The Emperor Waltz (44 page)
Authors: Philip Hensher
It was important that things be born amid sacrifice, marked by the biggest sacrifice anyone could offer. She opened her mouth to bless him, and as he moved the sword away for the swing, she placed her hands together, the good one with the poor broken one, to pray. The words began to pray for her. The wind of the sword’s descent was the air under the wings of a great bird, descending upon her.
Two thousand people saw Perpetua die.
A hundred went away thoughtful, and detesting what they had seen. They told five people, ten, twenty.
There was the gesture of the girl at the last: the way she had raised her hand and smoothed her red hair, brought it to one side, left her neck bare to be struck by the sword. They remembered that best, all the days of their lives.
One of those twenty who heard the first telling of Perpetua’s death said that the Romans were no better than the wild men of the desert. They were all beasts in their appetites, their meaningless justice and reprisal.
Another of the people who went out into the town was the executioner who had brought his sword down on the neck of Perpetua, and seen her poor broken body give up the ghost. He, too, thought of that movement of the hand, pulling her hair to one side and flattening it. That day he did not join with the other soldiers in the barracks. He rose up early the next day, and on a horse rode out into the desert. After a time he slowed the horse to a walk in the early-morning light. The sky was pink, and the sands were calm, littered with small white rocks, and the stones called roses of the desert crunched under the horse’s hoofs. There was a remote and resonant singing, somewhere far off: the deep noise of the sands of the desert moving, many leagues away. There was nothing but the great circular horizon and the sky. Like most of the curious town, he knew the story of Perpetua’s last days. He wondered why someone should feel the need to leave everything she knew, and surrender the certain for the unknown. He had heard her called mad, but he did not think now that she had been mad. It was so hard to be virtuous. She had taken the step. In the first light of the day, so much like every other day in the desert, he saw a path like a line of steps, leading away from him towards the light. He felt with shame the acts he had carried out in his life. On the back of the horse, he stretched his arms upwards, in relief, in the empty world, like a boy stretching in the empty air.
When the doctors said to me, ‘How did this infection happen?’ I answered, ‘I cut my foot.’ And this was true. But if they went on to ask further, I started to lie. I said that I had been walking in the kitchen in the dark one night, and a piece of glass had, unnoticed, cut my foot, and I had only noticed it the next morning when I saw some blood. (The comparative lack of feeling in the feet of diabetes patients makes this plausible.) In fact my first statement was accurate. I had cut my feet. I had taken a pair of nail scissors and, trying to hack off some hard skin, had cut into the flesh beneath. It had grown infected to the point where I had had to go to hospital. Why did I not admit to the stupid thing I had done? I wanted the medical staff to like me, and an accident seemed to place me on their side, whereas a stupid piece of reckless self-mutilation would place me among the mass of incomprehensible other.
I presented myself at Accident and Emergency at St Thomas’ Hospital in London at eleven on a Wednesday night. The infection had been apparent since Sunday. I had been ignoring, or half ignoring, the pain in my foot and the slight feeling of delirium. This was a mistake. When I had been diagnosed as diabetic, ten months before, one of the things that I had been told was that I must pay attention to my feet, and especially to any injuries. I had listened. But my blood-sugar at the time had been raised to such a level that I was more or less incapable of paying attention. Delirium had made me stare, incapable, at the doctor explaining this. So I had treated the infection as a tiresome thing that would probably go away with some antiseptic cream and Elastoplast.
On the Wednesday night, I changed the dressing. Beneath the dressing, the toe’s skin was angry, red and swollen up to the first joint; above that it was white, dead and swollen. There was no sensation anywhere. I got into a taxi and went to Accident and Emergency.
Somewhere, Virginia Woolf remarks on the division that exists between the well and the ill, how invalids and the unwell disappear into a world that hardly exists for the healthy. For the seriously ill, one of the most immediate of these divisions is in the distinction between him and the medical professionals confronting him. You are a patient; we are your cure.
