school photos 14

I wasn’t allowed to walk. A shaggy-haired porter sporting a tan dustcoat pushed my wheelchair to the lifts and took me up to my ward on level eight. The hospital with its corridors and sharp turns was his world.  He talked about fitba and Rangers. I nodded now and again, to show I was listening. He hadn’t bothered looking at my name tag. It didn’t seem worth the bother of telling him I supported Celtic.

            My wheelchair was parked close to the partition window, across from the nurse’s station, in a ward with five other women patients. They were shocked. I was shocked, always believing I was a man. And the matron, all full of bustle, is shocked most of all. She snatched the care notes from the porter and snorted ‘Josephine. You’re meant to be a Josephine’.  I thought she was going to box my ears. She insisted the porter take me away from her ward.

            He shrugged. ‘Sorry dear.’ With practised impudence he slouched away and round the corner towards the lifts.    

            A student nurse with long brown hair tied tightly back and black-rimmed glasses shuffled into our room to help the matron get me settled. The curtains were drawn on their rails round the corner bed. They give me two minutes to put on a gownie with drawstrings at the back that covered everything but my bum. When the curtains were drawn back, then I became like any other body, male or female.

The lady in the bed next to mine made small-talk and enquired what I was in hospital for. I told her I'd some kind of fit. There was a straining of ears from the three beds facing us. Then everyone relaxed into their own ailments, which they wove into the throw of their conversation as if knitting a communal wool jumper.   I was fed lunch that seemed like a dinner with mashed potatoes and custard for dessert.

            Patients in the other beds made such a fuss when the student nurse came back after lunch and tentatively held out a plastic bottle for me to give a urine sample. Near the window the grey haired women was always getting up onto spindly legs and  staring out, smoking, and sucking and clacking on endless peppermints shouted over, ‘She’ll be soon wanting more than a sample’. The women on both side of the ward cackled. The student nurse’s almond shaped eyes slid away from mine and focussed on the extension arm of the reading lamp at my head.  My flush rose from my toes and sweat prickled under my arms. The red beacon of my face matched the student nurse’s. Our matched faces were a hoo-haa delight to the other older women.  

            Afterwards, the day settled into a routine. A doctor arrived at my bedside to take blood. I don’t know why he was doing it and I didn’t ask, his solemn face reassuring me. He put on the tourniquet and I presented him with my flexed arm, but the whitening of my skin seemed to confuse him and he couldn’t  find a vein. He had four then five attempts, before the blood swirled into the syringe, unnaturally purple, or even black in the strip lighting. He withdrew the needle before releasing the tourniquet and blood dribbled down my arm. His mouth fell open and in his panic he does a number of things, releasing the tourniquet, mopping at the blood with a Steret swap and pressing down at the puncture wound with a ball of cotton wool. He indicated I should keep pressure on it, before putting the syringe on a metal tray and hurrying away, leaving my arm extended and smelling as if it had been lying in a medical cabinet.

            ‘I don’t like Paki doctors,’ the ginger-haired woman two beds along from me said. It was the first time I’d heard her speak. She’d spent much of her time, blankets wrapped around her head, sleeping.  Unlike the others, who were quick to discuss their ailments, I didn’t know what was wrong with her.

            The woman in the next bed looked up from her book and her head dropped again scanning the page, her expression neutral, but she flicked a page a bit too quickly. She caught me looking at her as she flicked the page back. My face coloured, but not near as bad as before with the student nurse. I covered it up with a question.

            ‘Good book?’

            ‘Pretty good.’ She showed me the cover, Cal.

            ‘I read that at school.’

            Her eyes were a bright greyish blue. One eyebrow rose in a peeked cap. She was a large woman, silver and brown hair caught by kirbies on each side of her face. I’d worked out from what the other women said, and what she’d said, there was something wrong with her fingers or toes. They tingled too much or too little and made her feel a bit stupid.

            ‘It was a good book.’ My voice was a plea.

            ‘Yeh.’ She looked fixedly at the page.

            I knew not to say any more or ask any more daft questions. Visitors came, but no one came to see me, or the woman in the bed next to mine. There were oohs and ahhs as I was constantly referred to and doe-eyed grandchildren staring at me fixedly as if I were part of the fixtures. I took to hiding my head under the blankets.  

            One of the nurses rung the handbell in the corridor outside as a signal that visiting time was over. I heard a muffled voice. ‘Hi-ya,’ Mum said to the woman next to me. ‘I hope he’s not sleeping.’ She wheeched the blankets back and I was looking into her smiling face. She set up base camp on the portable bedside cabinet with crisps and sweeties. I knew I was ill when she brought out the bottle of Lucozade out of her plastic bag.   

            ‘Sorry,’ Mum explained, ‘the buses were murder’. She settled herself into a padded seat beside my bed and unbuttoned her coat.

            ‘It’s stifling in here,’ she remarked to the woman in the bed next to me.

            While other visitors drifted towards the exit doors, they talked over my head for about five minutes and I picked up the woman’s name was ‘Doris’. Mum was always doing embarrassing things  like that, making friends with total strangers. Even when the nurse came in to shepherd visitors out, Mum sweet-talked her into letting her stay for another ten minutes.

            Mum was quite a good mimic and she kept me—and the other patients—entertained with tales about what was happening at home with Da and Our Jo. You’d have thought I’d been away for weeks and not just a few hours.

            ‘Little Ally’s got a new imaginary friend,’ Mum said.

            I laughed even before she got to the punch line. Alison always had imaginary friends that we had to feed with balled up bits of paper and make cooing noises at. Her worsted bear was worn thin and looked as if it had been chewed by a pack of hyenas, but O’Mally, as Da called the bear, had a more charmed life than a sacksful of cats.

            ‘Little Ally’s new friend Lily, is quite the bee’s knees.’ Mum laughed. ‘And even goes to the same school as her.’

            The matron looked over the glass screen dividing the corridor from the ward.

            ‘Got to go,’ said Mum, bending over and kissing my forehead. ‘See you tomorrow.’