Second opinion

AS WE KNOW, human life is sacred. Now, indeed, that God is dead and reli- gion defunct — to put it mildly — there is nothing left in the universe to worship except ourselves. It follows, I think, that he who saves human life is engaged upon the holiest work which can be vouch- safed us. This sometimes makes me feel positively self-righteous.

Last week, for example, I arrived at the prison to discover that a young man had attempted to cut his wrists with a ballpoint pen. He had been put in a bare cell and deprived of all the appurte- nances of suicide, such as shirt and trousers, and was now dressed in Home Office anti-suicide garb, a blue terylene outfit with velcro fastenings.

These are what are known as strip con- ditions, and the cell is called the strip cell, which, a prison officer informed me, is also known in another prison down the road as the Shrine.

`Why's that?' I asked the officer.

`I don't know, sir. Perhaps it's because it produced so many miracle cures.'

`Why did you do it?' I asked the young man in strip conditions.

`There's nothing out there for me,' he replied. 'Life's shit.'

I explained that, at least to an extent, life was what one made it. `You don't know nothing about me, you can't talk. It's all right for you, life's easy for you.'

`You don't know anything about me,' I said. 'You can't talk.'

`There's nothing in life for me so why can't I kill myself if I want to?'

`Because it's against prison regula- tions, I'm afraid. What you do outside prison is your own affair, but while you're in here you won't be allowed to kill yourself.'

I turned to go.

`Can I have a cigarette, then?' he asked. Give me smoke or give me death. Two days later I went into his cell. `Hello, doctor, I feel fine now, can I go back to the wing?'

How gratified I felt that I had saved another life — or if not a life, at least a ballpoint pen.

It's just the same in the hospital, of course. A young man was admitted deeply unconscious from the effects of what are known as recreational drugs. Some recre- ation! In his case, they were opiates and benzodiazepines, the effects of each of which are reversible with antidote drugs.

Let sleeping psychopaths lie, say I! No sooner was he awake than he started to create chaos. His shirt — a replica of those worn by a famous football team had to be cut from his supine body in order that he could be fully examined. `F— you, you fat motherf—ing fat pigs!' he said, in gratitude for having been snatched from the jaws of death. `That shirt cost me 40 f—ing quid and you had no f—ing right to cut if off me. With that innate sense of justice with which, as Rousseau knew, primitive Man is by nature endowed, he picked up his drip stand and began to swing it round at the equipment near him.

`I'm gonna f—ing do 50 quid of dam- age to your f—ing ward because of what you did to my shirt.'

One of the nurses tried to calm him.

`I'm going out there to f—ing lull myself,' he said menacingly, 'and you've got no f—ing right to stop me.'

The nurse didn't try to stop him. `She's not a coward,' one of the other nurses told me. 'She's quite tough. She's the one that cut Andrew B. down when he hanged himself in the toilet. But you have to draw the line somewhere.'

Theodore Dalrymple