by Jan Carson
The bed rails vibrating against Sonja’s arms left marks and were a comfort to her. It felt as if the room and all its fixed occupants were offering her absolution.
Occasionally, she sang over the machines, or tried to harmonise with them, songs from Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book. She’d learnt these in a clipped English accent, because this was how songs were sung on children’s DVDs, and there was nothing else to watch in the flat. ‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’ and, ‘the bear necessities of life will come to you’; nonsense words in a dark room. The ladies settled when she sang, their lines evening out to form ribbons and almost flat roads. And Dylan slept more soundly beneath his Spiderman blanket. He was all knees and angles when he slept on the ward, like a creature ready to bolt. She was glad she could not see the cut of his dreams.
Sonja did not sleep. She moved between the aisles taking wrist pulses and pressing her temperature gun into the ear of each lady in turn. The gun made a clicking noise upon entry and a thin beep when it was time to withdraw. This felt wrong to her, like shooting a person who is already dead. Sometimes she forgot to sterilise the gun between shots. This was not good enough. Sonja was normally tight on procedures, more so than the day nurses, who did all their checks in the last ten minutes of a shift and forged the patients’ notes with different coloured pens.
‘If they paid me a decent wage, I might be a bit more bothered,’ the day nurse told Sonja. ‘My last job was in an old folks’ home. I made twice as much, with better holidays and all I had to do was shovel porridge into them three times a day.’
This infuriated her. It was not so much the absence of compassion as the laziness which made her wish to pull at this girl’s very straight hair and say, ‘Someday you will make a terrible mother.’ Sonja had always been the sort of person who enjoyed rules and, where there were no rules, would invent her own to keep the hours from falling idle.
A quick squirt of hand sanitiser between patients.
Disposable, rubber gloves for drip changes and emptying catheters.
Dylan, to bed, as soon as the eight o’clock cycle begins.
A chapter of Pride and Prejudice, read aloud, each evening at nine. (Sonja assumed that these were the kind of ladies who appreciated Austen for her manners and her well-planned dinner parties).
With rules and order, the night could feel four to five hours shorter than it actually was. Before the tiredness had a chance to sink its teeth in, it would already be breakfast time. As soon as the day nurse arrived, she could sling Dylan over her shoulder like a damp carpet and slip away from this place. Sonja did not like to stay a second longer than necessary. She used Dylan as an excuse to leave. It was not the child. It was the way the room changed when the day nurse arrived, or Dr Turner. The ceiling felt lower, as if the room was only big enough to bear Dylan and Sonja and the sleeping ladies. The air was too thick to breathe.
‘All good?’ the day nurse would ask.
‘All good,’ Sonja would reply, her coat already buttoned against the Belfast drizzle.
‘I don’t know how you stand it, Sonja. It’d really creep me out being locked up in the dark with these freaks.’
‘I like it,’ she’d reply. ‘You can turn the lights on if it bothers you that much.’
None of the other nurses wanted the night shift. It was strange to be in a room so full of people and yet so empty. At first, the stillness had sat heavily with Sonja. She’d paced the alleyways between the beds, talking to herself reassuringly, as she might’ve done in the presence of a ghost. Later, she’d grown to crave the silence. Living in Belfast made her twitchy. There were noises everywhere: helicopters, sirens, young men swearing at each other sharply in the street. She was always bracing herself. There was constancy here in the dark: the fat ladies slept, the machines mumbled gently, and no one from the clinic ever came unannounced.
There was a line where the clinic ended and Sonja’s room began. Dr Turner crossed it first thing each morning, with a notepad in one hand and, in the other, a coffee mug. He stayed no more than three minutes, and for the entire time, looked uncomfortable in a room without accessories of any kind. Beyond the ward’s doors were pot plants and uniformed nurses, pastel wallpaper, en-suite bathrooms, and the warm, vanilla smell of private healthcare. Each of the fat ladies had checked into this holy kingdom. They had looked upon it and pronounced it entirely suitable for a short visit. ‘No different from a five-star hotel,’ they’d said, and packed their genuine-leather suitcases accordingly.
