In the Light of What We See

by Sarah Painter

  ‘I’ll come back later.’ Mark was out of the chair and kissing me goodbye.

  ‘You don’t have to run off,’ the nurse said, but he’d already picked up his jacket and was halfway to the door.

  The nurse wound the pressure cuff around the upper part of the arm he’d just released. It was an automatic machine and she left as soon as it had begun. I hated that machine. I didn’t trust it to stop inflating, thought it might go on and on until my arm was compressed to the diameter of a drinking straw.

  I was grateful for the distraction, though. I was annoyed with myself for being irritated with Mark. He was the only person I knew in the world. I needed him. The thought made my stomach lurch. A memory leaped up from my subconscious; my aunt Pat shaking her head, saying, ‘You’d rather fall flat on your face than accept a hand to hold you up.’ Pat. Long, long grey hair, always up in a gigantic bun. Firm fringe, frowning eyes. Married to Uncle Dylan. Waxed jacket, crinkly eyes, long walks. So I couldn’t remember the last year or more, but I’d remembered Pat and Dylan. That was something.

  I thanked God I hadn’t listed them as my emergency contacts on any forms and, as far as I could remember, hadn’t told Mark about them. The last thing I wanted was for them to worry. No, that wasn’t true. That would be the altruistic thought. The truth was this: I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t want them to see me lying in this stupid bed, with my head caved in and my memory fucked up, and for Pat to purse her lips and say ‘I told you so’ without even having to open her mouth. I couldn’t picture Dylan in a place like this, not even to visit. He belonged on the Gower coastal path, above rocky coves and beneath a blue sky, dotted with razorbills. No, I was going to deal with this on my own. I’d tell them later, once I was well again.

  GRACE

  Grace waited outside the closed door of Matron’s office, trembling all over and with a sick, faint feeling. She ran her thumb over the shape of her bluebird pin hidden in the pocket of her dress, trying to draw comfort from its familiar shape. The sharp points of its wings, the smoothness of the enamel.

  All the juniors dreaded being sent here. They swapped stories of standing on the rag rug in front of Matron’s desk and of being struck mute, paralysed by the ice in her voice and the coldness of her words. Even the indomitable Evie had been a little red around the eyes after she’d been hauled up for coming into the home late.

  It wasn’t that Matron shouted. After all, they were used to shouting; the ward sisters issued every order at a high rate of decibels. It was the gimlet stare. And the knowledge that with one movement of her fountain pen, Matron could place a black mark on their hospital record. A stain that would stay for ever. A stain that would affect their chances of securing a position after their training or, perhaps, stop them from graduating altogether. If there was one thing that was worse than the thought of nursing for the rest of their born days, it was the thought that they wouldn’t get to wear the uniform of staff nurses or to bellow at terrified juniors. In short, to have scrubbed all of those blasted bedpans for nothing.

  There was a noise from inside the office which might have been a ‘come in’ but Grace was glad she didn’t enter when, a moment later, the door opened of its own accord and the director of the hospital swept out. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction.

  The door was still open and she caught a terrifying glimpse of Matron, behind her desk. A giant insect in a starched cap. ‘Nurse Kemp.’

  Grace stepped into the room, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. She could feel the sweat prickling all over her skin and, in one horrible moment, thought she might’ve forgotten how to breathe.

  ‘I’ve had a report from Sister Bennett.’

  Grace looked in the direction of the voice, but terror rendered Matron invisible to her. It was as if she’d been snipped out of reality with a pair of scissors. Grace curled her hands, digging her fingernails into her palms in an attempt to regain some focus.

  ‘It seems,’ Matron continued, ‘that you’ve been behaving inappropriately with one of the private patients.’

  Grace looked up. The shock of the accusation and its complete unfairness made her speak up. ‘No, Matron. That’s not—’

  ‘Are you questioning Sister’s honesty?’ Matron’s thin voice stretched until it almost disappeared.

  ‘No, Matron,’ Grace said, after a beat. ‘But—’

  ‘You have been witnessed conversing with Captain Burrows in a way which does not befit your position in this hospital. I warned you before you came here, Nurse Kemp, I will not have any silliness in my hospital.’

