“But what about finding out why I’ve been sleepwalking?”
He sighed audibly, rocked back on his heels. There could be all sorts of reasons. Dr Krull knows your history. He can advise you best.”
I stuffed coins slick with sweat in my pocket. “What do I do if I lose time again?” Panic seeped into my voice.
“Take the pills Joy,” he instructed patronizingly, as if I was a small child who couldn’t quite grasp the obvious.
Dr Krull knows your history. I imagined the ink pen he held scratching one pale, blue iris out, a stethoscope strangling his neck and the struggle to breathe making him take some other form. The paper plane beneath the pillow sprouted an extra wing.
I sat in the compact, white, waiting area downstairs by the sliding doors. Tiny wax women bearing injuries hitched rides on the wheels of ambulance beds, headed towards death or reinvention. Only a handful of people were sitting down, in varying stages of illness. My left hand was jittery. I caught the tail end of a conversation a rail thin blonde was having at the phone box. She puffed on a cigarette in between gesticulating wildly. Smoke curled around the outline of a scorpion tattoo on her exposed midriff while a haggard man in a worn, black leather jacket with thinning, dark hair rushed by holding a bouquet of daffodils. I pictured the recipient, a wife or lover sitting on an uncomfortable bed eating the petals.
Then that image was replaced by one of a brown-skinned woman swimming in a river, kicking hard against a tide. The blue petal in her mouth floated like a rootless tongue. My chest tightened. My mouth became dry. The man was a fleeting thing who’d brought an unlikely passenger through the sliding doors. He jangled a set of keys nervously in his pocket. I pressed my ears against the sound, still gripped by the knowledge that unsettling things could slip into moments of weakness and holes in your day. A trickle of blue water ran down the middle of my vision, bookmarking the two worlds.
An ambulance van pulled up outside by the kerb. The doors slid open. An empty bottle of rum rolled towards heels clicking. The sharp clicking heels trapped a crinkled Trebor mint wrapper, a five pence coin with the Queen’s head spinning, a torn multi-coloured woven bracelet. My mother had made a bracelet like that for me once, weaving the material between her fingers expertly, and humming.
The cracked ambulance siren was silent. Its doors smacked open and closed. Inside the ambulance were future scenes waiting to find their way into my life; trying to tie my laces one handed, cracking eggs on a shiny black desktop, watching the yolks slide down to the floor, becoming small chickens clucking erratically. I saw myself lying on the ground by the open freezer door, a cold mist on my face. I cried over the ache and loss of my arm. My body shuddered. I reached into the freezer pulling out yellow fish whose mouths kept moving after they spat out the same brass key, before melting into bright water in my hand.
The woman with the clicking heels showed her face, gaunt and knowing in the gap. A hospital ID hung from her neck. She squinted, scribbling notes in a pad. She knew she couldn’t help me. I was a lost cause. She took a deep breath, released the wind from her mouth, scattering the scenes inside the ambulance. They fell into each other, changing to some unlikely animal. Yellow chickens became yolks again, I smacked a brass key repeatedly against the desktop, and fish carried untied shoelaces in their mouths. My mother’s bracelet fluttered at the edge just as the siren came on, wailing in my ears.
I felt a hand on my shoulder; its broad, firm grip was familiar. “Hey, have you been waiting long?” Mervyn asked, face full of concern. He helped me up. The man in the chair opposite coughed into his chequered handkerchief. I managed a half smile that felt more like a grimace. “Thanks for coming,” I answered, trying to wrestle the sinking feeling in my stomach, the panic I was feeling at the thought of being out in the world again.
“No problem. You knew I’d come. Anything for you, you know that. I’m just happy you reached out to me. We haven’t seen each other much since Queenie died.”
He blew a breath out slowly, as if trying to compose himself. Damp spots had spread on the collar of his crisp, blue shirt. Maybe he didn’t know how to comfort me, what to say. Sometimes, people struggled in these situations. I almost told him I didn’t know what I needed to hear. And Queenie? What would she say seeing me like this? It was partly her fault for inconveniently dying and leaving me alone. Anger bloomed in my chest, followed by sharp, painful pangs of longing.
“I brought you here once as a kid you know. You’d stopped breathing. Your mother was beside herself, hysterical. I’d never seen her that way.” He rubbed his face, grappling with the memory. “When you finally came round, it was as if… You’d been somewhere. You were a strange child, otherworldly at times.”
We crossed the stretch of gleaming, pale aisle, leaving behind groaning lift doors and the constant patter of footsteps. He’d parked his black Mercedes Kompressor right near the entrance. I slid in carefully. It smelled of mint and leather. He turned the engine and radio on; set the car into gear before expertly moving off. The bulldog on the dashboard began to nod at the panic and fear growing inside me; Anon caught the bulldog’s head during two pit stops. Tears ran down my cheeks. I rolled the window down partially, leaned against it to feel the cold air on my face and the city shrinking beneath the fingers of my lost arm.
Queenie 1980’s: Born
The hole came attached to the baby’s ankle, just after it was born. At first it was barely the weight of a breath. Then it became dense and unknowable despite the irony of the baby who arrived into the world howling at the pale, blue ceiling, blinking frequently as though adjusting to her new setting, clenching and unclenching a demanding fist, being named Joy.
Motherhood Na wah oh! Queenie thought lying in the hospital bed, drenched in sweat and bone tired. I don suffer for this child she muttered, the comment barely passed her lips. The Doctor and nurse smiled at each other. After cleaning the baby up, the flaxen haired, pudgy-faced nurse handed her over wrapped in a light cotton blanket.
“Oh she’s a beauty!” the nurse remarked, glancing at Queenie for a reaction. Queenie gave a wobbly smile. “Thank you. I thank God for this blessing.” She felt as though she was on the edge of the moment, floating beyond the emotional connection the situation called for. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she be overwhelmed with the depth of feeling other mothers’ spoke of? Instead she was relieved. Soon she’d be able to fit into her clothes again, hold down food. Her morning sickness had been morning, afternoon and evening sickness. She’d found herself embarrassingly vomiting into a bin on the street, throwing up on a bus, darting into pubs as quickly as her unsteady legs could carry her; vomiting so much it seemed she’d lost organs in the process. They surrounded her while her head bobbed above putrid, urine stained toilet bowls. She checked they were hers by the weight of a lung in her hand, a heart circling the bowl, its ventricles flooded by flushing water as she rocked back on her knees cursing.
The baby was at her breast. Queenie felt nothing except pangs of hunger and a doom she couldn’t explain. She wanted to ask the nurse why the baby’s shadow was in the doorway. The small mass in her arms screamed. She knew the nurse wouldn’t be able to tell her. She closed her eyes, a gauzy haze descended. Her lids flicked open. The shadow was at her breast, sucking greedily on a large brown nipple. She looked into Joy’s knowing brown eyes, her irises orbited darkly. Queenie sighed, sinking into the hole. The ceiling fan spun between prior scenes of the birth.