The Whole Dingle-Dangle (Highlander)

I’m looking at myself naked for the first time since the operation to remove the main tumour. Except that, reflected in the wall-to-wall mirror of the shower room, waiting for the nurse to come to soap and rub me down, I’m not so naked at all. From neck to knees I’m splashed in fading orange-red iodine paint. I’ve lost a lot of weight, I raise and bend my arm and the skin wrinkles and folds; at my right shoulder there’s a hollow where there should be muscle. My two week-old beard hasn’t grown in evenly, there are white tufts amidst the peppery grey stubble. I’m holding on to the infusion stand, perhaps would have to anyway to remain upright. To the right of my groin, the elastoplast-coloured colostomy bag. Dressings cover the operation incisions. My penis hangs down, shrinks back, rather, a catheter emerging from the urethra, the tube leading to a bag of pale lemony urine attached to the stand. Another bag holds dark red liquid waste collecting from the internal operating wounds. High up on the stand an infusion bag from which mineral-enriched fluid is fed into me a via a port on my hand, while a tube from a smaller bottle containing pain-killer leads directly to my lower back. I feel no pain at all except when I cough or laugh.

But if I half-shut my eyes then all these attachments and stick-ons assume a decorative, even magical aspect. I see myself as a missing white man, gone native in one of the last lost valleys of the Papua-New Guinea Highlands. The stand my spear – a sheaf of spears! – or a bow taller than a man, the colostomy bag a gourd strung from my waist, containing seeds or perhaps spear or arrow heads, the dressings an arrangement of signs, meaningful, as is the body paint; the catheter a penis adornment. Squinting more I see my beard begin to straggle down to my chest, see my hair growing, matted now, a shell protruding from the caked mass, a horn piercing my nostril.

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