An ICU contains any number of competing realities. Let’s return – without explanation or commentary for now – to the place I once believed was a ferry terminal and, later, a Parisian auberge. A place that was once red and gold and then powder blue. When an infant class tries colour-mixing, at least one child will take any two colours you like and, unerringly, make brown with them. My consciousness may have been doing much the same thing.

Terapia Intensiva, Policlinico Umberto I, Roma. Sometime between 8 and 9 January 2019.

I hear the hiss of a rainy city street, coming from outside.

Everything has become brown or beige: the lighting, the carpets, and the office-standard furniture at the front desk. The front desk of what?

To my right, there is what looks like a shop or café window. It’s dark outside – all I can see is indoor light reflected in the glass.

I believe I am back in Rome. Perhaps I never left.

I can’t move, but I seem to be sitting at the back wall of a waiting room, like a GP’s surgery. But then I wonder if I’m in a café again, because this time I can even smell the coffee. This is hopeful sign: if there is coffee, there must also be water …

But the coffee has come in from the street. Someone in rain-splattered biking leathers delivers carry cups to the front desk. So not a café, then. Near the desk, a couple of people sit patiently in plastic chairs. And are those … washing machines, around the corner? Are they waiting for their loads to finish?

In this unusual surgery or café or launderette, loud music starts playing. Queen. I recognise the songs. A white-haired man in a white tunic comes from behind the front desk into the room.

Whether he’s moving towards me or I to him, I can’t say. But suddenly I am nearer to everything: to the man, to the desk, to the window that is no longer a window but a black screen or curtain. I pull down my oxygen mask and ask him for a drink of water. But he is lost in the music. Then:

Now I’m here … (now I’m here) …

… Now I’m there … (now I’m there) …

I ask again for water, but the man neither sees nor hears me.

I’m just … just a new man …

… ‘Cos you made me live again …*

And when the mega-riff kicks in, he struts his stuff up and down in front of the desk. There’s no talking to him. Mid-dance, he pulls off his surgical gloves and pings them, from a considerable distance, straight into a bin. 

Everything is getting louder. A crowd – hidden behind the black curtain – roars at the end of the song. Is there a gig or festival going on there?

The music plays on and the white-haired man ignores me. Then he disappears behind the screen to more cheering from the crowd.

Ay – oh!

* * *

Later, the sun has come out and above me there is the blue of a Roman sky. I remember that I‘m in hospital, but the ward is on a first floor gallery above a library: I can look down a well in the centre to see all the bookshelves. There’s a steady traffic of staff and visitors going up and down in lifts.

I didn’t see her approach, but a middle-aged doctor is standing at my bedside. She asks me my name.

I get this right, at least.

Then she asks, ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘In Rome,’ I say. ‘In hospital. Umberto Uno.’ Primo, I should have said.

‘Really?’ she says. She seems quietly amused by this. ‘Interesting.’ Then she slips away as quietly as she appeared.

There was something about her smile I really didn’t like. It frightened me. What did she mean?

Am I dead? I wonder.

There’s a moment of shock, but instead of panic or regret or prayer, what follows is calmness and an overwhelming clarity. The possibilities seem to be these:

a) I‘ m already dead, and I’m either in some kind of half-life or in a strange ante-room between life and death.

b) I’m dying, inexorably.

c) I’m dying, but there is still some hope of recovery. It might not yet be too late to turn things around.

All three scenarios seem equally plausible. All I can do is fight for life or defy death until something changes. My resistance takes two forms.

One: I think about water. My mouth is so dry that I must be dehydrated. I must get some water soon or I really will die. This ought to be a simple matter of calling a nurse. I pull my oxygen mask down again and call out ‘Acqua’ or even ‘Acqua, per favore’. Nobody comes, and the white-haired man is back behind the front desk, out of range.

Two: Although Queen have finished their set, there’s still rock music playing – a studio recording this time. I decide that so long as the music plays, I will kick my legs to the beat and keep on kicking.

Later, I see another man in a white tunic. He’s big, thickset and has lank, unkempt dark hair. He has the air of a 19th century German academic or a botanist friend of Goethe. He is busy at a trolley doing something with containers. I hope against hope that he is trying to create water for me by means of chemistry.

He isn’t.

The music plays on, and still I kick, but something has plateaued. Some of the urgency, the sense of threat has eased, and my kicking has become gentler and automatic.

From the outside, four people arrive: a middle-aged woman, a younger woman – her daughter, I think – and the younger woman’s boyfriend, who looks and carries himself like a young Cristiano Ronaldo. They are accompanied by a middle-aged priest. They approach ‘the German’ and the older woman starts talking to him. She is quite animated. She introduces ‘Ronaldo’ and, with a certain pride, the priest. ‘The German’ is polite, but looks weary as he listens to her.

I sum up the situation in an instant: the woman is his estranged wife and – since he’s been ignoring her phone calls – she has come to the ward in person to force his interest in a wider family matter. Perhaps the impending marriage of their daughter to ‘Ronaldo’. This would explain the priest, who – this being Rome, after all – maybe has a certain standing in the church. This, in turn, might explain the woman’s pride.

‘The German’ returns to his work at the trolley and the group moves on. As they shuffle past, the priest stops at the end of my bed. His gaze scares me as much as the doctor’s enigmatic smile. It’s a big ask – bed-bound, cannulated, cathetered and with half my face behind an oxygen mask – but all the same I try to meet his look with a steely stare of my own. This, too, is a form of resistance.

No last rites yet for me, yer bastard.

The priest rejoins the family. And I return to my kicking.

* * *

*Song lyrics from ‘Now I’m Here’ by Queen. (Brian May.) 1974.