A House in Order by Nigel Dennis Page A

to die.

I counted seven whole days of this sunshine
    I counted seven whole days of this sunshine after the day the tap started running. They were not happy days, because I nearly collapsed under them, but they were a string of extraordinary surprises and discoveries, such as a baby might make on starting to recognize things. Not that I looked much like a baby: my hands were purple with blood and swollen up like meat, and my face in the glass was a horrible sight, with the flesh all broken and the veins showing and hair growing out in a tangle like a bristle broom or a thorn hedge. When I got my shirt off at high noon one day and the newspaper paddings underneath came off, my skin came away with the rest, so that I couldn’t tell it from newsprint at the deepest layer and saw broken sentences in my old skin. I didn’t dare to try and wash the shirt, in case the sun went before it dried, but I spread it on the staging most of one day and had a job putting it on again at night because it had dried as hard as cardboard. As for my boots, myfingers hurt so much that I couldn’t untie the knots for days, and when I did at last I hadn’t the strength to pull them off. I think I was terrified, too, by what my feet might look like – and sure enough, when I got the leather off at last, I thought I would die of the bursting pain and the poison: my hands were healthy compared with these stewed bags of plums. Reviving seemed as bad as dying, and just as likely to kill me, and my blood gave me no peace at all, playing up every nerve in my body and making every hair stand up with a tickling that was as bad as the pain. I was sure I would go blind if I didn’t get out of the sun, but there were so many other pains and chills in the darkness of the shed that I settled for swelling all day and contracting all night. Anyway, by the end of those seven blessed days, when torrents of a cold rain began, I could recognize bits of my old self – thumbnails creeping out from my flesh and spreading into their usual shape, skin staying in place, numberless pains changing into frantic tickles, and so on. I must have been better, because I slept through two days of rain, eating food that was mostly rain-water. After which the snow and sunshine came back, and I saw that my hands and feet were going down from purple to crimson with even an occasional streak of dirty, whitish red. I must have been getting better, because I remember thinking it unjust that where other men would be able to show wounds from their war, I, largely thanks to having lived a decent life before the war, might come home as healthy as when I left.
    Another old habit, orderliness, began again too, though only concerning keeping myself as warm as possible. I laid my two blankets out on the staging every day to warm and opened my bundles onto them, so that I went to my freezing bed dry and even slept an hour ortwo before the cold woke me up. I was doing this business with my bundles one morning when I pushed aside one of the absurd paper pots in which I had taken such pride in the autumn. One of the wild storksbills I had dug up had been put in it and was now showing, like a tiny folded fan, the beginnings of a green leaf. Knowing that this was impossible, I picked up the pot in my sore fingers to look closely, and dropped it. Out fell the plant and the dry sand and there, before my eyes, were the roots. ‘So you have survived too, have you?’ I said to it.
    It took me a good hour to get it back into its burst pot, my fingers hurt so much. I repeated: ‘Impossible!’ all the time, feeling that though nobody can be sure how much a human being can survive, one has a pretty good notion with a plant. However, there it was, so after shrugging my shoulders I gave it some water from the tap and put it in a shady place. I had no heart to look at the other plants and no wish to find out how utterly dead they were, nor did I care particularly, because they only reminded me of my idiot