Rest and Be Thankful

by Emma Glass

  Shoulders stooped, he shuffles backwards and turns and walks away. To straighten himself up, to shake off the sadness. Wilf walks towards me, to speak, to say something, but he stops and stands at the counter. I stand next to him and take two mugs from the cupboard. He says nothing, just stands near. I can feel his heat. His shirtsleeves are rolled up. He smells like cotton and soap and sweat. He smells like hard work. He watches me, he is a watcher. He says, ‘You make nice tea,’ and he leaves.

  If I Wasn’t Prepared, You Didn’t Stand a Chance

  Walking in, I know it’s wrong. All wrong. The light is too bright, the air is too hot. The chairs are set out in a circle but the circle is too small and the room is too big. And this big room is brimming with death and it’s too late to do anything because I’m dazzled by the sun shining through the window, so strong, and the strangeness of the furniture and Tracy has followed me into the room and sat down in the circle.

  The board on the wall pinned with pictures of patients, piles and piles of smiles, is leering and sneering. Mocking smiles of the children who left, who healed and went home, and worse, the smiles of those who stayed, could not leave, have not left, have died. Shining sunny siren smiles. Tracy sees me staring at the pictures, she looks and smiles and asks me if all those children are well and went home and I lie and say yes. I lie looking into the last smiling face of a lost little one. Tracy smiles and I am stabbed through with guilt. Knife stuck in to the hilt. My mouth is dry, my words are whispers when I turn and see the tea set laid out on the little tray and ask her if she would like a cup. Yes please, milk and two sugars. Someone has put milk in the milk jug. Someone has arranged the teacups on saucers with handles all pointing in the same direction. There are fucking biscuits. The china is bone white with blood-red flowers running over the rims, dripping down the sides. This is the death china. This is brought out for families when their children die. This is supposed to show respect. This strange, ancient crockery has only ever touched the lips of those who are touched with death. And Danny is not dead yet. The flesh on my shaking hands crawls and controls the movements I make to pour tea and spill milk and stir sugar.

  This is where I get a grip. This is when I strain for strength. Dr Lucas and Wilf walk in, split off and sit either side of Tracy. I am relieved to see Dr Lucas sitting straight up tall in his chair. He has uncreased his face, he has combed his hair, his mouth is serious but soft. Wilf has unrolled his sleeves and buttoned the cuffs. Dr Lucas looks at me and nods. I pour them tea too, I don’t take a cup, thinking forward to the free hands needed for the full collapse.

  Scraping chairs and clinking china. Dr Lucas clears his throat and begins.

  It Was Better Than I Thought/It Was Worse Than I Thought

  My shoulder is soaked through. I hold her tightly. Her body jerks and jolts as the wails come in waves. Beginning low, growling, guttural, surging upwards, skeleton shaking, escaping as she flings her head, flips her neck back, hope it doesn’t snap, her mouth is wide open, wet. I hold her so that she doesn’t fall to the floor. She’s not ready to be soothed yet, so my arms remain rigid, we don’t rock.

  Her sucking swallowing shrieking is childlike and terrifying. I am worried she will choke. I loosen my grasp slightly, she gasps, sucks in air, swallows snot and tears, coughs, and I know what is coming next. She coughs and coughs and spews out the grief. And mucus. And tea. Watery and running. The tea is still hot. I feel it soak through my tunic. The smell is acrid, acidic, a smell of sugar and sour milk and nicotine. I breathe through my mouth.

  Tracy is trembling still but the sick has shocked her and the shrieking stops. She pulls away from me slowly. Her hair clings to her sweat-soaked face.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says in a croaking whisper. She swallows hard and winces. I feel the burning with her in my own throat. She keeps her eyes low like a told-off child. I reach my hand out and touch her arm.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say softly. ‘Don’t you worry about this. Why don’t you go and splash some water on your face and then go and get some air?’

