THE COMA

Oliver in a coma with voices and patterns all around him...

In the swirling mayhem of a dream gone wrong, with discrete images mixing and matching and merging into something truly absorbing yet frightening, the boy lay totally motionless on his bed. His world was mostly like this all the time, and in all truth he didn’t mind. It masked something darker, something blacker, something he didn’t need to think about.

Pipes and tubes did this and that for him. He breathed unaided �" just about �" and the bruises had just about faded. But his eyes remained resolutely shut and the patterns mixed and merged in dreams that could go on for ever if they washed like a mixture of pastel colours over reality and turned sadness into a kind of bland happiness.

It was a brand new world, and he was coming to know its few odd corners.

Sometimes ice formed, crinkling like magical frozen feathers just out of reach, but he wanted to reach out and touch them. Of course he did! Those feathers were the wings that would help him fly away. And fly away he must do because someone was doing something evil and must be stopped at all costs.

And other sometimes there were voices, quite clear voices, familiar, lovely voices, voices from a past that maybe never was, though he thought something like it must have existed somewhere along the line.

And there were words he could understand. Of course he could understand them! They informed his world, they kept him thinking, they were the patterns of his new reality. And at the same time they sometimes drew parallels with a past that might have been.

“We’ll go down the lake lad when you’re up and well again,” said his favourite voice. “They say you might be able to hear me and maybe even understand, so I’ll tell you what we’ll do, though things will be mighty different from the way they were, what with what happened and all that. But we’ll go to the lake, you know the lake, with our rods and nets like we did in the good old days, and we’ll cast out and catch whoppers, both of us with whoppers to tell ev’ryone about when we get back home. They’ll listen and envy us, they’re bound to, the man and the boy triumphing like that! And there’ll be fish for tea, fresh fish roasted over an open fire or barbecued fit to fill your mouth with splendour, like jewels made of taste. We’ll do that all right, Oliver my boy, you see if we don’t.”

And after a while the voice would go too soon to be replaced by other sounds.

Quite often it was coughing. Not him coughing, at east he didn’t think it was though to be honest he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure, but he knew there was coughing. Loud coughing, and crying, weeping that most certainly wasn’t him. And sometimes there was retching, nasty, spine-curdling retching and loud crying, then quiet sobbing before there was more retching, until one day it stopped altogether and he heard a fresh voice, loud like the fishing-man’s voice but different like cod are different from salmon or cheese is different from yoghurt.

“We did all we could, Mrs Malmsbury, and the little lad had a lot of fight in him, you can be sure of that and take that away with pride, but in the end he gave up and I’m prepared to say, here and now, that one day you’ll see it as the best that could have happened… but we did our absolute best … and sometimes the best just isn’t enough, we need more, more than we could possibly have.”

And a woman’s voice said tearfully “Thank-you doctor, I know you did your best, but...”

What was that? Doctor?

He closed the eyes in his mind and thought, cutting out the random voices and thinking really hard. If the man was a doctor then was he in a hospital? Is that what all the sound and darkness was? The patterns, myriad glorious patterns? Because it’s being in hospitals when you meet doctors, isn’t it? They fix broken bodies and someone had a broken body once upon a time with that cough, didn’t they?

And much more importantly, she had a broken body.

Who was she, lying on the floor with blood oozing out of her and forming a puddle all around her? He knew her, and he didn’t know her. Black … he must return to the black...

A flicker, flash of memory and it was gone. It had to be. He couldn’t bear seeing it any more, not in his mind and not, surely not, in the world.

And the patterns came again, welcome, hazy patterns, images split and cracked and joined back together all wrong. Or right. Maybe they were right and everything else was wrong.

“They say you might be able to hear me and understand me,” whispered the friendly voice, welcome suddenly, to amputate the thoughts, “they say if I talk to you you might understand me and then get better… I want you to get better, Olly, the scumbags robbed me of my world and all I’ve got is you, and I’m afraid that blind authority is going to take you away from me, too, they say a boy needs to be fostered by parents and not just a parent, not just a single man whose heart has been twisted out of shape by the scumbags… I hope you can hear me, Olly, because when you wake up, and I pray you will wake up every hour that I live and breathe, when you wake up I want you to tell them what you want, what you really want, it may well be down to you...”

Then a swirl of nothing, and the weeping voice spoke, feminine and broken. “Doctor, if any of his organs will help someone else you can take them. It’s what he said he wanted, when we watched programmes on the telly and they were talking about transplants, programmes like that made him sad...”

And then the night descended like nights never do, and his world suddenly became so black you could pee in it and not see where you were peeing. There never had been such a gloriously black night, never had been such an absence of absolutely everything. Thank goodness for this escape from the voices, the sounds, the echo of … reality And there never had been so much silence. The voices, the coming-and-going rattles, the odd words cast around him, the promise of a fishing trip on the lake with Bert, his dad Bert, the good man, the best of all good men, all were silenced.

And the dawn came like dawns do.

And he opened his eyes to see where he might fly to.

© Peter Rogerson 16.12.16