81   He serves a three year sentence

HENRY FUCKIT'S NURSING NOTES

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Singer has had the plate removed and will be going out soon. After the anaesthetic he wept openly and painfully, causing some embarrassment to the other patients. His dark suffering eyes are red and swollen and he snivels helplessly and hopelessly like a child who does not know why he is crying.
I see Martin Singer as a refined and complex character. Each surface detail is an indication of depth and turbulence. Each clue, if followed, leads into rich confusion. He is reading modern women writers, in search of the female psyche, the essence of Woman. He is divorced. He is in group therapy. He holds a Master's degree in sociology. He reads Eastern religion. He has a new girlfriend.

Lifting an elderly woman from her bed into a chair I sensed her pleasure at feeling a man's arms holding her. She took comfort and strength from it.

I cast about for Death. Like a torchlit snail on a branch laden with pre-dawn dew. Before the advancing convulsion, extension and rotation; sweeping with that extraterrestrial helmet, antennae twitching and quivering. I sniff the air, peer into shadows, strain my ears, scan for rays and vibes. Maybe in the eyes of the other patients something lurks.

I blanch and quake with fear when I read such a description of 'schizoid existential manifestations,' the forerunners to 'the onset of psychosis.'

The self, in order to develop and sustain its identity and autonomy, and in order to be safe from the persistent threat and danger from the world, has cut itself off from direct relatedness with others, and has endeavoured to become its own object: to become, in fact, related directly only to itself. Its cardinal functions become fantasy and observation.

I am relieving in F2, Neurological.
He was attacked by 'six kaffirs' in the riots whilst working for Bantu Affairs in Gugulettu. They shot him 'through the heart.' Miraculously he didn't die but he suffered brain damage after an interruption of blood supply, and his motor control was badly impaired. Now he is a jerking, slobbering, gibbering invalid who walks with such painfully violent difficulty that he is confined to bed except for visits to the toilet.
'One shot.'
There are only four male patients, so there is even less to do than in C2. With boredom comes depression. The future looks bleak and chaotic. I find myself nervous and frightened.
Now this particular patient is twenty-five. His attractive, bouncy young wife has come to take him for a drive and I must get him down in a wheelchair. She is apparently very cheerful and bears it with surprising fortitude. They have a child.

To be able, dispassionately and with clear eyes, to draw a line below which the quality of life must not be permitted to deteriorate.

Once again excruciating boredom lays hold of me. Frustration seethes and I feel desperate for some way of escape. I have fought this sense of featureless futility. Somewhere at an indefinite time I strayed into dark realms which the subsequent years have done nothing to illuminate and make safe.

Outside Accident Unit was a strange and wondrous sight. A man was helped from an ambulance and escorted inside. From his skull a yellow handled screwdriver protruded at an angle.

Old Mr Davis will need great reserves of strength to survive this battering.
Bored nursing assistants torment him. 'For God's sake, go away! I want to be left alone!'
To his consternation he has been moved several times from one ward to another. A change of Sisters, a change in arrangements.
First he is allowed unlimited Scotch. Then it is withheld entirely.
He asks his surgeon if he might go back to his flat in Muizenberg to convalesce. This callous fool tells him, 'No, they don't want you back there, Mr Davis. You must go to Eton Convalescent Home. They don't want you.'

It is not cold but outside it is raining steadily. There are six male patients and I have little to do but think: of disappointment and travail. I become more aware of the transient and frivolous and yearn for depth and quality.

I am powerless, savouring pain and beauty, hoping to bear them with some kind of resignation.

Orderly, did I ever tell you? The cucumber, once it has been peeled, becomes the most indigestible food in the world. So they peel it.
Are you enjoying it, Mr Davis?
I don't seem to be able to digest it. Oh God.

Davis: God, can't they give me a shot of pentathol or whatever it is? The Barnards said they would both prefer to be put out of their misery if they found they were suffering from an incurable disease. There's nothing worse than this damned emphysema. God, I can't take this any more. I'd rather be dead.

