Chapter One: ‘O Pato’ 

Seven hours until I have my bionic bum fitted and there’s little hope of sleep. Nightingale ward in St Thomas’ hospital should rather be called Nightinhell or, more simply, Nightmare ward. Groans of pain from the diagonally opposite bed are masked only by the incessant whirring of the old boy directly in front of me’s breathing apparatus. In another bay out of sight, someone’s drip feed has run out and will beep, beep, beep, beep until the night nurse has time to attend to it. 

I don’t want to be(ep) here. I want a functioning digestive system and to be somewhere exotic like New Zealand or Newcastle, Blackpool or Bermuda. And I want to be outside. (Beep.) Up a mountain or wake-boarding the sea front or hacking through the jungle. Instead I’m up shit creek. Lost my paddle about a year ago. But it’s not worth moaning. I always wanted to win Wimbledon and I’ve got over that not happening (yet). I’ll get over this unhappy relationship with my colon soon enough, too, I’m sure. Then I’ll go to those places and do those things. But I promised you a story about somewhere I had been, so let’s trace back to the lavatorial launchpad and start the countdown… 3, 2, 1, Thunderpants are go!¹ 

(Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2013)

Red flags hung a foolish stickman struggling in the perigo correnteza. Warned of these dangerous currents, he was swimming and getting nowhere, encircled by his sign. Winds intermittently fluttered fabric and bent the flagpole but stickman was stuck and you could see why he was being paraded as an example for all at Copacabana beach. Fearsome, towering waves rose and lashed out at the shore, full of hunger for an ignorant gringo². Now, I’m no seafaring surfer, breaker of waves (…first of his name), but I’m no fool either. Today was not a day for improving my swimming. 

It’s called sand because you find it where the sea meets the land. Rio de Janeiro was the land of Christ the Redeemer, who had blessed us with extraordinarily cheap tickets to ride the cable car up to his lofty abode this morning. What he hadn’t mentioned on the invite was that the clouds enclosing him until lunchtime made it impossible, at 10am, to see far past his knees. Let alone his head. And you could forget about sweeping panoramic views of Rio; the exotic metropolis encased within forests flush with life; favelas with a frightful glamour to them, violence and corruption set to the Sugarloaf backdrop of beauty; and of course, the Atlantic sea, dotted with outrageously enormous peachy beachy bundas glistening golden in the sun, visible even from the mountains… possibly. I’ll never know. Because I couldn’t see a bloody thing.

Sunday service complete (‘thou shalt not be a stingy bastard’), on the return leg of the cable cart I was singled out as a young gringo and dragged to the front of the carriage to dance with a busking Samba crew. This involved standing awkwardly and smiling as seconds slow-danced into minutes, me noticeably rhythmically challenged³ and a head taller than the performers, before putting 10 Reais into their donation bucket for the privilege of the enforced entertainment, praying to cloudy-nuts that they’d leave me alone after that. 

Down through the city, through blocks that could have been Paris, could have been London, could have been New York and out across a front street that couldn’t have been Blackpool but could have been Barcelona and, at last, we had arrived at Copacabana beach. Three weeks in the outback of the country with my girlfriends’ family, under the disapproving eye of her Evangelical father. A morning under the mockingly invisible and chuckling belly of Christ, but now I had, finally, been redeemed. 

Land ended at the sea and today so, too, did any possibility of further exploration. The waves created a double defence against aquatic entry. Huge giants crashed down, rippling smaller, secondary waves to lap a preliminary warning at the shore. Franciele⁴ wasn’t a big fan of open water in any case, but with some gentle persuasion we were soon semi-submerged at a safe waist height. Me, wearing my new shades Fran had splashed out a whopping £14 on in River Island pre-trip and her, stunning in a bikini bought on the same spree, paddling slightly shallower but more submerged.  Christ, she looked gorgeous. She was a good foot shorter than me but that didn’t stop me stooping for a kiss. 

But I didn’t make it. As long as my toes curled in the sand I’d felt we were safe. You remember that bollocks about the sea meeting the land. One of the great towering giants was decidedly dissatisfied with two teenage upstarts ignoring his foot soldiers and waded into the battle. And then, my feet no longer touched the sand. Which way was up was up in the air and under the water and an indiscriminate limb flailed against something and then my head resurfaced and we were no longer paddling. 

I’d lost my glasses. Fran hadn’t lost her bikini, before you go getting any ideas. But we’d both lost control in an instant. Neither of us could touch the bottom and we were now fighting with every ounce of panicked anaerobic energy to return to the shore. Kicking and flailing towards safety, I was on a treadmill ramped far beyond my top speed. The wave inexorably dragged backwards, briefly dropping us down before flinging head and limbs up and hard down under the surface. Kicking up, I was the weaker swimmer but Fran didn’t seem to be having any more luck fighting the giant. We both repeated this rag-doll cycle two, maybe three more times, me screaming, ‘Heeeelp!’ and her, ‘Ajuuuuda!’ through salty breaths but both knowing our voices were hopelessly drowned beneath the giant’s flurry of aquatic fury. 

