Beyond the High Blue Air Page 3
We all need to be on our own. The information just delivered to us by the two surgeons has become a broken jigsaw of meaning, splintered pieces that need to be reassembled somewhere, alone, in peace. Three of us are left behind standing on the edge of a bridge that leads into the cobbled streets of Innsbruck Old Town and I can see sunshine warming the ancient stone buildings. It looks peaceful; I want to go there. I turn to Will and he understands. He and his father will go back to the hotel and get some lunch.
I have no plan. I probably should have lunch, but I’m not hungry. The world has been put on hold and I’m drifting out beyond the edges. The aimlessness is soothing, a kind of willed deferral of all the jagged thoughts; I will face them, but for now I want to keep drifting. Across the bridge the scene looks comfortingly unreal: delicately ornate façades of buildings in the traditional Tyrolean style suggest a make-believe world far from the morning’s reality. A sign hanging from one of the buildings draws my attention: ‘Goldener Adler’ is inscribed in Gothic lettering and soon I find myself standing outside an old stone inn on the edge of a cobbled plaza. Entering the dim interior I see a chubby young woman at the reception desk who could be Heidi; her dirndl and shining golden plaits speak of mountain peaks and sunny pastures and innocence uncontaminated by pain. Can I help you? she says, and I hear myself replying that I need a room, some rooms. For which date, and for how many nights? she asks efficiently. I don’t know, I answer. Indefinitely. She looks at me with concern. My son is in hospital. I didn’t want to say that, I haven’t had to say it until now; it feels too private. She takes a key from the board behind her and says with such kindness I must fight back my tears, I hope you will be happy here. I think I have a room you will like.
She does. A corner room that looks out over the plaza, large windows on each wall and a sitting area with sofa, armchair and desk, it is spacious and light. We could retreat here. The station hotel Ben and Charlie booked us into is perfectly suitable, closer to the hospital and with more amenities, but it is deadening. A businessman’s hotel, its airless decor and efficiency leave nowhere in which to hide away and make private. I hadn’t thought it out until this moment, but some primitive maternal instinct warns me that we could not hold ourselves together for long in such a place, and here we might. How ancient is this instinct to provide a refuge, a burrow, a nest, anything hidden away and safe from the dangers that lurk prowling and snarling in the dark outside? Stepping out of the Goldener Adler into the chill afternoon air I have a sense of having restored a kind of order, exerted some small control over the calamitous events that have overtaken us. Goldener Adler, golden eagle: light, strength. Miles would like that.
Early that Tuesday evening Ron arrives from London. I have missed him; we’ve spoken on the phone but it is his presence I need. Now he is flying out to see Miles, and to see me. Watching him walk across the airport arrivals hall I think again how distinguished he looks, his integrity so obvious that it gives him his particular gravitas, but to know him is to know the ridiculous fun one can have in his company. When we meet I see the pain reflected in his eyes, complicated by his concern both for Miles and for me. How have you been? he says. How is the boy? He takes me in his arms and I feel stilted, different, I’m not the same as before; I am damaged. He was widowed two years before he met me when his wife died of cancer after many years of illness; theirs had been a long and stable marriage and for him and his two now adult daughters, Belinda and Amelia, it was a deeply painful time. I wish he did not have to suffer again on our behalf.
Ron had waited these two days before coming here out of respect for David, that at such a time it should be Miles’s father who sees Miles first with all of us together, the original family. Such consideration is typical of him, though I know Miles would want him here from the beginning. All four children love Ron as a father as well as a friend and confidant; he is an integral part of our family now. David and I separated eight years ago and our lives have settled into their different ways. To be suddenly thrown together again is an unnatural and painful accretion to an already painful situation. To any curious fellow guests on the first morning before Ron arrives we look like just another family on holiday, father, mother and children sharing a hotel breakfast and later setting off together for a walk through the town; that our group is anomalous and our walk leads to an Intensive Care Unit does not show. The strangeness, the strain for us all, is subsumed by the horror of the situation that has brought us together and when in the evening the exuberant waiter in the Italian restaurant greets us as la bella famiglia inglese we don’t put him straight. I worry that it is especially difficult for the children, but now Ron has arrived and I take comfort from the civility of his and David’s relationship.
Ron and I take the airport bus into town and arrive at the hotel just in time to join the children and David setting off for the evening visit to the hospital. I can see the children’s relief at his arrival, the sharing of our predicament, his understanding without explanation. Once at the hospital Ron and I go first, walking down the dreaded corridor before I show him where to put on his plastic apron and gloves and then leading him through the eerie silence of the ward to Miles’s room. The machines are blinking, the ventilator soughs rhythmically, the nurse sits quietly in the corner reading. Miles lies alone on the high bed, so still he could be embalmed, a magnificent specimen of young manhood on display for whoever dares. Miles darling, Ron is here. Why do I say that? It’s not for me to be the interpreter, their relationship so strong my intervention is not required. I wonder if Ron would prefer to be on his own with him; it is difficult finding the words, easier to be alone, I think. I kiss them both and leave the room.
