Salient

By Graham Pryor

Locked in to a world of regulation and routine, the narrator reflects upon his condition, one of being inescapably medicalised, and relives the events leading up to his current state of being. An unexpected intervention to his solitary thoughts comes from the natural world, bringing the suggestion that there is an alternative, and that the time will come again when he can choose a different path altogether.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244819866

Graham Pryor

Graham Pryor studied American Studies and English at the University of Hull. Subsequently, he pursued a career in information management, leaving his childhood home in Hythe, Kent, for the north-east of Scotland, where he has lived and worked for the past forty years. Cerberus is his fifteenth novel and, he says, his favourite.

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Salient

Salient

A novella by Graham Pryor

This one’s for Luke, for saving my life

Salient is a fictionalised account of real events and experiences.

All rights reserved. This book and any portion thereof may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Copyright © 2019 by Graham Pryor

ISBN 978-0-244-81986-6

First printing: September 2019

1

Already it’s May and I’m still wearing the gear I wore in the depths of winter. The North Face hoodie with the sealed cuffs and fleece lining, my old ski gloves and boots. So cold. I’m not exaggerating, the wind off the North Sea has been blowing unceasingly since Hogmanay and today, would you believe, it’s actually snowing.

On the road ahead, just before the village of Balmedie, the traffic has begun to bunch. Just like it always did before they built the new road; only I can see clearer now, all the way from the Orrock rise down almost to the Blackdog interchange. It’s a faster, straighter run, more or less, to Aberdeen.

Something’s up, everyone in front is slowing. There are some hazard lights going on. Looks like we’re stopping. It can’t be the snow, can it? – I mean, it’s hardly settling, not like there’ll be a drift or anything, and it’s too late in the year for ice, surely.

Uh-oh, looks like a truck has shed its load. Fish lorry from Peterhead. What a stink. Mashed fish slithering across the carriageway. I can smell it from half a mile away. What a waste – hauled from the bright waters of the ocean only to be spewed like vomit on the road. I hate it when this happens. And all that fishy slime, guts and scale stuck on the underbody of my car, it’ll reek for days. Everyone’s driving through it with great caution, first gear and still slithering, it’s like negotiating a swamp.

There’s a herring gull swooping and it seems to fix me with its yellow eye. Suddenly I’m aware of eyes all around me, the dead gaze of a multitude of ruined cod and turbot, staring up piteously from the jumbled road. Then the big white bird, screeching as it circles, a look of alarm on the face of the motorcycle cop, no cheery wave this morning, astride his bike on the hard shoulder and peering back through the snowfall at the approaching traffic. Something about his expression hits me and I dare to take my eyes off the debris on the road to snatch a glimpse in my rearview mirror. There’s a lorry approaching. One of those articulated monster trucks that carry piping to the gas terminal at St Fergus. It gives a deep snort, more the sound one might expect from an express train than a road vehicle, the sort of bellow one hears from those bloated trucks that pound their way across America’s mid-west. Just the one hopeless hoot. And it seems to glide, this monster, silently swallowing the space within the rim of my rearview mirror. I hunch, a meaningless response in this situation, purely an automatic reflex, but there is no sound, no screech of tires, no further honking, just an impression of intense wetness, the feeling that the earth is slithering away around my car in a slick rush of slippery froth. I hear no crash but feel the silence that follows impact when the rear half of my car is compressed like a squeezebox.

Sharp scratch coming up, you lucky man. The voice is unfamiliar, brusque but not unkind. I can’t move, there is something firm around my middle, holding me flat on my back and my arms feel thick and heavy.

Lucky...? The word sounds incongruous. What sort of luck had I had, then? I can barely whisper the word; it has no context.

I’d say, comes that voice again. Two broken arms and concussion? I’d say you were lucky to have come out of that particular calamity alive, from what they tell me.

I feel the sting from a needle piercing the flab of my stomach, firm pressure briefly applied to the wound that isn’t.

There, that’ll set you to rights.

My brain flutters like a roll of index cards as I run a mental thumb through them, stopping when I am satisfied I have exposed all the clues, the smell of this place, the association of thoughts and impressions. Even with my eyes concealed under the bandage around my head I am near as dammit sure I know where I am.

It is not the happiest of conclusions for a lucky man.

Do you know where you are? This voice is different, someone else speaking. I hear the snap of gloved fingers and the bandage is pushed up above my eyebrows, my eyelids opening stiffly under bright light. Too bright to focus. Shapes approaching human form loom above me in the light. Quick limbs extend in front of my face.

Follow my finger, commands the voice. Then, can you hear my watch ticking. Foolish question, watches don’t tick these days, do they? That question again, do you know where you are?.

I find I cannot answer, only laugh, a deep gurgle that starts as a chuckle and ends in a bray. We have ways of making you talk is the phrase that enters my head, but my interrogator sounds English rather than speaks with a cartoon German tongue.

Hospital, I suggest tentatively, not wanting to be correct but fearing I am. The infirmary, I venture, my spirits expiring. From my experience, hospital is a one-way thoroughfare. People come in and don’t leave, not in a vigorous sense, that is. My father was admitted to hospital and didn’t make it out again. My mother, well, she was allowed out – on parole it seemed, back in the mainstream but never put together to be whole again. I have always had a dread of ending up here, subject to someone else’s assessment of myself, losing my identity to the new role of patient. Institutionalised.

My mother’s medicalisation began before I left the family home. It was all about her heart, of course, the first indication that something was not quite right when she couldn’t climb the stairs of Dover’s Victorian lighthouse one summer without gasping like a fish out of water. There followed thirty years of treatment for hypertension: pills, patches and puffers – she tried the lot (all variously ineffective) and trundled on through life, sustained by her faith in the various medics who attended her. We expected her not to last, a view compounded when, after one crisis of hospitalisation, we were advised to take her home and make her comfortable, with the prospect she might survive until Christmas. Yet she survived for several more Christmases, defying the consultants who’d mistaken the effects of their medication for symptoms of dementia. Into her nineties, outwardly she showed minimal further deterioration, to our eyes rendering an acceptably conventional withering through old age, but punctuated nonetheless by recurrent mild heart attacks. So, clutching her casket of pills and