Bob Hinshelwood's Other writing
   Life lived within is also lived without. 

Lying in bed, the rucks in the bed-linen like granite rock to lie on, my future is a composite of past times. In the present my skin is a furnace, alive with its own nature. My member is the centre of the fire. It goes up and down like Tower Bridge. My immobility is agony as that member flags constant demands I do something for it. Sometimes my nurse looks under my bedclothes and will see it saluting her. “Oh,” she says, always, “I'm surprised at you in your condition. We don't want that, do we?” – and drops the sheet back on its throbbing tip. How to catch her attention, how to tell her. Only my eyelids work now – apart from my member hoisting itself with a life of its own. If she would only touch it with the coolness of her fingertips, a fire brigade job, to staunch the firebrand. If only those long, elegant fingers would grip its shaft to establish a control. But never, she never once glanced in the direction of my frantically blinking eyelids.

            They were worried about my eczema. Common, they say, in such cases of paraplegia. Para-bloody-plegia from the neck down, that's what I'd got. The doctor stood gazing out of the window; my nurse stood next to him gazing into him. His well-scrubbed very pink face, well-shaven and smooth as her bosom, betrayed no interest. How could he know the fight I had with my surging skin, humming like the national grid. My struggle did not involve my muscles, my joints, it was a tournament between my mind and its feelings – one that never ceased. I could tell him the prescription I needed – it was standing next to him, resting her long hand in a lingering moment on his folded arm. He was a dapper man, silver hair, still playing squash in his fifties, the healthy and wealthy type. I had known them, sold insurance to them – in those gone days. And she, his nurse, was pure radiance. What a couple, a heroic tableau at the end of my bed. My member addresses them.

            In the end, it was an ointment for her to rub into the eczema. Why could she not rub it into the places I want her to rub!  All I can do is let my thoughts run; I imagine her in all sorts of ways - the nakedness, the flexible writhe of her curves as she moves, the moaning for me at night-time... oh dear. My mind, no match for this fever, retaliates. Often instead, it constructs her in the most absurd antics -= wiping her buttocks, picking the wax from her ears... brushing her teeth. I ask you!  Shaving her calves. Always the intimacy of her flesh. My charged skin won't let her go. And – I tell you – this is a stout fifty-year old matron, with a sour expression, and who ties her waist into a nasty groove between pads of fat above and below. This is not a lithesome 25-year old, dangling a sumptuous cleavage before my eyes as she soothes my paralytic limbs. What more -= I ask you – can I do. I see only an angel, feel only the tongues of desire caressing my skin. So, I hate her, my love.

It is solely the desire of the mind's eye before me. And it is only with a mind that I can fight it. I try to imagine the mathematics of her girth, the hydrodynamics of excess lipids, the chemistry of sweat glands. I try the driest of academic puzzles, the most ditchwater-like affairs of the hum-drum. But to no end - the caverns of my soul have no limit – endless niches and passages in which can be secreted the loathed longing of my skin. Thoroughbred honest thoughts can never hunt them out to the last one, can never dint my body's soaring temperature. When one day I shall be taught the mastery of typing with one toe, or with a stick strapped to my forehead, then the first thing I'll ask for is a massage girl to take me off to a sauna and lay me out and deal with that subcutaneous layer that itches, every Everest-like moment of my libido. Then I will be released for ever. So, I do believe.

            Until then... I love my nurse and fight her in my helplessness.