Touch

A voice emerged from the relentless, angry din. I realised the man was speaking to me.

“Is this seat taken?”

I hauled my rucksack off the seat to my right and stuffed it under my chair. In all honesty, I think it may have been the last available chair in that heaving hell-hole of an A&E.

“No. All yours.”

A man, vigorous, though older than me, swung a woman in a wheelchair round to face him. As he lowered himself into the plastic bucket seat, he wheeled her towards himself with a beguiling smile, as if pulling her into an embrace. Expertly, he wedged her footrests between his ankles. His legs splayed to make the position possible, and his left thigh pushed hard against my right. In other circumstances, I’d have called him a man-spreader, but the context belied that thoroughly. He looked at me questioningly, as if to say, ‘Is that okay?’ I responded with a slight nod and smile. Relieved, he returned the nod, then turned again to the woman, leaned in towards her, his face once again composed into a broad smile.

“We got a seat, Rose.”

Rose looked away.

“Thanks so much,” he said to me in a different, more conversational, tone. “Phew, it’s all go in here isn’t it.”

I thought I detected the slightest hint of a North American accent, though perhaps he’d lived here a long time. “It’s all go,” felt incongruous — a British English phrasing.  

“Oh, no problem at all,” I said, as brightly as I could. “Yeah, pretty unpleasant, isn’t it?”

He sat back and took a deep breath. Then he leaned forwards again towards the woman, putting his right hand on her knee and twisting his body towards me slightly, to effect an introduction.

“This is Rose. She’s got dementia, and she's non-verbal”

“Hi Rose.” I smiled. “I’m Wendy. How’re you doing?”

Stupid question. You idiot.  

Rose's head moved slowly towards me, perhaps in response to her name or to a new voice. With her striking, pale grey-green eyes, she cast a limpid gaze of pure hatred upon me and would not look away. I gave her another smile, but there was no mirroring in her face. Her facial muscles were rigid. Jaws clamped like steel, and her mouth firmly shut. I visualised the need for a large flathead screw-driver to lever it open to get her to eat. A brutal image.

Both wrists laying in Rose's lap were encased in plaster-casts.

My mind has a tendency to Move Directly to awful places Without Passing Go. This time it jumped, wholly irrationally, given the evidence of casts rather than bandages, to the erroneous conclusion that Rose had cut her own wrists. 

Though her expression never changed, Rose seemed baffled by the casts. She began picking at the plaster in a slow but deliberate fashion. Her nails were remarkably clean, clipped and filed into a nice oval shape. That seemed likely to be hard to achieve. There was probably a weekly ‘nails day’ in her home. I wondered vaguely if the man had any help. The man, meanwhile, had been looking around the room, trying to get his bearings, reading the signs on the various doors into treatment areas, perhaps looking for the toilet that I happened to know was hidden behind the loudly-humming vending machine. But as soon as he clocked Rose's compulsive behaviour, he leaned in again and gently put his hand over hers.

“I know. It’s horrible.” 

Not controlling, not patronising, just soothing. Achingly tender. Rose's head rotated slowly back to her left. She fixed her gaze of hatred upon him for a moment, then, rewinding the movement exactly, returned it to me, where it rested again.

My own resources were at rock-bottom. I had just moved back to the main waiting room after being somewhere in the labryinth, behind what I was wryly referring to in my head as the 'rood screen' of doors that separated the waiting room from the part of the hospital where things happen. Somewhere in there, beyond the rood screen, I'd been sitting on a chair in a corridor, on fluid drips, for six hours, having previously fainted completely out in a treatment room, and required oxygen. There had been talk of a possible blood transfusion, but that seemed not to have been progressed.  When my last drip bag had finished, I'd been spat back out into the A&E waiting room, because they needed my corridor chair and drip stand for someone who was sicker than me. I had no idea what the next steps were. At this point, I had clocked up 27 hours since arrival in A&E, with no sleep —aside from my faint —and with only occasional sandwiches and vending-machine snacks to eat. I was in intense pain. I couldn’t imagine why, and, though I kept silently verbalising positive phrases like ‘it’s fine’, ‘it’s no big deal’, ‘you’re in the right place’, ‘we’ll get this sorted,’ I was, in truth, pretty frightened.

But I wanted to talk to the man. To Rose. To be kind. To make a connection. To try to say the encouraging things that people manage to say in these horrendous situations. Problem was, I didn’t know what the words were. Faces of friends who are so good at this passed through my mind. I tried to channel their pro-social vibes and kick myself up the arse. Kindness is, after all, what we are all here for. But as it was, I was afraid that if I started, I would be trapped in a long-term conversation. Who knows how long the three of us would be sitting here. And I had zero energy. My socially avoidant, introverted internal voice was yelling at me, “FFS, don’t speak to him.” 

