The Woodcutter

You make a few more rusty hinge noises and Dr Jekyll demonstrates that the tens of thousands spent on his training have not been altogether misused by saying, ‘Nurse, I think he needs some water.’

He presses a button that raises the top half of the bed up to an angle of forty-five degrees. For a moment the change of viewpoint is vertiginous and you feel like you’re about to tumble off the edge of a cliff.

Then your head clears and the nurse puts a beaker of water to your lips.

‘Careful,’ says Jekyll. ‘Not too much.’

Bastard! He’s probably one of those mean gits who put optics on spirit bottles so they know exactly how much booze they’re giving their dinner guests.

When at last you get enough liquid down your throat to ease your clogged vocal cords, you don’t try to speak straight away. First you need a body check.

You try to waggle fingers and toes and feel pleased to get a reaction. But that means nothing. You’ve read about people still having pain from a limb that was amputated years ago. With a great effort you raise your head to get a one-eyed view of your arms.

First the left. That looks fine. Then the right. Something wrong there. You’re sure you used to have more than two fingers. But a man can get by on two fingers. Missing toes would be more problematical.

You say, ‘Feet.’

Jekyll looks blank but the nurse catches on quickly.

‘He wants to see his feet,’ she says.

Jekyll still looks puzzled. Perhaps he had a hangover when they did feet on his course. But the nurse slowly draws back the sheet and reveals your lower body.

The Boy David it isn’t, but at least everything seems to be there even if your left leg does look like it’s been badly assembled by a sculptor who felt that Giacometti was a bit too profligate with his materials. There’s a tube coming out of your cock and someone’s been shaving your pubic hair. So far as you can see, your scrotum’s still intact.

You try for something a little more complicated than wiggling your toes but an attempt to bend your knees produces nothing more than a slow twitch and you give up.

You say, ‘Mirror.’

Nurse and doctor exchange glances over your body.

They’re both wearing name tags. The nurse is called Jane Duggan.

The doctor claims to be Jacklin, not Jekyll. A misprint, you decide.

Jekyll shrugs as if to say he doesn’t care one way or the other, mirrors are a nurse thing.

Nurse Duggan leaves the room. Jekyll takes your pulse and does a couple of other doctorly things you’re too weak to stop him from doing. Then Jane comes back in carrying a small shaving mirror.

She holds it up before your face.

You look into it and observer and experiencer unite in a memory of what you used to look like.

You never were classically handsome; more an out-of-doors, rough-hewn type.

Rough-hewn falls a long way short now. You look as if you’ve been worked over by a drunken chain-saw operator.

Where your right eye used to be is a hollow you could sink a long putt in.

Out of your left eye something liquid is oozing.

You realize you are starting to cry.

You say, ‘Fuck off.’

And to give Nurse Duggan and Dr Jekyll their due, off they fuck.

ii

It turns out you have been in a coma for nearly nine months.

During the next nine you come to regard that as a blessed state.

There is some good news. You’ve slept through another lousy winter.

Your memories are as fragmented as your body. You’ve little recall of the accident, but someone must have described it in detail for later you know exactly what happened.

It seems you’d been very unlucky.

Normally in the middle of the day Central London traffic proceeds at a crawl. Occasionally, however, there occur sudden pockets of space, stretches of open road extending for as much as a hundred metres. Most drivers respond by standing on the accelerator in their eagerness to reconnect with the back of the crawl.

You’d emerged in the middle of one of these pockets. The bus had lumbered up to close on thirty miles an hour. You were flung through the air diagonally on to the bonnet of an oncoming Range Rover whose superior acceleration had got him up to near sixty. From there you bounced on to a table set on the pavement outside a coffee shop, and from there through the shop’s plate-glass window.

By this time your body was in such a mess that it wasn’t till they got you into an ambulance that someone noticed there was a coffee spoon sticking out of your right eye.

Both your legs were fractured, the left one in several places. You also broke your left arm, your collarbone, your pelvis and most of your ribs. You suffered severe head trauma and fractured your skull. And you’d left half of your right hand somewhere in the coffee shop, but unfortunately no one handed it in to Lost Property.

As for your internal organs, you get the impression the medics crossed their fingers and hoped.

Not that it can seem to have mattered all that much. Until you opened your eye, the smart prognosis was that sooner or later you’d have to be switched off.

At first you have almost as little concept of the passage of time as in your coma. You exist in a no-man’s land between waking and sleeping, and the pain of treatment and the pain of dreams merge indistinguishably. Brief intervals of lucidity are occupied with trying to come to terms with your physical state. You are totally self-centred with your mental faculties so fragmented that information comes in fluorescent flashes, making it impossible to distinguish between memory and nightmare. So you do what non-nerds do when a computer goes on the blink: you switch off and hope it will have put itself right by the time you switch on again.

But though you have no sense of progress, progress there must be for eventually in one of the lucid intervals you find that you’re certain you have a wife and family.

But no one comes visiting. Your room is not bedecked with get-well cards, you receive no bouquets of flowers or bottles of bubbly to mark your return to life. Perhaps the nursing staff are hoarding them, is your last lucid thought before drifting off into no-man’s land once more.

Next time you awake, you have a visitor. Or a vision.

He stands at the end of your bed, a fleshy little man wearing a beach shirt with the kind of pattern you make on the wall after a bad chicken tikka. You think you recognize his sun-reddened face but no name goes with it.

He doesn’t speak, just stands there looking at you.

You close your eye for a second. Or a minute. Or longer.

When you open it again, he’s gone.

But the space he occupied, in reality or in your mind, retains an after-image.