Kitabı oku: «The World I Fell Out Of», sayfa 5

In the gym my routine was simple: arm exercises first – twenty minutes on the handbike, then biceps curls and triceps lifts on the weights machines. Then, hoisted onto the specialist plinths, I began the process of coping with the appendage formerly known as my body. Propped in a seated position, my feet on the floor, foam wedges behind me to catch me if I went backwards, I started to learn how to balance sitting upright. How peculiar it felt. Because I could not feel my backside in contact with the plinth; I had the sensation I was a head and shoulders poised on wobbly air. I swayed like a blancmange, only staying upright because I could grip the edge of the plinth with my crocked fingers and lean back on my arms.

Next, from the same seated position, as my left wrist strengthened and began to hurt less, I was told to place my hands beside me on the firm surface and try and lift myself. Impossible. But critical to the future. When your body is paralysed and you try to lift your own body weight solely with your unaccustomed arms, you cannot believe how hard it is. The movement starts in your brain with a huge heave and ends, if you’re lucky, in a flicker you barely perceive. The physios put a bench in front of my knees so that if I toppled forward, I would not go onto the floor. And there I sat, for perhaps forty minutes at a time, hands aching on the blue plastic, wobbling, tilting forward a little, bracing through my shoulders and arms, trying to heave. Did anything happen that time? I could only tell by peering down, trying to imagine a sensation of lightening. It was exhausting. And I couldn’t kid myself that I saw anything.

The gym had a radio, with notoriously bad reception, tuned by whichever member of staff got to it first in the morning. If Big Willie switched it on, we had Radio 2, because he was addicted to trivia and knew the answers on Pop Master. Margaret, the lovable, warm-hearted physio assistant, upon whose shoulder I often wept, preferred Smooth. And Susan, my own physio, a feisty rock-chick with a tongue stud and attitude, the woman who became the focus of my world, always went for Rock Radio. Somehow, as the weeks stretched onwards into summer, and the hours spent in the gym fused into one another, the only tune I can remember, throbbing fuzzily, flatly, over and over and over again, was ‘Heartbeat’ by Enrique Iglesias and Nicole Scherzinger. The more tinny and unmoving, the better, as far as I was concerned. Only in the gym could I bear music, where there was company and distraction. On my own radio, in the intimate surroundings of my own bed with an earpiece in, I never tuned to music stations. Only talk could I cope with. Current affairs. Hanging onto the familiar voices of the Radio 4 Today presenters, friends from my lost past, discussing current affairs that used to matter. When I was surprised by snatches of music or songs, especially those that meant something to me, the violence of my grief was overwhelming. Music released emotion. In order to stay strong, I had to shut it out.

About six weeks after my accident, the staff took us out of the unit in a minibus to the local shopping mall to play ten-pin bowling. It was my first time out in the world in a wheelchair and I found it brutal – physically alarming (would my head stay on going round corners?) and emotionally souring. Glowering from the minibus windows at the drivers zooming past in their busy, able-bodied lives, I cursed the bad luck that had put me here, in crippledom, in what felt like the Sunshine Variety bus, rather than where they were.

At the giant shopping complex, I struggled with everything – the fresh air, the searing daylight, the tiny gradient up to the entrance, the sight of people, people, people, effortlessly doing all the things I used to do, getting out of cars, rushing into shops, window shopping. The sense of dislocation and loss was profound and I felt so small that I wished I could disappear, swallowed up in my own tears of self-pity. Weeping defiantly, I inched my way along the fronts of shops full of clothes designed to look good when you’re standing up, cursing them as well. As I was by far the weakest wheelchair pusher there – and it’s a tough school, spinal physio; you have to push yourself – I was trailing a long way behind the others by the time I got to the bowling alley at the end of the mall. Black humour is possibly the very last lifebuoy left in the sea at times like that; it certainly came to my rescue that afternoon.

The spinal outing had coincided with that of a group of special needs adults, who were clustered around the arcade games at the entrance to the bowling alley. Severe Down’s syndrome, people with growth deficit, damaged bodies and all degrees of learning difficulty, enthralled by the flashing lights and the buttons to press. Then they saw me coming. I guess I was some sight: a kind of Ninja Turtle moving very, very slowly on wheels, encased in black and white plastic from chin to groin, flailing elbows, funny gloves, red eyes, a yellow bag of urine and its valve trailing mysteriously from under my trouser leg. They all turned, entranced by the vision. At the entrance, just where the arcade machines were, the shiny floor of the mall turned to carpet and upon it I stuck, becalmed, and my legs went into spasm.

