by Bowes, K T
The nurse took a step back and Hana realised she probably looked a little scary. “Please leave me alone,” she said with an exhausted sigh. Hana sat down again and put her head in her hands. The nurse slipped away and Hana was disappointed she neither apologised nor let her see Logan. She gathered together her handbag and the bag of goodies she brought for her husband and left.
Hana reached the lift, all her optimistic energy completely gone. She wiped a frustrated tear from her cheek and struggled to control her misery.
“Hana!” Logan called her, battling in the doorway as he tried to push the metal rack through with him. It’s wheels pinioned him in the doorframe. Hana stepped back as the lift opened and a porter came out wheeling a patient in a wheelchair. She turned a tear stained face towards her husband. “Hey, don’t cry,” he said gently as he hauled the drip over to meet her. “Who’s been causing trouble now then? You know they’ll beat me if you upset them!”
“They told me to come and then wouldn’t let me in,” Hana sniffed into the front of his shirt and Logan stroked her hair and comforted her.
“Fancy going for coffee?” Logan asked. “There must be a cafe or something in this hell hole.”
“It’s downstairs,” Hana said, delving into her bag for a tissue. “It’s too far for you to walk.”
“Oh.” Logan looked disappointed.
“If I leave you with this bag, I could nip there and back,” Hana suggested. “Would you like that?”
Logan pressed his lips against Hana’s and she tasted his toothpaste. His beard grazed her soft skin and she sighed with contentment at his proximity. “I missed you so much,” she said.
Hana bought two cappuccinos from the vendor near the front doors and returned to her husband. The nursing staff agreed Logan could sit in the visitors’ room with Hana, but the couple rebelled, finding the seating area near the lifts more open and entertaining. They stayed for an hour and a half, sometimes talking, sometimes observing the foot traffic. As the hour for visiting arrived, Selina appeared to commandeer Logan. “You’re not serious?” Hana said. “You won’t let me in to see him and now it’s visiting time and I can sit with him, you’re taking him away again. What did I do to you?”
“You got me in trouble with Dr Singh,” Selina said with petulance. “And staff nurse.”
“Well, you told me to come down early and then pretended you knew nothing about it. What do you expect?”
“You need to come with me, Logan,” the girl said, blushing as she laid a plump hand on his brawny arm. Hana felt a flash of anger and her colour rose in her cheeks.
Logan eyed the young woman as though she were a bug. “It’s Mr Du Rose, to you,” he corrected her. “And the minute you’re done, I’m leaving.”
Hana chatted to another patient for a while, a middle-aged man with a hand injury who had no visitors and seemed lonely. “I hate this hospital,” he confessed. “I feel like a lump of meat.”
Hana patted his hand but was distracted by the commotion coming from behind her husband’s closed curtains. She excused herself and slipped through the gap to find Selina arguing with her husband. “You can’t go home, Lo…Mr Du Rose! It would be very risky.”
“What’s going on?” Hana asked, giving Logan a chance to snatch his sweatshirt out of the girl’s hands. A bright blue plaster cast adorned his left arm and he looked grey and sick.
“I’m going home!” he stated with anger in his voice. “I’ve had enough.”
“Ok,” Hana conceded and glared at the nurse. “I think we both have.”
Logan was reluctantly discharged and forced to sign a waiver in case it turned out to have been a dreadful mistake. A porter arrived to wheel a sulking Logan out to the car, despite his protests about being capable of walking.
Finally they were in the BMW and heading safely home. “Wow, Supercop loaned you his car?” Logan said, eyeing the walnut interior. “I bet he didn’t put me on the insurance.”
“Don’t know,” Hana answered, refusing to take the bait. “Doesn’t matter as you won’t be driving for a while anyway.”
Hana stopped briefly in Ngaruawahia, to collect Logan’s prescription from the local pharmacy. While it was being done she nipped over to the garage and bought two coffees from the Wild Bean café there and brought them back to the car. Logan lay back in the passenger seat with his left arm resting across his thigh. The effort of escaping the hospital exhausted him and he looked dark under the eyes, his olive complexion washed out and pale. With $40 worth of medication, Hana drove home to Culver’s Cottage, trying not to bump the BMW over the rugged driveway.
