Beyond the High Blue Air. Lu Spinney
I can’t see what he is doing as he crouches down but he returns calmly and now shouts in my ear, Heating, the heating, better it’s off, okay?
I nod but I’m not okay. Miles has begun to judder, his body jerking, his head shaking terribly from side to side. The doctor leans forward to take his pulse and check his oxygen saturation level, then sits back in her seat. He continues to judder and I think he must be sensing something through his comatose state, that his unconscious registering of the change in his environment is triggering these severe spasms. I can do nothing to soothe him, except let my hand linger on the top of his head and try to will my love through to him, to enfold him and cocoon him with all the force of my love.
Ridiculously the plane lands at Biggin Hill, with its connotations of Biggles, the adventurous pilot of the vintage schoolboy comics; how Miles and Will would have loved that as small boys. It’s a beautiful day, and as Miles is lifted out of the plane and on to the runway I realize it is the first time the sun has shone on him for six weeks. His skin has a ghostly sheen, his immobile eyebrows and closed, thick eyelashes unsettlingly dark in comparison. I can see that the two young men wheeling his stretcher try not to look at him too obviously, but it is unusual to see someone in a coma at close hand and they are both fascinated and repelled. Miles is still a handsome, powerful, athletic-looking young man in spite of his pallor; his rigid unconsciousness shocks. An ambulance is waiting outside the small airport and the cheerful driver helps me in. You sit next to me, love, in the comfortable seat, he says. You must be a bit out of sorts after that flight. The medics can go in the back with him. He’ll be all right, don’t you worry, love.
He talks all the way to London, turning on the siren whenever the traffic looks bad ahead. That’s the joy of these things, he says, gets you where you want to in no time.
II
The ambulance drop-off point is in a small street at the back of University College Hospital, one of London’s great flagship modern hospitals. Two porters wheel Miles on his stretcher up to the third-floor intensive care unit. I follow with the Austrian doctor and nurse, and entering the unit we are met by a young man with a harassed expression and a junior doctor’s badge pinned to his white coat. Take the patient into this room, he says, pointing it out to the Austrians, and then to me, Please wait in the reception area while I examine your son. I have time to see Miles handed over to two nurses waiting in his empty room, to see him being slung, rigid, from the slightly higher Austrian gurney onto his new bed so that he lands awkwardly with a jarring thump. I register the first inkling that something is different here. For the past six weeks the Austrian doctors and nurses have done what they had to do with a kind efficiency that I assumed to be the norm.
Waiting as instructed in the empty reception area, I close my eyes and feel myself falling exhaustedly through deepening layers of incomprehension. But I’m back in England, I tell myself, and things will be easier now, things should become clearer. Eventually the young doctor reappears, and as I instinctively search his expression for any glimmer of hope, there is nothing. I’m afraid the Austrians seem to have got it wrong, he says, without preamble. I don’t understand why they appear to have increased your son’s score to four on the Glasgow Coma Scale whereas in fact he’s only three. It’s not a very clear report, he says (the Innsbruck doctors had taken the trouble to translate it into English). And I’m afraid too, he adds, that since he’s arrived on a Sunday the on-duty neurologist will have to be called, which may take some time.
As I wait for the neurologist in Miles’s room, I stand at the window and stare out over the teeming Euston Road below, cars streaming in both directions, hundreds of people going about their Sunday oblivious to the crises of lives they are passing by. Each time I close my eyes the sensation of falling returns. The neurologist finally arrives, flustered; I realize it must be irritating to have been called away from her Sunday especially to see Miles. There is barrier nursing on intensive care units; everybody, staff included, must wear plastic aprons and rubber gloves when handling the patients but this doctor does not. Are you the mother? she says to me. Yes, I reply. I am going to examine your son, she tells me, and then asks the nurse with a hint of exasperation to pass her the small torch that is quite easily within her reach. Pushing back Miles’s eyelids in turn she shines the torch close up to see whether his pupils contract with the light and then hands it back to the nurse with a grimace: hopeless, it implies.
I watch her as she continues her examination. Miles is still in a coma after six weeks, he is evidently severely brain-damaged, what is the point of her or him being here—she makes this all very clear. Then, looking at me directly for the first time, she says, I’m afraid I don’t think it’s worth sending him to the Acute Brain Injury Unit at Queen Square. I think he should just go straight to Putney. Perhaps she meant to use the word appropriate instead of worth, but worth just slipped out. Nothing else is said; she leaves the room.
Putney: I know the hospital. Formerly the Royal Hospital for Incurables—a large billboard at the side of the road proclaimed its ominous presence on the A3, the route I took every time I drove Miles and Will to school in Winchester; it was a shock each time to read it. How terrible, we would say every time we passed. How chilling the name was: Hospital for Incurables. Then one day when we drove past the sign had been replaced with the grander and more politically correct Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. I remember we talked about the change, about how words can influence attitudes, that moron and spastic and mongol are no longer usable. I can only think now of the unknown future that was crouching so mockingly, viciously, ahead of us as we drove blithely by. What else might still be waiting there?
Before leaving I meet with the young clinical director of the ICU with whom I had spoken from Innsbruck. He had been helpful and reassuring throughout and all the arrangements for Miles’s admittance to UCH had been made by him with the expressed intention that after examination and assessment Miles would be transferred to the Acute Brain Injury Unit at Queen Square. I wonder if he has already spoken to the neurologist or to the junior doctor who saw Miles on arrival, but his assurance no longer seems as certain. I am alerted to something going on that concerns Miles and to which I am not party. But with relief I find the sensation of falling has disappeared and instead I have landed with an invigorating shock. If I’m to be at war here, I think to myself, I will fight them to the last.
***
I have come home for the first time in six weeks. Inside, the house looks strangely distant, as though I am seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything is the same and not the same, it has been recalibrated by this thing that, last time I stood right here, was in the future, and now it has happened and nothing can be the same again. The house is old; it knows more of life than I do. Built in 1780, solid and Georgian, it is a house confident of its place. How many people have come home to it, opened the familiar front door under its delicate tracery of glass fanlight and stepped into the wide hall with this same mixture of feelings? Relief to be safely home, mixed with new and terrible knowledge? Soldiers have returned here from the horror of trenches and gas; what has happened to Miles simply adds another layer to its accumulated history. Life will go on, it says. Here, for the time being, you are safe.
There is an antique painted Vietnamese cabinet in the hall, which had been due to be delivered the day after Miles’s accident. It seems to hold a special significance, straddling the break in my life; how innocent Ron and I were when we saw it and decided to buy it, and when I arranged for it to be delivered that particular Monday morning. Miles has never seen it; he will be pleased that it has replaced the carved wooden African drum he disliked so much. In fact it wasn’t a large drum but the suitcase of a former queen of the Cameroons, packed and carried by her slaves, intricately carved out of some exotic black wood that gleamed even in the dark. Miles thought it had bad karma, that it filled the air with sinister intent. Please get rid of it, Mum, he said, it’s malign, it’s not right here, it isn’t meant for this house. It’s as though it holds a curse, he said. Too painful to think about that now. I walk through to the kitchen and open the fridge and find a glass bowl full of sliced oranges in caramel syrup—they would have been served with my homemade cardamom ice cream at the lunch party that was interrupted six weeks ago, but Ron saw the guests out after I’d taken the call. How strange that the oranges have lasted; I suppose the caramel syrup preserves them. The ice