Unreality hits so often in the real world, in the most mundane happenings. Unreality arrived at the doorstep, when my elderly wife, suffering from Alzeimer and practically bedridden for the last three years after a stroke, suddenly managed to walk unaided all the way from the first floor flat, in search of her mother who died 45 years ago. Was she hallucinating or was her mother’s spirit actually there, visiting her for some reason? Were the two brothers from Finland who have just moved in as our downstairs neighbours real or a figment of my imagination? They spoke perfect English and said they came to London because they got bored with the Finnish tundra and renifers. They came out to help me and we moved my wife into their comfortable flat to wait for the ambulance. The Royal Free Hospital is a short distance away from our place, but the atmosphere inside the Emergency Ward is always on the border of unreality. The nurses and doctors look and act like somnambulics, probably because they deal with a wide range of unreal people, many of whom are close to death and often never make it even to the new Assessment Ward on the first floor, where my wife eventually found herself , after a timeless wait in cubicle 7 (her birth number) and was put in bed 7. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her lucky number this time because when she was moved two days later to the seventh floor ward and given treatment in room seven, someone robbed her, forcibly removing her platinum wedding ring and another ring with a precious stone she was very fond of and regarded as her talisman. The only people who had such access to her that would give them an opportunity to remove jewellery were nurses and doctors. I cannot imagine that real people who choose to care for the sick could rob an elderly helpless woman, knowing that with her memory affected by Alzheimer and infection , she would not be able to identify them. This is where I feel that the real world ends and I find myself in total unreality of dark callousness and heartless indifference. It is not the high value of the stolen property that matters but the happening itself. I was given a glimpse of something I find difficult to comprehend – an unreal world with its unreal inhabitants which was truly frightening. As William Yeats wrote prophetically some 88 years ago in The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
A hospital is almost like a temple where one expect love, help, understanding and caring… Perhaps, that hospital was a phantom place and this whole sad episode has never happened. The borders between real and unreal are often made of mist.
