One day when I was a kid, I ran down a steep dune at Wilson’s Promontory that got steeper, and gravity inverted me, slamming my head through 135 degrees to hard sand. I remembered nothing until I floated home in my father's car late in the afternoon, gazing out at anamorphic scenery through the distorting glass of its 1960s curved windscreen; a psychedelic world of an unknown colour that had the taste and smell of sunshine filtered through dry desert sand. Concussion.
Years later. I woke out of anaesthesia in the delirium of some drug, the one - or one of the ones - that makes you talk to anyone in your state of ecstasy, before the pain sets in and has to be worked at. A few months earlier, breathing had not returned to normal and, one x-ray later, I had found myself on the fourth floor, south, of a cream-brick hospital in Parkville. The nose had set in its broken position. No-one had noticed after the accident, in which my face had cannoned into the back of the front seat; but why would they? Everyone knew that without a seat belt, I should have been a human javelin smashing the windscreen like film sugar glass, and then impaling the telegraph pole, so a broken nose was hardly a big deal.
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All fixed, someone said breezily, someone in a mask; as if I’d just had a haircut. Delirium. The doctors were friendly, the nurses were friendly, the other patients were friendly, and most friendly of all were the scrawny or fat migrant women who brought the food, made the beds and took away the trash. It was a friendly era. Or the drugs. They brought around newspapers. Bangladesh had made up with Pakistan, the Soviet Union signed some kind of a lopsided treaty with East Germany meant to last until 1995, and the US overturned John Lennon’s deportation order. Elizabeth Taylor even remarried Richard Burton, and Muhammad Ali made a couple of complimentary remarks about Joe Frazier after smashing him in Manila. At home, later, (which it would be for only another few months before I decamped forever) a spirograph of siblings, twelve, ten and eight, made their elliptical revolutions around the house like mice in a horizontal treadmill, while my father, keeping his distance, burned household rubbish in the incinerator that would smoke blue in light rain, far away at the end of the garden.
In my post-operative delirium I heard someone singing, but it was just the radio I had brought along, plugging it into the socket behind the elevated bed, after unplugging the overhead television for which you had to pay to watch inane daytime TV hosts power-laughing - silently if the sound was mercifully turned down - at couchloads of cross-legged quasi-celebrity guests. I keep your picture/upon the wall/it hides the nasty stain/that’s lying there. The radio sounded like heaven, or 1975. In my little town/I grew up believing/God keeps his eye on us all.
The delirium ended when the real pain started, a couple of days later, when an efficient nurse removed about two feet of gauze stuffing. It could have been two miles. 'Don’t sleep on your side, don’t lay flat, don’t try to breathe through your nose.' As if. Under black eyes, that taste had returned; sunshine through desert sand, but now the sand was drenched in blood.
Appetite returned after another day or two, and I could have eaten that weekend’s Caulfield Cup winner, Analight.
I’m not in love/no no/it’s because …
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