Logan slept for most of that day and the next. By Wednesday, he was more lucid and sat for some of the time in the living room in front of Hana’s struggling fire.
“He’s a really difficult patient,” Hana confessed to Izzie over the phone. “It’s not because he’s grouchy or demanding, but quite the opposite. He asks for nothing. I find myself constantly asking him if he wants a drink, some food, helping back to bed, a magazine, the light on, the light off…it feels like I’m perpetually pestering him. I’m a rotten nurse!”.
“Just think yourself lucky,” Izzie retorted. “Marcus does nothing but complain when he’s sick and he does this pathetic voice that makes me want to kill him!”
“At least you don’t get sick of the sound of your own voice,” Hana mused.
“No!” Izzie snorted. “I get sick of his!”
One evening, Hana found Logan trying to watch the television, despite the badly rolling screen and horrendous snowstorm which formed a black and white fuzzy picture that was impossible to watch. The next day she phoned an aerial company in Hamilton but found them unwilling to come as far out as the cottage without a petrol allowance. “It’s only Ngaruawahia!” Hana complained. “It’s literally twenty minutes away from Hamilton, not the outback!”
The salesman on the other end tried to blind her with technology and Hana gave up as the projected cost escalated further and further. She texted Bodie in frustration. Half an hour later he texted back with the number of a local guy, whom a colleague recommended.
An hour after her call to a mobile number, the aerial specialist sat drinking coffee in the kitchen of Culver’s Cottage. “$150 all up, Miss,” he said politely, the job already completed. “You just needed a booster on it,” he said, a genuine smile on his brown face. “Them city blokes know nothin’. All piss and wind, bro’.” He waved the cookie clutched in his fingers towards the kitchen window. “My ma lives over that way, through the bush,” he said, slurping his coffee and helping himself to another cookie. Hana looked interested.
“Really? How far away?”
“Just next door from here. Five minutes by road but you could walk it. Might get lost though if youse didn’t know where you was goin’. It’s dense bush at the bottom and streams and ridges you can’t see until they snatch you.”
Hana looked fearful, gazing at the forbidding darkness of the canopy with new respect. Hone continued, “Ma’s getting on a bit but my stepfather still does building work. Reckon she’ll call in soon to say kia ora.”
“I’d like that,” Hana said, craving female company.
“What’s them gates all about?” the young man asked bluntly. Hana bit her lip.
“We work in Hamilton during the week. It must be something to do with being raised in England.” She justified the outlandish security measure with a casual air.
Hone was passionate about the native bush which surrounded the properties, having an extensive and impressive knowledge about the different plants and foliage that grew best there. “I grew up playing in that bush,” he said longingly. “Most beautiful place on earth, it is.” He enjoyed another cup of coffee and sampled some baking Hana made that morning before leaving with a cheery wave.
When Logan woke later and dragged himself down to the kitchen, he discovered Hana making the living room curtains with her sewing machine set up on the large pine table. He was visibly pleased
with the thought of not enduring a headache at the expense of the dreadful television picture. It was the most animated Hana had seen him for some time. “That is such a cool gift,” he groaned in pleasure. “Thanks babe. You’re so thoughtful. The rolling picture made me feel seasick.”
As the week progressed, Hana used the enforced confinement to decorate the cottage, painting and wallpapering while Logan rested. She stopped and spent time with her husband when he was awake, chatting companionably or watching television together. Slowly as the days went past he grew stronger and the scar from the surgery looked less and less angry. On Friday afternoon, a district nurse visited, buzzing at the gates to be admitted. She was an older lady, originally from Raratonga, gentle and careful with Logan’s wound. He lay on the sofa, allowing her to examine his stomach and ribcage as she chatted quietly about her family in Tauranga to Hana. “Tea or coffee?” Hana offered and the nurse gratefully accepted, following her into the kitchen after she finished changing the dressing on Logan’s wound. She seated herself heavily at the table.
