Читать книгу Never Say Die - Lynne Barrett-Lee - Страница 10

There are events that happen in any life that become significant only once put in context with what follows them. My moment on the catwalk was one such.

Four days after my admission to Rookwood, Mum and Dad brought in a photograph for me. It was the one that had appeared in the Western Mail newspaper several weeks earlier, as part of their coverage of a not particularly important news event: the Glanafan Comprehensive School fashion show. I was fourth from the right of our line-up of models, all of us decked out in that season’s new nightwear; there was sufficient nylon that had we rustled too much there would no doubt have been enough static electricity to launch a zeppelin.

‘Thought we could put it on your locker,’ Mum suggested. ‘You know. Something to cheer you up.’

Mum had a point. Having spent much of the preceding few days in what I had come to decide was an extreme form of solitary confinement, to retreat inside my head was beginning to feel not just a means to escape the horror of my situation, but more a series of visits to a much nicer place—a dreamscape, almost, populated by a version of myself that was no longer imprisoned in this hateful bed.

Not that I’d wanted to be a model at the outset. (I certainly didn’t want to be a model as a life choice—I just loved the feeling that if I’d wanted to, I could.) When it had first been put about that they were looking for models, my response was the same as pretty much everyone else’s. A mass teenage lack of self-esteem, coupled with an equally natural fear of being made to look silly or uncool, meant our fall-back position was that anyone who dared put herself forward as a wannabe Twiggy would, without exception, be a tart and a poser, and utterly in love with themselves. Not the sort of girl, we all agreed firmly, that we’d want to have anything to do with. Dorothy Perkins, the store running the event, would, we decided, have to look elsewhere for their complement of catwalk crumpet.

But our group dynamic (not to mention our natural adolescent mistrust of things organised by adults) didn’t prove much of a match for our girlish human nature. As the hour passed that stood between break-time and lunchtime, it seemed it wasn’t only us that had had a major change of heart. By the time Juli and I turned up at the gym, we found ourselves in the midst of a heaving mass of girlhood, by turns giggling and strutting and giggling some more.

It seemed that despite our refusals to have anything to do with it, almost every girl in the fifth form had suddenly changed her mind. Someone even mentioned the Pirelli calendar.

This wasn’t exactly New York fashion week, but there was a real sense of anxious anticipation as the three women from Dorothy Perkins, who up until now had been observing the preening teens with a stern and slightly jaundiced eye, gathered the mob into three separate groups. Under their critical gaze, we were directed to walk a single length of the gym floor.

When my own turn came it was with less surprise than I might have felt, given my earlier pronouncements, that I found myself 110 per cent committed to being a tart and a poser. Whatever it took, so be it. Besides, I was really enjoying myself. I strutted my stuff, head up, shoulders back (as I’d read somewhere), willing the woman to notice my height and my grace, and desperate to hear that magical ‘yes’.

But my moment of glory was short-lived. Even before I’d fully had time to assimilate the long-term potential of my new status as catwalk beauty (being spotted, getting famous, lying on tropical beaches, sipping cocktails with umbrellas in, being swept away by Paul Michael Glaser and so on) I was the recipient of a sharp poke in the arm.

One of the shorter (and unchosen) girls glared up at me. ‘You were always going to get in, Bowen,’ she hissed. She nodded towards Juli, who’d also been picked. ‘You and her. Any lanky bitch was bound to. And you know something else? You’re going to look a right prat.’

Prat or not, I was delighted. No amount of bitching or barracking or bile could take the shine off the thrill of that day.

Next up, of course, we were to be ‘styled and sized’, both novel concepts in themselves. Not that I was a stranger to fashion and make-up. Though my wardrobe consisted mostly of T-shirts and jeans (I grudgingly owned two skirts only because they were a part of my school uniform), I loved make-up just as much as any other fifteen-year-old, and considered my unruly mop of curls to be a blank canvas on which to experiment with all the cheap hair-colouring products of the day. I’d been dark, I’d been fair, I’d been every shade of red, and was currently posing as a sultry chestnut brunette. Perhaps highlights? I knew I would have to consult Juli. She might have tired of her current strawberry blonde locks, and it was important that the two of us didn’t clash.

Dorothy Perkins being one of the trendier names on the high street, we didn’t harbour too many worries about what they’d be kitting us out in. Despite their constant edict that it was the clothes and not our excitable selves we’d be exhibiting, we knew better. It was us in the clothes that would make all the difference, so every one of us embraced the role of self-regarding prima donna with the sort of commitment almost never seen in class.