I raised my eyes for a moment and saw, remarkably, that Rose's gaze was still unmoved. She must have been looking at me this whole time. I met her eye, smiled, and, when there was no visible response from her, I resumed my head-in-hands position and allowed her hatred burn into the crown of my head once again.  

She was, I’d noticed, dressed in a smart breton top with coral stripes; comfortable, high-quality jeans; coral-coloured Skechers trainers (wow, a colour-scheme); and an expensive looking baseball cap. The cap, covering whisps of well-conditioned salt-and-pepper hair, sounded that subtle American note again. The man obviously took great care with Rose's appearance and dignity, I thought, with a poignant pang of emotion.

I took a sideways glance at him. Strong, handsome, silver-grey, well-groomed beard, gorgeous laughter-lines, that he twinkled frequently at her. Probably in his mid-sixties. They must have been a glamorous couple back in the day. Glamorous now, I thought, my brain chasing itself round corners as it always does. They both had a presence.

Inside her lovely fresh cottons, Rose's body was thin, rigid, and slightly hunched over. Instinctively, I tried to straighten my own back. I have a tendency to hunch myself. But I had been bent over the pain in my stomach for the last few days, and I just couldn’t maintain a straight posture. Twenty-seven hours in a chair in A&E hadn’t helped.

You and me both, Rose.

The other ruminations tying my tongue were about Rose herself. How unbearable it must be to sit trapped in your body, while your gorgeous husband chats away to people, to women, who can chat back and entertain him. You can’t signal, ‘Hey, I’m tired of this, let’s go and be on our own.’ You can’t, subtly, or even directly, request reassurance that you’re still attractive to him. You can’t even join in. I laughed inwardly at myself for projecting my own insecurities onto Rose, but at the same time, I felt the justification for her hatred, alongside the hatred itself, burning into the top of my head.

The man reached out and brushed an invisible crumb from Rose's immaculate top, and then, to my horror, turned to me and began to speak. He asked if I was okay. Whether I needed anything. I was dumbfounded. I should have been asking him that. He’d probably been unsettled by my silence.

“Ah, thanks, no I’m fine. Totally. Honestly…. It’s just a waiting game in here, isn’t it.”  

“Sure is,” he said. “They do their best, though.”

I nodded gratefully and felt slightly choked. Most people I had spoken with in the last 27 hours, like the woman sitting on my left, had directed wholly unwarranted bile towards the staff working their guts out in these intolerable conditions. Here was a kind, patient and generous person. In my life, I look for people like this. Teachers, I call them.

Behind us, two very unwell-looking, hard-bitten, sunken-cheeked, middle-aged men began shouting the odds across the waiting room. They were calling each other ‘paedo’, ‘nonce’ and ‘kiddy-fiddler’ -- giving out each other’s addresses and inviting all present to go and do the fucking necessary and slit the other one’s throat for the good of all. Evil froth coming to the top of lifetimes of marginalisation and disempowerment at the hands of drug-dealers, and a government who’d abandoned them and the places they lived.

I shivered. Their bitter phrasing and tone seem to slash directly into the pain in my stomach, and I felt every violent word deep in my over-sensitive, exhausted body.  

“It’s okay, Rose,” murmured the man, leaning in.

Rose seemed unmoved, except perhaps — was I imagining it? — for a marginally raised eyebrow.

Great response, Rose.

A nurse with a loud voice came out of one of the treatment rooms and demanded that the two men “calm down.”

“Please remember where you are’, she said with authority, “This is an Emergency Department. An A&E. Everyone here is sick and struggling.” There were mutterings of assent.

“Too right,” shouted one woman. “I’ve been here eight fucking hours! It’s not good enough! We really don’t need these gits kicking off as well.”

“Who are you calling a git, you old cunt!”

I winced.

A pair of weary looking security personnel came out from behind the rood screen, separated, and took each man aside individually. The most mobile man, who’d been pacing up and down in energetic and disconcerting fury, was taken outside. Five minutes later, a couple of young police officers were on the scene as well. Shortly after that, the furious man crashed back through back through the double-doors and spat words across the waiting room, causing me and others who’d been beginning to believe that the horrible scene was over, to jump clean out of our skins.

“I am sorry for my ‘behaviour.’  I hope I didn’t, fucking…‘upset’ anyone.”

Then he gathered up his phlegm in a loud snort and spat on the floor, turned, and marched out again.

