I suppose while I am still incapacitated now is as good a time as any to carry on with writing Thornton number four. The problem is I’m not very good at researching on Google and I need to know a lot more about the territory where I have placed the story, particularly the road between Pisa and Geneva.
So let’s go back to hospital and my brief companions. The corridors of the cardiac unit are decorated with prints of impressionist paintings, chiefly Monet, but the wards have no decoration except for a small, six by six inch icon in a candle holder of St George slaying his dragon and below it a notice in Greek reminding you to pick up your IKA book before you leave.
Manousis, the ex-policeman, who I presume had a history of heart problems otherwise why would he be in the unit? also evidently had kidney problems and looked nine months pregnant due to the retention of fluid, lying on his back with his swollen water melon belly. Sometimes he had the most harrowing cough that went off like a gun being fired and was most distressing, accompanied by gasping for breath and the bringing up of phlegm. Sitting up and wearing the oxygen mask usually quietened it down. In the early hours of my last night there I was woken by an explosion like the shattering of a sheet of glass and looked across the ward to see Manousis standing with parts of the oxygen mask in either hand. He had obviously turned the oxygen up instead of down with the mask still on his face and that was the result. This is presumption on my part but would explain what happened. He looked like a startled bunny anyway, which was hardly surprising.
Manousis was used to ordering people around, including doctors, (who didn’t put up with it for long), his family when they came to visit, other visitors, like Chris, ordered to leave my bedside and cross over to open the outside door. Douglas on more than one occasion ordered to set the television to rights, and I when up was not excluded from this aspect of his character. Shut the door, open the door, turn off the light, call the nurse, the air-conditioning is too cold. One occasion I didn’t leap to obey his bidding fast enough or hadn’t understood the command, the Cretan dialect can be so thick, and was rewarded with “Malaka!” He obviously thought that as my Greek is pretty limited I wouldn’t know the word – wanker. For the next couple of days I totally ignored him which I could see infuriated him and anyway, with my limited Greek, I was hardly the brightest of conversationalist to begin with so, when able, he would schlep over to the balcony door or the corridor to find someone to yak with. If there had been a real emergency I would have responded.
Now he was walking about. The blue silk pyjamas were changed for silvery-grey ones the trousers of which worried me to death as they were far too long for him and dragged horribly on the floor as he trod on them .As the hacking cough seemed to be somewhat on the wane, except possibly to draw attention – Manousis, you would have gathered by now had to be continually the centre of attention – he suddenly developed symptoms elsewhere. For example, with hideous moan he suddenly collapsed onto a chair clutching his back, one hand quivering supposedly uncontrollably, evidently in dire agony. Nurses rushed in to assist him back to bed where he continued to make a fuss. Doctor Kostas gave him an aspirin after which the symptoms subsided. On the mobile phone he was a different person to different callers and Douglas (whose Greek is miles better than mine) said he had developed so many symptoms he was no longer sure what he had said and to whom. If Manolis number one had visitors and Manousis hadn’t he made sure he entered the conversation at the earliest opportunity and as always it seemed he had an awful lot to say. He also garnered assistants from neighbouring wards. When doctors did their rounds, two or three minutes went to the middle bed, two or three minutes went to me and thirty minutes went to Manousis, Their frustration with him was obvious but then, as the Greeks say, ti na kanoume – what can we do?