The uncomprehending, raw pain on Ron’s face when I return, this strong man rendered defenceless. I put my arms around him and we stand together in silence by Miles’s bed. The nurse turns away and inspects the medical chart hanging behind her.
Embracing Ron, I think, I want Miles to be in love again, make love again.
A week passes. Ron, Will and David have gone back to London, to work, but they will continue to come and go. Still at university and now on their Easter vacation, Claudia and Marina have remained here with me. We visit Miles twice daily and are beginning to build our days into a routine. But this morning we must face our new reality afresh: the doctors are going to take Miles off his ventilator. They will ‘wean’ him off it – that is the medical terminology.
The word wean is a singular euphemism here, though correct in its way. Miles has suffered a traumatic brain injury and, reduced to infantile dependency by the injury, he must now go through the hoops of developmental stages that are set out unconditionally in its wake. In the way that anxious new parents do, we follow the stages of his development intently and applaud each tiny sign of progress as though it were being achieved by a prodigy. The irony is not lost on us – Miles invariably succeeded, and when something wasn’t easy he set his cap at it with unstoppable determination. How the tables have turned; determination is no longer available to him. The stakes are different: if he succeeds today he will breathe on his own; or he won’t.
Our time with him is spent urgently, the three of us spurring him on in turn, goading him to success. Miles, we say, bending close to his ear, you have been breathing with the help of a ventilator for the past ten days since your accident. Today the doctors are going to take you off it – this is such a strong sign of your recovery. You are amazing, Miles. You are going to come back to us. You can do it, you can always do anything. You have so much life left to live, Miles, you must come back. You want to achieve great things and you will, you know that. You are so precious to us, we love you so very much . . . And so on, the urgency, once again, dissolving into an unabashed gush of feeling.
The afternoon shuts down; if I close my eyes I think I can feel the world rotating. When we finally arrive at the waiting room that evening and I pick up the phone to let the nurses’ station know we are there, time
stops altogether for that moment. And then within seconds it seems Dr Stizer is walking down the corridor towards us and he is smiling, a huge beaming smile under his great moustache. The girls and I are gripping each other’s hand so tightly mine hurts but yes, he unlocks the door and says to me, Your son is breathing on his own! He looks so genuinely happy and now with this kind foreign neurosurgeon in the little room we hug one another and hug him too and dance about like small children, crying the first and only tears of joy that we will know for Miles. He is alive! Breathing all by himself! The amazing boy! We can picture his recovery, we’re euphoric. It feels as though Miles has won the most difficult race ever run, against the greatest odds.
We go out that evening to a Mexican bar we’ve come across that does excellent cocktails. We call the family and all the close friends to tell them the news and many mojitos later we dance down the street to the hotel, chanting as we go: He’s-brea-thing-on-his-own! He’s-brea-thing-on-his-own!
Our euphoria is short-lived. The days sink back into their routine; each morning I wake in the hotel room with a stab of fear. I remember what it felt like to wake slowly and easily but now I am taut with foreboding at what the day might hold. I get up and fill the small hotel kettle to make tea for whoever is with me, either Ron or one of the children if Ron’s not there.
Marina is with me today. She has just turned twenty, the youngest in the family and Miles’s adored little sister. Looking at her small shape still asleep in the bed I am relieved to see her face peaceful for the moment. I switch on the kettle and sit down to wait for it to boil, leaning back in the armchair with my eyes closed. Miles is lying in a hospital bed just a few streets away from us; despite breathing on his own he is still in a coma. In the quiet of these cold mornings I have a new ritual: I go to him. I’ve never been able to meditate but this thing I can do, willing my mind to cut loose so that I can join him where he is. There is a list I repeat like a mantra when I reach him: please let him open his eyes and know us, please let him walk again, talk again, please, please let his brain heal so that he can come back and be the vital person he was. I want to use the concentrated force of furious love to make these things happen. I suppose this is the way that some people find prayer helpful; perhaps this is a prayer.
I wake Marina with a cup of tea and call Claudia, who is in the next door room, to join us before we go down to breakfast.
Breakfast has become an ordeal. I used to love hotel breakfasts like a childish treat, the anticipation of what new and exotic choice might be on offer in a foreign dining room, but now I find I can’t eat anything. Walking into this Alpine dining room each morning I am repulsed at the sight of the serving tables set out with what seems a lavishly obscene spread of food: great bowls of gelatinous yoghurt, muesli glistening with nuts and seeds, glass jars of dark sticky honey and blood-coloured jams, fresh red raspberry, strawberry, dark blue fruits of the forest. There are platters of fat yellow cheeses or oozing creamy ones, slices of violent pink ham and salami, bowls of bald expressionless eggs and baskets piled high with voluptuous rolls. Round these tables the hotel guests circle intently, eyeing the food and jostling for position to load their plates, and I can only think of snouts and troughs. I find a table in the corner and sit down, and around me I’m aware of munching and swilling, a lifting of spoons and forks and cups to mouths that seem to open and close and chomp in a syncopated rhythm of mastication, all in time to the sickening jingle of hotel muzak playing on a loop in the background; it’s like being in an orchestrated farmyard. I am trapped in a nightmare that has continued into the morning, a ludicrous object of grief crouched in the corner, pinched and thin and angry, hollow-eyed and foul.
