Finding Paradise (chapter 8)
The following is based on a true story about a journey I took with my boyfriend. We traveled through Morocco in the 80s and it didn’t quite go as planned.
The ambulance arrived at the hospital. Ray actually looked concerned now, more so than before. Maybe it was just the hospital itself which concerned him. It was dirty. The room near us, just off the corridor, was full of bathtubs. Dirty ones, with no curtains around them. It was totally surreal. There were even toilets in the same room! It was like one of those mad dreams when you are dying for a pee and you can only find really grotty toilets, with no privacy.
Nigel didn’t protest as they carted him off down a corridor and through the double doors and into the E.R.; in fact, he didn’t speak at all.
We sat in the waiting area just outside the doors where the doctors had told us to.
We were exhausted, the night had been totally stressful. We could hear the most awful sound above us; they seemed to be renovating the hospital, and they must have been using the largest drill bit they could find because the whole building seemed to shake.
“It could be his liver”, Ray said after a long silence. “He got really ill a few years back and they said that if it happened again it could be nasty.”
I put my arm around him.
“He will be okay.”
I said that, but it wasn’t what I was thinking at all. If he had liver problems then there was a good chance he could be really ill. He had been acting strange, that could have been a sign. I knew a boy once who died from liver failure and he became really violent towards the end. Apparently because his liver didn’t function properly, he became toxic.
Maybe Nigel was toxic.
Suddenly the doors opened and a female doctor came out holding a slip of paper.
“Your friend is very ill,” she said with hardly any expression, as she handed the slip of paper to Ray. “Take this to buy a syringe, he needs injection.”
“Where do we go to buy the syringe?” Ray enquired exhausted by it all.
“Go out of the door you enter and is in front.”
Well that made sense. Was this some kind of quest where we had to solve enigmas? We assumed that she meant we should go out the door we came in originally, it had to be. The only thing was, that once outside there was only a car park. No outbuilding of any kind. At least we hadn’t seen one.
A doctor was walking out of the building at the same time as us and we showed him the paper. He gestured towards the left hand side and said that we would see it. Just what we would see was not clear, and we certainly were not prepared for it.
In the middle of the car park was a man sitting at a desk; it was rather like a Monty Python sketch. I literally rubbed my eyes and looked again. We approached the ‘desk’ in a shell shocked fashion and handed the slip of paper over. The man took it and mentioned a small sum of money, which we also handed over to him. He then gave us a syringe in a sealed pack
It was totally bizarre. We didn’t even comment to one another as we hurried back through the entrance clutching the syringe. Ray knocked on the double doors; the doctor came out, took the syringe and went back through the doors again. We wanted to follow her, but she wouldn’t let us.
We sat down again and waited, and waited. The drill above us tore into concrete and intensified my growing headache so much. It was almost like they were doing it on purpose just to piss us off even more. Hours later, the doors burst open again, only this time it was Nigel.
“I am not staying in there,” he protested, his eyes dashed around in their orbits. “They told me I need an operation, I am not having that here; I know what the matter is. It is a twisted colon, I have had it before, I will be fine after that jab.”
He didn’t even take a breath as he continued.
“There are flies all over the place. They are even in the oxygen masks, everywhere! And roaches. There is no way I am having an operation here.” We could clearly see his point, even though he did sound like a madman.
The doctors made a gesture to imply that Nigel was obviously insane. They actually seemed relieved he was signing out and didn’t even try to convince him to stay.
Nigel headed towards the counter with his insurance papers and handed them to the receptionist. We followed.
“I am not staying here” he kept repeating.
His whole body was shaking. It seemed that he was no longer in pain now though; just clinically insane.
Ray started to stroke Nigel’s arm and tell him everything was going to be alright. Nigel just gave him a sharp look, grabbed his papers again and walked out of the building. Suddenly I no longer existed and Ray was now tagging alongside Nigel, trying everything in his power to please him. Nigel was hardly taking any notice of him and just protesting constantly about the hospital’s conditions.
“They had flies in the oxygen masks!”
His eyes were open wide, and he twitched as he spoke, maybe it was the medication.
“I need something to drink,” he demanded.
“Okay, “ said Ray softly ,in an overly caring manner. “We can go to a café.”
He looked around frantically for a café; as if his life depended on it.
“There’s one, come on let’s go and get a drink and relax.” He said calmly.
He sounded totally patronising, but he didn’t mean to. His head was wrecked and I had no idea what he was going through. However, later on some of this behaviour would make sense to me.
Much later on.
We sat outside. Ray was stroking Nigel’s arm and telling him it was all going to be okay.
“Will you stop stroking my fucking arm!” Nigel shouted. “I know what it is, it is a twisted colon, I have had it before.” He sounded more like he was trying to reassure himself.
Suddenly, all seemed to slip back into normality and they started talking about everyday mundane things. Like what Nigel had been up to before he came over, the mutual friends he had seen, my sister and mother.
I just switched off.
