While I Was Sleeping

by Dani Atkins

  ‘I’m glad you finally agree that’s what you’re doing,’ I had said with a smile.

  The rehabilitation team had been amazing. They had painstakingly re-taught me all the things my body had forgotten. Even eating and drinking had to be reintroduced with infinite caution, but finally, when my body was able to tolerate it, I began to regain, if not my curves, then at least some flesh on my bones.

  As the weeks slipped from summer to autumn, and then on to winter, I began to reach a level of acceptance that initially I had never imagined I would find. I was finally able to think of Ryan and the life I had so nearly lived, without breaking down in tears. It was still raw, it still felt like a recent break-up, but at least I was moving in the right direction. I didn’t need the constant reminders from the medical team to grasp how astounding my recovery had been, and it left me feeling almost morally bound to make something meaningful of this newly returned life of mine, and not to squander the miracle on self-pity and bitterness.

  But all that changed on a morning in early November when I received the letter.

  I had been sitting in my visitor’s chair beside the window, deep in thought, when Ellen had come in carrying the plain white envelope. In my favoured neon-bright, lycra gym clothes, I was probably a garish splash of colour against the muted tones of the hospital decor. I’d felt nothing but relief when I’d finally moved out of the baggy hospital robes and into clothing better suited for physical activity. There’s a limit to how many times a person should moon their fellow patients when walking down the corridor, and I had definitely exceeded mine.

  I was staring out through the glass, but my thoughts weren’t on the small area of parkland I could glimpse out of one quarter of my vista, nor on the large concrete block of the multi-storey car park, which took up the rest of my view. I was too lost in my reflection of what had happened the day before to see anything of the world beyond my window. The incident still made me feel jittery and unsettled, as though a door had opened a crack, and I’d glimpsed something – a memory? – which kept niggling at me, like a missing clue in a puzzle.

  Over the weeks I’d become confident enough to walk the corridors of the hospital with the aid of just one stick. There were very few areas of the sprawling complex I hadn’t visited as I practised the art of walking, with considerably less skill than the average toddler. After a while most the staff on the wards recognised me, and there was a warm feeling of community that I knew I would definitely miss when I was finally discharged in a couple of weeks. The nurses, doctors and therapists had become much more than mere caregivers, they were now also my friends. Which was fortunate in a way, because very few of the people who’d previously held that title had remained in my life. By the time I’d eventually woken from the coma, my two closest girlfriends had both married and moved away; one to Edinburgh and the other to Australia. Of course there had been a clutch of acquaintances and former work colleagues who had tentatively shown up at hospital visiting time, yet every single one of them had looked distinctly uncomfortable to be there. Their conversation had seemed halting and uncertain, which made me wonder if they felt embarrassed or even guilty that their own lives had all gone on without me, while mine had been frozen in suspended animation. Or perhaps it was simpler than that? Perhaps I was a reminder of their own mortality. Any one of us could have stepped unthinkingly into the path of a speeding vehicle; this time, it just happened to be me.

  As usual on my walk, I had forgone the bank of lifts and had laboured patiently up the echoing hospital staircase, pausing to let the occasional octogenarian whistle past me. I usually went no higher than the fifth floor, but today, in possession of a second wind – or was it something more meaningful than that? – I had climbed two more floors, and found myself outside the maternity ward.

  I was slightly breathless, and could feel uncomfortable trickles of perspiration crawling lazily down my back, like meandering bugs. Through the glass of the door I could see several patients walking slowly down the length of the corridor, leaning heavily on the arms of their male companions. One of them turned and for just a moment our eyes met, before what I assume must have been a contraction overwhelmed her, and she turned to hang helplessly on her partner’s shoulders until it had passed. The gown she wore was stretched tight over her belly, which to my inexperienced eye looked large enough to hold at least half a dozen babies.