Oooooh, said the army of little people, and they forsook the flashing lights and motorbike simulators to gather around me. They inspected me at close range with grave, uninhibited curiosity, fascinated by the alien on wheels flailing weakly in front of them. I smiled and nodded at them, foolishly trying to protect my dignity. They didn’t care. They weren’t being judgemental. I realised that they had instinctively identified someone who was as low down the pecking order as they were. I was one of them, but I looked a bit funnier. I might even be lower down the order than them. Indeed, most of these solemn-faced souls were taller than me, and much more mobile. I felt as if I had been cast in one of Alan Bleasdale’s black comedy dramas. They were still staring, gently but persistently, when a nurse came to my rescue and pushed me onto the carpet towards the bowling alley, and balls I could neither lift nor bowl.

During those early days in rehabilitation, I got to put a face to Snafu, whose angry, distressed voice had echoed round my nights in the high dependency ward. Everyone adored Snafu – male and female patients, nurses, physiotherapists, his mum, his sisters, his Army mates, his five thousand ex-girlfriends: he was a tough, outrageous, larger-than-life character, as wild as a semi-domesticated polecat, as sharp as any stand-up comedian, as mature as he was vulnerable. Then nineteen, he had been shot in Helmand, Afghanistan, when a sniper’s bullet sneaked into the sleeve hole of his body armour, hit his shoulder blade and ricocheted through his spine at the top of his chest. He reckoned the Afghan was a rubbish shot.

‘If he was any good I’d be dead, wouldn’t I?’

As he lay on the ground, fully conscious, he remembers bantering with his fellow soldiers. He thought he was dying, but decided he might as well go with a smile on his face. His mates told him what soldiers always tell their dying comrades – that he’d be all right; that he’d be in the pub in no time. He was helicoptered to Camp Bastion, thence to Birmingham, and soon to the spinal injuries unit in Glasgow, to be nearer his family. The six-foot-four, fifteen-stone soldier morphed into a skinny, laconic, blue-eyed tetraplegic playboy, soon well enough to dance around the gym on the back wheels of his wheelchair like a trick cyclist, chatting up all the girls, amusing everyone with his antics. Either that, or he indulged in a soldier’s favourite game of mooching, fag in hand, at the door, trading profane insults with anyone brave enough to take him on.

During the Pope’s visit to Glasgow in 2010, Snafu appeared at one end of the ward, as if in a vision, a mitre fashioned from a pillowcase stuffed with cardboard upon his head, his body draped in a white blanket, a giant crucifix round his neck. He carried an aluminium brush handle as a staff and glided regally up the ward in his chair handing out fragments of sliced white bread to the occupant of every bed. In Glasgow, a city riven by religious divide, the comedy was especially edgy, of course, because he was a Protestant; a Rangers football team supporter.

‘Bless you my child,’ he said at every bedside.

And to the women and the female nurses, his eyes dancing sardonically: ‘Kiss my ring.’

Several years have passed, but I can still remember the sustained gale of laughter following him up the corridor that day. People laughed and then kept on laughing and then laughed some more. You simply don’t hear that in hospital. He provoked a similar outbreak of mirth in the gym when, bored and restless as he often was, he wheeled around asking all the women present how much they would charge to lap-dance for him.

The physios gathered their professional dignity and tried not to join in.

‘Get lost, Snafu.’

‘Go away! Aren’t you supposed to be on the triceps press?’

He was utterly persistent. ‘No, you have to tell me. How much?’

Eventually, casting their eyes around to make sure no NHS suits with clipboards were lurking, the physios played his game.

‘Four million,’ said one.

‘At least. Because my career would be finished if I was found out.’

‘Six million.’

‘I wouldn’t do it.’ A humourless junior physiotherapist on rotation in spinal.

His eyes lighted wickedly on me, purple-faced, toppled helplessly over my own knees. ‘Hey Mel, what would you charge?’

I was flattered to be asked. He tolerated me, just about, as a mate, although his banter was brutal – I was as old as his granny, plus he’d decided I was officer class. I’d been a horse rider, after all, and he’d found out my house had an orchard – so in the gym he loudly dubbed me a caviar-eating snob. In private, when he found me in tears, he was kindness itself. He was a year younger than my own son.

