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special than anyone had anticipated.
    I was sick to the back teeth of special, but I couldn’t make myself ordinary by an act of will or I might have been tempted to try it a long time ago, provided it was on the Ellisdons mail-order catalogue basis, On Approval, your money back guaranteed if not perfectly satisfied.
The worst of the whole darn bunch
    I surfaced, by incredulous degrees, from the anæsthetic, into an experience of pain that was beyond anything I had suffered at Manor Hospital, where they tickled the bone with a little hook to get a biopsy sample, or at CRX when Miss Krüger had made us dance for her pleasure. It was worse because it was constant, without modulation. It was some time before I could bring it down into something as mild as an internal scream of betrayal. Ansell had lied to me. Ansell of all people. Et tu, Barbara! If this was ‘a certain amount of discomfort’, then she was a devil who enjoyed making people hurt, who got a thrill out of offering reassurance and then kicking it away, leaving me to dangle on a rope of pain. She was a compendium of all the ghouls I had ever known or heard of: she was Miss Krüger with her invisible pointe shoes of agony, she was Vera Cole wielding her razor on sick boys because she hated to see them suffer, she was Judy Brisby with her nerve punches, she was Anna Mitchell-Hedges letting demons out of their travelling-case. She was the worst of the whole darn bunch because she had seemed so much like a friend.
    With the assault on my throat after the botched anæsthetic I had thought my dolor rating, my theoretical Uppsala score, was close to the maximum, but now I had to reconsider my settings. The new sensation was off the scale. Perhaps there came a point, as with my tape recorder, when the needle flicked far into the red and the apparatus began to fail, the signal unrecognisably distorted.
    Again I was told that Mum was on her way, as if that was the answer to everything, to anything. I still didn’t know what I haddone to deserve this black jackpot. I was a dolor millionaire, no doubt about it, and I couldn’t help suspecting that they’d done the little man wrong all over again.
Burning spiders in the socket
    I had only one consolation as I lay there, with a spouting volcano of agony newly installed in my hip, which I lacked even the power to protect by curling up around, though instinct continued to dictate that impossible reflex. At least the pain was in the right place. The intolerable signals were being broadcast from a transmitter at the proper address, where the left hip was. There was far too much of the pain, and the surgeon had sewn burning spiders into the new socket, he was a hateful monstrous illegitimate brute but at least he wasn’t incompetent. He was torturing me in the right place. The left hip was the one chosen for the first operation. The right hip had the benefit of a little movement, but the left was always a hopeless case.
    People came in every now and then and spoke to me, but I couldn’t take in what they were saying. And sometimes I answered them, but I didn’t know what I was saying either. I was howling with pain, and when they gave me pain-killers they didn’t kill the pain at all, only muffled the howling. The pain shrugged off the pain-killers, the pain had been inoculated against pain-killers, but at least I wasn’t making so much noise and upsetting other patients along the corridor.
    Over time I realised that Jack Juggernaut was in my room, smiling and saying something reassuring. ‘Don’t worry,’ he was saying. ‘We’ve heard it all before.’ Heard all what before? I didn’t understand.
    Eventually he was able to get through to me. It turned out that when I started to come round I used every swear word I knew. I didn’t know many. I had had very little experience of using swear words, since the time at Woodlands camp when I had learned a useful word and for a few days fucked everything that fucking moved. I