A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno

Author:Paul Dalgarno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2022-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

2013

More languor, warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone.

I’m in a room that, at first glance, doesn’t look like it’s in a hospital, although the wall art is a giveaway: abnormally colourful flowers, vases, fruit and vistas. No sand timers or scythes, no softening apples or trypophobia-triggering holes in strawberries and crackly leaves – a wide berth given to memento mori for an audience that needs no reminding. But is that the right choice artistically? When Burns wrote that his love was like a red, red rose it didn’t feel like a plastic one in a cheap restaurant or the prints on hospital walls – he’ll love his rose until a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun . . . even though the rose, like all roses, will die, its aliveness – newly sprung in June – spotlit against a gloomy backdrop of deep time and inexorable decline, glowing all the brighter for it.

Eva and I went to Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh when I visited for the Tattoo, saw where the Covenanters were imprisoned and the supposedly cursed mausoleum of their tormentor Sir George ‘Bloody’ Mackenzie. A few years prior to our visit, a homeless man had taken shelter in the tomb and fallen through the putrescent wooden floor into cobwebbed remains, his shrieks supposedly summoning the Mackenzie poltergeist. Not long after that, a couple of teenage boys were charged with violation of sepulchre, an ancient graverobbing law, for taking a skull from Mackenzie’s lair and using it as a hand puppet before playing football with it on the cemetery grass. The graves there were the opposite of hospital art: Calvinistic skulls and crossbones, moss-covered skeletons and statues shouting reminders that you – yes, you! – will be mulch soon enough.

There are seven chairs in the treatment room, all plush, with vinyl covers that must make it easier to clean up vomit, blood, urine and superbugs. One chair is empty today due to a scheduling issue or rigor mortis, blowflies laying eggs that hatch and creep into wounds and body openings – mouth, nose, anus, genitals – within . . . Jesus, Margaret, lighten up . . .

I look tired – no surprises there – but also relaxed, the combined effect, I think, of the chair, the sunlight, and the fact I’m grazing on a magazine. The pile on the table offers choice if not variety. The covers of the so-called women’s mags look nearly identical, as do the covers of the male-oriented car mags. For children and the childlike, there’s the CBBC magazine, the Beano, the Dandy. They also have some word search and crossword books that have largely been completed or sabotaged already.

The sun has found my entire body through the big sash window – a good omen. I’ll be here for hours yet, always am, dunking stale biscuits into cups of tepid tea. The cannula in my arm doesn’t seem to bother me – I’m a pliable pin cushion these days, connected by a tube to a drip bag with what looks like cranberry concentrate.

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