Dr Krull came to visit. He sat at the end of the bed looking unsure, holding a paperweight of a woman standing reaching for snow, then sitting down as the season changed.
“I know you like these,” he said, placing it on the cheap looking set of drawers beside the bed. He cleared his throat unbuttoning his green suede jacket.
“I wasn’t sure what to bring or whether to bring anything at all. It’s difficult in a situation like this.” I liked him all the more for not bringing flowers.
Funny, despite the pain and discomfort I was in, I was conscious of how I looked. No matter the circumstances, women always wanted to look their best in front of an attractive man.
“The hospital called me,” he said. “They found my credit and debit card in your possessions.”
“I’m sorry,” I croaked pathetically. I wanted to say I didn’t know what I was doing but that would have been a lie. Can’t you see I’m being punished enough?
“It’s okay,” he replied. “The important thing is that you’re alright. We’ll have to talk about it at some point though. You’re very lucky to be alive. Do you remember what happened?”
I looked up at the faint shadows on the ceiling crossing white space. “I don’t remember the moments before it happened. I think I was sleepwalking.”
Thoughts of Rangi’s elegant butcher’s hands cutting, slicing, and choking during sex, of the purple sheet slipping down his hips, the exposure of skin, the feeling of coming up for air after being choked and how my arms flailing felt familiar.
Dr Krull brought his chair closer. His hair was ruffled, giving him a more boyish look.
“Try to remember,” he urged. “Don’t you think it’s odd that your mother’s been dead for months but we haven’t talked about her? It’s important you remember.”
I remained silent and dry mouthed, wreckage in an uncomfortable, adjustable bed.
Dr Krull continued to speak in his calm, measured way. Half of him morphed into the debris of my life.
Seeds
Mervyn came to the hospital, cut a weary and forlorn figure at my bedside. His grey, pinstriped suit was rumpled. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His large hands trembled as he held my face, pressed a kiss on my forehead, smelling of alcohol mixed with aftershave.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” he offered attempting to steady his succession of facial expressions: concern, pity and guilt. I looked away; I couldn’t bear the pitiful looks thrown my way.
“How did this happen?” he asked.
“They didn’t tell you?” I croaked, clutching the soft bedding in my sweaty palm. The skin of a day old banana on the dresser was now partially black with spots of new darkness crawling upwards. There was a beauty in the way things decayed, nature taking its course. “They said I sleepwalked right onto the train tracks.” I thought for a while. “Why would I do that? What’s wrong with me?”
“Oh God!” he answered, pacing back and forth. “I could throttle your mother. You’ve forgotten you did that as a child for a bit, right after-”
“Right after what?” I hoisted my body up slowly, sinking into the pillows.
“It’s nothing, it can wait.” His eyes glistened; shoulders sagged in some kind of small relief. For a while, we occupied positions at either end of a silence. Weakened from medication and the bleakness of my future, I lay there wrapped in blackening banana skin trying to hold onto a bomb.
When the nurses came to administer my afternoon meds, I willed myself to disappear under the bed, dragging my body on the floor towards the sound of wheels. Blood seeped through my bandages and into the nearest corners. The patient in the bed next to me had changed. I fell asleep to the feel of my camera in my hands. The lens whirred filling up with water, my hand caught in a flash mimicking fast moonlight. I thought about Mervyn and the anxiety he’d displayed. He was keeping something from me. I knew it. Why did it feel like everybody in my life had something to hide? Why would I have blocked out the memory of sleepwalking as a child when that was connected to losing my arm?
Then there was Anon holding the brass head from the ambulance bed. Where had she been going with it? Questions swirled in my head. The sound of stones infiltrated the lens; running water pulled the camera down. The stones rumbled in the slipstream. I tried to hold the boxy camera steady but couldn’t. It flashed uncontrollably, blindingly, hiding those earlier images of the night in some grainy purgatory.
Days passed. A bright green apple replaced the black banana on my dresser. A small patch of brown, crinkly skin like a pockmark had began to spread on its otherwise pristine surface. I waited for the slow erosion to come. The routine continued. My bed sheets were newly changed: crisp and white. I listened to the daughter of a patient read her To Kill a Mockingbird. Her wrinkly, spotted arm trembled in delight. I was at my wit’s end between the boredom and the pain. I woke up wanting to go back to sleep and went to sleep not wanting to wake up.
By the time Rangi arrived, the small TV set borrowed from another ward had begun to flicker and he looked as if he’d stepped right out of the black and white movie wearing clothes from the wrong era. There was a weight on my lids, a hovering shape I’d turned into. It was dark, past visiting hours. I didn’t ask how he’d slipped in. Instead, I lifted my body up awkwardly, slowly. Still tasting sleep in my mouth. My left arm ached from lying on it for too long. I could hear the hum of the fridge tucked behind the ward reception and stray heartbeats in stethoscopes tapping against glass mouths.
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 nigh
t 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.”
“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.
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