Free Beyond the High Blue Air by Lu Spinney Page A

especially to see Miles. There is barrier nursing on Intensive Care Units; everybody, staff included, must wear plastic aprons and rubber gloves when handling the patients but this doctor does not. Are you the mother? she says to me. Yes, I reply. I am going to examine your son, she tells me and then asks the nurse with a hint of exasperation to pass her the small torch that is quite easily within her reach. Pushing back Miles’s eyelids in turn she shines the torch close up to see whether his pupils contract with the light and then hands it back to the nurse with a grimace: hopeless, it implies.
    I watch her as she continues her examination. Miles is still in a coma after six weeks, he is evidently severely brain-damaged, what is the point of her or him being here – she makes this all very clear. Then, looking at me directly for the first time, she says, I’m afraid I don’t think it’s worth sending him to the Acute Brain Injury Unit at Queen Square. I think he should just go straight to Putney. Perhaps she meant to use the word appropriate instead of worth, but worth just slipped out. Nothing else is said; she leaves the room.
    Putney: I know the hospital. Formerly The Royal Hospital for Incurables – a large billboard at the side of the road proclaimed its ominous presence on the A 3 , the route I took every time I drove Miles and Will to school in Winchester; it was a shock each time to read it. How terrible, we would say every time we passed. How chilling the name was: Hospital for Incurables. Then one day when we drove past the sign had been replaced with the grander and more politically correct Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability. I remember we talked about the change, about how words can influence attitudes, that moron and spastic and mongol are no longer usable. I can only think now of the unknown future that was crouching so mockingly, viciously, ahead of us as we drove blithely by. What else might still be waiting there?
    Before leaving I meet with the young clinical director of the ICU whom I had spoken with from Innsbruck. He had been helpful and reassuring throughout and all the arrangements for Miles’s admittance to UCH had been made by him with the expressed intention that after examination and assessment Miles would be transferred to the Acute Brain Injury Unit at Queen Square. I wonder if he has already spoken to the neurologist or to the junior doctor who saw Miles on arrival, but his assurance no longer seems as certain. I am alerted to something going on that concerns Miles and that I am not party to. But with relief I find the sensation of falling has disappeared and instead I have landed with an invigorating shock. If I’m to be at war here, I think to myself, I will fight them to the last.
    I have come home for the first time in six weeks. Inside, the house looks strangely distant, as though I am seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything is the same and not the same, it has been recalibrated by this thing that, last time I stood right here, was in the future, and now it has happened and nothing can be the same again. The house is old; it knows more of life than I do. Built in 1780 , solid and Georgian, it is a house confident of its place. How many people have come home to it, opened the familiar front door under its delicate tracery of glass fanlight and stepped into the wide hall with this same mixture of feelings? Relief to be safely home, mixed with new and terrible knowledge? Soldiers have returned here from the horror of trenches and gas; what has happened to Miles simply adds another layer to its accumulated history. Life will go on, it says. Here, for the time being, you are safe.
    There is an antique painted Vietnamese cabinet in the hall, which had been due to be delivered the day after Miles’s accident. It seems to hold a special significance, straddling the break in my life; how innocent Ron and I were when