Nurse: Come on, Mr Davis. It's time for your nine o'clock smile. You've got to smile once every hour.
He coldly ignores her.
Thank you, Orderly. You're very good.
Yes, the orderly's a very nice chap. He's very good with old ladies too.

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and are spent without hope.
For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow.
A land of darkness, as darkness itself and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.

A shave in B1, Surgical - a stump gone rotten. The sweet stench is heavy and mixes thickly with the mucous in my nostrils and at the back of my throat. There is hatred in the old man's eyes.

Mr Davis is worried about his bowels.
'God, it's uncomfortable! Some of the time it feels as if it's worked, and some of the time it's only half out. It feels as if it's worked. Then there's nothing. God, this is a bad place to be!'
He asks Deon Du Preez for a pink lady.
'A pink lady? Fuck, all these people want to do is shit themselves!'
'Oh, this terrible inconvenience of wanting to crap all the time. It takes the breath away.'

In the ward with Mr Davis and the cheerfully senile Heinrich Lorenz there is an atmosphere of lunacy. Logic is reversed, the order of things is turned upside down.
'Louis, Louis, Louis!' shouts Heinrich Lorenz. No one knows who Louis is. He starts singing a hymn.
Davis calls: 'O Orderly, won't you try and get me some whisky? I'm feeling terrible. It's half in and half out. They'll just have to give me an enema. These damn bloody pink ladies are no damned good!'
Lorenz: 'Doktor! Doktor! Ven are zey going to give me notice?'
Davis: 'Senecods are the only things that work. I've been taking them for seven years. One in the morning, one at night, and it worked beautifully. Smooth, with no hard lumps and not too soft.'
Heinrich Lorenz is lying back in bed, his hands behind his head, stark naked, the sheets thrown off.
'Doktor, ze machinery is vorking.' Piss spurts up from his old cock like mineral water from a hot spring in the desert. 'You know, I've not vonce noticed zat I've been taken outside. And it's all on your authority, not zo? I'm not underestimating you.' He nods to the empty bottle next to him in the bed. 'You can empty zis bottle. I filled it up in ten minutes. Ha, ha! I'm sure you can get better entertainment from uzzers.' Farts comfortably. 'Alright. Vot percentage of error is zere in your business? Do you vont to take ze appendix out? You can start now.'
'Mr Lorenz, do you want to use the bottle?'
'No. Do you? It ze old story ze same: You can't have too many bottles.'
I expose the patient to see if he's wet.
'Vot do I look like now? Still ze same? Ha ha ha!'
'Vere's Louis, ze silly little bugger?'
'I don't know.'
'Who's under ze bed?'
'There's no one under you bed, Mr Lorenz.'
'No, no, no! Zere's somevone under my bed. Who is it?'
'I don't know. Louis.'
'Oh. Alright, leave him zere.'

'Tell me, have you seen your doktor? Today your whole face has changed completely. Your expression, your eyes, zey are completely different. Zooper phlegmatic. You should look in a mirror and you vill see how you have changed.'

Mr Davis has been taken away to Eton Convalescent Home, much against his will and in a cloud of whisky fumes and poetry.
'There's not a trace of senility in me, and I'm eighty-two.'

An artisan, he broke his leg whilst working at Sasol Two in the Transvaal. His story: Very young he was obliged to marry. They had two 'beautiful kids.' And she was a pretty girl too. There was a turnabout - he fell in love with her, she cooled off and they were divorced after four years. He went to Sasol to earn big money, living in a camp with three thousand of the roughest; drinking, fighting and whoring. A familiar story, a commonplace story, a predictable story. A story like a cheap novel for a train journey - frowsy with a bad taste so it doesn't matter you never reach the end of it.

Heinrich Lorenz coughed messily and I breathed out of the corner of my mouth away from him. In the tiniest of flashes he caught sight of repugnance. Just for a moment there was communication.