  Grace felt dread descend. This was it. She was going to be sent home. The other girls might fear a black mark on their hospital record, but Grace feared the end of it. If she was sent home in disgrace she may as well do away with herself. Evie had told her about a girl who couldn’t hack the training. She’d drunk a bottle of bleach and the morning nurse found her stiff as a board with dried vomit all over her bed. With that realisation, a kind of clarity came back to Grace. However wretched she felt she did not want that. She straightened her spine. ‘I’m sorry, Matron, it won’t happen again.’

  ‘See that it doesn’t,’ Matron said.

  Miraculously, that seemed to be the end of it.

  Back outside in the deserted hallway, Matron’s office door carefully and quietly closed behind her, Grace took a deep, shuddering breath. She felt as if she’d stepped away from a cliff edge.

  It wasn’t a surprise to her the next morning when she checked the rota sheet and discovered that she’d been moved to another ward. The unfairness of it burned, but a small part of her was relieved. She hadn’t done anything inappropriate with Captain Burrows but she had liked him. Her behaviour might have been strictly professional, but her thoughts hadn’t been so scrupulous. She thought his face was handsome and his manners pleasing. He had an intelligent light in his eyes which ignited feelings in her, and that was not something she sought or welcomed. She was making a life for herself at the hospital. An ordered life of hard work and self-sacrifice. She didn’t want reminders that she hadn’t always been Nurse Kemp. She didn’t want to give her traitorous heart the slightest reason to beat faster.

  That night, as she and Evie got undressed, rubbing their aching feet, Evie surprised her by saying, ‘I heard you were on the rug. ’

  ‘I had to see Matron.’ Grace climbed into bed, marvelling at how wonderful the thin mattress felt after a day on her feet.

  Evie was looking at her with an assessing look. ‘Not as dull as I first thought. Good show.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Grace said, rolling over to face the wall. ‘I shan’t be doing that again.’

  MINA

  Once I was awake enough to notice details, I became slightly obsessed with the peculiarities of my ward. The windows were set high up the walls so that the inmates could only glimpse the lower part of them, seeing a tantalising slice of trees and sky through the glass. It was in the Edwardian part of the hospital and, despite the fresh paint and modern equipment, there was something undeniably shabby about it. I had spent hours mining for memories of my life and could picture my shiny modern office in the therapeutic radiology department; it felt unreal that the two places could belong in the same building.

  The ward flooring was the same industrial-grade linoleum that ran through the rest of the hospital, but it was a speckled grey-pink with a faded stripe of black that ran around the middle of the room, past the end of the beds. I couldn’t stop looking at that pattern and imagining it as a kind of track, as if in the old days the nurses had run on wheels that needed a special surface. I liked to imagine them gliding along that strip, never deviating, calling to the patients six feet away in their beds: ‘Now, Mr Jones, just sit up yourself there, you know I can’t help you’; ‘Mrs Smith, if I throw this bedpan, be sure and catch it’.

  There was a rhythm to the days that I found comforting. Every detail – the sucking sound of the door to the corrido
r or the clatter of trays on the food trolley, even being woken up because Queenie in the bed opposite needed her blood pressure taken at regular intervals – created a soothing backdrop. It was half past four when the trolley came round with our evening meal. I’d asked why so early and the care assistant explained that she wouldn’t get round all the wards before half five if she didn’t start then.

  The smell emanating from the tower of covered trays was not promising. I sat up and tried to feel hungry. While I was working on that, I tried to feel properly grateful for being alive and for being able to eat in the usual way and not through a tube fixed in my stomach like the woman in the bed by the window. There was a blanket rucked up at the bottom of the bed but I didn’t have the strength to straighten it. It was printed with the words Royal Sussex Trust but, because of the way it was lying, the letters ‘sex’ were visible uppermost and alone. Someone really should’ve thought of that before they ordered the blankets.

