Dispossession Read Online Free PDF Page B

know or to
remember, that I’d have to work out on my fingers. But all my time in
hospitals, whether resident or visiting, had only ever shown me two standards
of accommodation: solo rooms for the rich, and wards for the hoi-polloi. I was
prepared to believe that there might be provision to put NHS patients on their
own, when their condition required that, but a bad head and bruises were surely
not enough. Neither a lapse in memory.
    Nor was one question, one answer enough. Answers breed
questions, inevitably; every step forward only shows us new horizons, just as
far away.
    “Who’s paying for it?”
    “I wouldn’t know, would I? Aren’t you?”
    There at least was one answer that I knew already. No, I
wasn’t. My company had offered private health insurance in my contract, but I’d
turned it down in an excess of political zeal. Carol had been angry, I
remembered: wanted to know what was the point of saying no to something that
would cost me nothing, that would give me regular check-ups and have me
high-stepping over the queues whenever I needed treatment. Me, I’d wanted to
know what was the point of the company paying for something that I was entitled
to for nothing; every private patient, I’d said, costs the people more than the
Exchequer saves. It’s a trickle effect, I’d said: private work saps quality
staff from where they’re needed more, and the more people go private the more
they endanger the whole future of the NHS. What will be the need for it, after
all, when the majority of the population has made other arrangements? Slippery
slope, I’d said; and down at the bottom there are ambulance drivers wanting to
see a credit card or a policy document before they’ll scrape you off the
tarmac.
    All of that I’d said; and here I was, scraped off the tarmac
myself and hustled off into a private room without the chance to gainsay it,
and if Sue were responsible for this she’d be in trouble next time she showed
her face around the door.
    The nurse was called Simon, he said, and he didn’t have any
problem with the idea that I wanted to be alone while I washed, for all that he
and half a dozen others had presumably had me naked under their hands often
enough in the last few days. I’d been unconscious then; now I was back in my
body, and not actually being foolishly modest about it, despite appearances. I
wanted to rediscover it, I guess, to take possession again: to learn exactly
what the damage was, and to do it unobserved.
    Simon seemed to understand that, without my having to
explain. At any rate, he left me to peel back the covers on my own, and check
out as much as I could see for dressings.
    Hadn’t felt up to this yesterday, the mental shocks had been
enough. But my whirligig mind had run somewhat out of whirl, during seven or
eight hours’-worth of drug-induced coma. I didn’t like it, that I had
apparently total memory loss for a significant period—no, more than
significant, a Richter-scale earthquake of a period—of my recent life; but
acceptance had at least settled like sediment, if it hadn’t dissolved like
sugar. It was a fact that inhabited my head like a tumour, like a stranger, but
it was at least there and I could handle it. I could mediate all my thinking
through that, not to make too great an idiot of myself hereafter.
    Getting that sussed, getting—you should excuse the expression—my
head around it, however temporarily (no illusions here: I could think myself
perfectly in control of the situation, and five minutes later be a shrinking,
whingeing wreck again for no material reason at all, only that some synapse in
my brain had gone zip instead of zap, and thrown me into panic mode): even if I
was only suppressing questions that would have to be confronted later, that
suppression still left me free to be curious at last about my physical
condition. Everything was functioning well enough, that much I’d gathered. I
didn’t even have the tube in my arm any more, now that