All the Rage

Knocked

HIS EARLIEST ADULT experience — he wakes up in a hospital wearing stiff clothes, cold clothes. Also there is a some kind of mistake in his head. He is not alarmed, the boy, only puzzles in the cloth- and sour-tasting darkness of the ward until he knows it is a ward and that something has gone wrong and put him here.

‘Nurse?’

The boy does not say this. He would never have thought to call a nurse: his character is undemanding and, besides, he cannot imagine needing anything beyond perhaps an explanation for the maritime rush which is catching at his ears and this dizzy, laden weakness of his thinking.

‘Nurse?’

It is this word that woke him, he believes — its repetition. First word of his alternate life.

‘Nurse?’

Footfalls consent to be summoned and close on him, as fast as irritation — heel-thumps before toe-thumps and a squeak each time they argue with the floor.

The nurse’s shape halts three beds down from the boy and interrupts the glimmers of a window in a way that seems peculiarly shocking.

‘What do you want, then?’

She is nothing like the boy’s mother, has a voice which is entirely strange to him, and sharpened — it sews through the air, passes over him, then on. He hears it ting against the farthest wall.

‘Well?’

‘Can I have a glass of water?’ The melody of the question is indecisive, apologetic.

‘No.’

And the nurse-shape begins to leave again, even more quickly, while the boy wonders if the other child, the thirsty one — who sounds like a boy, too — will maybe die soon from a lack of water. Water does seem such a plain and reasonable requirement that only some fatal intention would allow it to be denied.

Lying still and heavier than he has ever been, the boy recoils very slightly within his unfamiliar pyjamas. He believes, almost at once, that these are part of the belongings of some previous small patient who has died while on the ward, odds and ends reused for the benefit of others and no further trace remaining. There are numerous, uncountably numerous, places where the boy’s skin is being touched by the dead-boy cloth. The jacket cuffs nuzzle clammily against his wrists. It is very likely his arse is where a dead-boy’s arse has been, and moreover his parts which are meant to be secret are comfortably settled in these trousers, perhaps because this is how the dead-boy’s used to rest. His mickey where another mickey was. A smoky rush seems to rummage across him as he considers this and his left hand sneaks beneath the covers to make sure of himself and feel that all is well.

The hand seems slower and more clever than it used to be.

‘Nurse?’ The boy tries his own mouth with the word and it emerges much as he’d expected.

‘Yes.’ She has paused because he has spoken and this makes him proud, but wary of coming responsibilities. ‘Yes, what do you want?’

‘Can I have a glass of water?’ He isn’t thirsty, only curious.

‘Yes.’

And the water is brought to him, shining with guilt, and set between his palms when he has raised himself through a wavering and thickened space. The boy holds his drink with monumental care — has to concentrate on gripping, as if he might soon forget how. He clings to the smoothness of the glass, to someone else’s want, sips and swallows loudly and with a kind of grin.

‘Why does my head hurt?’ Because it does — the left side of his skull and even his cheek are singing with a weird, dark awareness, something exhilarating.

‘A horse trod on you.’

This seems not unlikely.

He tucks the water inside himself, understands it is coiled now in a blue shape that perhaps half-fills him. ‘Thank you.’ He is polite. His father and mother would expect that of him. Then he slides back down to be flat, the water lapping and giggling as he moves.

A horse.

Yes.

There were horses.

There were lessons with horses to make the boy confident and able to sit up straight, a commanding presence in later life. A premeditated Christmas present which had started in January: ten o’clock on Saturday mornings, an hour with himself and various older, wilier boys in a wide, high barn — peaty and sawdusty stuff underfoot and everywhere alive with a humid and dangerous reek. Frost beyond the walls, but the boy hot, the boy feverish with horses.

They were large in the manner of trees — a threat of falling about them, of terrible damages waiting in the hollow-sounding jaws and the long bones of their faces, the fierce, unsettled gouging of their hooves. They were big machinery with sudden blares of unpredictable intention, eyes that could not be relied upon. Hoisted and struggled up on to the leather-creak and sway of their backs, the boy was too astonished to recall what he ought to do with his hands, his heels, his spine, his legs, his courage and his common sense. These were things that he could not cling to, that he lost in the massive breathing of every animal.

At eleven-fifteen on Saturday mornings he would sit in the back of his parents’ car, being taken home, and he would smell of animals and improperly hidden fear. He would experimentally consider that his pain tomorrow — there always was pain the day after — might be easier if he had been beaten, that his bruises would be less shaming then.

No one has, in fact, beaten the boy at any time — although his mother did once hit him hard across the face and he does not know why. His father was already crying when this happened and the boy believes the crying was ready and prepared for him, his jolted mouth, the idea that he might be knocked into sense, into being a proper and undisappointing boy. The incident made him feel briefly and overly close to both his parents. Of course, he has often read stories where English boys are flogged in vast and incomprehensible schools and there are no parents — he sees it as wicked that he treasures these scenarios, prefers them to his current reality.

The boy holds thoughts he cannot name, he hates and wants and wants and hates his endless failures and the yelling instructor in the barn and the better riders’ indolent disgust. On the drives home his parts which are meant to be secret will occasionally flinch and tease and he will form blurred wishes to be simplified, destroyed and built up better again from nowhere.

When his mother and father ask him if he enjoys his riding lessons, he tells them, ‘Yes.’

Although today — yesterday — the boy is pleasantly unsure of when — he was saved from having to tell his parents anything.

This is how you get to be alone in hospital.

A horse.

It was called Crombie and was yellowish and had a famously bad temper. It had known he was afraid.