AN ORDERLY GOES
Deon Du Preez, early thirties: 'I'm telling you now, Sister, before everybody, if the cops come for me I'll go up there and I'll kill that matron. As true's God. I'll kill her. I'll go up there and, wragtig, I'll kill the bitch.'
His story: On Saturday afternoon he and his pals went to the races. A friend's wife decided to stay at home and in the course of the afternoon she heard an intruder. One of the pals, there to steal a quantity of money he knew was hidden somewhere in the house. He was horrified to find her there. Shocked, he went to the kitchen and sat down. Should he or shouldn't he kill her? Deon and company returned drunk and heard the story and a fight developed out in the street. The villain pulled a dagger and Deon hit him with a plank and they took him to the boere. Today he says he must appear in court to give evidence.
NOW - this matron lives in the same area and happened to see Deon fighting in the street outside her house and it was she who had summoned the police to break up the brawl. She doesn't go for Deon's story, that's why he wants to kill her.
Later in the morning he disappears and it is assumed that he has resigned in a temper.
'Silly boy. He's got a record and it won't be easy for him.'

Badly told? Drama of the street does not obey rules of logic. To tell a story is an imposition and a distortion.

Sunday morning music in hospital with sunlight and a cool breeze.

Dan Jones is a forty-year-old welder, a rough man with a coarse beard.
Address: Queens Hotel, Dock Road.
Next of kin: Manager, Queens Hotel, Dock Road.
He fell from a second floor window of the Queens Hotel into Dock Road, breaking ribs and both his legs. No connections, no past, no future.

Radio Five has deteriorated with the afternoon. The repertoire of one hundred pop tunes is repeated yet again, day after night after day, interspersed with the insane screaming of advertisers. If I were to listen through an afternoon of this (on my own) I would without doubt be driven beyond despair.

Mincing Fisher, the vicious homosexual orderly, leans his arms on the cotside and looks down at Mulligan, an elderly demented patient.
'Hey, just take a look at ou malletjie here. He's got one eye open and one closed. Mmm. He's really fucked in the head. Yes, I think he's said goodbye to this world a long time ago.'

Norman Steyn, 57, with rapidly advancing senile dementia, has a broken hip. I look into the blank eyes of a fish. He is unresponsive except for the rare slow grunt of an animal.

Heinrich Lorenz: 'Vy does Mae Vest vear black bloomers? Answer: In memory of all zose who have gone under. Ha, ha! Oh yes. And vy did she come to Joburg? Answer: To see Jeppe's Extension. Ha, ha, ha!'

Claude Mulligan is a burnt out drunk with a broken leg, Korsakoff and friends in attendance. Slurred speech, crazy idiot look in his blue eyes, no memory, no will - a cabbage.

'If this place is not enough to make a person mad, then I don't know. Yes. So evening is approaching. It is afternoon. This is not morning darkness.'

Just look at this goon paging back and forth through a trash magazine. Whining and moaning. He's uncomfortable. I try to lift him higher in the bed and he screams theatrically the moment a finger is laid upon him. Intense irritation floods through me and I brutally wrench him upwards, snarling, 'Fuckin' rubbish!' Then he yammers and stutters and slurs the words of heartfelt gratitude. He is despicable. He is going to write to the Argus about us wonderful people. Cringing wreck of an obsequious poes.
Lorenz has pissed in his denture mug.
'Ze pressure vos too great. No, no. Be careful!'
For an hour he has been pestering me with delusions about his car waiting outside to take him to Constantia.
Why has my patience worn so thin? Why do my answers become vicious, my manner callous, my tone filled with malice?

Steyn has a visitor, a stocky man of about thirty in the cheap smart clothes of a door to door preacher. He leans over the bed and reads from the Bible with an affected American accent, ersatz Billy Graham, grotesquely comical in the way he slurs his words and grimaces angelically. Norman Steyn stares up in blank wonderment, lost in senility.

Fisher to Mulligan: 'Have you had enough, Sir? Have you finished? Yes?'
'A guts-full? You eat like a bloody horse.'

His wife has tipped me five rand in appreciation. Protection money? She wants his ring as he is losing weight fast and she fears it might fall off. That's about all she will have. She is worried that on going back to Valkenberg he might be relieved of it. You never know.

Mulligan can't remember that the batteries in his radio are run down. Each time his eye falls upon it where it stands on the locker, he reaches out, takes it, and turns it on. He twiddles knobs for a long time until convinced that it doesn't work. Five minutes later he will repeat the performance.