After the coffee we got the bus back to the village. I couldn’t wait to get back and go to sleep, I was exhausted. However, when we got back to the village it seemed that things had suddenly become more complicated. All Nigel’s bags were outside in the hall and the owner of the house had an unexpected revelation for us:
“I don’t want that man in the house, he could die”
He was very serious about it and not very sympathetic.
We just looked at each other. Ray took out some money and told the landlord that we would like to stay another week,
“Is not possible” he stroked his moustache and gazed through us with the air of a great prophet. But he was just spaced out from the weed he had smoked, and the expression was probably due to the fact that he was trying to find the right words.
“I have Moroccan family, they take house, you leave tomorrow.”
Well, we understood what he was saying. We were being kicked out. As if the past 24 hours hadn’t been enough.
Where Nigel was going to go we had no idea, and the nurses too. Might have been nice to have a little heads up on the rental situation.
We went to our room and smoked the last spliff. Ray took the knock pretty well and in no time was asleep. Nigel looked like his mind had taken a vacation without him, he was completely AWOL. He was with me but he wasn’t. I wanted to try and get into his head to see what was going on. The past few days had not been how I had imagined they would be, I thought that maybe just by listening to him I could get some insight as to what was going on in his head and more importantly, Ray’s.
We needed batteries for the walkman so I asked Nigel if he wanted to go and get some with me, in the village. It was only a small village but it was amazing what they had in stock in the local minimarket. The Moroccans stared at us; we must have been the talk of the town. After we got the batteries we went and sat in the posh café over the road.
Nigel was a mess. His legs trembled, and his eyes constantly rolled back into his head, yet he seemed lucid and able to control his speech. He was talking about pretty normal things, but I could see that some kind of hell was going on behind his eyes. He also appeared to be hallucinating, I could tell by the way he would keep jumping and looking out the corner of his eye. He even mentioned it at some point. Quite calmly.
“I am hallucinating all over the place” he announced quite matter of factly.
He told me how, the first time he had ever taken acid he had felt ‘normal’. He said he felt like he was on it right now. I am not sure he wasn’t to be honest. He was not looking good. I didn’t let anything he said shock me or bother me too much, I thought it best just to keep as flat as possible and not contradict him or cause any friction.
So we just talked for quite a while about mundane things.
Suddenly, Ray burst into the café; eyes blazing and leaning over on one of the chairs to catch his breath — he looked like he had just ran in a marathon. He quickly made his way towards the table.
“What the hell are you doing here with him!?” he screamed at me as he grabbed me from the chair.
“Take it easy Ray we were just talking,” said Nigel.
“You shut up!” He yelled at Nigel “You have caused enough problems. Come and get your stuff and split the money because I want nothing more to do with you anymore!”
We paid for the coffee and all marched off back to the house. The locals observed our every move; possibly wondering what was going to happen next. Ray was so furious, I had never seen him like that before. Well, once, in Liverpool when he couldn’t score, about a week before we had left. He had been intolerable. Maybe that was it, maybe had withdrawal symptoms, he hadn’t been smoking his usual daily quota and that mixed with the stress of the last week must have taken its toll.
In reality though, it was so much more than that.
Back at the house they split the money and the cigarettes. The nurses were also there, it seemed that Nigel had managed to convince them to go off to Agadir and rent a room.
The last moments we spent in the hall of the house were intense and somehow symbolic. Ray had some loose change in his pocket and he told Nigel he never wanted to see him again as he threw the coins at him.
They seemed to glide through the air in slow motion. They glistened in the beam of sunlight coming in through the window. I could almost see every coin as the dust particles in the air also glistened, engulfing the coins as they fell to the floor. We all watched in silence as the coins hit the floor and bounced around, sparkling and twinkling.
Nigel picked them up and left with the nurses without saying another word.
The rest of the day was difficult. We left the house and decided to go for a walk on the beach. Ray would not let go of me, just like the night Nigel had arrived. He kept telling me how Nigel was dangerous and couldn’t be trusted, and that he was so glad I was okay because he thought that he had done something horrible to me.
I asked if maybe we should call a friend in England and get them to come over, but he didn’t want to. He was in a bad way. His arms and legs were as hard as wood, he was so tense. His eyes were deep and dark, almost scary. Like Mel Gibson’s in the film Lethal Weapon when he is about to blow his brains out and Danny Glover stops the hammer with his thumb. Just like that.
He held onto my hand as we walked up the beach. He lit one cigarette up after another. A dog followed us and to me it seemed to have some significance, like the dog was trying to tell me something. It was obvious that the stress of it all was also, inevitably, taking its toll on me.
When we got back to the village we saw the New Zealand couple and Jerry. They seemed concerned for us. Jeane said that they would be going to Paradise Valley the next day and if we wanted to go with them we could. I was hoping so much that Ray would say yes. We could actually go and spend some time with normal people, and have a normal day out. Ray did say yes.
We told them that we had been told to leave the house and they said that there were rooms available in the house where they were staying, we just had to go and ask the landlord. We went with them straight away and it was just as they had said. We got a room and were going to move our things first thing the next day.
They were such a nice couple and to this day I am not sure how things might have gone if it were not for their help.
