My Year Off Read online

  What did I think about, lying there on the floor? Oddly enough, it was my missed rendezvous with my parents that became my obsession and I entertained all sorts of explanations to the conundrum of my immobility. Perhaps, like Stephen Hawking, I was suffering from motor-neurone disease. Perhaps I had a brain tumour. My cousin Jane had died of a brain tumour. At times, bizarrely persuaded by the remaining strength in my right side, I imagined hobbling across the street to my car, somehow driving with one arm. I was like a rat on a wheel, revolving desperate escape plans. I had no inkling of how ruthlessly I had been disconnected from the world of appointments and obligations, or how long it would be before I returned to it. Suffer a stroke and you find that the complex wiring we call ‘the individual in society’ is peremptorily ripped from the fusebox of everyday life. I had blown a connection in Nerve Central and all my circuits were down.

  Then the phone rang again, and stopped, as before. I felt I had to do something decisive. I knew there was a phone on the floor in the living room downstairs. Somehow I had to get there. With what I now see must have been an extraordinary effort, I dragged myself under the frame of our big brass bedstead with my ‘good’ right arm, noticing with interest the little flergs of dust and the strange debris that collects in such places — forgotten paperbacks, discarded Kleenex, a pair of Sarah’s tights — and then squirmed, commando-style, over the carpet to the head of the stairs.

  Here, reaching out to the banister, which fortunately was on my right side, I pulled myself over the top step. Again my dead weight took control, and I found I was sliding helplessly and painfully head first down the stair-carpet to the mezzanine landing where I had a borrower’s-eye view of my library of modern first editions: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills; The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis; A Good Man In Africa by William Boyd; and Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet Please?

  I vividly remember — indeed, I will never forget — this part of the day on the landing at the angle of the stairs. For some hours, I lay on my back staring up at a framed brown-green school map of French colonial Indo-China, a souvenir of that trip to Phnom Penh in 1993. Then I had been looking for an adventure. Now I seemed to be caught up in one. I had crossed by night from what Susan Sontag (in Illness As Metaphor) calls ‘the kingdom of the well’ to ‘the kingdom of the sick’ and, though I still had no name for this new country I was in, it was dawning on me that I was no longer the person I’d been twenty-four hours ago.

  I was puzzled and curious. It was almost as though I was not in my body, the body that seemed to have let me down so badly. (I still wonder if the ‘I’ who is typing this with my ‘good’ right hand, is the same as the ‘I’ who used to peck away, two-handed, at 50 w.p.m.) From time to time my thoughts, such as they were, would be interrupted by the phone. Two brief rings, then silence. In the stillness of the afternoon, and from my position on the stairs, I thought I could detect, faintly and faraway in the kitchen downstairs, the whir and click of the machine and then Sarah’s voice. But I was too far off to distinguish her message and, anyway, what could I do to answer? I was terribly frustrated. I wanted to call out: ‘Darling, I’m here, please come and help me.’

  But could I do this? To test speech and memory, I began, weirdly, to recite ‘Jabberwocky’ out loud, forming the words with difficulty.

  ‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe …’

  As evening drew on I manoeuvred myself on the mezzanine landing for the descent down the final flight of stairs to the living room. I did not want a repetition of that painful and undignified slide. I did not want carpet-burns. Controlling my weight with my right hand on the banister, I inched head first down to the hallway. It was gloomy here, and pleasantly cool. The massive family portrait of my bearded Victorian great-great- grandfather, also named Robert McCrum, glowed in the shadows. The clock, whose chimes had punctuated my day, was ticking steadily nearby. More squirming and then I was in the spacious living room and there, across the carpet on the floor, was the downstairs phone. I felt like a pioneer who, in crossing the Rockies, finally arrives in California.

  British Telecom records show that I called my parents — it never occurred to me to call Emergency — at 19.53 and that the call lasted two minutes. My mother, who was by now thoroughly alarmed at my failure to appear in Cambridge, picked up. Apparently I told her I could not move. She tried to keep me on the line but I had already rung off.

