They patched me up in hospital, St Vincent’s, of course, and you’re supposed to talk about how dedicated and loving the nursing staff were, but that’s not something I can bring myself to say, no matter how true it is according to Nicole. People who empty your bedpan, stick a tube up your dick and wash your body from arse to nostril while constantly trying to strike up a conversation are nothing but a plague. I can’t see them any other way. From the first day to the last, almost all I said was, ‘I want to get out of here, this is hell.’ There was only one solace: morphine. I had never been on a pain pump before and, those first few days in particular, I was very pleased to make its acquaintance. Your generation and your father’s are not averse to drugs, I know that, I wasn’t born yesterday. But if you ask me, your wacky baccy and the powder some of you snort up your nose don’t come close to the fabulous haze called morphine. God, the pleasure of it! It wasn’t long before I was insisting that I suffered from a particularly low pain threshold and they just went along with it, probably to be done with my whinging. Morphine dreams pack a punch and it’s not even much of a problem when the dream and so-called reality start to bleed into each other as if a gentle rain is merging the colours of a painting left out by an amateur painter who went inside for a hearty dinner with a glass of wine when the sun was blazing down out of a cloudless sky and has only noticed hours later that the weather is no longer particularly summery and his landscape has taken on another form. Suddenly naked women were parading around me inviting me to snuffle up the smells of their bodies, especially between their legs. Feelings I thought I had lost forever rose up inside me. Your great-grandmother was alive again and looking gorgeous under a parasol, sipping a cup of tea, while watching happily and with undisguised pleasure as I abandoned all restraint in a forest of nymphs. My pubic hair was garlanded with a daisy chain, my proud member stood firm, wild boar grunted contentedly in the sun, and two warm mothering mouths were sucking my nipples. I was French kissing like a champion and comparing the saliva of these mythic females like a connoisseur of sweet wine. Love? To be sure, it was an overwhelming love without pain or sorrow, guilt or jealousy. Everything had become one, like those crazy Hindus once wrote in their Kama Sutra. At the same time I experienced the ecstasy Lucretius must have felt while writing his long poem about the building blocks of life, a book I had devoured not that long before with some admiration and even a certain sense of loneliness. All atoms, all one. After a while there was also darkness, I don’t mind admitting it, but that didn’t stop me from pressing the pain pump again to forget my hip and the bedpan under my bum. The darkness took the form of a work of art under construction, a kind of temple on a piece of waste ground where hippyish youngsters were doing the building work while performing strange rituals to usher in the end of days. A granny took me by the hand and led me deeper into that artwork. Most of the hippies turned out to speak German, but there was also English and I even heard some Dutch. The old lady showed unsuspected vigour and resolution and dragged me deeper into the musty-smelling dark. I heard singing and the sound of someone digging. ‘There he is,’ the old dear said, and I made out the shape of a young lad, seventeen or thereabouts, just like you, or have you turned eighteen by now, or even nineteen? ‘Hello, friend. Everything OK?’ I asked. The digging stopped. The boy turned his face towards me and something cold took hold of me. ‘My name is Wilfried,’ I said, suddenly trembling. The boy gave an impassive smile, as if wearing a mask that had suddenly come to life, and said, ‘I know. And you know who I am too…’ Behind me I heard the old woman clucking like a spiteful turkey, a bit like the sound Muslim women make at weddings, but joyless and, above all, implacable. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know who you are. You’re Angelo.’ The mask froze on the boy’s face and I felt the woman’s nails digging into my bony back. ‘You’re the only one who knows how filthy it is,’ she said, and suddenly I was back in that bed at St Vincent’s resolving to keep off the pump until at least midday, no matter how gruesome that prospect seemed at that moment. In the days that followed there were no daisies draped around my paltry manhood and it was mostly family who came to haunt me. One in particular tormented me mercilessly: my granddaughter, your father’s sister, your late aunt, who constantly drove me beyond the edge of a terrible rage that took a long time