‘Half a million,’ I said. ‘Because my freak value doesn’t outweigh the fact I’m too old.’

‘Nah,’ he agreed.

Snafu got particularly bored at weekends, when there was no gym. One Sunday evening, the place packed with visitors, his terrible screams echoed down the ward: ‘Aaaaargh!! Nurse!!!! Come quick!!!! I can’t feel my legs!!!’ For amusement, he regularly soaked the auxiliaries when they helped him shower, or when the fire alarm went off, as it did often, he sped up the ward screaming, ‘Fire! Everyone out! This one’s for real.’ It was Snafu who yelled triumphantly across the gym, ‘Susaaaaan! Ah’ve pished masel’!’ when his catheter tube became disconnected from his leg bag; who invented wheelbarrow races for the paralysed; who decided to practise commando crawl across the gym, dragging his legs behind him, and of course wriggled straight out of his tracksuit bottoms, exposing himself to the world, and leaving the physiotherapists initially too helpless with laughter to cover him up; and it was Snafu who, despite his impaired hands, beat everyone in the target-shooting competition one Wednesday afternoon, part of our weekly games session. As a flourish, to demonstrate he was in the company of amateurs, he also shot the clock on the gym wall: the holes remain in the glass to this day. He had wanted to be a soldier since he was four and before he was paralysed he’d been in line for specialist sniper training and promotion. A man-child: incorrigible, charismatic, vulgar, cynical, careless, self-destructive, heroic, vulnerable, shrewd. Of all the people I encountered in the tiny, little-understood world of spinal injury, he was the one that made me the most sad.

Approaching bedtime on the rehab ward was the worst. The conveyor-belt sequence kicked in again, in reverse, and we sat by our beds, queueing for the team of two nurses to come and hoist us out of our chairs onto the sheets and attach our overnight urine bags. Then we waited for the final drugs trolley. Long-term incarceration in hospital teaches you tolerance, patience and the knowledge that we are all very, very human. Even now, years later, when I close my eyes I can hear the banter of Rosebud in the distance and the squeak and rattle of the night-time trolley she is pushing. And around me I can sense some of my fellow patients starting to flutter and jangle. Respectable middle-aged women, with husbands and flowerbeds and Vauxhall Astras, but now hungry for whatever opiate or benzodiazepine they needed to soothe the mental anguish of their state, their personal paradise lost. They hungered, bodies paralysed but writhing inside for medication, just as mine had writhed in the high-dependency ward. When was the trolley coming? One woman would press her buzzer anxiously and then others would follow. The drone of multiple alarms would sound down the long ward.

‘What kept you?’ Mrs Bennett would cry.

Rosebud, ever insouciant, was having none of it.

‘What do you think this is? BUPA?’ she cried. ‘I tell you, you’re lucky it isn’t. I’ve worked in private hospitals and they bill you for every single pill you take. Even a paracetamol. Youse are lucky youse are here and not there.’

Apart from when the staff came to turn us onto the other hip on a four-hourly rota, we were then undisturbed until the morning. That was the theory. Nights change when you are in hospital. In fact, as I was to learn, nights change forever when you are paralysed. Any joy went. Your favourite sleeping positions ceased to exist, partly because you could not feel them and partly because you could not achieve them on your own. You adopted the protocol position you were put into – on one hip or the other, pillow wedged into your back, another under the upper knee, more pillows stuffed into the bottom of the bed blocking your feet from going into a flexor spasm downwards. Thus comfort was outsourced: someone else arranged your limbs and your torso in a way which was safe for your skin and for your tubes to survive unblocked. Your frozen hands were put into customised splints, the fingers strapped flat against the formed plastic so they could not contract, and all autonomy was removed. You could no longer scratch your nose, let alone pick it. The private geometry of your night, your ability to cuddle into shapes practised from childhood, was gone for ever: a very personal autonomy to lose. Meanwhile, the hour hands stuck, as if glued, to the face of the clock – T.S. Eliot’s ‘Only through time time is conquered.’ Peace was as lost as paradise. The nurses’ station on night shift was notoriously noisy; there were a handful of the staff who seemed unable, or disinclined, to lower their voices as they sat chatting. When buzzers rang, they would push back their chairs, the metal legs screeching on the floor. Weirdly, my paralysed bladder used to spasm at that noise: a peculiar sensation – somewhere deep inside an insensate body, in a dormant vital organ which contained a foreign body, a catheter, there was a horrid jump of indignation at the discordant pitch. Imagine. I could hear with my bladder! Was it transmitted via my ears, down some remaining nerve pathways, or was it a vibration in the air that affected my bladder alone, its catheter acting as a misplaced aerial?

