A Walk Along the Promenade - 6. Scene One, A Seaside Promenade in Summer, Part 6

For the rest of the week he had been primarily under the care of those two physiotherapists, Dee the younger and blonde-haired one and Liz the older one who was the one obviously in charge. She was the one who dictated what exercises and movements he did, always ready to tell him off when he wasn’t working as hard as she thought he should be doing. At first, he’d tried to protest about the pain in his leg and how easily he became tired, but Liz would have nothing of it, she would relentlessly push at him. She wanted him walking on crutches, be able to stand up un-aided, to be able to walk up and down stairs, and so many things just using those aluminium crutches.

He found walking with those crutches, with his leg in a full-length cast, difficult and tiring. They told him that he mustn’t weight bear through his left leg, so the whole time up on those crutches he had to keep his left leg raised, lifting it up against the weight of that cast. Even just taking a few steps was tiring and difficult, his balance was constantly being pulled to the left by the heavy cast weighing down his leg. It affected his whole sense of balance and actually made standing upright, perched on his right foot and leaning on the crutches, a strong act of will. The weight of the cast also seemed to take all the energy he could sum up. Just walking across the ward, to the toilet was tiring enough.

All the while he was struggling on those crutches there was Liz the physiotherapist at his side, nagging away at him that if he couldn’t walk/stand/climb the stairs he wouldn’t be fit enough to go home. Shaun would feel relieved when five o’clock rolled around he knew those two physiotherapists would not be coming back onto the ward, he was safe and quiet in the care of the nurses.

Mid Friday morning the doctors had come back to see him, a gaggle of three doctors, without Mr Melnyk his surgeon, but with Katie the ward’s manager. The leading doctor had told Shaun that he was now ready to go home. Shaun hadn’t felt ready but the desire to be finally away from the ward was too great, he’d quickly agreed.

“I’ll make all the arrangements,” Katie quickly told him, “I told your mother I’d call her when you would be coming home.”

Shaun had smiled his reply.

That night, as the day shift of nurses changed over to the night nurses, Kenny had come to his bed. Shaun was surprised to see that Kenny was no longer wearing his nurse’s uniform, instead he was dressed in a large, loosely knitted grey jumper that actually seemed to hang off his body and skinny blue jeans.

“I heard you are going home tomorrow,” Kenny said, smiling at him.

“Yes,” Shaun replied, unable to hide the relief from his voice.

“I’m off tomorrow, I’ve got the weekend off, so I wanted to say goodbye now. I’ll miss you,” Kenny said.

“Thank you. You’ve been really helpful, you’ve got me so far,” Shaun replied. Kenny said he’d miss him, Shaun had felt a rush of delight when he’d heard Kenny say that, and with the rush of delight he’d wanted to tell Kenny how he felt about him. Well, at least some of the things he felt about Kenny, the gratitude he felt for Kenny’s care. He couldn’t actually tell Kenny how he really felt about him, he couldn’t admit his attraction to Kenny.

“Thanks, I’m glad I helped,” Kenny said, as his right hand absent-mindedly turned a polished ring on his left ring finger. Shaun didn’t remember seeing that ring before, and he’d studied so much of Kenny over the previous four weeks. It was a silver ring, fashioned to look like two fine cords of rope wrapped around each other in a turning spiral.

“Is that ring new?” Shaun asked, the words out of his mouth before he had really thought about them. “I’ve not seen it before.”

Kenny’s right hand touched his ring again.

“We’re not allowed to wear rings at work, they get in the way of hand hygiene, but I wear it all the time I’m not at work,” Kenny explained. “I’ve never worn a ring before, but… Well, it’s my engagement ring.”

“She must be a really lucky girl,” Shaun said, the platitude jumping to his lips.

Kenny’s checks had flushed a pale pink, embarrassment rising across his face. He leaned his face closer to Shaun’s and quietly said:

“I got engaged to my boyfriend Eddy, two weeks ago.”

“Then he’s a very lucky guy,” Shaun said, and meant it.

“Thanks, I’ve got to go now. I’m meeting him for dinner.”

“Thank you for all your help,” he told Kenny.

After Kenny had left, Shaun had felt a deep stab of regret. For once he’d actually fallen for a nice, caring gay man but he’d been too late, another guy had already got there long before him. Kenny already had his Eddy before Shaun had met him. Shaun couldn’t even find himself a nice and caring single gay man to have a deep crush on. He couldn’t even get that right.

The next morning his mother had collected him from the hospital in a large, disabled-access taxi, and during the drive to her home she had kept up an almost constant monologue about all the problems he had caused her. How she’d had to get her home adapted especially for him, putting in a stair-lift and making his ensuite disabled-accessible (all of which he was sure she had organised discounts on), and how much stress he had caused her.

