Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

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‘At least I think I did,’ he said. ‘I was aff ma fucking heid at the time.’

Right outside the front door, just through the underpass, lay the streets of Govan, an inner-city Glasgow ward which persistently featured in all the indices of deprived Britain. Like urban foxes scavenging, the occasional local street dweller or small-scale drug dealer smelt out the needy patients and would drift by in the evenings, offering an anaesthetic of fags, booze, dope, pills, harder stuff. Here was an eager market; and usually with cash stowed in their zips and pockets. But nothing is successfully furtive when you cannot use your hands and slow-motion drug-dealing with cripples in the dusk was worthy of the blackest of comedy scripts. The dealers – though the name makes them sound more glamorous than they were – would hand over their booty and watch as the paraplegics, whose hands worked, fumbled in the pockets of the joggers of the tetraplegics, whose hands didn’t, to get their money out for them. That was the unwritten code with a knackered spine: anyone who had a less severe injury and could do something, helped out anyone who couldn’t. If your hands didn’t work, you found a mate whose hands did, and you locked your wheelchairs together in a macabre mating while they reached over and retrieved what you needed. For the scavengers it was a rare encounter with people far lower down the pecking order than they had ever met before.