In between interruptions, we learnt to endure the passive tyranny of those long hours, where no limbs stirred, no sheets rustled. These were not normal wards. You have no idea how eerily morgue-like paralysed patients are in bed when they cannot move. Nurses are notoriously superstitious; there are rich stories of ghostly scares on night-time wards with darkened corridors. Delphinium, one of the regular night shift, told me of the fright she had when a patient, paralysed from the neck down and normally as still as a corpse, sat bolt upright as she passed, the result of a sudden, unexpected spasm. Muscle spasms could happen, but rarely as extreme as that.

‘I was like, waaaaaaah. Nearly crapped myself,’ she said. ‘He didn’t even wake up.’

Night time. Even if our bodies were by necessity quiet, our minds were their own torture chambers, forever churning the random nature of the accidents, the screaming bad luck which had damned us to stillness. Why us? Why me? And often, if we did dream, our dreams tormented us by putting us back on our feet again. Dreams so vivid that when we woke, it was especially desolate to rediscover reality. One night I dreamt that Vitamin D tablets were a miracle cure for spinal injury, and because I already took them as supplements I was able to walk again. There I was up on my feet, walking unsteadily round the ward helping my fellow patients reach things from their bedside tables, and waiting for the doctors to arrive so I could tell them the good news. I woke up, convinced it wasn’t a dream, fighting a sickening lurch of hope and then disappointment before cold logic kicked in. I remember one night I even said to myself in my subconscious, now don’t be fooled, this is a dream, you can’t really walk again, and then I dreamt that to test it, I had woken up, and it was true – I could actually walk again. Double-dip dreaming. A plot within a plot. But of course everything remained within the parameters of the dream. Waking that morning for real was particularly cruel.

Always in the night there were the needy patients, the ones who became queasy or overcome with pain, or indeed were just desperate for human contact to break their desolation. We had call buzzers on wires; paraplegics had theirs on the bedside table, because they could reach. Tetraplegics with some arm function had them draped across their bedclothes, as in my case. Those who could move only their heads and shoulders had them by their cheek, so they could turn their head and press them. I hated using mine, but many people didn’t have the same hang-up. There were also the confused souls who couldn’t locate their buzzers, and they would just cry out, ‘Nurse … nurse …’ Of course the nurses couldn’t hear, but the rest of us in the room would be woken, and someone in a nearby bed would press their buzzer instead.

Doobie had a habit of rushing in, crying theatrically: ‘Who’s buzzing NOW?’ and striding crossly towards the patient with the flashing call button above their beds.

‘It’s Elsie,’ the buzzer-ringer would stammer, defensively. ‘She can’t press her buzzer.’

And we lay awake and listened to poor wee Elsie being administered to, because we had no choice. One night, when I was on a further course of antibiotics for a lung infection, I woke with an overwhelming need to vomit. I pressed my buzzer and heard for the first time the distinctive slap, slap of a footfall I would come to dread.

‘What is it?’ she said. Not kindly.

‘I’m sorry but I feel really sick,’ I gasped. I was panicking inside. This had never happened before. I didn’t even know if I could be sick.

She said nothing, but turned on her heel and disappeared. Soon she returned with a papier-mâché NHS sick bowl, the grey bowler hat of despair. Her body language was contemptuous. She thrust, almost threw, it at me, and walked away, leaving me to be sick alone. She didn’t say a word.

It was my first introduction to Nettles.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Angels of Mons

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Florence Nightingale

A catastrophe delivers you into an alien landscape, in which you must learn to survive. Paralysis takes you hostage. On the ward, interred long-term, you learn your territory, the space defined by the square of curtain rail suspended from the ceiling, delineating your tiny world of bed and bedside table. You lie and watch and familiarise, as must men behind bars, or animals in a zoo. Unbeknownst to you, you are already practising your next career as one of life’s observers, your useless fingers brushing the raised cot sides of the bed, rhythmically, plaintively, because you are not yet able to hold a book in your hands to amuse yourself. Maybe you will never be able to hold a book. You do not know yet.

