One Last Dick Joke Before I Die

*

The man in the next bed is a Buddha-like image of the jolly fat man, who does not learn that laughter only makes his stitches burst.

I don’t know how he stands it. I am in so much pain that I cannot feel it. Cannot feel anything, apart from a short-tempered disdain for young women in uniform who hover as distant and unmerciful as angels – buzz like blue-arsed flies – around my not-yet-dead body.

The epidural that took so many attempts to insert, while my nerves shrieked like the Furies of ancient myth, does no more than blunt the jagged edges of a boulder that pins me to the mattress. Like a butterfly pinned with my entrails spread in place of wings.

Yet the pain is somehow separate. I see it as a black sun blazing cold as buried coal with razor rays of jet.

The message to my brain is so confused, it takes a while to realise my penis is stiffer, longer, harder than it ever was in the golden glory of my adolescence.

God, I am a wrecked ship sinking with its sails set at full furl. No wonder the nurses keep their distance, for fear of being dragged down by the undertow.

Should I find it life-affirming that, even at this late hour, my balls insist I’m still brimful of spunk? Or is it a final ‘fuck you’ gesture at the world. Or just a deathbed dick joke, a tasteless jape before the watershed?

*

I have heard that dying men on battlefields cry for their mothers. Well, mine is here and is no comfort.

I don’t believe in ghosts, I insist in a nil-by-mouth whisper.

She leans close and I smell the unique perfume of Senior Service mixed with Lifebuoy soap.

“The thread is bomb darn gyroscope,” she says, which is profound and illuminating. Until I wake. And yes, it’s all a fucking dream. Like an eight year old’s essay when he runs out of imagination and time and scribbles the last line in his exercise book. The End.

And the trouble with dreams is that they mean nothing to anyone but the dreamer. The tedious, obsessive details of my subconscious form an unremitting voiceover track to my life. A psychotic noir narrative from which I – as the protagonist of a plotless potboiler – cannot quickly skip the pages to an action scene.

*

Of course, I’m not dying. This is just the psychological body-horror equivalent of man-flu.

As a self-dramatising rehearsal for my real and inevitable demise, I believe the script still needs a lot of work. And a better actor. Anyone but me.

*

The jolly Buddha bloke rewrites his own comedy as a farce, which plunges into pathos.

Each night, he tussles with the nurses as they restrain him from pulling the drips out of his arm. Each day, his mother visits in the flesh – not as ample as his: a female Laurel to his Hardy, all unkempt hair and squeaky voice – and pleads with him. Be a good boy. Your mummy loves you.

But, as I say, his is not a love story, nor a tragedy. He is reduced to the role of the fat schoolboy - Billy Bunter buggered - as the curtains close and he exits in a metal box on wheels.

*

The physiotherapist is a chunky Australian girl, sunburnt brown as an oak tree, with puffy nipples that poke like acorns through the fabric of her sweatshirt.

She has a wide-mouthed grin with an amazing smile: a shark-like array of teeth that promises a blow-job with an extra frisson of danger.

Where is my boner when I need one?

A totter to the toilets and back exhausts all my energy and needs to be planned with as much attention to detail as an assault on Everest.

Now that I can see a future for myself again, it consists of small landmarks. Each readily achievable and not too far apart.

“Come on, Mr W,” she cajoles me. “Deep breath in, then cough.”

She presses her palm to my bandaged gut, as I feebly clear my throat as if about to speak.

“Try again,” she urges. “I want to feel your diaphragm move and your tummy muscles tense.”

Sod that, I think. I’ve had a crude reminder that the human body is but a blood-filled bladder. I am no braver than a water balloon in the hands of a naughty girl at her upstairs bedroom window.

*

I say, I say. There’s a new guy in the next bed who’s got no legs.

No legs? Poor chap! (He’s in the wrong joke.) How does he smell?

Well, he doesn’t need Odour Eaters.

*

I sit in the dayroom, waiting to be discharged. Wearing my dressing gown and gawping at Jeremy Kyle, in preparation for replicating this same scene at home, in my own armchair. But perhaps with more swearing.

I can’t get dressed until the consultant surgeon sees me – or the clipboard of documents that describes my bowel movements, like a Dulux colour matching chart – and pronounces me cured. The shaman has to speak the magic word.

Shit, but there’s a complication. My temperature’s too high. After hours under general anaesthetic and weeks spent prone in bed, there is fluid on my lungs and the danger of bronchial infection.

“Just a few more days observation, Mr Wilks,” the sawbones says, in that patronising tone of voice that only someone who has carved you like a joint of pork can confidently assume. “Best to make sure you’re all better.”

*

I am coughing now. Fit to burst, as they say. But my stitches are the least of my worries. I have a strong suspicion this is what my old cat Jinx used to feel when he virtually turned himself inside-out to bring up a fur ball.

You know that moment when you pull up your zipper too quickly and fear you’ve caught your todger in its teeth? Well, that’s what my chest is like: as if I’ve popped a rib and punctured my heart.

I have a kidney bowl. In case I cough up my kidneys, no doubt.

Instead, I spit out a green, alien-looking blob of slime. Like a brussel sprout with veins.

The next cough brings a spray of gore. A Hammer horror splatter, which never looks convincing on the screen, but is bloody terrifying when it’s a warm pool on your lap.

Fuck, I’m not ready to face this test again so soon. Not when I’m sure I flunked the practise run. You’d think dying would be easy. Anyone can do it. Children. Babies. Even the unborn.

But it’s a hard lesson. Even worse than long division, which made no sense to me when I was eight years old. So much so that I prayed to god for a terminal illness, in order that I would never be expected to return to school ever again.

*

Outside, it’s snowing. I think of the cool patterns my blood would make against the whiteness. About being found frozen in a giant Rorschach blot and maybe reminding the person who finds me of a butterfly or a bird.

*