  ‘Here you go, love.’ A tray appeared on my table. It was still swung out to one side and I knew I couldn’t move it myself. The woman had already moved on, her wide back to me. I addressed the swathe of dark blue polyester. ‘Excuse me? Could you just—’

  She swivelled the table around on its castors with a quick movement, not even bothering to turn around. As a result the table ended up halfway down the bed. I managed to grab the edge and inch it back. Just as I was contemplating lifting the metal cover and releasing the dubious odour of my meal, a movement caught my eye.

  It was a tiny brown-feathered bird, sitting calmly on the rumpled blanket at the bottom of the bed. It regarded me, head on one side. I blinked, expecting it to disappear, part of me hoping that it wouldn’t. It felt utterly familiar and I wasn’t alarmed in the slightest. That in itself should have been cause for concern, but I couldn’t make myself feel anything except relief. The small bird, sitting so still, was a reminder that I was still me. It felt like the most normal thing I had experienced since waking up in hospital. The bird hopped to the edge of the bed and then flew to the curtain track that ran above my bed. It flew to the door and then back to the rail. The door, the rail. Back and forth. And I remembered something else about my birds: they appeared in order to tell me something.

  I pushed the tray table away. I wanted to say ‘I can’t follow you’, but I remembered, just in time, that I was effectively in public. The bird kept going. The orderly finished clashing food trays and pushed her trolley out of sight, into the next ward. I realised that I was sitting forward, my legs bent and ready for action. I felt a rush of adrenaline. I pushed the sheet down and dragged my legs over the side. The bird flew down, hovered for a moment in front of my face and then flew to the door again. I ignored the pain in my head, the sickness in my stomach, and edged my backside off the bed, my feet planted on the floor. I reached down for the catheter bag that was hanging on the side of the bed and hooked it on to the stand the nurses used when they helped me walk to the shower room. I was sweating by now, nausea rolling in waves through my body. I shuffled a few steps, making it past the end of my bed and halfway to the door. My head throbbed and the edges of my vision grew dark, like my eyes were closing up. I felt my knees sag and the horrible sensation of the catheter tube tugging at my insides as I slumped down.

  An arm gripped under my elbow and hoisted me back up. ‘What are you doing? Come on. Back to bed.’

  I turned obediently, desperate to be lying down again, for the pain in my head to go, for everything to stop hurting. As I turned I saw the bird. It wasn’t on the door, enticing me to the corridor and freedom, it was on the nurses’ desk. The one I couldn’t see from my bed. It fluttered from the surface of the desk on to the telephone.

  As soon as I saw it I remembered something. Geraint had called me. He’d left a message on my mobile. I didn’t know when the memory came from, but it was clear and I was certain it was real. I could feel the phone held to my face, pressing into my cheek as I listened to the message. At once I could hear his voice, the breathless panic, the little catch before he said my name. Like he’d been running or was trying not to cry. I examined the memory for clues but there was nothing else: I had no idea whether it had happened the day before my life became a long-running episode of ER, or whether it was months old.

  The nurse propelling me back to bed was talking. I realised there was an expectant pause but since I had no idea what had come before it, I didn’t say anything. Geraint. How could I have forgotten my twin brother? What else had been shaken loose in the accident? I pictured Ger’s face. His long limbs and skinny torso. Sitting in his bedroom and listening to music, shouting at me to shut his door and leave him alone. That was a long time ago, when he was a teenager. When we lived at home together. I dug my fingernails into my palm. I had to stay in the here and now. I wanted to shake my stupid head and make it cooperate. I couldn’t be woolly and useless. I had to help Geraint. He needed me.

  ‘I have to use the phone,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ll bring it to you. You don’t need to get out of bed for that.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I was acutely aware of how vulnerable I was, how much I relied on these people to help me. What if I’d annoyed this nurse so much she didn’t bring me the telephone? Refused me privileges. It was possible I was mixing hospital up with prison, but the black edges of panic were advancing, condensing my vision into a single bullet hole of light. ‘Sorry,’ I said, as meekly as I could manage. It sounded exceptionally convincing even to my own ears, which was one of the advantages of being so banged up. To my knowledge, I’d never pulled off meek before.

