I wanted to tell him I’d been waiting, that sometimes I could taste him in the small hours before dawn. Pain in my head had created a path littered with shattered reflections. My brain had landed on black tracks, then separated into frantic, blue-eyed gulls on plumped, white pillows, scraped with thin, sharp instruments. Sickness and excitement rose in my stomach as he approached. The air between us crackled with haphazard electricity. I recognised the distance in his eyes, watermarks from rain leaping off rough surfaces. I stretched my hand out to know it again, to rub my fingers in its spotted areas. My body throbbed. Then, he was beside me. How was it possible I could hear stones rolling down an echo, Anon’s heartbeats between clock hands, small versions of her breathing against the hemlines of nurses’ uniforms, yet Rangi’s feet barely made a sound? He drew the curtains around us carefully, leaving a tiny crack. His breath on my face was warm and alcoholic. Red scratches on his right cheek were rough. I pressed my mouth on them. His hands flew to my neck, holding it tenderly. I cried into silent footsteps as he undid his zipper urgently. And those creatures of dawn, carrying gutted spaces we drank from surrounded us like quiet grenades waiting for the pull of our fingers.
He was heavy against me afterwards. He hoisted himself up, careful not to make too much noise. My nostrils were clogged with his smell of faint cologne, weed and sweat. The taste of sweat lingered longest in my mouth. He sat down gingerly, took my hand, releasing a slow breath as though tension had left his body.
“What happened to your face?” I asked. Footsteps in the hallway petered off, made me more alert.
Rangi rubbed his face, threw a worried look my way. “You don’t remember this?” He pointed at the scratches, fixed me with an intense, loaded gaze.
I shook my head, closed my eyes. Tiny nuclei of colour slid beneath my lids, split then disappeared.
His eyes went to my stump. “I’m sorry Joy. That night… we argued. You weren’t yourself. You were wild. I’ve never seen you that way. You hit me with that ornament, that brass head your mother left you.”
My eyes flew open. “No, I’m sorry. Of the two of us, I think you got the better deal.” A slight resentment slipped into my tone.
A throbbing in my head began to spread, till I felt like a big, pathetic ball of nerves and anxiety. “What are you saying?” I asked, my voice tiny in the dark.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he rubbed a finger up and down the back of my hand slowly.
Outside, fireworks cracked and popped in the night skyline. Somehow, Rangi had slipped one into my hold. Bits of sky attached to it were gaps we could fall into. It sparkled against my fingers. And between his gestures of consolation, I wondered why he came to the hospital already smelling of sex and why this only registered with me later. I waited for the firework to go off, toppling the dangling ceiling above our heads.
The nurses became interchangeable, bearing half smiles as winter set in. They brought cups of tea, terrible, tasteless sandwiches and no hope of my life ever going back to what it was. When they washed me, I avoided looking in the mirror. I couldn’t bear to see my bandaged stump, still covered to protect the skin. Sometimes I saw it uncovered, leave my body; roll around near the plughole on the grey floor. Once Anon wore it in the mirror. I spotted her through the steam in the glass crying, her moist, pink tongue heavy with some knowledge. She knew something and she wouldn’t tell me. Flecks of gold spun in her dark eyes. Her crying became so loud I felt my heart stop. Rivulets on the mirror watered her stump that cruelly grew whole again before my eyes.
An image flickered in my mind’s eye. Anon and I were walking on the darkened train platform, the sound of an approaching train surrounding us. Two pigeons at the far end of the platform were losing their colouring to a sky she’d already built. She pointed to a gap. I edged forward into a heat so palpable, my skin burned. The tracks became hot soil beneath my feet. I was caught in a procession of some sort. Men dressed in traditional African clothing were dragging a bound man and woman through a trail. Stray branches snapped. I tasted a metallic flavour in somebody’s shortness of breath. Sweat slicked trembling hands, a rope dug into skin. Short glimpses of light between trees were blinding. Suddenly, the sound stopped. As if I’d gone temporarily deaf. I imagine pressing an ear against a surface of water must be like this; faint, traceable, individual murmurings but you cannot make sense of the whole.
The train wheel, black and heavy burst through the water onto flesh and bone, crushing it. The pain was so deep, so agonizing I would know it forever. I screamed, falling from the wheelchair onto the wet, shower floor. The nurse scrambled to her knees. I cried into the plughole, into the train tracks. Anon turned up the noise in the steamed mirror and the surfaces of water we shared.
Home
On the day of my release, I woke up to discover the man three beds down had died in his sleep. All evidence of him had been removed, only the crease in the silence indicated he was gone. I felt guilty sleeping through a death like that but he must have passed quietly, without any fanfare. It was a cold and surprisingly bright morning. Sunlight streamed through the small window. From the bed, I saw people milling about outside, facing the start of their working day. I was nauseous with dread and anticipation. The last time I’d been out in the world, my life had been different.
I sat up in bed cursing things I’d taken for granted in the past. Even the dark had been a constant companion. My body had adapted to it’s modes of infiltration; it’s silencing of stones in the jar on my kitchen desktop, it’s power to hold my limbs hostage on those heavy days I could barely crawl out of bed. The dark treated Anon like a prodigal daughter, allowing her to spring in pockets around me, carrying bits of a puzzle that disintegrated whenever I reached for them. I missed the movements my body used to make without a careful thought but how was I to know what was to come? Now, I was an injured woman wandering through a collection of battlefields, feeling the softening skin of rotten fruit in my fingers. Frustrated, my eyes swam.
The Doctors took ages making their rounds so I didn’t get discharged till after midday. I left one rotten pear and a leaking blue biro on the dresser as gifts for the next patient. A white napkin I’d fashioned into a plane was hidden under the pillow, already touching the edges of another life. The nurses had given me fresh clothes to wear; new cotton underwear, a pair of black jeans a size too big, a grey t-shirt and a snoopy sweatshirt, its long right sleeve dangling pathetically. As if it was waiting for my right arm to come back through the human traffic surrounding us.
The Doctor, a severe looking auburn haired man with a dented nose had informed me that due to my “history” they’d assign a health worker to my case to check up on me every now and again, help me adjust to living with my disability.
“Just for some support,” he added diplomatically. “So you can transition back to living on your own with these changes. It can be… emotionally overwhelming at first,” he said, smiling distantly, tapping his pen against the clipboard, mentally already onto the next patient. I sat there picking lint from my new jeans, blinking up at him as if he were a mirage in the wrong setting. Soon enough, one of us would shrink into a slithering of light.
“You’ve prescribed more sleeping pills?” I asked, weary of the constant cycle of medications.
He nodded patiently. “Yes, to help you in the meantime. Your body needs rest. If you’d been consistently taking the pills you were originally given, you may not have had that unfortunate incident I’m afraid.”