Douglas is fifty-five and looks at least sixty-five. Another weak and stupid man. Having had TB he now has bronchial problems yet continues to smoke heavily. He is indignant that he should be advised to give it up. An ex-alc too, by the sound of it. His story is a garbled mess of lies and boasts too tedious to concentrate on. With an aggressive, nagging insistence he airs the ideas and opinions of a feeble bigot.

Martin Singer is back and I am jolted from my stupor. Ten minutes of talking to him and I see how starved I am of educated, cultivated, modern company. My isolation is virtually complete. All that I have is what I can glean from books and magazines. It puts me ten years behind the time.

Claude Mulligan is fast losing his ability to coordinate mind and body. Now he is unable to walk and his speech is so slurred as to be almost unintelligible. He does not know the day, month or year and often is unaware of the time, being as much as twelve hours disorientated. He forgets that he has just had lunch and says he is hungry for breakfast. His hands and head shake and his vision is impaired, as are all his judgements. When he tries to pick up an object he reaches to the side of it and has to grope. It helps if he shuts one eye.
This time he says he spent twenty years in the Post Office as a clerk.
'Why did you leave?'
'That's a personal story.'
This is no dignified resistance to an attack on his privacy. This is because he can't think fast enough. Last time he was an accountant. Then he was married with two lovely children; now he's a bachelor. Confabulation, they call it.
'Mr Mulligan.'
'Yes?'
'Have you ever been in Valkenberg?' knowing that he has spent the past three years in that institution.
'No, or course not. Why, do I look made? Ha, ha, ha.'

Dan Jones enjoys life, working hard, eating, drinking, screwing. Keeping the company of other rough men like himself. Drinking, above all. A welder by trade, he has also been a mercenary in the Congo, a fisherman, and a stuntman. Welding is a hard job and contract work is well-paid if one is prepared to be on the move, living for months on end in godforsaken parts.
There has been little choice. He found himself on a road and has followed it. He must know it will end soon when he is knifed in a bar, or shot to death in the street. Maybe he will land on his head next time he falls out of a building. He has accepted his fate and some would say this makes him a noble creature.
The 'rays' emitted in arc welding have sterilised him.
'I can still get a cockstand and fuck normal, though.'
He gets a kick out of lying naked under a sheet and casually, accidentally, exposing himself to a nurse. Explaining to a pretty young thing about what happened to his leg, lifting the cast, he talks earnestly, all the while watching her embarrassment and excitement at the revelation of his balls. Then he pretends to suddenly notice and decorously adjusts the sheets.
Tales of fighting in Joburg bars - the Broadway in the south, the Bel-Air in Braamfontein. Weekends in jail. His mates: Harry Walker, Mel Lester, Monty Labuschagne, Hennie de Klerk, Okkie Van Heerden.
'I tell you, those were good days. Those were fuckin' good days.'

It is early Sunday afternoon and very quiet. I am bored. I am apathetic.
Outside, a group of chuls is sitting on the lawn under a palm tree singing hymns and carols, a little drunkenly. Slow and mournful on the heavy afternoon air. Do you have a friend in Jesus?
A zealous official in white coat hurries out and stops them. He is unmoved by the spirit of Christmas. This is a hospital. Take it to the Lord in prayer.

How terrible this boredom. The spirit falls supine, the eyes glaze over, lifeless, the voice is flat and despondent. Despair is close at hand in this valley of evil, black bitterness towering all around. Emptiness. Death.
Laugh, you cunt.

Outside a southeaster is blowing with steadiness from off the Indian Ocean bringing clean summer air. Christmas weather with few clothes; barefoot, certainly. Blue agapanthus flowers wave under a sky equally blue.

Three years ago his leg was smashed. Three years he has spent in hospitals, on crutches, being laid up. Nine operations. This tenth is a transverse graft, an attempt to get the bone to knit.
He is a zoologist delving into cell structure.
An exuberant young man, almost hyperactive in rapid speech and frequent laughter. He is tormented by an upbringing that was suffused with hatred and metaphysical violence, his own failed marriage, experiences in the Rhodesian civil war, financial difficulties, and now a crippled leg.
'I have learned some patience. And empathy with the sick.'