  Without being aware I was doing so, my hand went to the flat surface of my stomach, and a pain – just as sharp as the woman’s contraction – ran through me. That would have been me and Ryan. We would have been that couple, waiting in a frenzy of excitement and fear for the birth of our first child. We could have had that, if only I hadn’t been so careless.

  Beyond the pregnant women I could see a mother wheeling a Perspex bassinet from a nursery. The baby within it was obscured, but the pale pink blanket told me it was a girl. Suddenly it seemed incredibly wrong that I didn’t even know if the baby I still mourned for had been a boy or a girl. It had been a mistake to come up to this floor. I should turn around right now, and go back to my own room. And yet my feet refused to move, and I remained on the threshold of the ward until – inevitably – someone came up behind me and pressed the button to gain entry. It was a young male nurse, who turned to me as the door swung beckoningly open. ‘Are you coming in?’

  No, screamed the sensible part of my brain. Of course I’m not.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said a voice I hardly recognised as mine.

  I walked with a purpose I had no right to feel, past the two labouring couples, stopping only when I reached the doorway from which the young woman pushing the bassinet had emerged. It was the nursery, and my first thought was confusion that it didn’t look the way it does in films, with row upon row of babies, all lined up as though they were waiting to be chosen from a shop display. Then I remembered that in UK hospitals, mothers usually keep their babies at their bedside. Probably to protect them from hungry-eyed childless women, who stare longingly through the glass, yearning to be included in a group for which their membership has expired.

  However the nursery wasn’t entirely empty. There were two mothers seated in a far corner, chatting to each other as they nursed their newborn infants. I glanced down at my own boobs, which were only now regaining some degree of fullness, and wondered how that would have felt. I closed my eyes and saw a yellow-painted nursery, and an old-fashioned rocking chair in which I sat, holding a baby that never was, while Ryan stood by looking—

  ‘Excuse me. Can I help you?’

  I turned slowly away from the nursery window, blinking furiously so that the nurse couldn’t see my tears.

  ‘You’re not a patient on this ward, are you?’

  I could have been. Once. A very long time ago. ‘No. No, I’m not. I’m on Winchester Ward.’

  She opened her mouth, and I was pretty certain it was to ask me what I was doing here, and then her jaw dropped slightly, and an almost visible light bulb of recognition lit up behind her eyes.

  ‘You’re Madeline Chambers, aren’t you? You’re the woman who was in the coma and who—’

  ‘Nurse Martin. A moment of your time, please.’

  The young nurse jumped at the summons of the ward sister, and scurried quickly over to the nurses’ station. They were too far away for me to hear what was being said, but whatever it was, it certainly looked like a reprimand. The young nurse was shaking her head in clear denial, and at one point they both looked towards me with totally unfathomable expressions on their faces.

  It didn’t take a genius to work out that – unlike the other wards I had visited – the maternity unit’s doors were not open to outsiders. And that was truly how I felt, here among the pregnant and nursing young women. My fingers curled against the glass as I continued to stare blindly into the nursery with unseeing eyes. From somewhere I could hear a baby crying, and something inside me tugged with a mother’s instinct to attend to her child. I definitely shouldn’t have ventured onto this ward, wh
ich was reiterated only moments later when the suitably chastised nurse returned to stand before me.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we have to protect the privacy of the new mums on the ward. Sister has asked me to see you safely back down to Winchester, Miss Chambers.’

  The smile I gave her as I politely declined the offer of assistance was brittle and wintry. It was awkward enough that she accompanied me to the door of the ward, as though I couldn’t be trusted to follow the instruction to leave. And yet something continued to pull at me, making the effort of walking away from this place of babies so much harder than it should be.

  As I began my slow and careful descent back to my own hospital floor, I was filled with conflicting emotions. There was a longing and hunger that I could not entirely ignore or explain. It scared me. And from the worried look on her face as she practically evicted me from the ward, it had also scared the nurse. Was I the type of woman who new mothers would have reason to fear? I thought I had made peace with all the losses in my life, but this one hadn’t been overcome at all. Just one glimpse of a maternity ward and all the pain had flooded back, like the twisting gripe of labour which I now had to accept I might never get to experience at all.

