They shut my curtain around themselves.
‘So, how are you today?’ Ms Jo Moran asked.
She repeated the question and Ted Baker lifted my headphones out of my ears and clean off my head, without permission. He began rolling them in his hand. All business. Fuck. I had him wrong. ‘You gave us a right fright yesterday, but great you’ve no tube . . . that’s great. It was your heart more so, and not so much the lungs . . . but still we’re concerned . . .’ Ms Jo Moran said, with lispy emphasis on ‘still’.
Speak Up. For Fuck’s Sake. Speak Up. But it was no use, nothing was happening. I apologised. Again. No one heard me.
Some head consultant arrived, late to the party, partially shaven, leaving behind an odd clit-tickler under his chin. Looking for bloods and age and occupation again, over and over again this diagnosis of my socio-economic situation, my diet habits, my childhood trauma, and anything else that could make that picture society needs to see. He directed none of his questions to me. How society can help me succeed, or not succeed. He’d met me before. But forgotten. And before. Forgotten that time too.
‘You’re reading, I see, do you like reading?’ First look at my eyes. ‘I like reading. But never have time. You know,’ he said, tapping his stethoscope. Pretend-pleasant, to feel himself more connected, and more at ease, but he wasn’t letting me in on the secret destruction of my own body. He broke eye contact. Those were secrets they kept to themselves. If he only knew I was just beginning to trust books again, and he wouldn’t fuck this up on me. I reimagined the canals, the waterways, and the salmon – their journey. He leaned his shoulder towards the canary-yellow neck of Ms Jo Moran’s cashmere turtleneck and looked at my belly, then he noted a long list of instructions, his chin moving down and up. ‘We’re going to order another scan, how’s the pressure in the abdomen, do you mind if I?’ as he laid his cold hand on my gown. I could feel my knickerless bottom on the bed. Please don’t roll me over. ‘Hmmm. And maybe another abdo scan, if that’s all right with you?’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be too long, though that said, we can’t be sure there won’t be a big RTA on the M6 and then you’re not a priority, are you?’
Oh, Shane, I thought.
‘We’re so very sorry for disturbing your breakfast . . .’ he added, noticing my shock. ‘What is it you’re having?’ he went on, snorting, poking a pen around on the table, miming the stirring of the porridge pot like Father Bear. ‘Porridge, oh, can’t beat the porridge, can you, Ms Moran?’
guffaw guffaw guffaw guffaw guffaw guffaw guffaw
I had no doubt at all that Ms Jo Moran had made him the odd bowl of porridge. Off he winked himself away at her yellow-canary top, very pleased with his morning’s monologue and upbeat spirits, completely oblivious to his M6 faux pas. But I imagine he lived his life in a certain contented oblivion.
‘You doing the Connemara marathon?’ he asked Moran, as he took leave. ‘Maybe we could pair up?’ She nodded. They would jog together.
Someone, for the love of good God, bring me a grumpy fucker tomorrow.
Oh, Christ. Waterways & Waves & Father & Alex & seahorses. Yesterday.
And Oncology came.
And Respiratory arrived.
And a nice woman from Palliative Care popped her head in. And would pop her head in again.
And then they all went off and sat around a big table.
At a Round Table Meeting. (Via email.)
And decided what was best (for me/without me).
But no one will ever tell me. What. To. Do. Ever.
I didn’t even get an email or seat at the table.
Moran reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and oh, how she swooned at Paul Newman and how he, the most perfectly fuckable man in the world, hobbled around on one crutch guzzling a load of bourbon, and how even the most fuckable man in the world had an ailment, and that allowed him to be a dick. For some reason Newman was all I could think of. And fuck, how I wanted a shit-ton of golden bourbon just then.
‘Jane, wake up for us, good lady, come on now, come now, the consultant is here, Jane. Have you any family with you?’
Jane groaned.
‘NO. No, oh, really, sorry now, good lady, sit up for us now. Will they be in to see you today, the family? You do have a family, don’t you? Are they coming in TODAY?’
Someone shuffled awkwardly through Jane’s large pile of notes and they fell whoosh whoosh down on the floor.