In the clinic they were not averse to telling lies for their patients’ good. In the clinic it was understood (though never explicitly conveyed to the larger ladies or their husbands) that interior design of such a high calibre would be wasted on the comatose. And so, after sedation, the larger ladies were wheeled into Sonja’s room and locked up like surplus stock or holiday merchandise waiting to come back into season. This was sad and might even have felt wrong, if considered too closely.
The doctors and uniformed nursing staff preferred to avoid the fat room as much as possible. They liked to see themselves as the bookends, supporting either side of a patient’s visit. This thought helped them not to feel like horrendous human beings each time they noticed the mountain of genuine-leather suitcases stacked in the corner of the staff room.
‘How long do the “larger ladies” stay for?’ Sonja had asked Dr Turner, during her second week at the clinic.
‘How long’s a piece of string,’ he’d replied. Sonja understood what he meant and wondered, as she’d often wondered, why the people here could not tell anything straight, always had a softer way of saying something hard.
‘Days, weeks, months, years?’
‘Good God, no, Sonja. We couldn’t have them here for years. All that shaking, their brains would be liquidised. Three months is about all the human body can stand with this sort of treatment. Even then there can be issues.’
‘What sort of issues?’
‘Oh, the usual side effects: back pain, migraines, psychological problems, nothing too severe. One lady told me she was still dreaming of earthquakes a full year after she’d left the clinic.’
All this, and the slight possibility of death, had been explained to the fat ladies during their preliminary appointments with Dr Turner. It was their choice to come to the clinic. They’d signed the paperwork for themselves. ‘I agree to remain under sedation until my target weight of ten (or nine or eight and a half) stone has been reached.’ Generally, they ignored the small print, signed their names and then wrote the date below. However, it was the husbands who drove them to the clinic and picked them up afterwards, in low-flying weekend cars. More often than not it was the husbands who supplied the pens for signing.
Sonja hated these husbands, though she’d never met any of them.
‘What is wrong with the men in this country?’ she’d written in a letter to her mother, who was only six months into her widowhood, and still grieving. ‘They are always wanting their women to be someone else. They are never looking at themselves in the mirror.’
Her mother had written back, a week or so later, with news of the weather and her cousin who was getting married and, three short sentences in block capitals, worth paying attention to. ‘HOW QUICKLY YOU FORGET, SONJA. AREN’T THE MEN IN POLAND JUST THE SAME? FIND YOURSELF A DECENT ONE AND SETTLE DOWN.’
Sonja had known her mother was right, that it was not geography but something more fundamental which made men one way and women another. But she’d ripped the letter into little squares and binned them anyway.
On the evening she’d arrived at the clinic to find herself in custody of her first ‘larger gentleman’, Sonja was confused. She’d phoned reception, asked to be put through to Dr Turner, and got his receptionist instead.
‘I have a man in my room,’ she’d said.
‘You do indeed,’ replied the receptionist. ‘Mr McDowell, target weight thirteen stone. You’ll probably have him for about six weeks, Sonja.’
‘There’s nowhere else to put him.’
‘But Dr Turner said it would only be “larger ladies”. There’s no such thing as “larger gentlemen” in Belfast.’ Even as she said this, Sonja glanced over at the new patient, at the button-up pyjama top straining to meet across his belly and the way his thighs were splayed out on the mattress like ham joints. She realised how ridiculous this must sound to the receptionist.
The machines began to vibrate. It was already eight. The sound of angry bees filled the room as the first cycle of the night lurched towards climax. Mr McDowell began to shudder along with the larger ladies, his jowls jiggling like set custard. Sonja had yet to do any of her routine checks.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I understand that men get fat too. And, I even understand that some of them might actually want to do something about it, but they can’t be treated in the same room as the ladies. They’d be so upset; they’d be mortified if they knew.’