As in a prisoner of war camp, your relationship with your guards becomes primary. To achieve this, you first try to grasp their names – hard in the beginning, because most ward staff do not wear name badges, nor do they introduce themselves. They are too busy, plus there is an assumption of automatic familiarity, as most of the patients are there for a long time. Then you must learn to distinguish their uniforms, and work out the caste system so that you can tell nurses from auxiliaries – the nursing assistants. And then the cleaners, in green, typically big powerful women blessed with an extraordinary capacity for hard work. The nurses are bogged down with form-filling and drug administering; the auxiliaries, the ones near enough on a minimum wage, do most of the physical work with patients. They are the ones who clean you up when your bowels burst, who bring you a bowl of cereal in the morning and your milky tea, who roll you and dress you and truss you into back brace and collar, then hoist you into your chair, ready for the day. In the beginning, before you get to know them well, you badge them only as noisy or quiet, kindly or less kind. You judge them intuitively: do they enter your bed space with the body language which says, ‘What can I do to make you as comfortable as possible?’; or do they approach with the clear intention of escaping as swiftly as they can? Soon you can read them by the way they walk, their faces, the tilt of their heads, the readiness of their smile.

Most of the auxiliaries were the biggest-hearted people on the planet; those with least tended to give the most, both in time and emotional warmth. The canteen staff were the same. Many were extroverts, performers, who saw it as their role to entertain us. In Glasgow, everyone’s got a few Billy Connolly genes: they delighted in telling funny stories, often in competition, as they gathered over our still bodies to wash us. I’d lived in Scotland for decades, but I struggled with their rapier-fast Glaswegian. It was like tuning in to snatches of soap opera on foreign TV.

‘And she goes, like, “You never!” And ah goes: “Ah did so. No way he was gonnae get away with that!”’

‘How no?’

‘Have she shown you her latest tattoo?’

‘Who’s she no’ shown it to?’

‘I wouldnae have one down there. I’m, like, “Nice! Not!”’

‘You know me, half daft!!’

‘Bodrum. Half board £49.99.’

‘Ma Jamie he’s went the same. Boggin. I’m, like, waaaaaaaah no-way!’

Defined as logs by a log-roll, we behaved accordingly, not that we had much choice; we lay and listened to the domestic dramas unfolding over our bodies, and as we gained in confidence might start to join in. I preferred that, because listening to them talk among themselves, as if I was unconscious, made me feel staggeringly isolated and lonely. With hindsight, I realise their chat, showboating, exaggerated stories, made a hard job more bearable for them. It was timeless gossip, the conversation of bedsides and parish pumps and public wash-houses for centuries, and I much preferred the colourful stuff to listening to them moan about their shifts and the weather.

They told me about the time one of the auxiliaries had answered the phone. It was someone famous asking to speak to a patient she knew.

‘Aye, fine. Who’s calling?’

‘It’s Sarah, Duchess of York … but you probably know me as Fergie.’

‘Fergie, how are you? It’s Lily here.’

Glasgow’s like that.

There was Marigold, an exuberant, friendly single mother with a loud voice and a huge heart, who often sang to us and hugged us generously when she saw we were miserable. Begonia worked nights – a cryptic former rock-chick, introverted but humorous. So many were divorced single women who had raised their families alone. Chrysanthemum worked nights too – you got paid more – and spent most of the day caring for her grandchildren so her single daughter could hold down a job. ‘Men? Useless Bs, the lot of them,’ she’d say. No one ever swore in front of patients. Elm was an interesting man who kept a Komodo fighting dragon as a pet. Amaryllis, the wonderful Amaryllis, for whom no request was too much trouble, lived in a council house near the unit and had ongoing problems with a helpless alcoholic who lived upstairs and kept flooding her flat. Clematis, a fearless blonde twenty-one-year-old with generous hips, loved to talk about how she put down men. She’d give Doobie a hard time. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she’d hiss as they rearranged my body, ‘you stink. Do something about it.’ Periwinkle, an indomitably good-hearted woman with her hair pinned in an elaborate beehive, was saving up for her and her husband’s fourth holiday of the year. Turkey, it was always Turkey. She was so sweet. On her days off she often went into the city centre for the young paralysed men in the ward, to buy the fashionable T-shirts they wanted. They adored her.