The energy and violence with which the ‘apology’ was delivered did not match its content. I imagined that a security guard or police officer had required him to make the apology, and even supplied some of the words. It’s what parents do with children who hurt others. Demand that an apology is made. I wondered how – in both cases – with a child, or with this man – it would be possible to align the emotions with the words. Does it have some value as a strategy even if the emotions are not yet present? Or is it requiring someone to be inauthentic and therefore ineffective, if not even mildly abusive. And in this case, with an adult, is it infantilising? And why only that man? The other had been giving as good as he got.

But still – the busy waiting room was quickly returning to the general hubbub of discontented chatter, punctuated by the occasional pained moan. Sometime later, but not before several new arrivals had unknowingly walked the furious man’s spit into the waiting room, an exhausted-looking black woman with a rolling metal bucket and mop materialised. She mopped the area with her thread-bare grey mop, wrang it out into the bucket, and disappeared back through the rood screen, into the bowels of the hospital, as quickly as she had arrived.

  ‘Mrs Death’ I thought to myself, the extraordinary novel by Salena Godden vividly in my mind.

In this harrowing fantasy novel that spins out from the Grenfell Disaster, Godden personifies death, not as the dramatic, cloaked, skeletal Grim Reaper of popular imagination, but as a black woman, who, so often present, moves among us unnoticed. As Godden says, “there is no human more invisible, more easily talked over [or] ignored […] than a black woman.” 

Thus sensitised, I began forensically surveying the denizens of this waiting room. How many people here might be extremely close to death?  I cycled through anxiety, compassion, awe at the significance of what some people may be experiencing (patients and their companions), and downright fear. The proximity to the distress of others was close to overwhelming. I tried to be grateful that I wasn’t the most unwell person in the room, but the effort I was having to exert to maintain my sense of individuality – separate from this heaving collective and from the specific agonies of the other individuals around me – was immense.

When a distressed young man came in with a woman hanging in his arms like a corpse, it seemed I was actually seeing it. Death.

“What’s she’s taken?” enquired the receptionist in a matter-of-fact way. I didn’t hear the answer as the man, still clasping his cargo, twisted his body so he could lean closer to the glass and disclose privately.  

The pair were ushered swiftly through the rood screen.

I was to see the beautiful, dead, young woman a couple of hours later, walking around outside the hospital pushing her drip stand and vaping. I wondered then if I had witnessed the miracle of naloxone – the antidote to opioid overdose. But in the present moment, at the sharp end of this — to me, terrifying — hospital admission, I was realising why I appreciate being around recovery communities so much. There’s hope, joy, gratitude and empowerment in those communities. Someone like me with porous emotional boundaries thrives in those positive contexts, and struggles in their opposite. It’s a weakness that I want to work on. Being tossed around on the waves of other people’s emotions isn’t actually always all that helpful to other people. I’d like to be less porous and better able to hold my own.

The face of my little brother, who had been an A&E staff nurse, floated through my mind. He’d be thriving here in his natural environment. He’d take command, bring order to this chaos. He'd be able to help these people. He'd be able to help me. I wanted him, with such an ache of selfish grief.

I'd been talking to him in my mind since the pain had started four days ago. His voice is still there in my memory bank. Just now I could ‘hear’ him over the waiting-room noise, saying, ‘It is what it is.’ About what, I don’t know. My pain? His pain? Every. Single. Miserable. Relentless day in A&E? I curled over, sucked under another wave of physical and emotional misery.

After a while, I realised with surprise that the man next to me was trying, yet again, to talk to me. ‘He doesn’t give up, I’ll give him that,’ I thought, tearing myself from my internal hellscape to focus. It seemed he was trying to apologise for Rose's constant picking at her plaster casts.

“It must be horrible for her,” he’d said.

“Must be,”

“It’s the second time we’ve been in to get this done. The first time they did it, they didn’t set her thumbs properly, so we had to come back and get it done again.”

“Oh no! How frustrating! Did they know at the time they’d got it wrong?”  I was beginning to lower my defences and feel grateful to be pulled into someone else’s story, away from my own ruminations.

“Uh-huh,” he affirmed. “Thankfully they owned-up straight away. But it really does make it an ordeal for her. And it’s only a couple of months since she had a broken leg in a cast for six weeks. Poor Rose.”

“Gosh – she’s really been through it,” I said. “You, too,” I added, hoping that wasn’t too intrusive or personal, and painfully aware that Rose was eyeing me suspiciously.   