The night of the show itself was unforgettable; I would like to have added ‘for all the obvious reasons’, but it rapidly became clear that modelling, though not quite rocket science, did require a degree of poise and expertise. So it was that the most memorable aspects of the show involved strangulation by feather boa (it was said for months afterwards that the poor girl’s eyes bulged so much that the whites of them could be seen from the back of the hall); near disaster by necklace (stray beads were still being found in corners of the school hall for months afterwards, and on the night the only solace was that she didn’t take out the headmistress with a flying tackle); and finally, near choking by baby-doll nightdress, my own contribution to the evening.

This last was also an early lesson in the idiom that less can be more. In my element, clothed in a red satin baby-doll nightdress and skimpy knickers, I swept down the catwalk amid some gratifying whistling, and, avoiding the eyes of my parents (they were both purple), I paused for my twirl at the end of the runway as I’d been instructed during rehearsals. It was at exactly that moment when a man in the front row took a bite from a bar of chocolate and it seemed that the proximity of my thinly veiled derrière brought on a violent bout of choking. He eventually received assistance from a fellow audience member and the panic in the hall quietened down.

I don’t know to this day if the two were connected, but at the time I was quite sure they were. ‘Fancy that,’ I remember thinking as I shimmied back up the catwalk. ‘My bum nearly killed someone. Fame at last!’

But my fame was to be as short-lived as it was glorious. The intervening three months might as well have been a lifetime. Mum fixed the photo to my locker, as she’d suggested, and it wasn’t long before it was spotted by one of the nurses. She pointed at the picture. ‘Was that you?’ she asked. It was all I could do not to contravene my own rule and break down at the import of her words. Not ‘is’ me, but ‘was’ me. A person no longer here. Not the biggest distinction, but one that cruelly, however unintentionally spoken, addressed the stark reality of what I’d become. I was still me, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?

The routine at Rookwood would soon become familiar, but for the first few anguished days I felt adrift and alone. From the moment my parents first arrived on the ward to join me, I was aware that all too soon they would have to leave me again, that they were no longer fifteen minutes but a whole hour away, and that I would have to get used to being without them every night, and instead, in the company of strangers.

And not just any strangers. The staff at Rookwood were different; to my ear, they ‘talked funny’. With my lack of years and travel I’d never heard a Cardiff accent before.

After Liz left to go back to Neath, two auxiliary nurses arrived to carry out their usual routine. It might be doing them a disservice, given my traumatised state, but to this day I don’t recall them introducing themselves to me, much less engaging me in conversation about what they had to do. I felt like an outsider—a new kid at school; only, generally, at school, all the new kids start together, so you have, at least, comrades with whom to share your disorientation. As for Mum and Dad, they were all at sea as well. They’d both lived through the horror of a world war, yet Rookwood still managed to terrify them.

Ward Six—my ward—held little in the way of hopeful allegiances. There was no one close to my age in the female section when I arrived, and none in the male section either. I imagined this must be a little like prison, though in prison at least the convicts got to move around a bit. I was imprisoned by my body and without control over any single aspect of my life. It felt less that I was spending further time in another hospital and more that I had actually started what was to be the rest of a life spent in captivity. I couldn’t seem to get past the notion that even when I’d finally made it out of bed, I’d still be confined to this urine-stinking hell-hole; the only difference was that I’d now be in a wheelchair and could haunt the place much as that woman I’d seen staring, unseeing, at a brick wall when I’d arrived. I knew I would have to learn to cope with things minute my minute, but didn’t have the first idea how.

The minutes passed, even so, and within the first twenty-four hours it became obvious that meals at Rookwood weren’t going to be a highlight. There was choice, certainly, but that choice never seemed to vary. It was invariably Spam (or a Spam-lookalike) accompanied by limp salad, or one of two varieties of stew. The latter was either brown with unidentifiable lumps or white with unidentifiable lumps; not remotely haute-cuisine, not even meals-on-wheels; the inmates, appropriately, as I soon came to learn, labelled it ‘muck on a truck’.

But the food did at least have one thing going for it. It was so vile, I found it hard to eat. This was a circumstance that was to bring me a small but definite crumb of comfort. A week or so into my relocation, I received a visit from John, the guy I’d secretly carried a torch for, the guy who’d made it clear he felt the same. I had mixed feelings about seeing him again. On the one hand seeing anyone was a welcome relief. I’d refused to see Aldo at Neath General, and I felt ambivalent about agreeing to see John now. All attempts made at physical normality at Neath (the hairdressing sessions, the carefully applied make-up) seemed almost nonsensical in this desolate place.