Crocus was an older woman, a gentle soul who astonished me by telling me she didn’t know how to use a tampon. Candytuft had the build of a marathon runner and was always in a hurry, as if anxious to get to her next cigarette break. Like many of the staff, she had tattoos running the inside of her arm and extending down the outside of her palm. At first, prissily, I found it ugly; it looked as if her hands were dirty. Soon, tattoos ceased to stir me to value judgement: all that mattered, I learnt, was that someone had a kind heart, hands that worked and the time to help me. Helplessness is a great leveller and I became fond of the vast majority of the staff. It was a crappy job and they did it as best they could. They personified the essence of the NHS’s immense soft power – that world-famous humanitarian ethos of unquestioning free care, of embracing whatever sickness or disaster or disease is cast by the tide upon the doorstep. It’s a kind of warm, fuzzy feeling, a mixture of pride, altruism, generosity and compassion, and it’s the NHS’s most persistent asset. It’s what makes staff walk miles through the snow to get to work, or extend their shifts if no cover is available. It’s the ethos that says: It’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at. We might have little, personally, but we are professionals welcoming anyone. Our jobs, working for the NHS, give us importance and status. We belong to something great. As a result, kings and commoners alike get treated, mostly, with courtesy and kindness. A form of unwritten morality. The public have the same sense of ownership. Their warm, fuzzy feeling tells them, It’s free because it’s ours. You notice, after a while, that for some this brings an unrealistic sense of entitlement – to the best of treatment, to decent meals, to shorter waiting times. Which also means an entitlement to moan when these things are not delivered. Just as you notice the many who remain humbly grateful for the care they receive, however compromised it is by lack of resources.

There was, of course, the occasional member of staff like Nettles, whose ignorance made you dread interaction with them, especially in your helpless state. Nettles was small but heavy-footed, blonde and calculating, a woman who, as the old saying goes, you wouldn’t take a broken pay packet home to on a Friday night. I had taken a dislike to her for her lack of compassion over the sick bowl. The feeling was clearly mutual. The next time I spoke to her I could tell, just from the expression on her face, that my English accent jarred. I had lived long enough in Scotland to be sensitive to this. I was, in her eyes, judged simply a snob.

Hospital, in some ways, is like life on steroids, highly coloured. There were all the human emotions you could recognise, hyper-inflated. But it also contained another world of unfamiliar rituals and undercurrents, of strange protocols and jargon. Infection control was an essential but self-perpetuating hospital industry, and when you were learning independence with a constrained body, it often made life as difficult for you as it did for the germs. Every morning, after the cleaners had done the floors, the auxiliary nurses were tasked with sterilising the meagre surfaces in our personal areas: the over-bed table must be cleared and wiped; everything on top of the locker must be put away in the drawer to allow it to be wiped to prevent dust. Only our personal box of straws, a flag of long-term helplessness, could remain out. Every day, trying to become independent, I would place things where I could just about grip them with my feeble right hand. On the table, my glasses, my transistor radio, which I had developed enough finger power to turn on, my headphones, my laptop, my picnic mug with an open handle. With these small totems of normality within reach, I could retreat into my own world and pretend. On the bedside table, there was toothpaste and a toothbrush, which I was just learning to hold, spitting into a plastic beaker. I was fiercely protective of these things. They represented gains, hard-won goals.

And every day, after their break and before lunch, the auxiliaries would descend, like Valkyries, and sweep everything aside, moving, rearranging, pushing the table out of reach, smashing the precious little pretence of privacy. And of them all, the most thoughtless by far was Nettles. I watched her on days when I couldn’t go to the gym, a master of hiding from work she didn’t want to do, but Queen Jobsworth of wiping and cleaning, as she placed my table beyond my reach, swept my possessions into drawers I was too weak to open, unplugged my laptop, and pushed my mug to the back wall. Tidying, always tidying, wiping, intruding, controlling. When I pleaded weakly with her to leave my things out, she gave me a death stare and told me it was against the rules. She was hard and cold and unkind. I started to hate her; I fantasised about shooting her with an AK-47; I learnt to recognise the distinctive drag of her footsteps at night and cowered low.