Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

32 страница из 98

Dougie’s best friends from university, I much later discovered, came to stay at our home with him to comfort him during the first couple of weeks. I thought that was wonderful, that he had friends as fine as that. He was always more of a doer than a dreamer and I realised after my calamity that he was happiest when l asked him to do practical things; it was welcome distraction. When he knew I wanted to record what was happening to me, he brought in his Dictaphone. After he had gone I asked the nurses to place it beside me on the pillow and switch it on. I spent half an hour or so rambling gently about how I’d got here, trying to be professional, coherent. I had a job to do. A job to try and keep. I expressed anger at my own stupidity in falling off. Then I ran out of energy and the machine kept running, recording my breathing and the voices of the visitors in the bay opposite mine. Perhaps in my head that corner of the ward was still a curry shop at the time, or maybe by then I was at the stage of being convinced that a crowd of football casuals had got in and were trying to steal from my bedside cabinet. Shimmying between sanity and madness, I managed to summon the wit to ask a passing nurse to hit the off switch.