Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

65 страница из 98

‘You look OK standing up. For an old bird,’ he said. ‘I’d have a bit of that.’

‘In your dreams,’ I said as haughtily as I could, trying not to laugh at the pitch-black irony of a pick-up line from one deranged tetraplegic to another marginally less deranged; indeed, at the very suggestion either of us had sexual currency of any kind. How to plumb the depths of bitter-sweet. Later I rationalised that as offers went, given my condition, it was probably the best I was ever going to get.

He cackled and rolled off to pester someone else. I felt as if I had joined some hilariously macabre list of Dickensian characters. Tenement had done much the same thing as Del but on a lesser scale, a chronic alcoholic who had lost his house keys and fallen while trying to climb in the window to his third-floor flat. If his life had been chaotic beforehand, it was hopeless now. His hands jangled like a medieval palsy sufferer’s, and it was nothing to do with his broken spine. The stuff his girlfriend smuggled in for him could only assist. Despite encouragement he never showed up for gym sessions; he preferred to go outside and join the smokers, the small band of paralysed who huddled their chairs near the entrance to the spinal unit. Out there too was Steroid, a scaffolder who told the doctors he had tripped but confided to us in hand therapy, where he was learning to feed himself, that he’d run into a wall in a drug-induced rage and broken his own neck.