‘They’re never going to know, are they?’
‘You can’t be sure they’re not aware of things while they’re sleeping.’
‘Dr Turner’s pretty sure they’re dead to the world.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘You’re not paid to like things, Sonja,’ snapped the receptionist. ‘Get on with it or start looking for a new job.’ She hung up.
Sonja held the phone against her ear for a moment, trying to regain her composure as she listened to the angry hum of a dead line. After a minute or so she placed the phone back on its cradle. She had wished to say, ‘This has nothing to do with the “larger ladies”. This is all about me. I don’t want a man in my room.’ But this was not the sort of thing she could say to Dr Turner or even his receptionist. Sonja was still struggling to admit it to herself.
She looked up and across the darkened room. Dylan was sitting on the edge of the new patient’s bed, staring at him as if he’d never seen a man before. Sonja wondered for a moment if the child had ever seen a man before – really seen, not just in passing. Of course, men featured in his cartoon DVDs – broad-chested heroes and weaselly villains, rendered in bold primary colours – and there were men they passed every day; some they knew by name, like Phil, the postman, and Trevor, who came to do their windows twice a year. But there were no male staff members at the day care facility Dylan occasionally attended (these days, people were hysterical about men hanging around children), and he didn’t have a father or even a grandfather to learn from. Perhaps, this strange ghost of a man was the closest he’d ever come to the species.
Was this a failure on her part? Would the child grow up odd for lack of role models? Was she being selfish, keeping him all to herself in this lonely room? Sonja didn’t particularly care. She had a hunger for her son that was too sharp to bear sharing with anyone else. She would not know how to say this to another person or explain it without sounding crazy, but sometimes she looked at Dylan sleeping like he was a thing she could actually eat.
‘Look Mum,’ he called softly from the other side of the room, ‘a mermaid man. He’s the biggest one we’ve ever had. Is he going to stay for a while?’
There was a hook in the child’s voice, an echo of the way he sometimes said, ‘Can I go out to play with the big boys?’
Sonja crossed the room in three soft strides, wrapped her arms around her son and felt his bony shoulders fold into her chest. His pyjamas were just out of the wash and smelt of lavender and outdoors air. His little body jittered frantically in time with the bed. This was always funny to him, and he was smiling now, beaming up at her with his big brown eyes, like mirrors of her own.
‘Come down from there, son,’ she whispered. ‘Leave the poor mermaid man to sleep.’
Dylan followed her without question, across the room, to a spare bed where Sonja lay down next to him and held him tightly against her when the ladies cried out. Dylan slept. Sonja did not sleep, because she was not allowed to sleep on the ward and couldn’t have slept even if she’d tried. She lay straight beside him and knew that tomorrow there would be more questions about mermaid men, questions about where they came from and why there were no such creatures in his life. She would have to tell him lies.
They were not safe now, Sonja thought, not even here in this dark, dark room. The machines clicked on and another cycle began. The noise was like an itch you could not scratch yourself loose of. She would carry it with her out of this place and into the next. It was nothing she did not deserve.
2.
People in Glasshouses
When we were younger and had not yet moved to the city, my parents ran a garden centre. They sold plants for outside and plants for inside, compost and, during the months of November and December, Christmas items: mostly outdoor decorations and trees. Throughout the rest of the year they stored their Christmas stock in the coal shed with the other seasonal products: Easter bunnies and reusable harvest wreaths, picnic tables (both portable and permanent), and – stacked in the corner like demure dancing ladies – dozens of pastel-coloured parasols, still in their plastic.