“Nathan has never caused me this much stress and hassle,” his mother announced as they bounced along in the taxi.

Shaun bit down on snapping his reply that she had complained enough about Nathan, two months previous, when he’d left his wife Jessica for April, the twenty-three year old, very thin and very blonde Beautician. His mother had been screaming down the telephone at Nathan about how much he’d disappointed her. But Shaun knew that he couldn’t antagonise her or argue with her anymore, because once again he was dependent on her. He wouldn’t just be living in her home again but he was now completely dependent on her. He wouldn’t be able to return to work for months, if ever at all, and so he had to look to her to look after him. Therefore, he had to keep her happy and not unset her. He was back to being a dependent teenager again, and that hurt as much as the pain in his leg.

When they reached his mother’s home Shaun found that she had installed a stairlift, but it was on the kitchen stairs, the narrow staircase at the back of house, not on the main staircase that formed part of the house’s large entrance hallway. He’d had to take a slow and awkward walk, barely balanced on his crutches, right through the house to reach the stairlift, his mother was so proud of, tucked away on the stairs that lead off the kitchen up to the house’s first floor.

At the top of the stairlift he’d found an old wheelchair waiting for him. With a sigh of relief, he’d dropped down into it. From there his mother had shown him to his new bedroom, the double bedroom at the back of the house. There he’d been greeted by a pile of brown cardboard boxes, all firmly sealed up. This was all his possessions from his old flat, his old life boxed up in front of him. He’d wanted to cry at the sight of this, again evidence of how his life had been taken away from him, but he couldn’t. His mother had been bustling around him, telling him how she’d “improved” the room for him, pride so loud in her voice.

For the ten weeks Shaun barely left that double bedroom, leaving the house’s first floor even less. He’d get up each morning, after Mrs Roach brought him some breakfast to his room, she brought him all his meals up to that room, unless his mother insisted he ate his evening meal with her in the house’s dinning room. He’d have a strip-wash at the skin in the bedroom’s ensuite bathroom, perched on the edge of his wheelchair. Then he’d dress in sweatpants and tee-shirt, they were the only clothes he could easily put on himself and there was no point in dressing in anything more smart or stylish, he hardly left that bedroom. He would spend his days watching television, his television and computer had been the first things he’d unpacked, or else he’d slowly unpack his belongings from those cardboard boxes.

Over a week after he’d moved in there, he’d found his six porn DVDs, he’d almost forgotten about them. They were at the bottom of box contenting the rest of his DVDs, the Hollywood films and TV series he had enjoyed re-watching. The porn DVDs had been placed face downwards, as if someone was trying to hide them. He’d turned them over in his hands, for a few moments remembering the initial excitement he’d felt at buying them, before hiding them away at the back of his underwear draw, he didn’t want them causing any uncomfortable or worse conversations with his mother.

When his replacement phone had finally arrived in hospital, he’d left all the gay dating apps on it unopened. There seemed no point in reactivating them at that time.

After ten weeks he returned to the hospital, dressed in the loosest fitting skirt and trousers he had, accompanied by his mother. She told him she was accompanying him, in such a sharp tone that he knew not to argue with her. There, after several x-rays and a consultation with one of Mr Melnyk’s Junior Doctors, his mother had expressed her annoyance that Mr Melnyk himself wasn’t available in person, his cast had been finally removed.

The nurse in the Plaster Room, another middle-aged woman, had chattered along brightly as she’s removed the cast, with a strangely vibrating saw, and removed the dressings and remaining stitches from his left leg. Shaun had barely heard her words, the sight of his withered, scared and deformed left leg had almost taken his breath away. He’d read online that limbs under casts become hairy and scaly with dried skin, but his leg looked a hundred times worse than he’d expected. His leg was thin, almost all the flesh had seemed to have disappeared from it, uncomfortably deformed, it seemed to twist outward even when he tried to hold it straight, and was criss-crossed with deep and angry looking scars.

His leg looked so horribly unnatural. He’d not expected it to look like this, to look so bad, but it did.

The nurse chattered away brightly as she fitted a “walking brace”, a grey rigid plastic boot that stretched up to his knee, over an articulated brace that held his knee secure, that actually had two metal hinges on either side. Shaun barely heard what she said, things about how to look after himself, he was too much in shock at how deformed and ugly his leg looked.

He had found walking, with the aid of his crutches, easier with the leg and knee braces, even though the brace stopped any side-to-side movements, and turned down the offer of a wheelchair as he left the Outpatients Department. But he’d barely made it to the lifts in the main corridor before a wave of tiredness hit him and he had to sit down on the metal benches there.

“This wouldn’t happen if you’d just ask for some help,” his mother hissed at him before she returned to the Outpatients Department to find him a wheelchair.