“That dressing should be fine until Monday, but he needs to go into the surgery for it to be checked and changed,” she told Hana in her lilting Pasifika accent. Hana smiled as she busied herself with the kettle and some mugs. At the woman’s next sentence, she whipped around hard, spilling hot water across the stainless steel bench, “I know a fall down stairs when I see one and that ain’t no fall down any stairs.”
Hana bit her lip and turned back to make the drinks and mop up her flood. The weight of the truth pressed down on her again, constricting her chest, the guilt of lying as heavy as the injustice of the whole situation. Hana brought the drinks across and set them on the table. She seated herself carefully next to the nurse, seeing how intricately her black hair was fixed into its bun and beaded around the edges. She looked the nurse squarely in the eye and weighed her up. “I’m not sure what to tell you,” Hana said, “and what the implications of it would be, if I did. We filled in an accident form saying…”
The nurse reached across, patting her hand and smiling. “I’m telling nobody nothin’,” she said, her thick accent making her sound almost Jamaican to Hana’s ears. “I can see the line of bruisin’ isn’t consistent with a fall, even onto a hard surface. That man has a line around him, like someone wrapped somethin’ hard and thin about his poor body. Somebody with a nasty backhand, coming at him from behind, by how it looks. The angle of it - he’s lucky it was just ribs and spleen and not kidneys too!”
Her crime scene assessment finished, she sat back in her seat and supped her coffee. Hana sat with her head down, chewing on her lip. Her voice came out as a whisper, “It was a crowbar, or a wheel wrench, same thing really…like you said, from behind.” Hana sighed deeply and let her head fall back on her neck so she stared at the freshly painted ceiling through eyes that were blind and unseeing. She played out the scene with Tama like a roll of film in her head. “Logan was protecting me actually.” She let her head fall forwards again to look at the nurse. The woman nodded heavily three or four times.
“Thank you for the truth,” she said, still nodding and then patted Hana’s hand again. She leaned forwards conspiratorially, whispering, “I’ll come back Monday. Don’t go to the doctors’ surgery. I know what I need to look for now. But he don’t look good, so be on the lookout for signs of fever and discomfort. And next time, lady, you need to call the cops.”
The nurse left after sampling some of Hana’s baking and waved heartily to Logan as she looked into the living room. She left some dressings with Hana in case the wound required a change but as Hana hadn’t summoned the courage to touch it all week, she didn’t think she was going to do it over the weekend either.
The nurse sped off in her little black Suzuki Swift, powering down the drive at breakneck speed in much the same way she came up it. Hana saw dust from the gravel rising above the trees, long after the back of the vehicle was out of sight. She opened the gates from the house before the nurse got down there.
“I’m just going for a walk down to the trees,” Hana called to Logan. She strolled to the bottom of the front garden before the trees started, peering down at the only part of the road she could see. She heard the squeal of tyres and saw a flash of black, guessing the nurse had left the premises. Hana waited until she heard the gates clang shut.
In the half painted living room, she found her husband laying on the sofa in his dressing gown and pyjama bottoms. The dressing gown was still open as the room was particularly warm and Hana saw the dressing under his left rib. She plonked herself down in front of him on the rug, leaning back against the seat and Logan stretched forwards to kiss the back of her head, slipping his arm around her shoulders. Hana sat for a moment watching the screen. “Why are you watching SpongeBob SquarePants?”
Logan shrugged. “There’s nothing else on,” adding as an afterthought, “I haven’t seen this one. Pete’s got all the DVD’s and this one isn’t on it.”
Hana half turned to look at him in disgust. He gave her a smile more like his old self and Hana felt the worry dissipate slightly. She turned more so she was side-on to the sofa, putting her head on the warm cream leather next to his chest. Logan cuddled her in closer and they stayed like that for a while, Hana finally relaxing and Logan watching SpongeBob’s antics above her head, holding her hair down flat so it didn’t get in his way.