It is a new thing, this anger, and it is taking unattractive and unexpected forms. It is mostly scattergun, undirected – above all I could machine-gun the moon and stars, but I also want to pepper with bullets anybody or anything that comes in the way of my private grief or, and especially, that may be a threat to Miles. For example, the nurse who seemed careless when taking his obs yesterday or the arrogant young doctor who told me that snowboarding with a crash helmet causes more damage than doing it without one. Incomprehension is generating the anger I feel, we all feel – it is impossible to make sense of what has happened to Miles and our ignorance fuels resentment.
When the girls have eaten and I have drunk my coffee we escape upstairs to the privacy of our room, to think about the day. It will revolve around our visits to Miles, but visiting hours for the Intensive Care Unit are strictly regulated. Two hours are allowed in the middle of the day, from twelve to two, and two again in the evening, from six to eight. We have some time to kill after breakfast and the girls try to study while I try to read. But reading eludes me now. I’ve lost the desire, the private pleasure; now when I pick a book up it feels flat, empty, extraneous. Fiction is impossible, as though my imagination has been depleted trying to comprehend my own story. The most I can manage is a newspaper, but even that is difficult; more than ever the papers seem filled with stories of disasters and tragedies. Miles’s situation has opened a door onto the relentless, unstoppable suffering of other people, every day, everywhere; I feel viscerally aware that this terrible thing that has happened to him is only one drop in a vast cauldron of human suffering. Yesterday I read of a little girl at a fair nearby in Germany, who somehow got tangled in a giant helium balloon that broke its moorings. She was lifted up and away in front of her parents’ eyes, her torn and battered body eventually recovered some kilometres away where the balloon had come to rest in a tree. How could you make sense of that? I feel an incoherent gathering of rage at the pain that has been endured by human beings since time began and that will continue, unabated and unresolved. Which god should be held accountable for this?
We all give up and go for a walk instead. Innsbruck is a gentle town and out on the quiet streets there is no visible pain. No homeless people, or indeed any sign of poverty, nobody who looks unwashed or distressed or intimidating, none of the enervated faces of big city life. The mountain air is healthy, the scenery from every angle calmly splendid, the streets and parks are clean and unhurried. Do we spoil the atmosphere, with our grief? But nobody would know if they looked at us; only rarely do we let our true feelings spill out in public, for that is not our way. I think about TV footage of men and women wailing and gesticulating with grief in the countries where this is their cultural norm and wonder if that helps them to bear the pain more easily.
Just before noon the girls and I turn the final corner of our walk and see the hospital once more like a glass fortress at the end of the street. We each feel the same tightening dread as we catch that first glimpse, the dread accompanied by a sudden surge of fearful hope – something may have happened overnight that we don’t know about yet. We enter the hospital atrium and cross the light-filled space to the far corner where the lift will take us up to the sixth floor, to Miles.
Yesterday, though, the grief did spill. Marina and I had been out for a walk and passing a small church in a side street we entered it, in the hope that the place might lend us some peace.
After the glare of bright sunshine outside, the dim interior was instantly soothing, the air cool and fragrant with the scent from massed white lilies that gleamed from the chancel. It was empty and as the doors shut behind us a deep silence fell. Marina walked on along the aisle and I sat down in a pew at the back, to succumb to the silence and let the hope and faith of others with which the place was imbued envelop me. But as my eyes accustomed to the pale light coming through the high stained glass windows and I looked across the rows of wooden pews, all I could see was the giant figure looming up above the bank of lilies at the far end. There he was, a beautiful young man, muscular limbs draped in a white cloth, hands and feet nailed through and coated in blood while his face looked down at me with an expression ghastly in its passive suffering. Instead of peace I felt a fury rising, I wanted to rage at the faith that allowed and venerated such
a grotesquery. And then I began to hear a sound like the whimpering of an animal in distress, becoming louder and louder until it rose to a crescendo, an anguished howling of pain that reverberated round the once silent space. It was Marina, braced against the altar rail, her clear young face uplifted and fiercely streaming with tears.
We sat for a long time together at the front of the church. There could be no consoling, no words that could change the situation. We had already learnt that comfort came from sharing the pain and waiting until its eruption had passed. When we emerged into the street some time later it was over, and we were just another mother and daughter out on a walk in the beautiful spring sunshine.
I need to write and thank all the friends who have sent letters, cards, flowers to Miles and to us as a family. Grateful as I am, I can’t find what it takes to write individual replies. So I compose a one-for-all response.
Thank you for your wonderful supportive letter/card to Miles/me/us. It is a great comfort to know that you are thinking of Miles in the way that you do.
There is so much and nothing to say. Miles is still in a coma and we wait. There is no respite from the anguish of waiting but he looks so strong and beautiful and seems so close that we feel very positive about his recovery. We just can’t wait to have him back with us again.