The closest I had to a plan B was to swim to Fran and hope that our combined mass was somehow more likely to be flung to shore. Desperately flimsy science, but plan A was only serving to sap our energy. Rising for the fourth or fifth (or sixth?) time, instead of fighting the backwards pull I went across and with it. Reaching Fran just as the giant tugged downwards, this had the inadvertent appearance of me grabbing and pulling her under the surface. Her eyes bulged with fear and confusion. Demented and bulging as mine must have also been, maybe she thought I was trying to kill her. There was no time to explain. We were under. Holding on. Spinning. Holding. Kicking. Kicking each other. Hitting something. Upwards. Kicking. Clueless as to whether in the right direction. The safe direction. The shallow direction. And then, sand. Digging my heels in, as the secondary wave feebly tried to exhort me back to the depths, I was safe. 

But somewhere in the kicking and flailing and spinning we’d been separated. Where was Fran? Not near me. I turned and coughed ‘Help!’, spluttered ‘Ajuda!’… Two lifeguards were comparing bronzed biceps and didn’t hear me, oblivious to the tragedy before them. Her looking at me like I was trying to kill her could be the last look from Fran’s beautiful brown eyes, alive. What if, inadvertently, plan B had killed her. Saved me, and killed her. No, no no no no no no. I stepped back towards the giant as he crashed down his next thunderous blow and realised with an almighty sigh of relief that he had only been hungry for a foolish gringo. Now I was out of grasp, he coughed up Fran, disinterestedly, and receded. We dragged each other to the sand that was safely land and decidedly not sea, both falling to all fours. Coughing sea water and snot, I tried to apologise but Fran was gone. Storming up the beach, leaving her gringo fool collapsed centre-stage before the towering waves. The lifeguards clocked her as she passed and watched just below waist-height for a moment, before returning to their biceps. 

…..

Brazilian buffets are the stuff of a hungry teenager’s dreams. Chicken, sausages, steaks, flavoured rice, flavoured dust (odd but uma delícia), beef or chicken lasagne (as a side!), potatoes, salad (I’m told), and desserts ready as soon as your savoury palate is sufficiently satisfied. I was permanently hungry. Five minutes after breakfast I was ready for lunch and today it came five hours, a trip to the murky heavens, and a tumble roll of the dice with death later. 

So, the buffet was welcomed with both open arms and gullet and I chewed my way to an excellent value for Fran’s father’s Reais. I popped upstairs to the loo after finishing my fourth savoury plate and again after my sole dessert bowl. I never have been much of a sweet tooth. As I pootled back down the stairs for the second time, Evangelical father cracked a joke which brought a chuckle across the table at my expense. My Portuguese was in its infancy at this stage, so I asked Fran what was so funny as I plopped back into my chair, wondering if it was too weird to go back for a bit more lasagne (the beef one) post-dessert and poo. 

‘They’ve given you an apelido, a nickname: ‘O Pato’ – The duck.’ 

Apparently I’d disappeared to the loo within minutes of eating every meal for the last three weeks. Apparently ducks do that, too. So, I was the Pato. I really never thought much of it before then, but I suppose I did always need to rush off after a meal. But it hardly affected my life. I didn’t pay it any thought. And it didn’t seem to bother Fran. Later on, darting through Rio’s night markets to the seclusion of the beach, we snuck a moment away from her father’s not-quite-omniscient eye to finally share the kiss the sea had earlier stolen from us. 

But this Pato nickname was perhaps the first sign of my dumping deviance. Maybe, if plan B had saved only Fran and not me, the repercussions of my untimely death could have saved hundreds of miles of loo roll, Atlantic oceans-worth of toilet flushes and thousands of pounds of NHS funds. But it didn’t. And I’m living to tell the tale in Nightmare ward, the story almost dreamy in its now distant nature.

But wait, you say. You promised near death and ducks, and you delivered. Where’s our lesbian love affair?

Well, as may have come across in the tale, I was wholly smitten with Franciele. I moved away to university a year before her, missed her terribly and all my new friends could tell. My college football team even adapted a version of ‘In the jungle, the mi-ghty jungle… ah-wim-boh-wey, ah-wim-boh-wey’ to sing ‘She’s his girlfriend, Bra-zilian girlfriend…’ in homage to my besottedness. 

And then, one year on, she followed me north to a nearby establishment and promptly forgot I existed by the end of her freshers’ week. Classic! Except, contrary to the standard break-up, one year on we were best friends once more. She hadn’t left me for an upgrade, rather a different product altogether. Just as we were curling our toes in the sands of her new life and our new friendship, I was both sad and happy to be a part of it. But it wasn’t to last. Storm-New-Girlfriend thundered into her town, giant waves of jealousy swept Fran out to sea and this time, she didn’t return to me. 

I, however, did return for my final year at university to a new chant of ‘She was his girlfriend, Bra-zilian girlfriend…’ and, while writing this, I’ve crept two hours closer to the mighty surgery. I should try to sleep. 

Footnotes

¹The Gaelic name Turley means ‘like Thor’, or more fittingly, ‘like Thunder’, see Thunderpants.
²Gringo = European, Favela = Slum, Bunda = Bottom. 
³These days, Brazilian dancing ranks among my favourite party tricks. 
⁴All names are changed.

…..

Next: Chapter 2: A Very Local Prison

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