Simply Stories - All that Jazz

All that Jazz

by Jackie Anderson

“Hello! Only me!”

Jason groans and pushes himself as far back as he can into his pillows. That nurse again. The one with the huge smiles, the orange hair and the unpronounceable surname he calls ‘Jones’ because it’s easier on his tongue.

“And how have we been today, my lovely?”

Her scarlet lipstick widens her already generous mouth and it’s all Jason can focus on. He deliberately does not want to look at her eyes, green and shining with the freshness of the day and the enthusiasm of someone who loves life far too much. And the incomprehensible Welsh accent, he thinks, just my luck to land someone so insufferably cheerful as my carer. As if wheelchairs and nappies weren’t enough.

She ignores his bad-tempered silence.

“Well let’s be getting up and washed, shall we?”

She bustles around the room gathering clothes and preparing his hoist.

“I wash alone,” he grunts, in case she really does mean the ‘we’ in the whole getting washed idea.

“I know, lovey, I just get you ready and onto the seat in the wet room and you do the rest. It’s in your notes.”

“My notes?” With reluctance born of lingering distaste at his own useless body, Jason allows her to strip the bedclothes back and move him.

“It’s all in there,” she says and heaves to move his legs, those two withered lumps of flesh and bones at his hips.

“So you know…,” he begins. There is so much to know in his notes about his medical condition, and so little about him.

The hoist whines as she prepares it.

“I know about what happened, the care plan, your needs. But I don’t know you. Tell me, what music do you like?”

He stopped breathing for a moment. The room spun, turned upside down, shook and he shook with it. All sorts of music, he answers wordlessly. His mother had kept the guitars, his father had all the recordings. All the videos. Even after the band gave up on him, moved on, headed for the glamour of London in the hopes of a deal. Jason hasn’t listened to music since he woke up after the incident. His is a bubble of silence broken only by passing traffic or the voices of the neighbours arguing.

“A bit of everything,” he finally answers gruffly, settling on the hoist with the usual difficulty.

“I like all sorts of music: rock, R&B, jazz, classical, folk, country,” she twitters at the air as she works the machinery, “don’t you? Want me to play something while you shower?”

She nods towards his computer, the speakers, microphones, screens.

“No.”

“Oh. Well let’s talk. What do you do then?”

Jason can’t help himself.

“Sweet FA. Nothing. Fucking nothing. I am nothing,”

She doesn’t skip a beat in her preparations.

“You think?”

“I know.  Look at me. Stabbed in the spine by a pisshead. Now I’m fucking nothing. I haven’t left this room for nearly a year.”

She sits him in the wet room, stands in front of him, forces him to look at her.

“The pisshead hurt you,” she places her hands on her hips, lips pursed rather than smiling, “but being something or nothing is a choice you make. I like music and while you wash and I prepare your meds, I’m going to listen.”

She is breathtaking, Jason thinks, both in her audacious attitude and in the sparkles of energy that seem to dart from her as she moves. Above the sound of the shower he hears some old rock tracks. Freebird. He could play that note perfect once. A Whole Lotta Love. Its heart-pounding base was the sound track to his teens, a time he was laughed at by other boys for listening to his dad’s records. Sweet Child of Mine. A reminder of his first time, a sweet time.

“Tomorrow,” she says, leaving him in his wheelchair by his bedroom window, “it will be Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington for a change.”

“Bitch!” he calls after her. The silence that follows the slam of the door as she leaves crashes over him like a wave. His fingers drum a rhythm on the arm of the wheelchair. It’s taken all his strength to keep the music out of his head all this time. The thought of never playing a stage again was too painful. He wheels himself to his bed and then hoists himself into it. He leans back, breathless with the effort and waves a remote control at the monitor in front of him. The Walking Dead. Much more appropriate, he thinks.

Nurse Jones, as he dubs her, visits him every day, and even when he bellows at her, she plays music every day. She sings sometimes, with a rich, husky tone that reminds him of an oak aged whisky: smooth and utterly intoxicating. And when she leaves at the end of his ablutions, the silence is suffocating.

“I have a car,” she tells him a month later.

“So what.”

“So I’m taking you to the concert tonight. The Jazz Festival.”

“Not likely.”

“No choice. I’ve got the tickets. I’ve got keys to the car. I’ve made access arrangements. And you’re not going to say no.”

“You can’t.” Jason notices the tremble in his voice born from a flame of eagerness rising in his chest.

“Don’t say ‘no’ then.”