Swingers 3 Page 11

  When we got to the hospital I was hooked up to a monitor. My heart rate had gone up to 250 beats per minute, that’s much faster than you can count out loud. I remember two doctors rushing around, trying to get a cannula into my arm. Everything was going hazy through lack of oxygen to my brain and for the first time in my life I thought I was going to die.

  I thought about Dave and how he had not had chance to say goodbye to Rachel. I began to look around for Marie. I was in a room surrounded by all kinds of medical equipment and five or six people, but there was no sign of Marie. I began to shout her name. I had to let her know how much I loved her, I had to see her one more time to say goodbye. I distinctly remember a nurse telling me to stop panicking and calm down. This made me really angry; I wasn’t panicking and I didn’t need to calm down, I just wanted to tell the woman I loved goodbye before I bailed out for good.

  Luckily, Marie had heard me calling for her from the corridor outside and came into the room. One of the doctors told the nurse to back off because she was trying to push Marie out of the room, I could see Marie shaping up to punch her. They had pumped some sort of drug into me as my heart began to slow down again, I started to understand what was going on. It’s a strange feeling the way a lack of oxygen affects you, reality seems to lose its meaning and simple situations suddenly become incredibly complicated.

  With my heart rate back to normal, my exhaustion kicked in and I fell into a deep sleep. Marie stayed by my bed all night, never leaving my side. In the morning I woke up to find her fast sleep in the bedside chair. Over the next few days I underwent test after test. The doctors could find nothing wrong with my heart, one even told me that my heart was in excellent shape for a man of my age, because I had gone to the gym and kept fit for much of my life.

  After a week of being subjected to every blood test, urine test, being hooked up to every kind of monitor, even a treadmill test, I was sent home still not knowing what had caused the rapid heart beat. I had been put on beta-blockers to keep it under control and told to report back if anything else happened.

  We carried on but I felt ill most of the time, my heart would skip a beat every few minutes and I became more and more exasperated. Then one Sunday morning when we had been in bed for only an hour or so, it all turned bad again. My heart missed a beat, then another, and another, suddenly it was all over the place, two rapid beats, one half beat, then no beats. I switched on the bedside light and turned to wake Marie, but she was already sat up in bed. She took one look at me and rang for an ambulance again.

  At the hospital I was hooked up to a heart monitor that bleeped on every heart beat. It sounded like a child banging on the keys of a piano. The doctor looked at the screen and announced “You have Arithmea.” I was so breathless it took me a few seconds to answer him.

  “What’s…Arithmea?”

  “It’s when your heart beats randomly or irregularly, it’s caused by your heart’s electrical impulses not being synchronised.”

  “What…Can…You Do...About…It?” I asked.

  “Medication can sometimes sort it out, but if that fails we would have to cardiovert you.” Now I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it.

  I was too out of breath to ask him the next question but Marie did it for me. I almost wished she hadn’t. “What is cardioversion?”

  The doctor stood at the bottom of my bed, rested both hands on the rail and looked at me over the top of his gold framed glasses. He was a tall, slender man in his late fifties and had a well rehearsed bedside manner, but what he said next shook me.

  “We stop your heart with the defibrillators, wait a few seconds, then start it again, hopefully into a normal rhymn.” I looked at Marie, she was starring straight ahead, a look of shock frozen onto her face. I turned back to the doctor.

  “You mean…You’re going to kill me… and… then bring me… back to… life.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t put it like that,” said the doctor.

  “Well I ... Bloody…Would,” I answered.

  “Is there no other way?” asked Marie, her voice showing just a hint of a tremor.

  “Well we will see if the medication works over night, but if it doesn’t then I’m afraid it’s the only option, unless you want to stay like that?” he said turning to me.

  “I can’t…Live like...This” I said. “Do…What...You Have To…Do.”

  It was a long night, laying there listening to the erratic bleeping of the monitor above my head. I was willing the bleep to become steady, but as usual with me I was going to have to do it the hard way. Marie arrived early the next morning looking uncharacteristically dishevelled. When she saw the bleeper still all over the place she looked crestfallen. We held hands for the next two hours until they came to take me down to theatre. Marie walked with me as far as she could then waved until I went out of sight. It was probably harder for her than it was me; at least if I didn’t make it I wouldn’t be the one left alone.

  In theatre there was an anaesthetist, my doctor, and a pretty young nurse, all laughing and joking with each other. Don’t they care that I’m about to die? Don’t they understand how miserable I am? The anaesthetist slid a needle into the back of my hand and said “Dream of something nice, it will be over before you know it.” As I slid into unconsciousness I saw my doctor rubbing the pads of the defibrillators together. Now I know what a condemned prisoner feels when he’s about to go to the electric chair.

  I can’t remember if I dreamed something nice, but I do remember the young nurse shouting my name from a far away place. “Barry, Barry, can you open your eyes for me?” Her voice was coming closer all the time. “Open your eyes Barry, it’s all over.” Then she was there at my bedside as I opened my eyes “Hello there,” she said, “how do you feel?” I knew instantly that my heart was back to normal, I could breathe and think straight again.

  “I feel great,” I said. “I didn’t die then.”

  “Of course not, silly,” she laughed. “We will take you back to the ward soon and if you still feel okay you can go home this afternoon.”