  There’s a downside to hospitals being like a small town or community. It doesn’t take long before everyone knows everybody else’s business. So it came as no real surprise to me when, later that afternoon, Ellen happened to mention with suitably feigned casualness: ‘I hear you were up on the maternity ward this morning, Maddie?’ I had smiled, because some part of me had been expecting this. I felt like a naughty child, waiting to get her knuckles rapped. ‘What took you up there?’

  ‘The stairs,’ I quipped.

  Ellen laughed, but it didn’t quite make it all the way to her eyes. ‘I just wondered why you’d gone onto the ward.’

  I paused before answering. From an outsider’s point of view, perhaps it looked like a weird almost masochistic thing to do. And maybe it was. There was no way I could adequately explain the incredible pull that had drawn me towards the nursery. Perhaps it was the deafening tick of my biological clock, or perhaps for just a moment I felt like I had a right to be there. But how could I possibly explain that? How could anyone possibly understand that, when I didn’t understand it myself?

  You set in motion chains of events without ever realising exactly what it is that you’ve done. You attend a boring industry event . . . and meet the man you want to spend the rest of your life with; you inadvertently photograph a stranger . . . and mistakenly convince yourself he’s following you; you wander up to a maternity ward . . . and then you get a letter.

  Ellen extended the business-like white envelope, and even before it had passed from her hand to mine, I knew who it was from. I still recognised his handwriting. The M was tall and sharp, like the peaks of a mountain, and the d’s were fashioned like musical notes that had mistakenly wandered off a stave. I’d seen my name written in his hand on numerous birthday, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas cards, but this was the first time I had ever seen it on a formal envelope.

  There was no surname, no address beneath my name, no stamp and no postmark. So the letter had obviously been delivered by hand. Did that mean Ryan was here now, in the hospital?

  ‘What is this?’ I asked ridiculously, setting the envelope carefully down on my legs, as though it was an unexploded bomb. My fingers had trembled slightly, and Ellen was too observant a nurse not to have noticed that.

  Her eyes were on my face and there was concern in them, and suddenly that frightened me even more. ‘You should open it,’ she urged gently.

  I looked down at the familiar writing, and felt something flutter in my chest, a tiny warning emotion. ‘I will,’ I said, trying to sound unbothered, as though receiving letters from the man I’d not heard from in months happened all the time, which we both knew perfectly well was not the case. ‘I’ll read it later.’

  The obvious subtext of my remark was: I’ll read it when I’m alone. That way, if whatever he has to say makes me cry, no one need ever know but me.

  But Ellen was stepping right over the boundaries of her day job now, and speaking only as my friend. ‘You need to read this now, Maddie.’

  There was no brooking the firm note of authority in her voice, so I once again took up the envelope. The adhesive seal parted easily; which meant it had probably been closed only recently. The possibility that Ryan was here in the hospital was upgraded to a probability.

  Ellen turned to the cabinet beside my bed, straightening up the few items upon it, none of which needed straightening. I was grateful for the semblance of privacy she gave me as I pulled out the single sheet of white A4 paper. Even the shape of his handwriting had the power to wound me. It was so familiar that for a moment I didn’t bother deciphering the shapes into actual words. Was it because I knew that, once I did, something would change? Or did that reality only occur to me much later?

  Maddie,

  Don’t tear this letter up, or throw it away without reading it.

  As if, I thought, swallowing down a laugh that could well have sounded a little manic if I had released it. I was like a starving person, suddenly presented with a banquet. I was hungry for any contact with him, though I knew I shouldn’t be. The good sense that had made me tell him to stay away was a long-forgotten memory. It was galling to realise how willingly I would accept scraps from the table, even if I couldn’t have the feast.

