Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

There were magazines on small tables: Vogue, House and Garden, John O’London’s, Punch, the magazines found in expensive dentists’ waiting rooms, nothing to stimulate thought. I played a bad game of chess with lan and ordered two whiskies, which were cheap now we were afloat. I took mine chiefly to anaesthetize the asthma, but lan felt bound to respond by ordering another two, and resented this. He had less money than I and he thought we were starting the trip extravagantly. The ship was leaving the estuary for the sea. I felt the floor of that opulent lounge, till now only troubled by a buried throbbing, take on a quality of sway. I was distracted from the weight on my chest by an uneasy, flickering sensation in my stomach. I therefore left the lounge and went to bed after vomiting into the cabin sink.

      While eating breakfast next morning I watched the portholes in the walls of the saloon. The horizon was moving up and down each of them like the bottom edge of a blind. When the horizon was down nothing could be seen outside but pale grey sky. After a few seconds it would be pulled up and the holes would look on nothing but dark grey water. The priests’ conversation seemed unforgivably banal. I felt homesick, seasick and asthmatic. I went back to bed and used my inhaler but it had stopped having effect. I took a big adrenaline jag. That night breathing became very difficult indeed, I could not sleep and injections did not help much. The impossibility of sitting up in the bunk, the narrowness of the cabin and the movement of the floor increased my sense of suffocation. I lost all memory of normal breathing, and so lost hope of it. However, I could clearly imagine how it would feel to be worse, so fear arrived. Fear lessened the ability to face pain, which therefore increased. At this stage it was hard to stop the fear swelling into panic, because the more pain I felt the more I could imagine. The only way to divert my imagination from its capital accumulation of fear was to think about something else and only erotic images were strong enough to be diverting. Having no experience of sexual satisfaction I recalled women in the London underground advertisements.

      Next morning I asked Ian to call the ship’s doctor, who entered the cabin and sat beside the bunk. He was an elderly friendly Scotsman, straight-spined, red-faced and silver-moustached. His uniform had several rings of braid round the cuffs. His speech was all sudden, decided statements interrupted by abrupt silences in which he sat erect, gripping his knees with his hands and looking at the air in front of his eyes. He felt my pulse, touched me with a stethoscope, agreed that I was asthmatic and went away. After a while a nurse came and gave me an intravenous injection which made me slightly better. Later that day Ian told me it was quite warm on deck and a whale had been sighted. The following day the doctor came back, sat erect beside me and asked how I felt. I said a bit better, I hoped to get up soon. He said abruptly, “How are your bowels?” I said I had no trouble with them. He sat in a tranced rigid silence for a while, then said suddenly, “Buy a tin of Eno’s salts from the ship’s store. Use them reguIarly,” and left.

      That night I developed an obstruction of the throat which coughing could not shift nor spitting reduce. Erotic images brought no relief though I tried to remember the most shameful parts of all the obscene things I had ever heard or read. Next day I asked again to see the doctor. He told me I had pneumonia and must be taken to the ship’s hospital. He left and then the medical orderly came with a wooden wheeled chair. I panicked while being put in it, my mind crumbled for a few moments and I became quite babyish. I was not slapped but I was shouted at. Then I made my body as tense in the chair as possible in order to hold the mind in one piece. I was trundled along narrow corridors into the hospital where the nurse and orderly put me in a real bed. I was able to be calmer there. The hospital was a neat, bright little room with four beds and small flower-patterned curtains round the portholes. I asked for an intravenous injection of adrenaline. The nurse explained that this would not help pneumonia. She tied a small oxygen cylinder to the head of the bed and gave me a mask connected to it by a rubber tube. This helped a little. The orderly brought a form, asked several questions and filled it in. My religion puzzled him. I said I was agnostic and his pencil dithered uncertainly above a blank space. I spelled the word out but he wrote down “agnoist”. Ian came and I dictated a letter to my father to be posted from Gibraltar. A radio telegram had been sent to him and I wanted to mitigate any worry it might cause. I noticed nothing special in lan’s manner but later he told me he had difficulty restraining his tears. The doctor had diagnosed pneumonia with probable tuberculosis, and said it would be a miracle if I reached Gibraltar alive. While we were at work on the letter the doctor entered with a man wearing a uniform like his own. This stranger looked on with a faint embarrassed smile while the doctor spoke to me in a loud and cheery bonhomous Scottish way. “Aye, Alasdair, keep your heart up!” he cried, “Remember the words of Burns: ‘The heart’s aye the part aye that maks us richt or wrang’.” “Just so, Doctor, just so,” I said, playing up to him. He told me that I would be shifted to a land-hospital next morning when the ship reached Gibraltar, meanwhile (and here he looked at the dial on my oxygen cylinder) I’d better go easy on the oxygen, I’d used up half a tube already and there was only one left in the store. The two visitors went away and the nurse told me the other man was the captain.