  I felt incredibly happy.

  Now things began to happen fast. When the phone rang again, it was my younger brother Stephen. He and his fiancée, Emily (who, awkwardly, had chosen that very day to announce their engagement), were on their way from Camden Town; they had already phoned the police. I heard a siren outside in the street, the heavy boots of authority clomping up to my front door, and then a voice through the letterbox. I replied with the utmost difficulty, ‘No, I can’t open the door.’

  Weeks later I discovered the reason for the rare, almost unprecedented, alacrity of the force: my house had formerly belonged to Salman Rushdie, and the officers, unshakably convinced that I was the victim of a botched assassination attempt on the writer’s life — poisoned, perhaps, or sprayed with nerve gas — detected a vista of spectacular career advancement in this sudden and unexpected drama. Alas, my brother, after some comical misunderstandings, put them straight on this.

  Another siren; the sound of splitting wood. The police had climbed into the garden and were coming through the back door. I remember worrying that I was naked, but exhaustion was stronger than modesty. After my long day, it felt good to have people — there seemed to be rather a lot of them — taking an interest in my situation. Paramedics in green overalls were towering over me with the cheery bonhomie of furniture removers, rattling out questions to establish the state of my consciousness. ‘Who are you? What’s your name? What’s your date of birth, Robert? What’s your address?’

  Quite a crowd had gathered outside the house, No. 41, St Peter’s Street — curious neighbours alerted by the arrival of the paramedics and the police. Perhaps they hoped for a murder. Noel Road, where the playwright Joe Orton was bludgeoned to death in 1968, is just around the corner. Soon, I was propped up in the ambulance. I took Emily’s hand and felt her answering squeeze. The doors closed; the siren began to wail and we were on our way. I was so happy. I was with my family. I was going to hospital. I had survived. Through the window I could see the weekend world going on outside: shoppers crowding; cars manoeuvring through traffic; people with pints standing outside pubs. This world now seemed remote and unimportant. I had become a prisoner of ill-health, but I had yet to discover the terms and length of my sentence.

  One moment I was in the sea-green light of the ambulance on the way to Casualty; the next I was lying on a gurney listening to two young doctors discuss my case in an undertone. From time to time a young medic with garlic on his breath would shine a flashlight into my eyes, a standard test for brain function. Stroke victims are very likely to suffer swelling of the brain, which is often what kills them. When I heard that a specialist had been reached on the telephone, I became afraid that before my parents arrived from Cambridge this surgeon would trundle me into his operating theatre and slice the top off my head like a watermelon. A phone conference ensued. I lay there expecting the worst. But the specialist never appeared and I was eventually wheeled into Intensive Care for the night. By then, all I wanted to do was sleep. Huge, yawning waves of tiredness carried me down into a new dreamless darkness. Occasionally, I would be woken by the nurse’s flashlight in my eyes, checking for vital signs. Sarah tells me that my life was in the balance at this time, but all I felt was a rather blissful detachment and serenity. I did not panic. There was no bright light at the end of a long tunnel. I did not see my past whizz before me. Actually — I remember thinking this — if I was going to die, this was not such a bad way
to go.

  Quite soon after this first night of my ‘new’ life, someone used that phrase, ‘an insult to the brain’ — a commonplace of stroke care — and, as I digested the implications of what I’d just suffered, I could not prevent myself imagining rogue neurons viciously hissing, ‘Your mother is a water buffalo,’ to my sensitive cortex. Slander, calumny, or insult — call it what you will — I knew at once that I had survived an extraordinarily close call, what friends and acquaintances, visitors to my bedside, would later sometimes like to refer to, with slightly ghoulish fascination, as ‘your brush with death’.

  [2]

  An Awfully Big Adventure

  29 July – 1 August

  For a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on.

  Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

  The moment when J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan describes dying as ‘an awfully big adventure’ is a mawkish and embarrassing moment in an often mawkish and embarrassing play. Nevertheless, it’s an observation that contains a kernel of truth. When I analyse it now, I find that my own experience provides some intriguing, and probably misleading, answers to the enduring conundrum of our mortality.

  In England, death is shrouded in Victorian euphemism. People do not ‘die’, they ‘pass away’; they are not ‘buried’ but ‘laid to rest’, and not with ‘flowers’ but ‘floral tributes’. For some, the only alternative response to this scary subject is the kind of flippancy, for ever associated in my mind with the works of P. G. Wodehouse, in which so-and-so ‘handed in his dinner pail’ or ‘fell off his perch’ and was now, as John Cleese puts it in that famous Monty Python sketch, ‘pushing up the daisies’, in a speech I cannot resist quoting:

  This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late parrot! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life it rests in peace — if you hadn’t nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This is an Ex-Parrot!

  Just as grief is the half-sister to rage, so laughter is grief’s twin brother. There can be something strangely uplifting about a funeral, a moment of catharsis in which we can also celebrate our continuing survival.

  So I confess that my first reaction, as I came round in University College Hospital, but still drifting in and out of consciousness, was a kind of weird exhilaration. Yes! I had survived. I was not yet an ex-parrot. Lying naked under a pink blanket in the intensive care unit, wired up to the monitors, I was aware of being in the antechamber to the grave and even now, months later, I can still recall the eerie fascination of this experience and of having, by the greatest good fortune, returned to tell the tale. A sober assessment of my situation in the grim aftermath of what I was learning to call ‘my stroke’ soon tempered this mad euphoria. If I had known then what I soon came to discover about what the doctors were now referring to as ‘your stroke’, my relief might have been mixed with terror as well as gratitude.

  Next to cardiac disease and cancer, stroke is the most common cause of death in the Western world and, oddly, a word that in medical circles is rarely attached to either a definite or an indefinite article. This fell noun is also a term so commonly misapplied that, for very many people, it lacks a lethal connotation. Of those who survive the initial ‘insult’, about half will be left with permanent severe disability. The physical consequence of stroke is a horrifying catalogue of damage that includes personality changes, impaired sensation, paralysis, incontinence, visual or language problems, deafness, blindness, seizures, and even swallowing difficulties, the distressing manifestations of what the textbooks describe as ‘neurological deficits’. Approximately one third of those who suffer a stroke will die, often from a second or third subsequent assault on the neurological system.

  I did not die, of course — and I was never in any pain — but, physically speaking, I’d been poleaxed. My left leg was immobilized and my left arm hung from its socket like a dead rabbit; the left side of my face, which drooped badly for about a week, felt frozen, as if Mr Glynn had just given it a massive Novocaine injection. I could not stand upright; my speech was slurred; to cope with my incontinence, my penis was attached to a Convene, a condom-like device that drained my urine into a plastic bag; every few hours a team of three nurses would turn me over in bed, as if I was a slow-cooking roast. In place of pain, there was an hallucinatory sense of detachment, and I was also oppressed with an overwhelming fatigue. The smallest thing left me wanting to lie down and go to sleep; the muscles on my left side were so weak that to sit in a chair — which I wasn’t able to do, even with three nurses to help me, for some days — was exhausting. I was, besides, terribly confused about what had happened, confused and stunned, though unimpaired, intellectually: my memory seemed to be functioning just fine and I had no difficulty in recognizing people who came to see me, though I noticed that it sometimes took me a few moments to recall their names. On the other hand, I still have no recollection of where University College Hospital actually is, or how I got there, though I can recall the room and the cramped, sultry high summer atmosphere.

