Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

26 страница из 98

To enable me to communicate while on the ventilator, the nurses hung a laminated card with an alphabet by my right arm. After my fall, Pam, a dear friend of many years, rushed from France to support Dave. I have snatches of memory of them both at my bedside, with me conducting irritable, faltering mime conversations with them, spelling out the words by waving my right forefinger at the letters. My mind – I was convinced – was as clear as a bell; I became increasingly exasperated when they failed to keep up with my slow-motion spelling and grasp the words. They can’t be this stupid, I thought crossly. One day they arrived and said happy birthday – I remember feeling a genuine sense of shock and surprise. My birthday was 13 April, surely not yet. But I had lost control of time; I’d been on a ventilator for more than a week and the sound of its rhythm, sucking and sighing, the persistent beep-beep-debeepbeep behind my head, had become the vortex of my entire life. My real world was inside the apricot. I waited, while the scene changes came thick and fast and the only constant was the machine, sighing and pinging apologetically.