A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [78]
He pulled the lesion away from his body.
He glanced down, then looked away.
His flesh was stretched into a white peak, like hot cheese on a pizza.
He opened the jaws of the scissors.
Take a deep breath, then blow out as the pain comes. That was what the osteopath had said.
He pressed the blades of the sharpened scissors around the stretched skin and squeezed hard.
He did not need to remember to breathe out. It happened entirely of its own accord.
The pain was so far beyond any pain he had felt before that it was like a jet aircraft coming in to land a couple of feet above his head.
He looked down again. He had not expected such a large volume of blood. It looked like something from a film. It was thicker and darker than he would have predicted, oily almost, and surprisingly warm.
The other thing he noticed when he looked down was that he had failed to sever completely the flesh around the lesion. On the contrary, it was flapping from his hip like a small and very raw steak.
He took hold of it again, reopened the scissors and attempted to make a second incision. But the blood made gripping difficult and the fat seemed tougher this time.
He leant over, put the scissors on the end of the bath and picked up the carving knife.
When he stood upright, however, a swarm of tiny white lights drifted across his field of vision and his body seemed farther away than it was meant to be. He put his hand out to steady himself on the tiled wall. Unfortunately, it was still wrapped around the carving knife. He let go of the carving knife and pressed his hand against the wall. The knife fell into the bath and came to land with its point embedded in the top of George’s foot.
At this moment the entire room began to rotate. The ceiling swung into view, he got a vivid close-up of that little avocado-green magnet contraption which held the soap, then the hot tap struck him in the back of the head.
He lay on his side staring down the length of the bath. It looked as if someone had killed a pig in it.
The lesion was still attached to his body.
Holy mother of God. The traumatized cancer cells were doubtless flowing through the isthmus of flesh between flap and hip, setting up little colonies in his lungs, his bone marrow, his brain…
He knew, now, that he did not have the strength to remove it.
He had to get to hospital. They would cut it off for him. Perhaps they would cut it off for him in the ambulance if he explained the situation carefully enough.
He got very slowly onto his hands and knees.
His endorphins were not working terribly well.
He was going to have to negotiate the stairs.
Damn.
He should have done the whole thing in the kitchen. He could have stood in that old plastic bath the kids used in summer. Or was that one of the items he removed from the back of the garage in 1985?
Very possibly.
He leant over the side of the bath and grabbed one of the towels.
He paused. Did he really want to press towel fluff into an open wound?
He got carefully to his feet. The little white lights came and went again.
He glanced down. It was difficult to make out what was what in the general area of the wound, and looking at it made him feel a little sick. He turned his head away and rested his eyes briefly on the spattered tiling.
Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Three. Two. One.
He glanced down again. He picked up the severed flap by its outer side and pressed it back into place. It did not fit very well. Indeed, the moment he let go it slid out of the wound and swung unpleasantly on its damp red hinge.
Something was actually pulsing in the wound. It was not a reassuring sight.
He took hold of the flesh again, held it in place, then pressed the towel on top of it.
He waited for a minute then got to his feet.
If he rang an ambulance straightaway they might come too soon. He would do a little tidying first, then ring.
First of all he had to clean the shower.
When he reached up to take hold of the showerhead, however,