      After that life was hard for a while. I finished one oxygen cylinder and started on the last, which had forty minutes of comfortable breathing in it. It was difficult to disperse these forty minutes through the eighteen hours before we reached Gibraltar, sleep was impossible and I was afraid of becoming too tired to make myself breathe. During this time I was well cared for by the nurse and the orderly. She was a plain, slightly gawky, serious, very pleasant young woman. She gave me penicillin injections and clean towels to wipe away my sweat. The orderly was a blockily built smallish sturdy man with a clumsy amiable face. He gave me a large brandy at nine in the evening and another at midnight. I felt these two were completely dependable people. At one in the morning the doctor came in wearing dress uniform. I had never seen a celluloid shirt front before. He leant over the bed, breathed some fumes in my face and asked, with an effort at cheeriness, how I felt. I said I was afraid, and in pain. He indicated the oxygen mask, told me to use it if I got worse and hurried out. The cylinder was almost empty. When it was completely empty I rang the bell behind my bed. The orderly ran in at once in his pyjamas. I asked for more brandy, and got it. This did not lessen the pain but made me unable to think clearly about it. I may or may not have rung the bell for other brandies, my subsequent memories are muddled. I remember just one incident very clearly. The nurse entered wearing a flower-patterned long dressing-gown and seeming very beautiful. She looked at the empty cylinder, felt my brow then went away and brought in another cylinder. I laughed and shook her hand and I am sure she smiled. I felt an understanding between us: she and I were in alliance against something dismal. I don’t know if she had disobeyed the doctor in giving me the third cylinder. Maybe he had very few and wanted to keep a certain number in case someone else needed them later on the voyage.

      Later the ship’s engine stopped and I knew we were at Gibraltar. I think this was about five in the morning. I don’t recall who did it but I was shifted to a stretcher, wrapped up as snugly and tightly as an Egyptian mummy, carried into a bare kind of cabin and left on the floor. The stretcher had little legs which kept it above the planks. My breathing was easier now and I was beginning to feel comfortable. The doctor, in ordinary uniform, stood nearby looking out of a porthole. He was less drunk than when he had visited me in the night but mellow and communicative. I saw now that his erect abrupt manner disguised a wonderfully controlled, almost continual intoxication. I felt very friendly toward him and he toward me. He sighed and said, “There she is – Gibraltar – under the moon. I never thought to see her again, Alasdair, I forget how many years it is since I last saw her.”

      “Were you in practice ashore?”

      “This National Health Service is rotten Alasdair. Forms to be filled, paperwork, the pen never out of your hand. In the old days the doctor worked with a stethoscope in one hand and a s,s,s, a scalpel in the other. How do you feel?”

      “A lot better.”

      “You’ve come through a bad time, Alasdair, a very bad time .... a Catholic priest told me I was a lost soul last night.”

      He looked out of the porthole again then said, “I was married once. The girl died a month after the wedding.”

      “Do you think I could have another brandy?”

      “Would ye not like a