Logan ate soup for lunch and it was the first time he finished his plate, so Hana’s optimism increased. He went for a lie down and she attacked the wallpapering behind the fireplace with the bold print. She only picked it out the previous weekend but it felt like a lifetime ago. “Look, Tiger, you like it?” she asked the cat. He licked his paws and turned his back on her. The coving sported a gentle off-white colour but the wallpaper was a mix of Tudor Rose interspersed with a filigree pattern of silver. It was brave and striking, especially against the grey paint on the other walls. Hana cleared the kitchen table and used the tarpaulin again, pasting in the kitchen and carefully carrying the wet wallpaper into the living room.
She had two significant accidents. As Hana carried one sheet of paper, folded back onto itself in its sticky state, it unravelled and stuck to the rimu floor. It tore as she tried to pull it off. “Oh no,” she wailed as the glue welded it to the wood. It was hard to clear up, Hana resorting to white spirit, which made everywhere stink. She rushed down and shut the bedroom door so poor Logan wasn’t gassed in his sleep. The second mishap occurred as Hana climbed the ladder, trying to hold the folded paper aloft at the same time as watch her footing. She wobbled, failed at both tasks and put her foot clean through that sheet as well.
“Oh, bloody hell!” Hana stamped in fury. With all the wastage, she made it to the end of the wall with only one sheet to spare. It was a close run thing, but her workmanship was excellent and she stood back and admired the instant effect.
Exhaustion rushed over Hana’s soul like a tidal wash as she paused for breath. She felt as though she was on some kind of marathon, sewing, painting and wallpapering, in between making sure Logan was being cared for. It was overwhelming. Shaking herself to force the cloud of depression to let go of her heart, Hana persevered with her decorations, finally getting to do the part which the TV designers called ‘dressing the room’; meaning for her, climbing back up onto the step ladder.
When Logan stumbled down to the living room after a long but refreshing sleep, aided by some particularly grunty painkillers, he was just in time to stop Hana plunging backwards off the stepladder. She was completely immersed in swags of silver material, which made her look like a tall grey ghost and she tilted backwards at a precarious angle. “Whoa,” called out Logan, as he tried to move quickly forwards, convinced she was about to plunge to the ground. He reached up and put his hand at the back of the shrouded shape to stop it falling.
“I’m ok,” came a muffled voice from within the material, “why are you feeling my bottom?”
Logan rolled his eyes but still didn’t dare move
his hand, even though the action of stretching was painful. He swapped arms and made sure his hand rested further up, not that he could tell what he was supporting through all the swags. The activity up near the ceiling continued and Logan heard clicking from inside the shroud and lots of sighing and puffing as the weight of the material rested on Hana’s body. Eventually, with a lot of wiggling and more puffing, the material moved up Hana’s back and over her head, as though she was extracting herself from an extra-large pullover and she reappeared, hair completely on end and her clothes rucked up so he could see most of her midriff. She wobbled a bit as she regained her balance and then gave Logan a triumphant grin. He smiled back and shook his head, uttering, “Twit,” under his breath at her.
Hana climbed down the ladder and then spent ages running around under the curtains, pulling and tweaking them into place. She fitted one of the curtains with great difficulty prior to Logan’s entrance in an effort to surprise him, but hadn’t quite managed the second. Up the ladder she went again, to correct some complicated crossover which only curtain hooks can apparently perform, descending finally and standing happily with her hands on her hips. “Don’t you think they look wonderful?” she asked, her eyes shining in victory.
Logan duly admired and praised and opened and closed them with great ceremony, until Hana worked out he was mildly mocking her. “Stop it!” she complained, offended.
“The room suddenly feels so much more loved and just a bit posh,” Logan teased in a fake English accent. Hana slapped his arm, thrilled at the difference the décor made. “I’ll do the French doors another time,” she said wistfully. “I don’t have the energy tonight.”
She felt satisfied as she went to the kitchen, packing the sewing machine down and shifting it through to one of the spare rooms yet again.