  ‘No harm done,’ the nurse said. She had greasy brown hair pulled back into a tight, shiny ponytail, and enlarged pores spread out from the creases either side of her hooked nose. Her large features were sort of crammed on to her face, jostling for space, but when she helped me back into bed and immediately fetched the phone, and – praise be – left it within reach, she took on a beautiful glow.

  I dialled the number, miraculously available in the front of my mind. Just as if it had been waiting for me there, waiting for me to remember that I had a brother and that he was in trouble. I listened to the ringing, but no matter how hard I willed Ger to pick up the phone, it remained unanswered. I imagined the click, the sound of his voice saying ‘Yes?’ The way it would lift at the end of the word. I imagined each detail so perfectly that I could almost believe I’d heard it happen. Except for the ringing that began to sound like it was taunting me.

  I had just replaced the receiver when Mark appeared. No flowers this time. ‘You look better.’ He kissed me quickly, sat in the armchair next to the bed. He was freshly shaved and I could see a tiny nick on his throat. I imagined him dabbing at the spot of blood with a bit of tissue or his flannel, the sting of it when he doused his skin with aftershave. That line of thought made me think of something . . . Something I couldn’t quite get hold of and that annoyed me, so I pushed the jumble to one side and focused on Mark. He was frowning at the telephone table.

  His expression was intense and it disturbed me. Actually, it frightened me, but that was silly, an overreaction. I tried to make conversation, to distract myself from my sudden panic and to derail whatever Mark was thinking that made him look so severe. ‘I can’t believe they still make these.’

  ‘What?’ Mark’s frown deepened. It made him look ten years older. ‘Did someone call you?’

  ‘No. Payphones. Look.’ I lifted the receiver again. ‘See how clunky it is. I’d forgotten how heavy these things are.’ I weighed the receiver in my hand, feeling the unfamiliar curves, so different from my mobile. My touchscreen mobile. With its leather case that flipped open like a book. It was a memory, clear and crisp. ‘Where’s my phone?’

  Mark sat forward in his chair. ‘You don’t have one.’

  ‘I don’t have a mobile phone? Everyone has a mobile phone.’ I gestured down the ward. ‘Even Queenie has one and she’s homeless.’ And I remembered listening to a message from m
y twin brother on my mobile. I felt utter certainty that Mark was lying to me and my stomach dropped.

  He took my hand, stroking the palm with his thumb in a way that made me want to snatch it away. ‘You said they were unnecessary.’

  ‘No.’ I thought about shaking my head, to emphasise the point. I could picture Mark’s face. Not now, but in the past. I had a sudden, blindingly clear memory of him. ‘You said that. You said it was a waste and a sign of disposable consumer culture. We had a fight about it.’

  Mark let go of my hand. ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘It definitely happened.’

  ‘Don’t upset yourself. Things are going to be muddled for a while. Remember what the doctor said.’

  ‘I’m not confused.’ I paused to consider. ‘Not about this anyway. I had a phone. It had a swipey screen.’ I was sure I was right; I’d liked that phone. I could almost feel it in my hand.

  ‘Parveen has one,’ Mark said. ‘You said it was annoying.’

  At once, I wasn’t so certain. I had said swipey screens were annoying. Maybe I was thinking of someone else’s phone. Maybe I’d played with Parveen’s phone and had got mixed up.

  ‘Who were you trying to call anyway?’

  I lay back and closed my eyes, wincing slightly as if my head was hurting me, hoping to buy a few seconds to think. I didn’t know why, but my instinct was to lie.

  ‘Was it your aunt?’

  I opened my eyes in surprise.

  ‘Pat? If you give me her number, I can call her. Let her know what’s happened.’

  ‘No.’ I struggled to sit forward.

  ‘It’s no problem. I can look in your address book, if you like. If you can’t remember. I know where you keep it.’

  ‘No,’ I said again, as firmly as I could. ‘Don’t.’

  Mark looked satisfied. ‘Whatever you think best.’

  ‘I don’t want to worry them. I’m fine.’

  He held his hands up. ‘I said okay.’