30
After weeks of therapy, I think I remember the first part of the story.
I’m not being coy or peekabooish with you. I genuinely don’t remember most of it, and the parts I do, well, they are strange and askew, like old photographs, badly stored. Some patches have faded into nothing. Some have curled and warped into weird shapes, as though exposed to open flame. In other places they are jewel-bright, vivid as the day they were taken, but without context, like single jigsaw pieces, unable to tell the story of the whole.
I am walking down a hospital corridor, looking for the toilets. I am very upset, very frightened. Someone I love is in trouble, and from glances, circumspect lowering of voices, ornate and contextually inappropriate kindnesses, I suspect that this person is about to die.
All they will tell me is that she’s fallen. She slipped on the ice and hit her head.
But she looks terrible. Her head is a mass of bandages, her eyelids heavy and puffed over her eyes – and she lies in an attitude she does not even have in sleep, her lips pursed around a plastic tube that seems made of something more vital than she is right now. Not even her fraying mass of grey hair is visible. She is in some special unit, in her own room on the ward in a kind of glass box. Everything smells wrong; it’s that hospital smell, and forever after that smell will make me batey and bitey, like a trapped, feral animal.
At her side, something on a trolley beeps in time with her heart. That and her slow, gasping breaths, her chest rising and falling, are the only signs that she is alive at all.
They’ve called me away from school. First day back at school, I’m sure it was, and the cheap uniform with its neat darning over the torn holes and hem feels strange on me, as though it must be worn in again. I think I had only been there an hour before the headmaster came to get me, before… ah yes, I remember – before Miss Costas drove me here.
My heavy school shoes make a clumping sound against the linoleum. I am like a filled balloon, about to burst with dread.
‘Ah, there you are!’
I look round, and about thirty feet behind me I can see that social worker, Alan or Alex or whatever his name is. He is doing his stupid smile at me, and waving, and speeding up along the corridor to meet me, practically running.
I, conversely, can feel myself still walking forwards, trying to pretend I didn’t hear him though I obviously looked round, and I am aware that this is a shockingly rude way to treat an adult, particularly one who has power over me.
But I really don’t want to talk to him, especially not right now. He gives me the creeps.
I don’t have the courage to front it out, so I stop and wait for him to catch up with me. He’s still doing the smile.
‘There you are,’ he says, coming to a halt in front of me, and his gaze flicks quickly up and down the corridor before resting on my face. ‘They just rang me at the office. I’ve been looking all over for you.’
Since I have been where you’d expect to find me, I have nothing to reply to this. I let my glance fall downwards towards my ugly cheap shoes. I can feel his attention burning into the crown of my head.
‘Such terrible news,’ he says, rubbing his hands together. ‘She was such a nice lady.’
I shoot him a look, before I can stop myself.
‘Is a nice lady. So sorry. I meant, she was nice when I met her.’
I look away. My eyes are filling up again, too fast for me to control. His hand, when it lands on my shoulder, pats me awkwardly, heavily, while I dash furiously at my wet face, not wanting to break down in front of him.
He gives my shoulder a final squeeze.
‘I hate to bring this up,’ he says, lowering his voice, ‘but we have to make arrangements for you while your grandmother isn’t able to take care of you.’
‘I’m staying here, with Nanna,’ I say, blinking back my tears. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else.’
‘All right,’ he says, after a couple of seconds. ‘You can stay here. At least for tonight. Come on, now.’ He has hold of my arm, is guiding me forward.
I hesitate, digging my heels in, and I can sense the flicker of displeasure in him as I resist. ‘Come where?’
The smile is back. ‘You need to pack a bag to tide you over for your stay, and then we’ll come right back here, I promise.’
I am suddenly aware of an overwhelming feeling of wrong – of fear – that bites hard enough for me to sense even through my misery. I do not want to go anywhere with him.
‘But we have to tell Miss Costas first,’ I say, my voice trembling. ‘And the nurses.’
‘June already knows,’ he says, looking up and down the corridor again. ‘It will only take a few minutes. You want to be back here when your nanna wakes up, don’t you?’
I am imprisoned by doubt, by indecision. I do not want to go with him, but there is no way I can refuse that won’t seem incredibly rude, that won’t make me look like a crazy person. He hasn’t done anything wrong, after all. And I remember what Nanna always says: ‘Social services – never get on their bad side, pet. Watch what you say. They could have you off me in a heartbeat.’
For all his smiling, he looks to me like someone that would hold a grudge. He has the power to take me away from Nanna and put me in a Home. I do not want to antagonize him.
And after all, he knows Miss Costas is called June. They must have spoken. I’m just being stupid. I don’t want to look stupid in front of Miss Costas, who is my favourite teacher.
I push down my misgivings – his constant checking out of the corridor, the almost-caress at the end when he squeezed my shoulder, the way he stands too close – and nod.
‘That’s a good girl.’
In the front seat of his little red car, as we take the main road to the village, I reach into the pockets of my coat and suddenly realize that I have left my house keys in my school bag. My bag is lying under the chair next to Nanna’s bed at Addenbrooke’s.
‘I’ve not got my keys,’ I say. ‘I left them at the hospital.’
He does not reply or look at me. I tell myself he must not have heard me, though I know in my heart he has.
In my heart, I already know everything.
I don’t remember much more about the car journey.
Thankfully, I remember even less about what came after that.
31
My adventures with hospitals are not over. Perhaps they will never be over. Live in hope, says Martin, and I try to.
Once more I am walking down a long hospital corridor, and I am looking for somebody.
This time, though, I know exactly where I am going.
‘Hey,’ I say, knocking on the wooden door. ‘Is now good?’
‘Oh hi. Yeah sure. Come in.’
Katie Browne is lying on her hospital bed in a pale green nightshirt. She puts down the iPad she was holding. From the tinny sounds that issue from it, I guess that she’s been watching The Hunger Games again.
Early on I lent her my iPad and told her to buy what books she wanted and rent movies on my account. Martin was sceptical, but so far she has always had to be pushed to spend any money on it.
It means, though, that I can see what she reads and watches – what she consumes – and what she consumes is fantasy Amazons, warrior-women skilled in sword and bow and laser pistol, protectors of the weak, champions of justice. Because I have access to the same books and movies on my phone, I’ve started to consume them too.
It’s surprisingly therapeutic, and touching. Through her wounded, unspoken front I see into her dreamworld, and it fills me with hope for her recovery.
And, by extension, hope for my own.
Through her window I can look down on the swarming roads and towers of Addenbrooke’s. She follows my gaze, smiles.