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Even before I reached the ward I could hear him shouting. He was sitting up in bed in stripy pyjamas, incandescent with rage, yelling at a nursing assistant. When he saw me coming he forgot his anger immediately. ‘Thank God! Oh, thank God!’ he shouted with apparent joy. Then he buried his face in his hands and wept like a child. I pulled up a chair, glancing apologetically right and left at Uncle Jack’s nearest neighbours.
The old chap in the next bed tried to look reproachful, but was so defeated by ill health it was beyond his powers of expression. On the other side, two youngish women were gossiping across a comatose man, whose face, the colour of fresh putty, was partially obscured by an oxygen mask.
Uncle Jack’s main trouble is that he can’t remember. This makes him confused, suspicious, hostile and occasionally violent. Recently, a community psychiatric nurse came to assess the state of his mind. The assessment consisted of 20 set questions, of which he answered three correctly. He knew his own name, his mother’s name, and the name of his sovereign. And that was it. He didn’t know the name of the current Prime Minister, for example. Neither did he have the faintest idea where he was in time or space. Terrifying, really, when you come to think of it.
‘Where the hell am I?’ sobbed Uncle Jack as I sat down beside his bed. ‘Torquay, Uncle,’ I said. He stopped crying and lifted his head. ‘Torquay!’ he said, horrified. ‘In the west of England?’ ‘Afraid so, Uncle,’ I said, genuinely sorry about it. ‘What am I doing in bloody Torquay?’ ‘You’re in hospital.’ ‘I can see I’m in a bloody hospital. But why?’ ‘For tests.’ ‘Tests?’ ‘Tests.’ ‘But where the hell am I?’ ‘You’re in Torquay, Uncle.’ ‘Torquay!’
My patience for the kind of circular, repetitive kind of conversations one has with Uncle Jack dwindled to almost nil a long time ago. My attention was therefore easily drawn to a succession of muffled groans coming from the putty-faced man in the next bed. His two visitors were head to head in vigorous moral debate and didn’t notice his discomfort. Somebody known to them had behaved atrociously it seems. They were arguing about which sanctions to apply. One said she was never going to speak to that person again. The other strongly believed that such behaviour warranted a ‘good battering’, and that she was willing to set everything aside and administer one that very afternoon.
Meanwhile, Uncle Jack was trying to draw me back into our own conversation. ‘Torquay!’ he whined. ‘What the hell am I doing in Torquay? Oh God! Why can’t anyone tell me what I’m doing here?’ I ignored it. Beneath the oxygen mask, the man with the putty-coloured face seemed to be involved in a discrete but titanic struggle to stay alive. As I watched, his body went rigid under the bedclothes. Then he died. He was dead with his visitors still chattering indignantly over him.
I got up and went over to the nurses’ station and passed on my suspicions about the health of the man in the bed next to my uncle’s. And first the nurses, then a team of doctors, did all they could to revive him behind closed curtains. ‘Oh God!’ wailed Uncle Jack. ‘Can’t anyone tell me why I’m here!’ The dead man’s visitors stood at the foot of the bed, dumbly, like cows.
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