“Yes,” he said – his focus clearly on my first statement only. And only on Rose. “And this time was so unnecessary. I had left her sat on the bed while I raced downstairs to answer the door to a delivery guy. But stupidly (he spat the word out with a shake of his head) I hadn’t shut the bedroom door. To my shame, she got up to follow me.”

“Oh my…!” I swallowed the last word of my exclamation. Although I say it a lot, I don’t normally come close to saying ‘Oh my God’ in front of people when I don’t know if I might be stamping around on their sacred ground.

“Oh my…” I spluttered, feeling silly. “No shame!! No shame at all…!”

I wanted to say so much more, like, ‘How can you possibly feel shame? It truly wasn’t your fault. You are devoted to her. You have subordinated all your own needs to caring for her. You’re extraordinary! The best of humanity!’ 

He shook his lowered head in pain, rejecting my assessment.

“Well, she followed me, I didn’t realise. And of course, she then went tumbling headlong down the stairs and broke both her wrists.”

I could feel my right arm instinctively wanting to move to put my hand reassuringly on his left forearm. Anything to dampen the all-too-familiar misery of self-blame. I felt it as if it were my own.

I resisted any movement. “Oh gosh. I’m so sorry.”

“What a thing!” I said to Rose, attempting to include her in the conversation., uncomfortable to be talking about her when she was right there.  

Rose persisted in hating me.

As if to prove the point, and without for a second breaking eye-contact with me, she raised a plastered forearm upwards, inserted a delicate, oval forefinger fingertip fully and efficiently into a nostril and had a good dig around.

“No, love,” whispered the man, vicariously embarrassed.

Rose turned to him, finger still twisting, as if to say, ‘You let me fall down the stairs, so I’m damn well going to pick my nose whether you like it or not.’

He let out a long breath, though very quietly. Trying, it seemed, to push his despair back down deep inside. Then he collected himself and to my horror, once again, turned kindly to me.

“So, you seem to be in a lot of pain. Seriously, is there anything I can do?”

“No, no!” I tried to straighten up and look less pathetic. “I’m okay. Just a bit of internal bleeding, haha. They’re working on it. I think they’d like to get me a bed on a ward, but it’s proving tricky. I’ve been sitting here for more than 24 hours now.”

He looked shocked, visibly moved, and I could sense the muscles in his arms flicking in response to me, as mine had to him. In truth, I ached to collapse into the embrace that hung in the air between us.

‘Yeah,’ I thought, ‘But please don’t touch me. It would really cheer Rose up if her lovely husband touched me. I’d start flicking bogeys if I was her.’

“It’s fine. I’m sure it’s something quite straightforward,” I said, minimising. “And they’ve given me lots of the good stuff in a drip already.”

“Well, okay,” he said doubtfully, “But I’m happy to go rattle some cages for you if you need. You look like you need some pain-relief.”

‘Go rattle’ and ‘pain-relief’ sounded slightly American. I was so curious, but still deeply unkeen on ‘having a conversation.’ The pain was making me feel sick and faint and just persisting from minute to minute took everything I had.

“That’s kind – but seriously, I’m okay,” I said, dropping my head again, noticing on the way down that Rose was back to picking at her casts.

“Sure. But you just let me know. Or, if I can get you something to drink… or anything.”

His desperation to help shimmered around that last word, ‘anything’. I recognised that sense of needing to do something for someone – as a protest against the reality that you can’t do anything about the thing you most want to do something about. I wanted to give him the relief of helping me – but the truth was, I wasn’t up to it. The connection, the indebtedness, would cost me what I didn’t have.

“Thanks.”

He turned away from me and pulled Rose in close again, in the process pressing his thigh hard against mine once more. This time, I drank the nourishment from the physical connection with a kind man in a powerful body, feeling an unsettling combination of need and guilt.

“Hey, love. How you doing, huh?” he cooed at Rose. 

Rose did not look up. He whispered soothingly to her.

“Yes, they’re horrible, I know. I’m so, so sorry.”

He reached out and stroked her hands – once again trying to defeat her agitated picking with his tenderness. I felt his tenderness in my body, as if he were soothing me. As if there was so much tenderness that it was bubbling over Rose's hands and falling all over me. Collateral tenderness. I smiled at the words that formed in my head, and I closed my eyes, hoping to ride a wave of peace for a moment.

But it was short lived. He turned to me again.

“You know what? I really need a quick bathroom-break, and to see if I can find out how long we’ll be here. I hate to ask —I’ll be real quick— but if you were able just to keep an eye, I could do that. Would that be okay, do you think? I mean, obviously, if you’re not comfortable – that’s completely fine.”

I felt the cortisol spiking– but overrode it instantly.

