“England! England.” Summoning up the past. Not the country, nor even the reality, but an idea. The Englishman; a dinosaur, like the rhinoceros, belonging to a bygone age. Surviving, just, in isolated pockets. Evolution is no place for fair play.

“England! England.” A hymn for the dying.

Peter gets his wife on the blower and chats about nothing for an age. He finishes with

“I love you.” He never says that when she visits. The doctors came round to talk with him earlier. I don’t know what they said but whatever it was, it must’ve really scared him. 

The nurses are being especially kind to John. That’s a terrible sign. If they’re overly friendly with you, you know you’re in big trouble. He’s got a blood transfusion into one arm and a saline drip into the other. The ward stinks of the poo that seeps gradually into his bedside bag. He lies propped up, head lolling to his chin, eyes glazed, arms at his side, palms facing outwards (like a photo of a dead gorilla I once saw posed for a hunters’ prize photo) with his gown slackly limp across his thighs, his penis hanging out. He’s done a remarkable job of shouldering physical dignity and sickness at the same time - either is a heavy enough burden for most of us - but now it’s just too much for him. The nurses approach, pulling rubber gloves on with a slap, and swish his curtains shut.

Now it's my turn. I’m completely at their mercy. More needles, more injections, more pills from an unknown hand. I’ve no say on what is put into me, what drugs I take, what course of action is coming next. I despise this. I want to have a say in how I die or live. I’ve been here so long that I think familiarity’s set in on their part. I hate the nurses for their smiles and happy banter. They’ve totally blown their chances of a tin of Quality Street if I ever get out of here.

When I wake John’s being sick, heavily, projectile red vomit, blood in via the arm last night, out via the mouth today. He sprays the wall and floor with an immense wave. The hole in his stomach gurgles and spurts even more fluid up like a geyser.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” he gasps as the nurses try to stem the bleeding. To me he is nothing less than a god. His heroic defiance in the face of his own impending death, his refusal to sink into pity, is on a level with Scott’s ‘I do this to show what an Englishman can do…’ note. I watch an Englishman being wheeled away to a private room. It’s not good for us to see this, a nurse says. On the contrary, I think, it’s essential that we realise what’s coming to us all. So that if we make it out of here, we live what remains of our lives as best we can, Kings in our freedom, respectful of death. As John is, as Reg is, so must I be. One day.

The desk fan that was cooling John whirs on, chopping up emptiness. His blood pressure machine is silent.

I slip from the ward, sad, hobble the length of the empty, sterile corridor, waiting for the shout that means a nurse has seen me, which never comes, and head outside for some fresh air. I settle on a shady bench in front of the hospital. A pasty-white group of fat women and skinny men, all doused in England football shirts and tattoos - one man with a closed eye, smashed in recently by the looks of it - gather around a girl who’s fainted on the lawn. They panic like flustered chimps as their efforts to revive the girl - which involve shaking her limp upper body viciously and shouting “C’mon San’, for fuck’s sake, c’mon,” - fail. I shudder with disgust and fear at the sight of them. Behind us another man with blood trickling from a head wound onto his England shirt screams at a car 

“Fuck off, I told you, you cunt, fuck off,” and staggers off up the roadway, away from the emergency department, flexing his lats like a bats’ wings, looking very satisfied to have caused such drama.

“Stalin considered this the first ever socialist novel,” says the tea lady - the quiet one of the two, not the one with big bouffant hair who calls everybody ‘lovey’, the other one - as she flicks through my copy of ‘Robinson Crusoe’.

“Really?” I’m dazed.

“Yes, that’s what Malraux said anyhow. I love these plates, I’ve got a book at home, ‘The Water Babies,’ that’s got colour plates in it like these…”

Her words take me up among the clouds. It’s not that she knows of Stalin or Malraux that’s so pleasing, but that she feels able to talk about them freely to me. Here, in North Kent, where knowledge of anything other than oversized gold clown jewellery and cheap cider is considered with suspicion and hostility, not only has she dared to learn about mad Russians and daredevil Frenchmen and more but…she dares to talk of them.

“England! England!” Now it’s me chanting, with joy, and I really mean it. The gods briefly show their munificence in the face of this Gentlelady

If this were a novel we patients might have fine words constantly ready to spring from our mouths. Sarcastic humour, insight, wisdom. But there’s none of this on offer in here. Just silence, and what’s needed to get what we want, and careless phrases borne of anger directed outwards - towards nurses who regardless of our rudeness continue to do their very best for us – because, in the style of our age we’re uneducated and unimaginative and therefore can’t comprehend how we deserve what is happening; can’t realise that this is how life is, that we’re not important, no more than an insect in Bhutan five thousand years ago was, and that it’s all… nothing personal.

An old lady is wheeled in. She begins to moan. Then yell. She thrashes and screams behind her drawn curtains. There’s a constant ‘beep-beep’, like a machine has become unplugged. The nurses don’t come to turn it off. They left as soon as they’d put the breaks on her bed. It’s a particularly rude and careless night shift tonight. I can hear them in the reception area, just a few metres away from the lady’s bay.

“D’you know,” one says, “Marge reckons that nine out of ten Africans in her clinic are HIV positive! And that two out of three that come to our country have Aids!”

“I just don’t know why we let them in,” adds an Asian nurse, “bloody immigrants.”

“Come on England!” Yes, come on, keep up England, you brave idea, you gentleman, leave ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ behind. Your country needs you.

The lady yells in tongues, no language that I can discern. I go to the toilet and try to peek at her but it’s too dark to see anything through the crack in her curtain. I wonder what part of the world she comes from and if it’s better there than here. She seems to settle, but then, having drifted off a little, I’m woken again by her near-inhuman shrieks. It’s three thirty am. More ‘beep-beeps’. Her saline tube’s probably come adrift. She thrashes about for half an hour. The heavy air is full of huffs and thumping of pillows and “fuckin ‘ells”. Nobody really wants to curse the lady I’m sure, but we need to sleep. I’m dog-tired, I don’t want to hear this pain; I want to get better, not be constantly reminded that I’m in the morgue’s waiting room. I run my fingers over my face. Feel all the dry skin and scabs on my forehead. It’s due to the bad water, a nurse said yesterday; bad water, here in a hospital. We’re meant to be getting better and I look like a leper. I flip onto my front, my comfort position, catch my canula on the metal grid headboard and yelp.

After breakfast a consultant tries to talk to the old lady.

“Its no use, she only speaks Polish,” explains the staff nurse.

“Can we get an interpreter in?”

“We’ll try.” The nurse says. The patient spits out a tirade of incomprehensible anguish. The consultant raises his voice above hers,

“Can we move her to a side room, so she doesn’t disturb the others in here?”

“We wanted to keep her under close observation,” says nurse.

“But she’s ninety-one for God’s sake, she’s allowed to die!” The consultant huffs, rather too loudly, more for us patients’ sake than the nurse or his fellow doctors. He yearns to be a man of the people I think.

“But Mr J-, there’s a pile of paperwork if that happens.”

“What’s this world coming to,” the consultant mutters, moving onto the next bed.

I look over to the old lady, a shrivelled prune of a thing, a stick-thin-Auschwitz survivor; she appears frail, even for one of her advanced years. She can’t speak a word of English, doesn’t know what’s happening to her, has no known relatives; just what is it the nurses are trying to preserve? Life isn’t sacred, not at all. But what matter these thoughts, this is the way it is and there’s no stopping it. I feel my face. I’m peeling badly in this bad air and bad water place. I rub some E45 cream in and wallow in my depression. My vanity is increasing with each layer of red flaky skin shed.