Frank by Antony Osgood

And so it was that several months after first complaining of the constant sharp pain in my stomach, I was brought to the clinic five miles distance. It was the kind of discomfort that seemed to resemble an eight-month foetus samba – elbows resting on a nerve – though obviously, I do not have that experience first-hand, I never shall – but if I ever did conceive a child, I would not let it risk this hazardous world, but would prefer rather to keep it safely tucked away in a crimson womb or a nice box filled with bright tissue paper, until the end of days. No, this was merely the phrase I used to inform the half-wit warders. This being a descriptor to which they took exception, complained about often. And thus without their knowing proved my point. Their zombie-minds were affronted by a pretty petty word. Driven from day-dreams of pastel fêtes, BBQs and institution open days. Wet-dreams of restraint, time-out, and playing in dark corridors with new patients. You know what psychiatric nurses are like. Well now, I thought, look, while I had what passed for their limited attention, had the ear of these not-quite nurses, I would mention also the pressure bubbling my chest. I spoke earnestly concerning the hammering of my heart, the acid gouging of my throat. Confessed the likely cause. Ridiculed. But mornings of being unable to get out of bed, months of rolling fatly on the floor and resisting being pushed to attend the workshop to whittle wood pointlessly, at last being taken somewhat seriously, I came to sit in the beige clinic waiting room with my escort Brian (bald, broad-nose, weighty ears) and the trainee Darlene (red-hair, tattoos, quite the tomboy, too slender). They sat on either side. I presume Darlene qualified eventuality as a nurse Perhaps what happened in the clinic made her change career. I like to think I have made a difference to a great many. Their warm elbows, sensitive as radio telescopes waiting to discover life on other planets, were arranged as if by accident to gently touch my own. Their bodies would provide an early warning. You know in old theatres fallen on hard times when you’re packed-in tight for an amateur performance, and any little movement ripples through elbows and along the shared arm rests? You can just tell what the man at the end of the row is eating during the intermission – candy or popcorn or ice cream from a blue paper tub – simply from the swell of his chew that has passed like a code along the line of pent patrons. The same. The clinic – where they carried out the procedures – was in a room next to the waiting room. The waiting room was the sort where you imagine the architect’s brief included the words nondescript and airless. Make the seats plastic and uncomfortable. Make the sweating thighs of patients stick together. Buy too low chairs, put tables out of reach. Below humming strip-lights sedate patients into accepting the delays to their appointments. Cause the room to incubate patients’ vulnerabilities, cause them to swallow whatever bromide is selected. One window overlooking a parking lot, a thin line of trees before cracked sidewalk and badly repaired freeway. It would be a dull view and I was grateful to be handcuffed to the chair. One clock, off centre, not quite telling the right time – not a lie, more an oversight. Place a great many public health leaflets on noticeboards attempting to make haemorrhoids a topic of concern.  Don’t frighten people with oncology. Erectile dysfunction is fine. Drugs – dump information about drugs and children. Safe sex but no abortions. The kind of place you enter with one complaint and emerge with fourteen others. The perfect place to make people anxious from waiting. The clinic had – kindly – ensured other civilians were absent. My appointment, the last of the day, meant our minivan – the side panel identifying both the hire company and the institution – was the only vehicle in the patient lot. The waiting room was silent – a muted TV showed the local news report on the heatwave and the prognosis for the prairie crops. It was not looking good in the waiting room. ‘Well, this is nice,’ Darlene said. Not good at all. I was reminded of those special screenings cinemas offer autistic kids. The clinic’s attempt to not scare the normal folk meant we were the only people – apart from the staff – in the place. To pass the time I had read aloud sexual health posters, information concerning podiatry, A5 notices about mental health services – making Brian laugh, shake his jowls, and Darlene say, ‘Good reading, Frank,’ as if I were a troubled kid who had not once held a book. The smile I practiced long and hard to put folk at their ease I did deploy. Darlene shuddered. Brian was reading a knitting pattern as if this was the most normal thing a psychiatric nurse waiting for retirement could do. But you know what they say. Darlene had made the rookie mistake of fetching no reading material. Even with me being the only patient we had been obliged to wait for half-an-hour, and I had begun to hum Tom Waits. Just his name, not his music. Over and over, Tom Waits. One thing you learn in a hospital is how to wait. I was not fazed. Brian was occupied with honing a lifetime of indifference. Darlene was inspecting her nails and noticing my lack of the same. The clinic had followed to the letter the advice of the lead hospital medic and someone had removed all periodicals in case, in case, in case – I do not know – in case I became aroused or made angry by the sight of someone unsavoury – or maybe palatable – in case photographs of the outside world reminded me of something traumatic. Triggered by a finger or a nose. You would have to ask them. You know psychs made you sign your own risk assessments? Who knows what psychiatrists think? And so we waited, how we waited, each with their own thoughts, elbows touching, the gnawing stomach pain prodding me to groan, sheen a sweat in the airless waiting, waiting room, me up high like a king on a bariatric throne, my two improper nurses in their low little slender chairs, bored. ‘Mr Shattack?’ The medics and the nurses in the hospital said they had just cause to keep a close eye on me – observation was the word – but when you get right down to the nubbin of it they spoke only in symptoms not causes. They did not have a clue although I told them. But can you tell them? You cannot. You know what psychiatric nurses are like – barely nurses. When I said, ‘Will you listen to me for just a moment?’ the psychs – and I imagine they would prefer their profession to be capitalised – each performed nose-related rituals as if they were a tribe of newly discovered islanders from Papua New Guinea following a secret custom, their habits classified by ethnographers – they snorted, they looked down their rhinoplasty, they sniffed, they picked, they pushed $800 glasses from nostril to bridge – expensive spectacles never sit well on faces other than models’ – the psychs queried which me I was talking about – like I was some kind of joke – and the nurses, who were barely dressed as civilians let alone recognisable nurses, said, ‘Frank, all we do is listen to you but we’d listen better if you talked some kind of sense,’  but can you tell them? You cannot. ‘Frank?’ The smell of myself – at that I time I did not trust the loneliness of vulnerable baths in hospitals – too slippery, easy to fall, and the hoists did not seem able to safely carry such a weight – and the smell from inside – my stomach was crammed beef jerky, gristle, cartilage, impossible stuff to dissolve – could, back then, easily overwhelm me. I had to tune in to what was going on about me, I mean, really focus; it was the same with the hospital food – I had to think of the meat in order to tolerate the vegetables. My medication at the time had the effect of diffusing my own voice and agency along with boil-washing symptoms. This meant things often escaped my notice. Even if the improper nurses on the ward had something of interest to say I am not sure I would have be able to hear them. ‘Frank, they’re calling your name.’ That was Brian – his bored voice I recognised. I looked up. The only civilian in the waiting room. ‘Stay with us, Frank.’ That was Darlene. And there in front of me was a proper nurse – uniform, white, clean – a short efficient man. From the Philippines, maybe. Tidy moustaches. I liked his mouth, his ears were clean, no piercings, and his nose was clear of blackheads. ‘I’m trying, Darlene, but it’s hard to concentrate.’ ‘Mr Franklin Shattack?’ the nurse asked, standing right in front of me, almost level, almost face to face, and he would not budge or smile with his pretty lips until I acknowledged him, nodded to confirm my name, my date of birth, which I did eventually, appeasement being a good place to live. ‘Good,’ the nurse said, which was a word Darlene chose to echo – you could tell she was a trainee. When she first came to the ward I thought she was a man, and I said, ‘Ooh, you’re tasty, boy I could eat you all up,’ but then Brian took her aside and the next shift she made sure she wore a skirt and leggings, let down her hair, then I lost interest, but still, Darlene was kind, though she had ugly features. ‘A man of your size,’ I had been told over, ‘has no business judging others,’ when really making judgements is the stuff of life – what you want to eat is a judgement, the people you hang around with, too. You remember records, long players, vinyl, when the needle stuck endless in the middle, and there would be no more music, only scratching, like a warm mouse trying to escape a cold trap? Dieticians, doctors are like records, turning, endless, noisy, nosey. A man of my size, my bloat, my circumference carries risks, not simply of diabetes, heart disease, blood pressure, but oesophageal risks, too, polyps, restrictions, cancers, misdemeanours, apnoea, reflux, no food after six, only a milky tea to take down the meds, and maybe the weight was not helping my supposed discomfort or my pain – the hospital wanted a physical check, though I had told them plain and simple the why of it, the how of it. They did not believe me. Insisted on an endoscopy, just to check. Actually, a gastroscopy. Their intent was to refute what I had long been telling them. The improper nurses who monitored my food at the hospital thought I had figured a way to game the meals. Get extra rations. Putting on such weight, they could not account for it. Perhaps I was guilty of assaulting other patients in the courtyard garden for their afternoon buns. Bribing the orderlies. Or maybe stealing medication to make more of the bloating opportunities offered by psychotropics. ‘What are you hiding in that mouth of yours, Frank?’ You know what they say about psychiatric nurses. Can you tell them? You cannot. Even when you spill the beans they think you are untrustworthy, delusional. I was rolled at long last, long long time coming, rolled on the bariatric chair out of the waiting room – bumped over the threshold to the white clinic room with crammed machines and a trolly bed – and made to feel like a carnival queen – into the cold clinic, though I was hot. I have to say I may have blanked out during the hoisting to the bed, and it is likely I have tried not to remember the swallowing of the camera, or the little hooks pushing past my teeth, down my throat, for biopsy collection. But after the thin doctor with his face mask got the camera working I do very much remember him stumbling back, swearing, and I do remember smiling, which you are not supposed to do. I did say, ‘I told them all along.’ And when the doctor and the proper nurse and the improper nurses with their serious faces, when the toy was pulled out of my stomach and my throat in a hurtful rush, they each took a step back from me, shouldered the walls in unison as if performing synchronised swimming in an emptied pool. And the sun beams streamed radiation through the single window. Within which light the medics were forever mutated. Transformed into horror masks. I will give you trauma. Taken from this supposedly cosy world to another. And in the light came, illuminating everything they had never seen before. In through the window though it was late in the dusky evening with a storm about to break the heatwave and the clotted-blood moon rising. There in front of them was the confirmation of my faith and the shattering of theirs. Had I not I said? On the sides of the gastroscope, curled rattlesnake-like, on its dark plastic and the metal gaskets and on the camera housing and all along the biopsy teeth were scratched by tiny hands using razors my own name written a dozen times or so. I tried to count, but my laughter jogged my eyes, and no matter how often I began the count over I never reached the end. Say a dozen inscriptions of my name. And in blood pawed by tiny fingers were pleas in plain English to be rescued from the darkness of my body. That room, why, it must have been a dozen years ago. Those medics, that revelation, the voices of the proper nurse and the improper ones, the doctor’s curse, the clinic, the fighting for the door, it was another life. I never laid eyes on the hospital again. My belongings found their way to a new room, and I never saw Brian or Darlene, nor the proper nurse with the tasty nose and ears, but I remember them everyday and am grateful given there in the clinic they never did what they do to me here, heavily sedate me up and probe me down. Weekly endoscopies, scans, colonoscopies like amusement arcade prize grabbers, like open pit mines scooping out precious metals, biopsies of those I consumed, those who remain inside, tunnelling, making me gag, cough, stop breathing, acid reflux. The doctors here fetch prizes out of me. I think of Brian and Darlene and the nose psychs, think of them with gratitude. Since I left the tender care of psychiatry I have barely mentioned the people I ate. All the little people who scour my insides in complaint, they are mine, and I resist their retrieval, but there is only so much a man can hold on to. I have lost weight. One by one my meals are being cut away. Lifted out through my oesophagus. The scrapings the doctors rescue, rummage about for, are abandoned for a moment beside me, left in a little silver dish like unloved new-borns. Deliberately set aside for me to see their struggle at adjusting to the light of this hazardous world, when I would prefer rather to keep them safely tucked away in a crimson womb or a nice box filled with bright tissue paper. Tiny Caesarean people, hardly more than a mouthful, gummy flesh puckered, still fresh. Reacquainting themselves with the world years after I ate them, moving slow. And while I suppose it is the nature of things to change, I have been vindicated and made stronger by such punishments, knowing I made the right decision to keep the twenty-two people I cared about or loved or desired safe and forever and unchanging inside me. Swallowing them, gestating them forever for their flavour. Though the reflux – I should not eat so late – is a price I had to pay. When parts emerge I am lessened. I am not losing weight but having integral parts of me stolen. I wear normal trousers now. A belt, even. This is nothing to celebrate. I remember at the clinic Brian’s sallow face in particular – I was not bothered enough to take notice of Darlene. Brian was yellowed not only by the clinical light. He will never look at a knitting needle in the same way without thinking first of gastroscopies – he never imagined his retirement being a loop of my smile. I shall always cherish the vision of his compulsive swallowing – I know what it is to gag. The joy of a painful bloating. Cough it out, Brian, I might have said. But I was giggling. When Brian saw the deep scratchings and the blood-words, saw the biopsy emerge without a sample but instead a rather lovely slice of nose, that memory’s tasty, too. It will nourish me for however long I am kept here, in a room without a window, and the pre-op space, next to the operating theatre. These days I am more deflated than I like. I am made less holy. Here, where doctors weekly extract little bits of people from me, I imagine soon there will be nothing and I will disappear completely. Without my consent. Doctors steal sacred bits of me. My eucharists, mine, how they belong to me, those phantoms of kisses, smothering ghosts of otherwise losable love. There is a little of my old self tucked away. It crows now and again, here and there – please give me some credit, I am being totally Frank with you – I still greatly enjoy saying, ooh boy I could eat you all up. Retaining a morsel, just that tiniest bit of you that matters, well now I suppose that is likely the whole point.

Antony Osgood

Banner Image – pixabay.com. Red flash

Story image – Google images, empty waiting room with a row of plain chairs and plain walls.