“Yes, yes, of course – I can do that! We’ll be fine. You go ahead. Take your time.”

“That’s truly wonderful. Thanks so much.”

He pushed Rose away to allow him to get to his feet. I felt the sudden loss of connection with his thigh with a wholly disproportionate grief. Cold tentacles suddenly entered me via my exposed right leg and curled their way through the whole of my body.  I shivered.

“I’ll be real quick, Rose, just finding out what’s going on. Wendy’s here, okay?”

Rose looked up at him with her signature almost-imperceptibly-raised eyebrow. Why would Wendy being here be any kind of comfort? Perhaps it’s just the sounds of the words.

He stood behind the wheelchair. I thought he might be planning to pin Rose to me in the same style as he’d sat with her, so I tried to kick my rucksack further back in preparation for docking. Wondering who might be behind me, I fretted defensively about my laptop, feeling guilty for my mistrust. But he didn’t push her towards me. He wheeled her in towards the seat he’d vacated, bringing her legs in touch with the lip of the plastic chair. He stroked a hand expertly down her left shin to check he’d trapped, but not impaled, her, put the brake on, and was instantly off at pace.    

Rose and I were almost side by side, facing in opposite directions.  

“Okay, Rose?” I ventured, feeling tense.

How many times in a typical day would she have to endure hearing those words. I imagined a legitimate response. ‘No! I’m not fucking okay! So stop fucking asking me all the time! And while we’re at it, you’re doing my fucking head in with your nice smiles and your patronising fucking tone!’

She looked at me with hatred. I gulped.

“I’m here, okay? He’ll be back soon.”

I smiled weakly, feeling I was talking as if she were a child I was babysitting, and I hated the sound of it. I tried again.

“Pretty horrible in here isn’t it. And I gather you’ve been here for a while. I really hope that it’s not too much longer for you. You must be so keen to get home.”

Now I was making assumptions about how she must feel. I didn’t like that much, either.

I casted around for another attempt to connect without imposing my worldview and assumptions on her, but nothing would formulate. Should I just be straight with her, and state that in truth I was wondering how heartily sick she was of people, me included, asking if she was ‘okay’ — especially given, in the circumstances, they weren’t really asking her? It was just a Pavlovian reflex.

I often just want to be straight with people like that, though fail to follow through because it feels too risky. Real intimacy is such a hard thing to achieve. And here was someone who couldn’t reply. So, there would be no testing it out, no feeling my way and retreating or reformulating if it felt like I was getting it wrong. But, I reflected, that’s actually no different from any important, high-stakes piece of communication. If you don’t step out to the point of no return and risk vulnerability, you don’t actually communicate anything. There is no exchange. Who was the truly silent one here? Was it Rose? Or was it me. 

My sense of my own, deeply-embedded, communication difficulties — my fear, my introversion, and my own existential silences — a lifelong theme, I’ve come to realise, with an aetiology in trauma — washed over me.

I looked at Rose and didn’t know what to say. I hoped my face was communicating the apology I felt, not only for my failures, but for whatever it was that she was having to live with and had presumably been living with for some unbearable time.

Her extraordinary, other-worldly, pale grey-green eyes stared, unblinking, at me.

The lonely feeling that always comes on the heels of that all-too familiar experience of disconnection arrived, and, with it, right on cue, came another vicious belt of stomach pain. I curled over again, and this time failed to conceal a groan. My bent back ached. What in the name of hell was going on inside me? Why was I bleeding? Could I be bleeding-out inside myself? Would I just die in this chair? Was I going to faint again? It looked far from inviting – dirty and sticky – but I desperately wanted to collapse, to slide onto the floor and lie down.

A drop of liquid fell onto the knee of my black trousers. Sweat? A tear? I looked at it in abject misery. A spot of darker black in the blackness. The spot moved in and out of focus, as I tried not to faint.

Then, to my absolute astonishment, my tiny, dark, field of vision just above my right knee was suddenly, and wholly unexpectedly, inundated by a brilliant, dazzling, whiteness. Was I fainting? Or was this some kind of transcendent experience?

It took more than a few moments to realise that Rose had leaned forward and, somehow, inserted her right plaster-cast between my downturned face and leg. To my amazement, she then bounced her cast, twice, softly, on my knee.

I raised my head as my body flooded with astonished gratitude and my tears finally began to fall. This extraordinary, suffering woman had, moved by my suffering, kindly reached out to offer me comfort and patted me on the knee.

As I straightened up, Rose withdrew as if nothing whatsoever had happened. She simply gazed once more, with apparent hatred, into my eyes.