The mass of invalidity and incapacity in a London Accident and Emergency department is uniform and repulsive, especially at night. I sat in the waiting hall to be seen by a triage nurse. About me were homeless men, a couple of students who had been assaulted in a minor way, and an unusual couple. They were Haredi Jews. One, in a wheelchair, was extraordinarily obese, his belly not just spilling onto his thighs, but actually protruding beyond his knees as he sat. His head was lolling from side to side: he was beyond communication. His companion, a thin man with ringlets and a hat, wearing the traditional black overcoat, was deep in prayer, bending his head back and forth energetically over a copy of the sacred texts. From time to time, a receptionist or a nurse would nervously approach, try to speak to the obese patient, then, on getting no response, would start to approach the devout carer. He made no response, continuing with his intricate prayer ritual; his ritual spoke to God, and not to the world. He had no interest in drawing anyone into his world of contemplation and revelation and God. His religion did not convert or persuade. It just was. The nurse or receptionist would approach, and mutter something like ‘I’ll come back in five minutes.’ But in five minutes, the prayer was still continuing, and they went away again.
My experience of Accident and Emergency is varied. In the past, I had cycled, and had been thrown from my bicycle, been hit by cars, had fallen onto my elbow over the handlebars. On another occasion, I had sprained an ankle, which had swollen enormously, and been staggeringly painful. Then, I had been given painkillers and told to go home and rest it. Now, I was in nowhere near as much pain. Did I belong in this room? It was only an infection and an unattractive appearance.
I might have been the only person in the room, staff aside, who was sober. A woman in a bay opposite kept trying to get up, her hospital gown falling open at the back to show underwear that did not match but was clean and even expensive-looking; the bra strap was a vivid pink against her dark skin. You only ever see very incapably drunk black women in London. A man in a suit next to her, hooked up to a saline drip, was either asleep or comatose with alcohol. They were alone, but somewhere near by someone was shouting, ‘You make me sick. You make me fucking sick, what you put me through, what you fucking do.’
I was conscious of not belonging to the rest of the admittances. There was a community of emergency, but I did not belong to it: I was not drunk; I needed medical treatment. From time to time a doctor or two came into the bay where I was extended on a slippery trolley. They talked to each other without introducing themselves. They were junior doctors, for the most part. They appeared frightened, probably of tonight’s patients and, equally, of the senior colleague who would descend on them. I tried to talk to them as they passed through, and to the nurses, and to the senior colleague, who appeared around three. I thought of the story I would tell in the future, when I was surrounded by my friends. I wanted to heal the divide of strangeness and examination that had arisen between me and those who were tasked with curing me.
We exist in society, and we make our own societies as we go. Those people who attempt solitude are rare, and often have to resort to external limitations to make a success of it – moving to an island, or taking up drugs, or ecstatic meditation, blotting out others with intoxication or God. In a society, isolation leads to eccentricity; eccentricity leads to loneliness; loneliness leads to madness. In the 1970s, a serial killer called Dennis Nilsen committed his first murder, he said, after not speaking to another human being for many days. That is one solution the soul comes to. Another is to grow inward, with one’s own mannerisms and solutions. We are all egotists, but the withdrawn and isolated human can turn into an egotist with no interest in others and no understanding, either. Today I watched a man walk along the Wandsworth Road. He lived alone. His clothes indicated that. They were in simple colours between beige and blue. They were comfortable-appearing and not very well fitting. You felt that he visited the hairdresser, but the hairdresser had correctly intuited that he had nobody at home to comment on the result, or to advise him that he needed to go somewhere else to have his hair cut. As he walked he talked; his lips moved; his head shook and his face twisted from time to time in anger at some recollection. He was thinking of injustices done to him, and there was nobody in the street who could be alarmed, because nobody knew him. He was not mad, not quite, but almost, and he was definitely alone, incurably.