My body didn’t feel like my own any more, in either a physical or emotional sense. Though it was so much more than simply a reaction to the unwittingly ill-judged comment of one nurse, the idea took hold and wouldn’t go away. She’d been right; the ‘me’ to whom she’d referred no longer existed. The ‘me’ who lay inert on a bed in Ward Six was a different animal entirely. The young girl who had had to have her clothes cut off her body for surgery had now become someone who needed her clothes cut up to put on her, to make the dressing process easier. A small thing—an eminently practical thing, obviously—but one that seemed a metaphor for everything I’d lost.

And also gained. I didn’t get many opportunities to see myself as I now was, but the business of dressing and undressing afforded depressing glimpses of how much things had changed. I’d always had as many self-esteem issues as the next girl—maybe more—but one thing about which I’d always been proud was my svelte stomach, which was concave. Less than a month after the accident and it was no more. Looking down, lying down, it had been replaced by a hillock. A hillock that made me look several months pregnant, the legacy of a body that no longer moved and muscles that were no longer toned. It was this aspect to which John (understandably stuck for small talk) alluded as soon as he arrived. As memorable comments go, his was a gem—one I knew even as he spoke that I’d never forget.

‘Where,’ he asked, ‘has your flat stomach gone?’

It was an inauspicious start to an inauspicious visit. Our conversation limped on, increasingly pointless and depressing, and he never came to visit again.

If my few visitors (and they were indeed few; travelling by public transport from Port Talbot to Llandaff was complex and expensive) were a welcome respite from the relentless tedium that made up the days, the nights were anything but. I’d never been to one, but I felt sure that if Ward Six at night time were in need of description then the tag ‘fish-market’ would suit it very well. And that wasn’t just because of the all-pervasive odour. The noise and activity simply never seemed to stop; it was cacophony central every night.

Much of this was only to be expected. Unable to move ourselves, we had to be turned and attended to regularly, but unlike Neath, where I was seen to quietly, calmly and with consideration for sleeping patients, it seemed that in here noise simply didn’t matter. Although the nursing station was well away at the far end of the male section of the ward, I could still hear everything they did. And if, by some miracle, the noise generated by loud conversations, doors banging and what sounded like a banquet’s-worth of clattering crockery failed to keep me awake, there was also the continual problem of us. As spinal patients, none of us—ridiculously—were able to reach our call buttons (day or night) because they were positioned out of reach on the wall behind our beds. We had no choice, therefore, but to shout for attention. And then, of course, at each other, for having been woken up.

Such sleep as I did get in the early days at Rookwood was visited by dreams, good and bad. Then, as is still the case now, I often dreamed I was walking. Better still, I sometimes dreamed I was flying: over green fields, blue rivers and lakes and mountains in bright sunshine, swooping up and down on the currents of air. I’d feel so free I would hate waking up. But then, also as now, most of my dreams were nightmares; the anxious awareness of footsteps behind me, a malevolent presence I could never identify, and the fear of being unable to run away. The worst nightmare of all, though, was waking every morning, seeing the ward and having to face my situation again.

But however the machinations of my unconscious mind might have helped or hindered the process of coming to terms, nothing was to have as much impact in those early days as what I was soon to start seeing around me.

Up until now, I’d been cocooned in my own little bubble of perfect, unique misery, but Rookwood was soon to remind me that I wasn’t the only one to whom fate had been cruel, that there were people who were worse off than me. About six weeks after my own admission, another road traffic victim was admitted. She was nineteen and had also been knocked off a motorbike, sustaining head and neck injuries. Consequently, she couldn’t speak, and though she could move her arms and legs, those movements were spastic and uncontrolled.

Like me, Bridget had a ‘before’ picture on her locker, one of a staggeringly beautiful young woman, with long black curls that fell almost to her waist. Much as the contrast in my own situation hurt me, it was as nothing to hers. Her face was now horribly contorted and dribbling, and the glossy curls had all been cropped. What was worse, to my mind, was that her mother had a mirror and seemed constantly to feel the need to show her the state of her appearance—to this day I have no idea why.

It wasn’t just looks that mattered either. One of my most enduring memories of that time was the boy across the ward who had lost the use of both his arms and his legs, so didn’t even have the luxury of two functioning limbs.

One day, he asked my mother if she would scratch his nose for him and this upset her so much that, once she’d done so, she had to leave the ward in a hurry so that he wouldn’t see her tears. The memory today still brings a lump to her throat.

Slowly, then, I began to take stock and take heart. There was really so much that I could do for myself; my situation could be so much worse. In comparison with these people I was lucky. Me? Lucky? How could I possibly feel that? I didn’t know, I didn’t care, I was simply grateful that I did.

I just hoped the feeling wouldn’t go away.