  I learned later that cardioversion is a common procedure, carried out almost everyday in most hospitals, and the risk of dying is less than being run over by a snowplough in summer. But my arithmea returned three weeks later and for the next eighteen months I hardly went a month between attacks. In this time we pulled away from the club, leaving Craig to carry the burden. This was a bad time for us. Marie went into hospital for a routine knee operation and ended up with pneumonia. She spent two weeks in the high dependency unit and had us all terrified. The club was very much second in our thoughts for a long time. As Marie recovered I was near breaking point, none of the multitude of tablets I had tried was controlling the arithmea. As a last resort I went to see a private cardiologist. He looked at my notes, organised some more tests and arranged to see me again.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your heart apart from the electrical misfire,” he said. “The trouble is, up until now all the treatment has been aimed at keeping your heart beat steady, but you have not been treated for the electrical element that’s causing all the trouble. Sort that out and you should be fine.” His words were like a breath of fresh air to me; at last someone had figured out how to treat my condition. He prescribed some tablets which I still can’t pronounce to this day. That was almost two years ago and touch wood, I’ve been fine ever since. Our return to fitness coincided with us kicking back into the club and giving Craig a much needed rest. The grinding recession was biting hard and La Chambre, like most other adult clubs, was feeling the pinch. The good old days were long gone and we had to almost reinvent the place.

  In the last year alone we have spent over £30,000 on the old girl and it won’t stop there. In fact it never truly stops: La Chambre has a personality all of its own. She is like a very high maintenance girlfriend that demands you lavish riches on her but you know that if you do she will be more than worth it and repay you in ways you never dreamed possible.
It’s been a bumpy ride at times, but this club has given so much pleasure to so many people over the years and if that alone was her legacy, then it would be enough, but she stands for so much more. She stood alone at the front line for so long against the raging mob, the first and only club that held firm against the do good-ers, the media and the legion of bureaucrats that raged against the swinging culture. At times it felt like the Alamo inside La Chambre, attacked and battered from all sides, but she held firm and eventually pulled through. The club to me is like a force of nature, an energy that infuses anyone who steps inside her doors. A sanctuary for those who choose to reject the ways that have been taught to us and have taken another path.

  Even after all these years if I have had a bad day I can walk into the club and feel renewed and reinvigorated, other people have told me the same. Is it the layout of the place, the feel, the buzzing atmosphere? I don’t know. I just know it works and long may it continue.

  Myself and Marie on occasion have just sat in the lounge after a party, when everyone has gone, when the disco is silent, the lights have stopped flashing, when the playrooms are empty and the dungeon is quiet, we just sit and soak up the residual energy. It’s almost tangible. Some people have asked us if the club is haunted. Well, I believe it is, not in the traditional sense, but by the fun and laughter that has over time been absorbed into the fabric of the place. You can sense it as soon as you walk in. So what of the future? Well the club will go on and so will we, as long as our bodies let us, that is.

  I sometimes think maybe we should consider taking it easy and letting someone else take over, but then Friday comes around and we start to feel that buzz and hey presto we’re hot for it again.

  What of our old friends? Well, we still see Danny and Sue now and again. Danny never changes, he still talks too loud, his hair is still unruly and falling over his face but these days there’s a little less of it and there’s more grey than black. Sue still has the power to send my knees weak just by giving me a sexy look with those big, brown eyes. Danny retired last year and they bought one of those big static caravans down by the coast, so now they share their time between their home and the seaside. We go over sometimes and sit and watch the sun set with them over the water.

  Rachel eventually met another man and remarried, but he wasn’t into swinging. I suppose he didn’t want to share her, can’t blame him for that. Anyhow, they moved away somewhere down south. Last time we saw her, just before she went she told us “The times she and Dave had spent with us had been some of the best times of her life.” She looked happy, not elated, but happy, as she kissed us goodbye, I had the overwhelming feeling that she was still drifting. We haven’t seen or heard from her since.

  Charles and Georgina Haverington, the couple who live in the mansion, fell on hard times. Well, when I say hard times I mean down to their last million or so. It got so bad that Charles had to throw open the doors of Blockley Manor to the public. “Damned intrusive having Joe Public tramping through your home.” Charles told me, “Still, needs must eh?”

  “Just think of it this way,” I told him. “You can take people round and show them where you shagged Marie, or the bench me and Georgina came together on, or the red velvet room where Georgina brought Marie over to the dark side.”

  “Never thought of that old boy, it could give a whole new dimension to the tour, I’ll try it.” I’m still not sure if he was joking or not.

  Angus and Zoe, our Scottish friends, are still going strong up in Edinburgh knocking back vast quantities of illicit whisky and home made wine. They came down to Sheffield a while ago and had a night out at the club with us. Angus’ moustache is even bigger and mostly all white now. He is well into his sixties but he was still a big hit with the ladies. I had to keep my eye on Zoe in case she went near the ice cubes.

  Kenny and June have disappeared from the scene. Since we last saw them at the club, no word has been heard from them. I can only assume that Kenny’s rectal problems made it impossible for them to continue their swinging career.

  As for me, I sit here writing this book in my sixty second year of life, I see old age lurching towards me with all the inevitability of a drunk at a party. I try to push it away. I don’t want to grow old, I want to keep my vitality and my lust for life for as long as I can, yet I know I must step aside and let the younger ones through. I envy the young couples at La Chambre. It’s not jealousy, how can I be jealous, I have seen and done so much in my life that if they only achieve half of what I have done they will think themselves blessed. No, I envy the time they have before them, all the things they have yet to experience, all the good times to come and, yes, the bad times too. It’s all part of this fantastic lifestyle we call ‘swinging.’

  And so we come to the end of this third and final book in the trilogy of our lives in the swinging scene. I’m looking across at Marie as I write these last few lines. She’s smiling at me. She doesn’t seem to age. She’s still that pretty, petite, sexy blond who has stood bedside me all these years, experienced it all with me and for that alone I consider myself a lucky man. For any couple reading this and just starting out, my only advice would be don’t look back, don’t look down and hold on to each other for dear life; it’s going to be one hell of a ride.