To the edge of the living and the dead

‘‘A crack in the tea cup opens,’’ wrote Auden, ‘‘a lane to the land of the dead.’’ As often he was bang right. Though my tea cup was a coffee cup.

The first day of spring, driving rain, eight degrees, and I drank a cup of instant coffee, one of my daily half dozen or so. But this one repeated on me, repeated like a pirate’s parrot.

Burping is mildly comic. Unless it fails to stop. It failed to stop. Indeed it worsened, dredging up ever more distant echoes of my ingestive past, grace notes of banana, of lasagne. And with them came fingers of bile, caustic emissaries from the fleshy pouch to which all food and drink descends.

Whether it’s DB Draught with a late-night burger, or Oyster Bay with rillettes de porc, it all goes to the one place.

And now that place was misbehaving, was chemically, biologically, out of whack, was brewing into my own little Three Mile Island.

I didn’t yet feel nauseous but I could sense nausea stalking me and I knew I would soon be ill, knew it for certain, knew it by instinct, that wordless evolutionary library of which we’re all card-carrying members.

The guts that sustain me were about to fell me.

What’s remarkable is how rarely they do. I’ve lived 724 months and for about 720 of them my guts have been no more than a humming engine I’ve barely been aware of. And that’s an apt image.

For just as in a car it’s the bodywork that seduces us but the engine that really matters, so it’s the guts that matter in a man or woman, though we’re forever seduced by the flesh.

Guts are us. And how similar our guts are to all guts. To clean a fish, slicing open the belly, exposing the insides, is to look in the mirror.

Here’s the coiled and rubbery tract that runs unbroken from throat to sphincter, and hanging off it, held within the arched embrace of the ribs, the organs, prince among which is the plumply purple heart.

I scoop the lot out with my fingers, and lob it to the waiting gulls.

Guts gone wrong are memorable. On a ferry 40 years ago between England and Holland I was on my knees and hugging vitreous enamel within an hour of leaving Harwich.

Eight hours later I was still there, empty of everything including hope, yet still heaving at the nothing in my stomach, heaving indeed at the stomach itself.

I’ve rarely felt quite so deep in the coalmine of despair. Had anyone offered me a revolver I’d have paused only to bless them and their children and their children’s children before putting the barrel to my temple.

I’ve been to mass once. It was at midnight on Christmas Eve in 1979 in a candle-lit medieval cathedral in Spain. And as the choir progressed up the aisle I felt simultaneously hot and cold and the pew shook.

I came round the next day to find a doctor, summoned drunk from a Christmas party, injecting my backside with a medieval syringe. His verdict was poisoning by a plate of shellfish.

Mine was that there was no point in living. Four days I lay in delirium while the guts staged their spectacular revolt. On the fifth day I rose, weak as a newborn, and I pulled on my jeans and they fell back down. Guts are us.

And now four decades on and the other side of the world, those same guts were rebelling again. I could feel my house of wellbeing starting to crumble. When the nausea finally arrived, the whole edifice fell with a rush.

You don’t need the details. They brought with them an overwhelming weakness, a draining of the limbs. An hour later I lay on my side on the sofa and drew up my knees like a Saxon burial and surrendered.

There was nothing else possible. To be ill is to withdraw from the world. Everything was in abeyance. Time passed in an aching haze.

I forced myself off the sofa only to feed the dog and I found that my guts had slapped 20 years on to me. I shuffled to the kitchen in a geriatric hunch. It took effort to open the fridge. The dog’s appetite seemed obscene. I drank a little water and lay back down.

Now, three days later, largely recovered, I am told it was probably norovirus. So be it. The name makes no difference.

All that counts is that it wasn’t the land of the dead. But you could see it from there.