Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh

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СКАЧАТЬ had simply removed his now-opaque spectacles, wiped the greeny-red gunk off the lenses, replaced them equably on his splattered countenance and gone back to the operation. He was the G Ward man. He presided over its mysteries. It was a mysterious place. You heard things about it, unsettling things. That, for instance, it smelt really bad – the authentic smell of human flesh which, according to rumour, smelt uncommonly like roast pork. I heard that it was uncomfortably, tropically, freakishly warm in there because the thermostat had to be turned right up, or the patients’ burnt skin would contract in the cool air. I heard that patients lay on their backs all the time, with a thin cotton sheet suspended above their recumbent frames, because if their flesh touched the sheet it would stick to the fabric and would have to be yanked off in screaming agony. I learned that this was why Geoff’s trolleys had to be lined with antiseptic paper, for the lumps of charred human being….

      Thank God for Geoff, we used to agree. He was welcome to the battlefield of burns victims. Rather him than me, everyone used to say. I’d as soon shoot myself in the head as go near the burns patients …

      G Ward stood by itself, a whole corridor’s width of Burns Hell. The entrance was at the far end of a side-corridor, up a long incline. The letter ‘G’ stuck out from the wall, like the sign over a concentration camp. Walking past (no, accelerating past) when one of its doors was being opened, you would occasionally get a stray whiff of roasted meat. You imagined the nursing sisters inside the swing doors, speaking in urgent whispers, a sisterhood of suffering, girls who had seen terrible sights, who’d become inured to human torches and Roman candles and people set on fire by their neighbours or co-religionists because of a minor difference of opinion. You imagined all the staff in G Ward moving about in tropical darkness because it was more restful that way, just as I used to think that horror films must be conducted all the way through in Stygian gloom.

      One evening in July I was on late shift. I wasn’t due to knock off until 10 p.m. Things were quiet and I was sitting in the Porters’ Room at 9 o’clock, reading Kafka and waiting for the last hour to while itself away.

      The phone rang. ‘Is Geoff there?’ said a voice.

      ‘I think he’s gone to the canteen,’ I said.

      ‘Tell him to ring G Ward, would you?’ drawled the voice. ‘Emergency theatre, fifteen minutes. OK?’

      I promised I’d tell him, and went back to The Castle.

      Three minutes went by. An anxious woman, a junior houseman, put her head round the door. ‘Where’s the porter, what’s his name, Geoffrey? They’re yelling for a porter in G Ward right now. Some patient has to go for surgery, pronto.’

      ‘Geoff’s in the canteen,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be back soon.’

      ‘We need him now, for God’s sake,’ said the woman. ‘We can’t have the operating theatre staff waiting around for a porter to finish drinking his tea.’

      ‘But I’m sure –’ I began.

      ‘You’ll have to do it,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to wear a mask. Do you know where Geoffrey keeps the disinfectant masks?’

      ‘I can’t do that,’ I said, a panicky tremor entering my voice. ‘I’m not going to G Ward.’

      ‘What do you mean, not going?’ asked the woman. ‘This is an emergency. You will go up there right now, collect the patient and transfer him to the operating theatre on the first floor for immediate surgery. And you’ll need a disinfectant sheet on the trolley, I hope you realise.’

      ‘I’m not trained,’ I said, having a sudden brainwave. ‘I’m not a burns porter because I haven’t had any training. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I’m sure Geoff will be back any moment and –’

      ‘Oh, training,’ she said nastily. ‘Is that it? Oh, I see, you feel you need some kind of degree in – what? – Advanced Portering Skills and Trolley Management before you can do a simple thing and help to save somebody’s life. Is that it?’

      She all but said, ‘You stupid boy,’ and smacked me round the head.

      ‘You have been to school, I take it,’ she continued. ‘And you have got half a brain? And I know you can walk and talk, because I’ve seen you do both. Now get a trolley up to G Ward this minute, before I lose my temper.’

      So I found some sheets of special skin-soothing paper and put it all over the trolley. I couldn’t find a mask anywhere. And I set off with a heavy heart on the nastiest journey I’d ever known.

      I was going to have to go inside G Ward, into the fuggy, tropical, pork-smelling hell of the burned and damned, and I knew that, as I walked through the ward, the burnt patients would lift up their Night of the Living Dead faces and their Souls in Purgatory blackened limbs and I knew the minute I saw the special, just-arrived Emergency Case for which my trolley was meant, I would pass out with the horror of it, and everyone would get really upset.

      I came out of the lift, pushing my paper-coated trolley before me. My legs were like lead. Though I was supposed to be helping out at an emergency, my reluctance and cowardice (though I liked to think it was a stubborn refusal to be pushed around) meant that I was walking slower and slower. There was nobody around, just the blankness of the horrible, custard-yellow NHS walls and the glaring, recessed lights overhead. Here was the corner of the corridor. Up a long incline, perhaps sixty yards away, the big, black-on-green sign read ‘G WARD’ like a ghastly threat.

      I pushed the trolley into the side corridor. Fifty yards ahead, the great black ‘G’ wiggled and danced about in front of my vision. I had become a cinema-verité, hand-held camera and all the shots were jiggled and out of focus, as I blinked back tears of alarm and struggled to see clearly. But my destination was all too clear. I was going to the worst place in the world.

      And it was because of the blasted windows that I felt so appalled. The doors of G Ward were always shut because of the need to keep the air temperature consistent and unwavering. Every other ward had its door open to visitors and passing medics and droppers-by; but not the ward from hell. I’d noticed, when furtively passing the doors, there were two little porthole windows at which you were supposed to present your face, to be identified before you’d be allowed in.

      In thirty seconds, I told myself, I will have to present my face at the window and wait to see what unspeakable apparition gazes out at me …

      I can’t do this, I said silently.

      I am walking, I told myself, into the biggest horror film I’ve ever seen, and it’s all going to be real.

      Something had changed about my relationship with windows. At home when I was small, they’d been the glass shelter that kept the outside world at bay. Then they were the screen through which awful people could come and look in at you, like Quint and the Snow Queen, as though inspecting your tortured soul. Now there were these round porthole windows, where I was the outsider looking in, but the people on the inside would have gargoyle faces. Everything had got all topsy-turvy. A crucifix on the wall brought back memories of St Mary’s, and the staring-eyed Maniac, my father’s crackpot patient, the asphyxiating Christ, the blood-boltered posters, the red-rimmed eyes of Dracula just before he pounces – all my most dreaded images. The big G loomed nearer. It began to take on a three-dimensional quality, like those monumental slabs of brick wall that spelt out the letters of Ben-Hur. I was about to be engulfed in heat, and the smell of cooked people, and the noisy whimperings of the dying and the muted groans of the ones whose skin had only recently started to tighten up and blacken.

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