Dialogue: The deep, warm bath of self-pity

By JOE BENNETT

It wasn't just the pain. The pain was doing its stuff all right, throbbing away and being painful, but what really convinced me I was going to die was that when the radio told me someone had offered the members of Abba a monstrous sum of money to get back together and recreate their nauseating Swedish musical tinsel, I simply couldn't summon so much as a jot of anger.

"Oh," I said to myself, "Abba, I see, well, who cares?"

And that, as I am sure you'll agree, is as sure a sign of the imminent croak as you'll find this side of the Black Stump. Not, of course, that I know where or what the Black Stump is, but, of course, I didn't care about that either.

The pain, you see. It bore the steady doomladen thump of mortality. I could hear the drums, Fernando, and they beat for me.

At school I chose woodwork over biology - although the way they were taught in my day there wasn't much between them - so I can't be precise about the pain, but the point was that it seemed to be both internal and where it matters - that is, possibly heart, possibly lungs, probably both. I'd had it.

Everything I had to look forward to was slow, lingering and probably disfiguring.

No point in going to the doc. First reaction indeed was to withdraw whimpering under the duvet with a hugged dog and to plan a further and complete withdrawal from the cruel world.

In minutes I'd got the whole thing organised.

Draw the curtains, and go out only under cover of darkness. Order groceries by internet, pay by credit card, write a note telling the pimply delivery boy on pain of disembowelling to ditch the goodies at the door, and then paint the dogs' teeth the colour of custard and train them to snarl at visitors, leaving me to count down the balance of my span in hermitic solitude and a deep, warm bath of self-pity.

Then there was the business of the will. That proved to be fun, offering enormous scope for irritating the sort of people who hope to profit from the late and unlamented.

Well, not actually enormous scope given that the sum total of 44 years of capitalist acquisition was a mass of second-hand books and one three-bedroomed house of which the nice people at the bank still had their bloodless fingers wrapped around all three bedrooms.

Nevertheless I computed that the proceeds from flogging off the kitchen would suffice to keep the dogs in meat and sofas for the rest of their days, leaving me with a bathroom and a living (ha) room with which to wreak disappointment on the world I was leaving behind.

But there was pleasure to be had from sorting the acquaintances into sheep and goats and distributing mouth-watering fodder to the few and pretty goats while leaving the sheepish many to starve on the barren mountainside of my displeasure.

All this mental merriment took place in the grim hours just before dawn when I for one am not always at my most doughty.

Dawn didn't change the pain, but it did bring about a mental shift of sorts, and I decided that it would, after all, be moderately entertaining to go visit the doc and let him know that here was another negative patient outcome for him to chalk up on his balance sheet.

Only trouble was that when I shuffled hunched and aching into the surgery I learned that the doc had gone permanently to Tokelau.

I had to choose one of three unknown medicos on whom to dump the cheery news of my demise.

I chose the most cheerful-looking of the three, on the grounds that one might as well get maximum mileage out of misfortune. But she seemed slow on the uptake.

Grinning away and nattering of inconsequential matters, she got me lying belly down on the couch, probed my thoracics for a bit and then told me to put my shirt on.

I watched her metaphorically pull on the black cap, feeling as she did so a mild detached interest in how she would break the news.

"Physio," she said. "A couple of sessions should do the trick."

The physiotherapist had cold hands.

"You know," she said as she did extraordinary and quite agreeable things to my spine, "lots of people when they get this sort of pain imagine they've got some terminal disease."

"Oh," I said. "Really? Ha ha."

"Yeah," she said and paused in her pummelling.

"Did you read that stuff about Abba? They might be getting back together."

Have you ever heard anger sing?