to speak to anyone at all, not even Julian while he nursed he, for about two years now.
“There was a boy whose name was Jim” I started, since this is the only long poem I can reliably remember, “Whose friends were very good to him. They fed him tea and cakes and jam, and slices of delicious ham, and chocolates with pink inside, and brought him tricycles to ride. They read him stories through and through, and even took him to the zoo..”
By the time I had finished the poem: “when Nurse informed his parents, they were more concerned than I can say. His mother, as she dried her eyes, said, well it comes as no surprise. He would not do as he was told”, Joan’s eyelashes, a very pale ginger colour , were moving, and with a feeling of dread I stooped to see if her eyes were open. She had always had vivid blue eyes to go with her red hair and pale skin. They were still bright. They moved very slowly, as if she were watching a fly crawl across the spotless white wall behind me.
“Joanie! You’re awake!”. Julian coaxed her: “Well done. That’s so good. You see, you do respond well to voices. Perhaps Andrew will tell you some of the wicked Swedish things he knows.”
So I started to tell her a fairytale, Red Riding Hood, but when I got as far as saying there was a little girl lost in the great dark forest, I couldn’t go on.
“Help me. Help me, Pat” said the bruised old woman in the corner. A Filipina nurse went over and talked to her calmly about her husband. She talked as if the husband was still alive, and I was shocked to hear that the patient was able to talk and understand what was said. Her voice had seemed to come from some unutterable distance. Julian asked to see Joan’s notes, and the nurse, who obviously knew him well, went over some of the details with him. He showed her how the Occupational Therapist might adjust the neck rest of the wheelchair so that Joan’s head would not flop too much. He tried to sing to Joan, but her eyes closed once more, and we left.
We walked in the parks, and talked about our lives. What will you do afterwards, I asked. “I don’t know. I have been doing this for sixteen years now.”
“Come and stay with us — when — when you’re able.”
“Thank you. I don’t think that will happen for another year or so.”
He said he had no income at all at the moment, and was having to take taxis in from Wantage where he lives to Oxford at about