‘No.’
‘OK, well then, now good lady, we’ve looked at the scans and there’s a lot of water around your heart. And what will we all do about it?’
‘Swim in it?’ Jane said.
‘Hmm. Well, Jane, we’ll make you as comfortable as we can and . . . THEN . . . we’ll move you out to another ward later. Maybe even later today.’
‘Where?’
‘Today to ANOTHER WARD, Jane,’ he shouted.
‘I don’t want to go, no, no, I’ll stay put here, I’m more than happy here at home, I’m fine and I have my little dog here, and young Patrick beside me.’ Jane waved over at Hegs’s bed. Two student doctors in matching headscarves frantically took to scribbling on their Harry Potter notebooks. Both Hufflepuffs. Predictable. Pet dog – scribble. Presentation. Onset. Symptoms. Scribble. Scribble. ‘Now, Tom will probably only have a sandwich. Just the one. I’ll just fix him one. Of course I’ll put the dinner down this evening, so maybe I don’t need to ready him any food at all, oh, Lord, but I never got to the butcher, ah, sure, time enough, sure besides he never likes to eat too much in the afternoon. He has one of those things. What do you call them? Oh, you must know, you must know what you call them, those things that’d pierce through you when you eat. Especially dry food.’
The consultant looked around, agitated, and bobbing his head, he counted us, calculating the time it would take as he probably had an eighteen-hole to tackle at three or a bike to cycle somewhere in tight Lycra with his arse lubed for the saddle; he certainly didn’t need to know anything about Tom’s tea. He sent a woman back, the lovely woman who spoke Portuguese to the air as she dusted, to settle Jane.
Michal wheeled over a commode to my cell. ‘Throw on hoody, miss, you’re going for scan. It’s all I have today, I am afraid,’ he said, apologetically. ‘Wait. I lift you. Here. Hold tight on to Michal. Hegs broke one-legged wheelchair yesterday like, I’m sorry but so what am I to do?’
A fucking toilet.
I couldn’t answer. But an answer wasn’t required.
I hoped he’d take me to the pub across the road. Bet he took Hegs to the pub across the road. The Blind Man’s Inn. Indeed. Some of the porters did that with the old men who had cancer. For a pint. I tried to get up and put my feet under me, but my knees buckled and I fell backwards onto the bed. Michal came behind me and lifted me up by the hips. ‘’KKKK, good, OK, try move your bottom back, and back, good.’ Michal grabbed another white theatre gown and he lifted it round me like a shirt, doubling me like the young lad in the off-licence who double-bags my wine. Margaret Rose rushed over with knickers, pulling them up along my feet and dragging them, until she settled them between my legs.
‘Ah, she’s vary weak,’ Margaret Rose said to Michal. He nodded as he tied the top gown at the front. ‘Are ya sure yar doing the right thing taking her off like this? I think she’d be better back in bed. Scans, they’re all on about scans. How’d they feel if they were stuck in a scan as sick as her? Poor Sinéad. ’Tisn’t right.’ She pulled the tag off a new pair of bed socks, awkwardly with her front teeth, and unrolled them on my feet. ‘Yar feet are vary puffy.’ She pressed her fingers into them.
I got up to walk and Margaret Rose and Michal grabbed hold of me. ‘Nooooooo,’ Michal shouted. ‘No, you not allowed, I no allowed, please you have to stop making my job so harder. I allowed to make no decisions. You’re too weak, SinAID,’ he said to Margaret Rose and me in turn.
‘Get her hoody so or she’ll freeze ta death . . .’ Margaret Rose, concerned, noticing my teeth chatte
ring, rubbed the palm of her warm hand on my face. They both tried to lift me on to the commode, but I kicked at it, there was no way I was sitting on it in public. I was not somebody who took a taxi on a loo. ‘Do that, go on, and see how far you get with yar kicking, you won’na get to the door of this ward, Sinéad, please. Stop,’ Margaret Rose pleaded.
‘Yes,’ Michal agreed with her, ‘this is not good . . .’