  I know you told me to stay away. And I’ve respected that these last few months. But something has happened and I now need to speak to you urgently. I don’t want to say anything more in this letter, because what I have to tell you is too important for that. We need to talk face-to-face. I am waiting downstairs in Reception. Please don’t send me away, because you need to hear this. You need to hear it today.

  I’m sorry, Maddie. I know this is difficult for you to understand, but please can you just trust me? If it’s okay for me to come up, ask Ellen to phone down and let me know.

  Ryan

  I read the letter three times before I spoke. It was as though he was writing in a foreign language and I needed time to try to translate its meaning. There was no point going for a fourth reading, because I remained baffled. The tone of the letter was urgent and slightly ominous. It made me feel as though the news he had to relate might not be welcome. Despite the fact that I attempted to damp it down, a spark of hope kept trying to flicker into life. Was this about his marriage? How terrible was it of me to wish that was the reason he was writing to me?

  Ellen had finished with her faux tidying and was standing patiently, waiting. ‘Will you see him?’

  I swallowed noisily. ‘Do you know what this is all about?’

  The answer flickered in her eyes a millisecond before the lie slipped from her lips. ‘No. I don’t.’

  She knew by the twist of my smile that I didn’t believe her.

  ‘What shall I tell him?’ she pushed, nudging me inexorably towards the edge of the nest, way too soon. I wasn’t ready to fly yet. Or was I?

  ‘Tell him to come up.’

  There was no disguising her sigh of relief. Whatever it was Ryan had to share, it was a weight on shoulders other than his, which made the possibility that it was anything to do with his marriage far less likely. Besides, I remembered the way he had sounded when he spoke of her. That depth of feeling only disappeared if one of you went away for a very long time . . . about six years, to be precise.

  I stopped Ellen just once on her way to the door, ashamed of the question I was about to ask, but asking it anyway. ‘Do I look all right? My hair, does it need brushing?’

  She smiled sadly and shook her head, her eyes running briefly over the hair falling in a thick dark curtain down my back. ‘You look lovely, Maddie.’

  He was at my door much quicker than I had been expecting. I’d only just thrown the compact-sized mirror back into my sponge bag, after smearing a thin layer of Vaseline over my suddenly bone-dry lips. The kindest thing I could
say about my reflection was that it probably looked a great deal better than it had the last time Ryan had seen me. I’m not even sure why I was so fixated about how I looked. This was the man who’d stood at my shoulder when my head was halfway down the toilet bowl. But that had been another Maddie, and sadly also another Ryan.

  Ellen had left the door open, so I knew he’d arrived by the slant of his shadow, which spliced the light from the corridor. We both took a moment. We both needed one. I used mine to try to control my suddenly erratic breathing; his was spent quietly clearing his throat, as though the words he’d come here to say were stuck within it. Ryan knocked lightly on the open door, and I twisted in my chair to face him.

  The feelings hit me like a punch. I had spent almost three months convincing myself I would be able to leave him behind in my past, and yet one glimpse of his broad frame; of his slightly dishevelled dark blond hair and tentative smile, and it was like playing Snakes and Ladders. One roll of the dice and I’d slithered all the way back to the start of the board.

  ‘Maddie,’ he said softly, walking into the room and carelessly destroying all the barricades I had erected around my heart. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’

  ‘You didn’t make it sound as though I had much choice.’ I nodded towards a second chair on the other side of the room and he pulled it up. He shrugged out of his jacket and took far longer than necessary folding it carefully before lowering himself on to the very edge of the chair. He reminded me of a man standing on the ledge of a high building, still not sure whether or not he had the guts to jump. It was startling to realise that Ryan was possibly even more nervous than me. And I still had no idea why.

  ‘You’re looking really good,’ he said with a smile. ‘Much more like your old self.’

  I gave a nod, taking the compliment at face value, because beneath it we both knew that the old version of me had slept through a great many changes and had woken up to a world I scarcely recognised.