Beyond the High Blue Air. Lu Spinney
snowboarding, are tense, tight-faced with the knowledge of where they are about to take us. They arrived in Innsbruck yesterday evening and were waiting at the hospital for Miles when he came out of the operating theater. Ben says the sight of him then was too difficult to be able to describe it to us; he was glad we had not yet arrived.
I hate that I don’t have those memories. I wish I could see a slow-motion replay of the accident, see his face close up afterwards, know what was going through Miles’s brain as it was splintering—
I cannot bear that it was unshared. I cannot bear the isolation of that moment, the loneliness: I imagine him falling like an abandoned astronaut, no longer tethered, his lifeline floating free as
he sinks through dark galaxies and whirling fragments of comprehension that the world is disappearing far behind him. I wish I could have been there, to hold him and tell him how much I loved him, how much we all love him, how we would fight for him.
Ben and Charlie take us to the hospital. As we walk into the vast glass-and-concrete foyer of Innsbruck University Hospital I feel the air being sucked away from me. The floor rises in waves, the walls bulge in, I can’t breathe; I have to get away. Disembodied, I look down from somewhere high above us all and watch myself talking calmly to Charlie as he leads our small group through the crowd of people towards the elevator, as though this were a perfectly ordinary thing to be doing this sunny morning.
We are sitting in a row in the waiting room, waiting. The room is silent, save for the dull hiss of oxygenated bubbles coming from the glass fish tank in front of us. Inside the tank tiny iridescent fish dart and swoop, up and down, backwards and forwards, their mouths gaping senselessly. The room is small and square, three walls painted a soft sea green and the fourth, adjoining the corridor alongside it, made of thick shatterproof glass. The fish tank sits on a plain black metal table pushed up against the wall and next to it there is a small wooden shelf with water jug, glasses, and a telephone for visitors to announce their arrival. There are some metal chairs, cold to the touch, and the long wooden bench on which we sit as well as a wooden coffee table with brightly colored Austrian magazines on it. At the end of the glass wall is a door with a small silver keypad next to the handle. It cannot be opened from our side without a code; we will have to be let out of this room when the time comes. Occasionally a doctor or a nurse passes by on the other side of the glass wearing cotton trousers and overshirts the same sea green as the walls. I notice they keep their eyes straight ahead, averting their gaze from us.
Only two people at a time can visit the ward, accompanied by a nurse. I go first with Will, down the corridor that we will come to know so well, stopping at the end to take out the plastic aprons and gloves from their dispensers on the walls. Even more disoriented in this new uniform, we then turn the corner to face the ward. It feels as though we have entered an underwater world: tinted green glass divides cubicles and nurses’ stations, and everywhere is silent save for the rhythmic tidal swish of respirators and the soft sonic keening of machines, like whale calls in the deep. Nurses and doctors glide through the rooms, serious, intent on the silent bodies each beached on their high beds.
As we reach Miles’s cubicle the dread of seeing him engulfs me. Will has his arm firmly around me as we enter what is—I sense it at once—a hallowed place, a shrine; there is an overwhelming impression of a warrior, wounded, suffering. Afterwards we discover that we all felt this same thing, felt the sense of spiritual power heavy in the room and that we were on the periphery of something beyond our mortal comprehension, as though Miles were absorbed in a conversation with Life and Death and we should not presume to interrupt.
He lies on his back on a high bed in the center of the room, perfectly still. The stillness is terrible. His strong face, the one we are so familiar with, that we know to be so expressive, humorous, animated, is closed from us in a way it would not be if he were asleep. After a week in the mountain sun his face and neck alone are tanned, a clear demarcation line where the top of his T-shirt would have been. He always tanned easily and it suited his dark looks; now that demarcation line breaks my heart. A sheet has been placed like a loincloth over his middle, but otherwise he is naked, his muscular young man’s chest and arms and beautiful virile legs defying his injury. A multitude of wires and tubes connect his brain and body to the bank of machines and electronic charts behind him which are recording every tremor of his existence, tubes coming out of his nose, his mouth, the top of his head, his chest, his wrist; but his face, bruised down the right side only, is calm, his eyes closed, the violent new scar running serenely from his hairline up and over his partially shaven head and down to the base of his right ear.
He looks so strong, so healthy, in such fine physical condition. How can it be that only his brain is damaged, and quite so damaged? It is later we are told that he is known by the doctors and nurses on the ward as the Athlete; the nurses flirt coyly with the word. But it is not just his body that is powerful; something is radiating directly from him, the air is thick with his presence.
Will and I stand silently, on one side of the bed. On the other a male nurse is filling in a chart. He finishes and turns to us, apologizes for intruding at this moment but explains that because Miles is on a ventilator there must be a qualified person in the room at all times. His English is impeccable. A ventilator: I wonder what the word for it is in German. In whatever language it is a thing only ever glossed over, half imagined, in a fleeting glimpse of horror. An iron lung it was called when I was a girl and polio was the scourge of the age. I remember my childish incomprehension, seeing pictures of people encased in them, as though they were in an iron suitcase like a magician’s accomplice, and the shock when told they could not breathe without it.
There is too much to take in. I bend down and kiss Miles’s cheek, then the other cheek, his forehead, his nose, his neck, his chest, but it’s no good, there are too many tubes in the way. I begin to speak, hesitantly, it seems difficult. We love you so very much, Miles. You know that. We adore you, we absolutely adore you. You know, don’t you, that we are all here for you. We can feel your strong fighting spirit, you are with us as you always are. You will be all right, you’re going to be all right, you are going to come back to us. I love you so very, very much, my extraordinary, precious, beloved son.
Who cares if I am gushing. Will bends to kiss Miles too. You’re going to make it, dude, he says quietly, you’ll be back. I love you, Miles. How gentle he is, this other precious son of mine, his gentleness intrinsic to his strength.
I need to ask the nurse some questions. The tube inserted into the top of his head, so dreadful to see, is monitoring the pressure in his brain and draining away the excess fluid to reduce the swelling. The tube in his mouth is intubation into the lungs from the ventilator; the one in his nose is intubation to his stomach from a bag of liquid food hanging on a hooked stand above his head. There are more tubes, for hydration, medication, monitoring the heart, a catheter draining dark yellow urine into a bag. The machines recording Miles’s new state of limbo could be the controls of a spaceship, the flickering lines and lights on screens recording his dislocated journey into the future.
The first time I cry is in the bend of the corridor on the way back to the waiting room, out of sight of the ward. Crying in a way I don’t know about, with great racked gasps. Will’s arms are around me and I feel selfish; he must be feeling this too, it is his brother he has just seen, his closest friend and companion, but he is comforting me. We return to the waiting room and I’m conscious of composing myself to face the others, our eyes meeting first through the glass wall as they search our faces for information in a way that will become our twice-daily routine over the coming weeks. Holding hands, Claudia and Marina are now led by the nurse down the corridor to see their brother.
***
Tuesday morning, the second day. As I walk past the nurses’ station a young doctor comes forward and asks me if I am Miles’s mother. He hands me a copy of a letter received by fax that morning and tells me that the doctors and nurses have been reading it.
For the attention of the Family of Miles Kemp
We are thinking of Miles at this very tough time and wishing him the very speediest of recoveries.
Miles has been playing a critical role in one of the BBC’s most important