The Ward spun. I wanted to vomit. My stomach was dizzy, gawking and rasping. Uhuhuhuh Margaret Rose held out a kidney dish and Michal got paper towels and cleaned up to my barrage of silent sorrys and helped me into pyjamas bottoms as Margaret Rose tied back my hair and pulled the hoody up on my arms.
‘Don’t worry. I leave it far outside the unit and carry you a little.’ Michal said, kindly reassuring me. I made a grab for my red lipstick on my nightstand and Margaret Rose picked it up, twisted it out from its tube, and then she dotted it along my bottom lip. ‘Pout, good,’ she said, but my lips were so dry it soaked right in. She pouted too as she put another few layers of dots on both lips, like a Seurat painting, and then a little on her fingers and rubbed it into my cheeks, like one of my kids’ paintings. Michal and Margaret Rose stood back and clasped hands like I was a daughter they had dressed up for a debutante ball.
*
Inpatients and outpatients share Hospital waiting rooms, so that arriving in an outpatient waiting room after being a Hospital inmate is a shock to the system The suddenness is disconcerting, coming up against outsiders with their handbags and raincoats and umbrellas and proper make-up, real people.
‘I parks chair,’ Michal said. ‘You catch tight my arm, don’t worry, I hold you. We leave the chair on the corridor, hiding. No one will steal, you know?’ he said and he winked at me.
We both laughed. A little sound escaped. Maybe I just needed to get out. Alex hadn’t texted. I understood his hurt, it was overwhelming, all of it, what was happening, what I’d gone and done with my secrecy, and I wasn’t sure it would ever subside. Betrayal. But for practical reasons, I could do with a dig-out or an interpreter. Michal repeated the instructions twice and in polite parenthesis told me not to feck it up. I was not to let go of him. I was not to say I needed a chair. Otherwise we’d be all day waiting for a taxi back to the Ward.
There were strong apricot vibes on the walls in the MRI area, a crate of fruit on the roadside in France without the Monet sun. A little child with skinny hips and a large head was unsettling counters on a toy. Blue. Yellow. Red. Green. It was wooden and stark, with remnants of flecks of pizza peppers matted into the beads. His parents sat directly opposite each other, as though embarking on Battleships or Connect Four, feet shuffling, awkwardly coated in heavy anoraks. There was an angry cannula in the child’s thin arm and his skin was rejecting it, reddening. He tugged at it, and his mother jumped up and moved to him like a penguin trying to make it out to sea.
Michal and I approached the desk and the receptionist asked Michal questions.
‘Cannula? Piercings? Tattoos? Implants? She pregnant? Sure? How so sure?’ asked the receptionist. Michal watched me as I shook my head back and over. No. Yes. No. Yes. Point to teeth. No. She kept bobbing her own head up and down to catch Michal’s gesture. ‘Lost your voice, love?’ We both nodded. Yes. Yes.
‘OK, well, we need you to do a test first.’ She handed Michal a small clear bottle for urine. She pointed to the loo. We both stared at her. ‘Pregnancy . . .’ she said, looking up, exasperated by my translator and me, and then caressed her wedding ring, twisting it in a clockwise direction. Perhaps she still made wishes with it, fresh wedding rings, troublesome. Then she stopped pulling the ring and recoiled behind a large old printer, which banged, managing to put ink on a page.
Michal sat down, picked up a magazine and stuck his head into it. VIP magazine. Some rotund celebrity chef was trapped on the front with a hipster beard.
‘How I Learned to Forgive my Tubby Hubby for his Flings and Make him Accept me for Who I Am.’
‘Sinéad Hynes?’
The queue was large and grew unsettled and noisy. Still no sounds arrived. I tried to get up.
‘It’s OK,’ Michal said, ‘. . . I come with you.’
I was so grateful.
‘This way, please.’
Inside the scanning room, everything was blue and it made a change from the orange hues. They instructed me on length of time and consent and so on, asked the same questions as Michal answered the same answers. I wasn’t pregnant. No one really knew how to react to this. I would have said, I told you so, if I had a voice. I lay back on a long tray as one of the radiographers placed my head in a cage, bright topaz Nikes on her feet, loose yellow laces. ‘Here, press this if you need us,’ she said, placing a cold plastic buzzer into the palm of my hand. ‘Thumb into the red button if you need assistance, OK?’ The plate chucked backwards, stalled, and tuttedtuttedtutted backwards again.