I cannot say I feel transported by a spirit of festive joy.

Jacob Niemand is about thirty-five. He loosely describes his occupation as 'operator.' He was married for eight years and has been divorced for a year. The marriage produced a daughter, now 'about seven.' He had a good job at Witbank but after some three years trouble started. There was interference from the in-laws. The mother and aunts were always calling to cook, bring food, clothes. The father would even come on the weekend to cut the lawn and work in the garden - as if he wasn't capable of doing it himself. Then he began to drink and that caused more strife. His wife took to the bottle too. He began to chop and change jobs and drink even more heavily. After the divorce he became shiftless, working for short periods and then roaming the country.
'I would buy a train ticket to Durban, jol around there for a few days and say, Ag, nooit! and buy a ticket for East London. There a short time and, Ag, nooit! a ticket for PE.'
This time he was in Cape Town with a canvas tog bag and the clothes he wore and maybe ninety rand. At nine o'clock in the morning he was still drunk from the night before. As soon as the bottle store opened he bought a shot and went to the Gardens to drink. It was there that he was attacked, beaten up, robbed of bag, money, jacket and shoes.
'I was earning four hundred rand a weak at Sasol Two. But I just spent it one time. No, just drinking. Thirty, forty rand a night. That's all there is to do. No, I haven't had one woman since I was divorced. Just booze.'
He has tried for Welfare relief in order to get back to Johannesburg.
'But they just tell me I must waai back myself and get work. They can't help. No, fuck it. I'll just have to hitch-hike.'
The last time he tried to visit his daughter there were 'too much hassles, too much grief.' First they said she wasn't there, but he knew this to be a lie. He went away and had a few drinks and when he came back they said he was drunk and couldn't see her like that.

Early there were two coon bands playing carols outside, and then later in the morning the Salvation Army came and played.
I had a couple of whiskies with Dan Jones before lunch but I feel sober and cynical instead of joyously peaceful. It seems preposterous that anyone should choose to die like that.

An eminently weak and stupid man, he proclaims his cowardice and tells stories to illustrate how badly he behaves when under pressure.
Misadventure at sea: Something went wrong and they were nearly capsized. When they managed to reach the shore he leapt from the boat, ran to his car and drove flat out for home. A neighbour calmed him and made him go back and help his fishing companion to get the boat up out of the surf.
Last night he phoned his wife to tell her the surgeons had decided that another operation was necessary. She was irritable and short with him, telling him not to keep phoning. He felt deeply wounded.
He feigns lameness in his right arm and asks me to give him a shave. Whilst I lather his face he tells me what a bitch his wife is but that he deserves her pitiless contempt. A sister walks into the ward and aggressively demands to know why he can't shave himself. He forgets about the lameness and attempts to be chummy and hearty and offhand. She detests his oily manner and the way in which he touches her arm, tries to take her hand. In trenchant terms she belittles him and upbraids him and insists that he shave himself and stop wasting the orderly's time. When she is gone his eyes are filled with tears of humiliation. A victim by vocation.

He says he has been through the mill.
Operation after operation, months of hospitalization, pain, limitations.
He is divorced. 'My two sisters are also divorced. We are unable to form proper relationships.'
The division in his family, how he left home at seventeen. The bitterness in his voice when he says he is unwilling to name 'them' as his legal next of kin.

The fat woman from De Aar has head and spine injuries. The back of her head is smashed in and she is in a semi coma. She wears a traction harness, a canvas headpiece which passes under the chin and pulls back over the ears and under the head. To it is attached a two pound weight hanging from a pulley behind her. Because it is difficult to move her she has not been washed and has the characteristic dried blood and sweat smell of the accident victim.

The woman with the fractured skull has started screaming. The cerebral cry, it is an involuntary animal wail. The inhuman quality of the sound as it echoes down the corridor has unnerved some of the patients and spoilt their appetite for lunch, which has just been served.