  Of all the people who were so kind to me in those first hours, there was one nurse I came to think of as my guardian angel, a graduate trainee — I think — from Oxford with beautiful corn-coloured hair, a lovely smile and the most gentle manner of any nurse I’d experienced then or subsequently. ‘What’s your name?’ I mumbled through my frozen jaw, as she bent over my bed. ‘Whicker,’ replied the angel. Curious, I asked how she spelled that, and was told that ‘Wicce’ was a traditional Anglo-Saxon name, a tiny spark of English history which amid the bleeps and wires of twentieth-century medicine I found strangely comforting. After I was moved from University College Hospital I never saw Wicce St Clair Hawkins again, but for her sweetness towards me in those first few dreadful hours of consciousness in hospital, with the dawning recognition of profound physical catastrophe, I shall always feel intensely grateful.

  Sarah arrived from San Francisco, white and hollow-faced with worry and loss of sleep. For the first week, she slept on a camp bed in the corner of my room, jumping up in alarm whenever I stirred in sleep, though I do not remember this. She had endured her own terrible drama en route. ‘Robert isn’t feeling very well,’ my mother had said, and her ominous telephone manner had led Sarah to believe, she told me later, that I was likely to die at any moment. In a daze she had got a flight to London, and had spent the eleven-hour trip huddled under a blanket, drinking shots of whisky. She says she had never felt so alone as she did that night, in the darkened plane surrounded by people. At one point she turned in desperation to her neighbour. ‘Do you mind if I talk to you a moment?’ she said. ‘My husband’s just had a stroke.’ The woman looked at her. ‘I don’t know anything about strokes,’ she said, and went back to Cosmopolitan.

  Sometimes, it seems that no one knows anything about stroke. The word itself sounds so inoffensive. As a verb, it’s a synonym for brush or sweep or caress. You ‘stroke’ a baby or a lover, and of course it’s also associated with idleness, as in ‘he never does a stroke of work’. And then again it’s linked, more accurately now, with old age, though even here it’s seen as a survivable affliction. History reminds us that both Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill functioned as, respectively, President and Prime Minister, after suffering mild strokes in old age. (Wilson’s, of course, was serious; he never really recovered from it and the United States government was effectively run, during the last years of his presidency, by his fierce wife, Edith.) Such behaviour would be unthinkable today — the media would not permit it — though until one of the world’s leaders suffers a serious stroke in office it’s likely that the public will remain, like the woman on the plane, ill-informed and largely indifferent. In Britain, the fact that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s father, Leo, suffered a severe stroke at the age of fort
y has helped to raise the public profile of an affliction that is either taken for granted or misunderstood. Perhaps if Sarah had confided to the woman what she most feared — that I would be dead by the time she landed at Heathrow — she might have elicited a more sympathetic response.

  In the life of twentieth-century man and woman there are not many mysteries, but Death remains. In an age when more and more is explained, when even the brain is slowly beginning to yield up its secrets, the Grim Reaper shows no sign of losing his ancient power to fascinate and terrify. And those who contrive, however briefly, to meet him and yet survive also exert a special hold on our imaginations. As my convalescence unfolded, I discovered a substantial and fascinating literature on the subject of death, of which the most notable is the poet John Donne’s Devotions.

  Donne, a near-contemporary of William Shakespeare, was a friend of Robert Harvey, the pioneer of cardiac ‘circulation’, and had what we would think of as a distinctly twentieth-century appreciation of the body and its limitations as the vessel of our humanity. Like many writers of his time, Donne addressed Death as a familiar, and we know him for his oft-quoted sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’. What his less well-known Devotions upon Emergent Occasions reveals is a mind acutely tuned, in a rather modern way, to the psycho-drama of sudden illness. ‘A sick bed is a grave;’ Donne writes, ‘and all that the patient says there, is but a varying of his own Epitaph.’

  By a strange coincidence, a few days after my stroke a media acquaintance and fellow forty-something, Michael Vermeulen, the London editor of Esquire, died of a heart-attack brought on, apparently, by years of hard living. I read his obituaries in hospital with guilty fascination, remembered our last, and quite recent, conversation in the foyer of the Groucho Club, and brooded sadly on the vagaries of chance. As Donne puts it, ‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’