by Mat Capper
I enter the hospital, the smell of cheap disinfectant hits me, I hear the tapping of feet going up and down the long corridors. Nurses, Porters and Doctors all walk in their anonymous quests for patients. I suspect some of them walk all day without ever arriving at their destination. I have to find God’s waiting room or 3B as its known. I’m on a mission to visit a friend in the last gasps of Lung Cancer. I haven’t seen him in a few days and I’m a little scared at how he may look. He’s gone through Chemo and Radiotherapy and was waiting to go into a hospice to see his last days out. Last time I saw him he was full of steroids and he looked like a bullfrog. I hope the water retention has gone and let him look a little more normal.
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The man I was going to see was known to me as ‘the Birdman’. An artist I had met on the streets of Liverpool. He was sixty but looks about eighty. He’s all white beard and false teeth and had a look of a pre-plastic surgery Kenny Rogers but less happy. I absolutely adored him and his art. He’d never sold a painting but found art as an escape from his torment.
The Birdman spent twenty eight years in a mental hospital; twelve of those years alone in a padded cell. His only company was a book about British birds given to him by his aunty when he was eight. He still had that book when I first went round to his flat in a decrepit old building. He let me read it, while he made a cup of tea. His flat smelt of cat piss and there was a large gang of blue bottle flies who lived in one corner making a constant hum. He must have had about thirty paintings lying round the room. Some of bridges and buildings, some of dogs sitting by fires; all of them unique and unseen.
The only visitors the Birdman had were drug addicts trying to borrow money and casual laborers trying to con. He didn’t have friends other than the voices that kept him awake at night.
I met him when I stopped a gang of lads giving him a hiding. He thanked me by offering up his sherry, which I refused but did walk with him a while and shared a smoke. He told me the beatings were common and he didn’t really mind so long as he was at least half pissed. People often called him ‘peodo’ given his white beard and tramp-like status. He was past caring and instead took all his frustration out on the canvas.
We became friends because he helped me to see beauty in even the simplest things like rubbish blowing in the wind. He taught me to find the good in everything and introduced me to fishing, which he described as ‘true connection to another universe’. He was an alcoholic. To all intents and purposes a bum.
The day we met we walked until it was dark. I had nothing else to do and was glad for the company. He told me a little about being locked up in the hospital for all those years. The strange thing was he didn’t seem annoyed at what he’d lost but was furious at being let out when Thatcher introduced the ‘care in the community’ policy in the early eighties. He was quite happy spending his days in isolation, that way no-one could hurt him.
It transpired that the Birdman had been abused in his youth by his family. Not just through beatings and verbal attacks but through some sort of ritual sexual abuse carried out by both his father and uncle. He never gave me the full details but when he had a nervous breakdown aged seventeen his family had him carted off to a hospital for the insane, claiming they could no longer deal with his moods. He never saw his parents again. Only his aunty would visit in secrecy and they would chat about nature.
When he was released from hospital into the community he was given enough money to live on and extra known as ‘disability living allowance’. This scheme saved the government millions because they no longer had to pay to keep him in hospital. It also meant that the Birdman spent his days drinking and gambling. He didn’t mind, he’d rather drink his medication on a daily basis than have some stranger stab him in the arse with a syringe every two weeks.
Over the months we became friends, I used to bring him round to mine for showers and a cooked meal every now and then. My family thought I was being good, but the truth was I loved his company. I used to kit him out with some of my clothes and drop him off back home with the shopping he needed. If left to his own devices he wouldn’t eat, so he was always glad of a change.
The problems started when the Birdman kept coughing up blood. I could never get him to go and see anyone about it. He hated doctors and trusted no-one. The one time I got him into hospital for tests he escaped when I went to get a coffee. It took me two days of looking, only to find him asleep in a bar called The Pineapple.
The time came when he had no choice but to be admitted to hospital. He could barely breathe and was losing blood. Almost immediately he was given the news that he was terminally ill. He was given the choice of having treatment or just palliative care, the sort of choice that gives you the choice between pain and death or no pain and a quicker death. He decided to try and extend his life so he could finish a painting he was working on. They gave him three weeks of chemotherapy which was an incredibly painful thing to witness. It’s the medical equivalent of the carpet bombing campaign during the Vietnam War. His whole body was destroyed and his weight ballooned due to the steroid treatment.
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I find ward 3B and enter cautiously. I ask a nurse about visiting times and she tells me alarmingly that they don’t apply. I can hear the familiar rasping cough of the Birdman and she directs me to his bed. I approach him and all I can see is a shriveled and yellow old man. His hair has almost all gone except for a few strands on the top of his head. He is asleep. Fortunately the morphine they give him keeps him in some sort of dream like state and he’s barely aware of what’s going on. I’m desperate to hug him, sit and have some sort of final conversation where we both acknowledge what is going on; I want to put some sort of closure on things for him, or at least I think it’s for him but in reality it’s probably for my sake.
I sit and wait.
His eyes open and his head turns in my direction.
Hello son.
Hello.
How am I looking?
Same as ever.
You need anything?
No.
Water?
No.
Tell me, you still writing?
Yes, bits and pieces.
Would you write something about me?
Sure, could I tape some of your memories?
Yes.
I’ll bring something in next time to do it.
Okay.
What would we call it?
‘The Birdman of Winwick’.
Wasn’t that the name of the hospital you were in?
Yes, it was the happiest years of my life.
We talked a little about things that weren’t important for the next hour or so and I left. I gave him a little hug and told him we’d go for a jog next time I was in. He laughed like he always did at my stupid remarks.
The Birdman died two days later, and I never got to tape or see him again. The same day a parcel arrived for me in the post. It was his book of birds and inside it he’d wrote-
Gradually my world is slowing down,
You don’t have to worry now,
You don’t have to cry,
There is nothing to fear.
Think of me in everything you do….
I visited his grave today, the only grave I ever visit. I don’t know why I do, but probably for some sort of connection to another universe.