Free Cedilla by Adam Mars-Jones Page A

a hospital, knowing that I would wake up feeling like a piece of playground equipment that has been methodically vandalised by people who should know better, trained health-service professionals. Grown-ups. Perhaps this time the anæsthetist would get in on the act. Let everyone have a go, the porter, the lady from the canteen, the whole bang lot. Last one on John’s hip’s a sissy.
    Only one thing made me submit to a second assault, and it wasn’t actually reverence for Ansell. I had gone against her in the past, when she had devised walking aids for me that I refused outright, and I could do it again. But until the second hip was done I wouldn’t be able to adopt anything close to a conventional sitting posture. I wasn’t worried about taking tea with the Queen. I would rely on her, when the time came, to put me at my ease – isn’t that her job? But with two working hips, even in the event that one worked less well than the other – as I so confidently anticipated – learning to drive came a lot nearer. Still a long shot but not a flat impossibility.
    I quite see the comedy of someone who had always resisted mechanistic accounts of the universe deciding that his life wasn’t complete without a car. On the other hand, if I didn’t grab the steering wheel with both hands, the joke would be on me for all time. I’d never be able to take charge of my own life. If I didn’t make it to the driver’s seat then I would never be more than a passenger, dependent on thegood will of others. A finite quality, as I had already understood. The people who looked after me had limited stocks of patience, and for all I knew they were more forbearing than most. I had never experienced what it was to carry a burden – and that was the whole point. My only experience of burdens was of being one, and I couldn’t claim to have unlimited patience either, in that rôle.
Yod Hé Vau Hé!
    By the time I returned to Wexham Park for my second dose of agony I was armed with new expletives. I didn’t want to amuse the staff with amateur swearing a second time. When the pain came I would try, however distressed and disoriented, to invoke the symbolic tetrad as explained in The Tarot , represented in the Mysteries of Memphis and Thebes by the four aspects of the sphinx (man, eagle, lion, bull) and also by the four elements. I planned to cry out Yod Hé Vau Hé , visualising the seductive shapes of the Hebrew letters in the book. I practised writing them out on the backs of envelopes and leaving them round, just to show that doctors didn’t have a monopoly on mysterious scribblings. I too could play that game.
    I left The Tarot conspicuous by my bedside when Mr Arden the surgeon came to give me his pre-operative briefing. This was a pep talk which didn’t leave me with much pep, now that we both knew the flintiness of the material that was waiting for him beneath the veneer of skin. I remember him saying, ‘Orthopædics is a fairly brutal business.’ He was apologising in advance. He promised he would use the saw wherever he could, and only break what he must of my concrete hip. If he noticed the book he didn’t say anything. This was rather disappointing, but it’s the sad fact that high professional accomplishment doesn’t necessarily broaden the mind. The Top Man in Granny’s sense, someone who had soared so high in his medical specialty that he had transcended Dr and become mere Mr again, could still be almost mediocre, viewed in his other aspects. No doubt there were times in my teens when I was downright snooty. I was working very hard to feel superior to the man who planned to crack open one of my hips for the second time.
    The pre-operative ritual had changed by the time of my secondhip-cracking. It was no longer necessary, apparently, to shave my groin ahead of time.
    There was no explanation given. By then I should have realised that explanations were not available on the National Health. It seemed a bit odd, all the same.