Rarely did anyone buy a parasol. This was the 1980s and patio furniture was considered too exotic for a Northern Irish garden, a concept better suited to the Continent, like sangria or shorts or UHT milk. The parasols grew older with each year unsold. Their plastic wrappers clouded over and, for aesthetics’ sake, were removed. Still they did not sell, even though, for a brief period, there was a craze for outdoor benches and the parasol situation looked a little more promising. After a few years of being displayed in the watery sun, they paled a uniform cream and could not be sold. My father threw them in the skip with the skeleton spines of that year’s Christmas trees. It rained on the skip and the parasols were useless as umbrellas. They could not even keep the rain off themselves.
‘You live and learn,’ my father said. This was what he usually said when he’d made a mistake that could not be fixed or covered up.
The following year he tried his luck with paddling pools.
It was a scorcher of a summer. My father could not have known this, but he claimed a tip-off from a man who ran an ice-cream van out of Portballintrae. By the start of the Twelfth Fortnight, all but one of the paddling pools had been sold. The remaining pool had a dent and would not sell, even when reduced. After some significant pressure, my brother and I were permitted to keep the broken paddling pool.
‘Because we’re not getting away anywhere this summer,’ my father said, which was strange to us, for we’d never been anywhere further than Newcastle, and even then, returned to the garden centre in time for dinner.
My brother and I dragged our paddling pool into the front garden, where the hedge afforded a small amount of privacy. Each morning we skimmed the surface for leaves and leaf-dwelling insects. It was worth the effort with a shrimping net for we were out from under our parents’ gaze and also the curious glances of customers, who could not tell where the garden centre ended and our private world began.
We soon discovered a tiny tear in the pool’s liner, no bigger than a buttonhole, where the metal side had pinched into the plastic. Sometimes we took turns pressing a thumb over the hole to stem the bleed of lukewarm water. This was a game to us, like splashing with saucepans or stirring up whirlpools with our arms. Most days we did not think about the way there was less water in the pool than there had been earlier in the day. We were six and four that summer and not yet aware that everything diminishes with time. In the morning we topped the water up with buckets.
We spent the entire summer outdoors, crawling in six-foot circles around the paddling pool’s sides. Our parents did not think to apply sun cream. This was not just neglect on their part. No parent in Northern Ireland would think to apply sun cream until 1988 and, even then, only at the beach. It was too shallow in the pool for proper swimming or ever being underwater. So, we elbowed our way around the edges like creatures emerging from some primordial swamp. We had not yet grown legs. O
ur necks and shoulders, rising above the waterline, turned the colour of uncooked sausage, then burnt and peeled away in flakes like boiled potato skin, to reveal peach-gold flesh and freckles beneath. Our hair was the white-blond hair of children from American television programmes. At night, in bed, I held my face in the crook of my elbow. The smell of sun-blessed skin could almost be tasted and was a comfort to me. I could not explain why.
The next summer it rained and we couldn’t find three dry days in a row to get the paddling pool out. My father had ordered six dozen more from the suppliers and did not shift a single unit. It had not been a good year for the strawberries either.
‘We’re leaking money,’ my mother would announce each Saturday evening after she’d finished the books. Like the paddling pool, I’d think, and imagine a tiny tear in the fabric of the garden centre, in the polytunnel, most likely, and my mother stopping it with a dishcloth.
The A-Team was always on while my mother did the books. We’d be half-watching the television, my brother and I, half-listening to our parents argue as we ate our carry-out off our knees. When the argument had swollen to a point where it could not be contained within the walls of the kitchen dinette, my parents carried it outside to the greenhouse, where they could yell at each other without being heard.
My parents were fortunate to have a greenhouse in which to conduct their arguments. Other parents, I would learn from friends and early lovers, were forced to scream at each other on the hall landing with the door closed or, when concern for the children became an issue, take their arguments outside to the garden, where it was almost always raining.
We liked to watch our parents fight. They were more believable than The A-Team and did not pause for advertising breaks. We soon learnt to turn the kitchen lights out so they could not see our silhouettes watching through the sink window. They never touched each other but I could tell from the way they leant in to the anger, and drew back, which words were the very worst ones.