That morning they were strung and circled outside in a field — no more barn, because this was meant to be the spring — March — but the ground was stiff again, ice layers cracking over empty ruts and slush where the sunlight was lying. Crombie didn’t like the cold. Crombie strayed and head-shook and his beast-mind turned, the boy could taste it, towards racing and hurts. The boy was in a slithery panic before the horse’s hooves ever dug in hard, or the charge ever started, the bolt.

No one had told the boy how to stop a bolting horse.

Some shouting, somebody loomed alongside him, reaching for the reins, but this drove Crombie faster and out on to tarmac, out to a road, out into a blind-white pitching sky, lashing breath, gripping, sweating and the small decision, and then much larger, that the boy should let go, must be over with this and drop.

Head injury.

In what is still the boy’s favourite legend a man fell from a ladder and was given a head injury, and when he woke he could see to the future and find whatever anybody needed.

This made him famous.

He was called Peter.

Which is the boy’s name.

Head injury.

The man was Dutch — being from Holland means you’re Dutch.

Which is confusing.

Dutch sounds like Scotch, but Scotch is a drink and Scottish is a person, so the boy is not Scotch — the boy’s mother and father are quite sure about that. They are thoroughly Scottish in every way.

If he says he is Scotch he will be wrong.

If he laughs too out-loud he will be wrong.

If he spoons his soup towards himself he will be wrong.

It would be equally wrong for the boy to keep a hard want burning at his heart, a need to draw in calamity and knocks.

He does it anyway.

And now he has a head injury of his own. He holds it like a smile poured in under his hair.

The boy pictures his brain as newly alert and changed to a glistening mass, a larger cousin of the oyster his grandfather made him eat last summer — told him it was living, that it would forage and thrive beneath his skin and scour him out into a better health. He is sure the accident has roused his oyster-mind and that it is currently flexing, searching forward with an appetite he admires. He hopes it has decided to look for his future, to bring it back and show him the ways it could be.

The boy is not alarmed when some kind of effort, some kind of striving, presses his eyelids unstoppably shut and sets the night running and swinging and plunging him to sleep. He leaves himself and travels.

He remembers — dreams and remembers — the other time he saw his father cry. His daddy had been singing: head back and the words there, red and wet in the mouth and, at the end of them, a weeping.

The boy’s manhood and contentment, he feels, will be built in evenings when he is grown and sings, and there are men about him and hugs which cuff his skull and magnificent griefs, such marvellous injuries to shape him and let him rage. These will be hurts he can be proud of, historic and honourable.

Then he pictures his mother’s table, her dining-room table on which he must not ever lean his elbows during meals. It shines oddly, ripples and draws his attention to stand beside it and peer down. Laid out along the mahogany he sees his older body, naked and washed. The boy studies his wish to be solid, short-bearded, complete, and to have impressive arms with one tattoo — a little flag with writing underneath it, which he cannot read, but realises is important. His parts which are meant to be secret remain as he knows them — a little boy’s mickey, always — and then fade — goodbye mickey. Somehow, he spills away.

It seems a proper punishment that when his parts are gone they haunt him more than ever. They sting.

And the boy then sees himself opened like a book while hands dig out the truth of him, work wrist-deep, and find a rifle and a chanter, the shine of a plough, forgetfulness twice-distilled, broom flowers and roses, a lobster upended and balanced on its claws, a woman’s hair dragged from its scalp and thick as jute, a righteous and clever tawse, a burning rivet and a burning brand and a burning cross and a burning word, a collar the colour of blood, a whale bone carved with a ship and on the ship a man who travels, who will scour the world, burn it, bleed it, thieve it out and suffer as he steps, heavy and mad as horses, and held in his hand is a heart, a sleeping heart, a hunted heart, a slave heart, a heart like a hole through to nowhere that he lifts above his head.

He waves to the boy and the boy waves back.

This waving troubles the boy — it shivers him and makes him rock.

‘Hold still.’

He is seasick as he rises up into the ward, turns conscious, hears the tiny panting of the pressure cuff as it inflates. His arm is throbbing and troubles him.

‘I said hold still. You can do that, can’t you?’ The nurse, another nurse, whispering. ‘You’re a big boy. Can’t you do what you’re told?’

This will be a predictable element of his recovery. Every three hours, night and day, someone will come to measure the condition of his blood, put the chill of a thermometer under his tongue.

‘Don’t bite it.’

For the boy this will be wearying and unheroic.

Tomorrow afternoon his mother will arrive and sit next to his bed with a new copy of The Beano and The Dandy and, in a paper bag, the Oor Wullie annual he was not allowed for Christmas, because it is full of rough talk and ways in which nobody decent should behave. His father will not visit, but will sit in the parked car outside and listen to football reports on the radio — this will be because the smell of hospitals makes him sick. He will send his best. If he knew about the Oor Wullie annual then he would not.

The boy will take his comics and his mother’s kiss on his forehead and on the one of his cheeks that is nearest to her. He will think he doesn’t want to read, because he suspects reading might be difficult, but he won’t say that, for fear of being rude. He will not know what to do when he sees that she is very sad about him, and so he will pretend that his head hurts more than it does and she will nod a lot and put a bottle of Lucozade wrapped in crinkling yellow stuff on the bedside cabinet which is his while he is here and then she will stand up and he will suddenly regret that she is leaving.

Once he is alone he will still have the scent of her against his skin. And he will catch the only true hint he’ll ever get from his future — that there will be times when that exact perfume strikes him, makes him open like a book and ask to be hurt by strangers until he cannot think. This doesn’t unsettle him, is merely strange. He assumes it is the first of many insights and, sitting up in bed — little boy, little mickey — he is happy. The crack to his skull has left him brilliant with wishes, unsteadied by apparently too many opening paths towards glories. He has been thoroughly punished in advance and this means that his powers will be remarkable.