Out there is society, and we live in it. We think of our society as made up of people we have known for years, of our oldest friends, of people we know and trust. But it is made up of people, too, whom we see once a week or once a month, perhaps only serving them or being served by them, whose names we might know or might not know; of acquaintances and friends of friends; of people, too, whom we meet only once and with whom we exchange a word or two. Does it matter whether we get to know these people, whether we pass the time of day pleasantly or ignore them entirely? Should we be good to strangers? Are we good to strangers, not feeling any moral imperative?
There is a dilemma that economists puzzle over, which no amount of self-interest can, apparently, explain. It is called the One-off Tipper. You are in a strange town for the first time, and are about to leave. You go to a restaurant opposite the railway station. The restaurant, a large sign on the window announces, is closing down tonight at nine p.m., as the owners are going into retirement. It is now seven thirty. You order your meal; it is brought to you without much conversation; you eat your meal; and you finish it while reading a book. The bill arrives and you pay it, adding fifteen per cent as a tip, for service. You leave and you never see any of the people involved, ever again.
Economists puzzle over why you should have left a tip. For them, tips, like everything else, are self-interested investments in future existence. But why should anyone tip when there will be no future relationship? Why should you tip a waiter in a restaurant that is closing, or a taxi driver in a huge city whom you will never see again, as much as the man who cuts your hair every fortnight or the waiter in the steakhouse a hundred yards from your house who serves your dinner once a week? Is the tip a hedge against the possibility that you have left your bag or hat behind – a tipped worker will be helpful, an untipped one will have thrown it away?
But the bond is what counts. For an hour, we are in the company of strangers, and we do not want them to continue as strangers. A gesture of kindness: an unnecessary donation; a financial statement of gratitude, even if we can’t say much more than ‘thank you’ in words: these come naturally, still. Perhaps we want to form some kind of society, to reach out, to make it plain that something human has passed between us and we might, very well, have talked.
Without that, there is discomfiture; aloneness. I felt like that the night I was admitted to Accident and Emergency. I had no connection with the other patients, and I had no connection with the professional carers.
As the medical staff came and went, few of them seemed to have time for anything more than a generalized gesture of kindness. The care in the temporary ward I had been moved to, from which either I would soon be removed to a more permanent and tranquil ward or despatched home, was driven, practical, swift. It did not have the anonymous quality of the care in the Accident and Emergency department, but there was no quality of leisure about it, either. The ward sister was an Irishwoman of formidable efficiency; the doctors who dealt with me asked questions or turned to each other and discussed matters as if I were not there, in terminology that I could not completely understand.
This detached and swift quality was something I started to share. And it started to influence the attitude I had towards the infected part of my body. At one point that morning, a doctor turned to me and said, ‘We’re not certain. But we think the infection may have reached the bone. If it has, there is a likelihood that we will have to amputate.’
‘The toe?’ I asked.
‘We hope it won’t be more than the toe,’ the doctor said. ‘The good news is that it isn’t gangrenous as yet, and you do have good circulation in your feet.’
At this news, I felt mildly proud – at having fended off gangrene, and having achieved good circulation. Like those participants in daytime television who demand applause from a paying public for the most routine and universal moral positions – ‘Hey, I
love
my children!’ – I was modestly accepting acclaim for the circulation of my blood. Had I been working behind the scenes, unknown even to myself, all those forty-seven years, to maintain a beautiful flow of blood to the feet? I felt almost tearful at the unsung commitment. The assertions of danger and the possibility of losing the toe, the foot, the leg, on the other hand, had nothing at all to do with me. I listened to these diagnoses in a detached way, as if I too were standing at the end of the bed waiting for my opinion to be sought. ‘You’ll be moved to Albert Ward later today, after the MRI scan,’ the formidable Irish ward sister told me, around ten. I nodded sagely. It was the best thing all round for the patient. At the same time, I had a detached and interested awareness that ‘gangrenous’ was probably one of the worst words, even in renunciation, that one might hear when in a hospital bed.