‘You OK, Sinéad? Remember press buzzer, once for OK, twice for not OK? Test it now.’
I pressed my thumb in. It was a leap of faith to imagine the button was red.
‘OK, great. It’ll be noisy. Try to concentrate on your favourite thing. Quite noisy. OK?’
Fuck. My favourite thing. Shit.
The kids. Anxiety.
Wine. No. Pukey.
Husband. Guilt. Shit. Shit. Visualise something. Not water.
Michal reassured me while Norah Jones sang out.
I settled on the Whooper swan, Molly’s lips, Newman’s eyes and finally the whirr of Margaret Rose’s hairdryer.
Michal Piwaski called out, ‘You OK K K K K K K K K K K K K. SinAID, you KKKKKKKKKK. Press once.’
I pressed once.
*
‘She’s not supposed to be out of that chair, Michal, ya naw this, darl . . . Jeez, what are you trying to do?’ Molly said, sitting on Shane’s empty bed mattress with her legs crossed, fixing her bandana back in place on her forehead. Michal helped me back to bed and then sat beside Molly, gently moving a few stray blonde hairs back under the bandana, flicking his finger gently on her jawline, teasing her.
Margaret Rose lay on top of her bedcovers, smiling as she read. ‘Nice yar back.’ One eye was on the magazine, the other flickering about me, going from my eyes to my abdomen and back up again. The kitchen staff had left a tray in my absence, white doily, glass of milk, jam patties, butter patties, plastic small containers for drugs, and my blood-thinning shot, urine test pots.
‘Ya able far that?’ she asked, nodding at the tray. ‘How’d it go? You all right, loveen? Ya look a bit shook, if ya don’na mind me saying?’
I nodded.
‘Ya sure, pet? Ya OK?’
I nodded again.
‘They’re very noisy those scanners. Tell ya the truth, I don’na like them, they’re frightening.’
She came over and tucked me into bed, and rubbed my hair back off my face.
‘Look, love, there’s lots to think about. Ya have upset yar Alex, though, badly. Ya nade ta fix it. Did they let you see anything on their faces? Good or bad . . . in the scanner?’ Margaret Rose asked. ‘Did they look bothered?’
I shook my head.
They didn’t look at me at all.
Norah Jones had sung out, and the local hourly news had come on Galway Bay FM, with its talk of death and new roads and a new Ireland I had forgotten all about, as I lay there, encased and listening to the news of others and how they had died. Road accidents, war, early spring swimming.
Margaret Rose put my phone into my hand and climbed back into her bed.
‘Send him a text. It’ll get him outta yar head and ya can rest.’
She moved back to her own ringing Nokia, looking
for my approval to take the call. I nodded. Any distraction.
The dinner arrived. It was always arriving.
No, I didn’t want any ice cream or fruit or fruit yogurt or fruit ice cream as I had missed the lamb stew.
No, no, I didn’t want prunes.
<
br /> I shook my head.
No, I didn’t want another glass of warm milk.
No, I didn’t want any jelly.
Yes, I do feel awful that these are at worst my own first-world problems.
Yes, I am a cunt.
Yes, I am more than aware that we are all terminal cases.
Yes, I do feel awful and no, sometimes I don’t have the correct words.
Yes, when I find the correct words, you’ll all be the first to know. If I can ever speak again.
Thank you very much.
I have lost my voice and I don’t think I ever want to find it again. But what I really wanted to say just then, was that being dead doesn’t scare me, in fact I give it very little thought. Dying does. Those few moments. They terrify me.
The in-between.
Fuck.
Margaret Rose looked refreshed after her phone chat and tucked into a cold lamb stew, finishing it off with prunes and ice cream and then asked for some custard, for she said that anything cooked for you is better than anything you have to cook for yourself. A few bowls later and both lips were now dancing in synchronicity. She smiled over at me as she turned up her radio and began to sing along to Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’.
As You Were Page 15