  She nods, still avoiding my eyes, but now watching the steady drips of sick from the hem of my tunic to the floor. I am aware of the puddle of brown spreading around my shoes.

  When she closes the door behind her, I close my eyes, I can’t help the folding of my face, I feel the tears, they are there, they are ready, I try to bite them back. I hold my breath, I am about to break. I am about to fling myself into a sorry sob but I hear voices in the corridor, so I pull it back with a sharp breath. Rudy and Jennifer are there suddenly in the doorway. Their expressions clash. Rudy’s tall straight form shatters, his laughter splinters me with broken glass. Jennifer, full of pity, rushes at me with paper towels, she takes my hand and helps me step over the pool of sick. She starts to dab at my tunic but has to pinch her nose and turn away.

  ‘I can’t, I’m sorry, Laura, I can’t do adult puke,’ she says, still pinching. She has turned green.

  Rudy is wiping away the fat tears that have formed. His laugh still echoes around the room.

  ‘Rudy, go and be helpful, will you? Go and look after Laura’s babies whilst she goes and cleans herself up,’ says Jennifer.

  He leaves the room chuckling, ‘I don’t do adult puke either.’

  I am slick with sick. I am stained with grief. I’ll wash but it won’t wear away. Grief will be worn like a cloak, will drag along behind me, heavy.

  I take a linen sack to the changing room with me. Stripping off my sopping uniform, I realise the sick has soaked through to my bra. I take it off and hang it on a peg. I stand in my knickers and soap my shoulders and as much of my back as I can reach.

  I rinse the suds off under the cold shower, too impatient to wait for the water to heat. With a rough white towel I furiously rub my skin dry. It scratches and feels good. I put on my jeans and top and head down to the basement, to the laundry room in search of scrubs or a spare uniform.

  I Take a Quiet Minute

  There is a magnetism to the little chapel that draws me to it. No, it doesn’t draw me, I am propelled. I am pushed towards the closed oak doors, my arm is led to the brass handle, I reach for it with outstretched fingers but the stretch is not my own. The oak is ancient and chipped, it has absorbed years of prayers and light and life. It is yellow and it gleams. My hand on the brass handle feels the cold of hundreds of old hands. I lean with weight to push the door open. When I draw my hand back from the handle my skin zings, the smell of metal is sharp and lingers.

  I could be anywhere in the world.

  My feet are quiet on the carpet, a strange change from the echoing steps on the tiled corridor floors or creaking or squeaking on the linoleum in the ward, just mopped, wet and shining, soles sticking until the floor is dry.

  The deep green carpet is lush and thick like forest ferns. There are faint footprints in the fibres. I am glad that someone else has been here today. The doors have closed behind me. All hospital sounds are shut out. There are no sounds in. But this is not silence. This is a breath taken, this is a wave drawn back. The chapel is waiting for a song or waiting for a prayer. I am waiting too. How I long for sound.

  I am outside in. The chapel stood here long before the hospital. It was always small and had a little cemetery beside it. They moved it when the hospital was built, scooped up whole and set down somewhere, brought back years later, piece by piece, bricks, and then the windows put in. I read that somewhere. And now a capsule, walls inside walls.

  The windows are lit, light streaming in, in all colours, rays of coloured ribbon, but light from where, I don’t know. I can make out the faint lines of bricks behind the windows. The colours are vivid, but the light is not shining down from heaven. It is artificial, but pretty all the same. I walk between the pews to look closer at the pictures depicted in the glass. Jesus is here, a peachy babe, hair perfectly golden with blue-sky eyes. Bright-white angels with pink cheeks. Shepherds in green and brown shawls, little lambs, and the Three Wise Kings, crowned in purple and
red, their arms outstretched, heavy with gifts. The scene wraps around the room, wraps around me, makes me feel warm, makes me feel almost cheerful, the colours tingling my tired eyes.

  The windowsills are lined with teddy bears, they are lined up, ready to join the procession of the Wise Kings. Every surface of the chapel is covered with stuffed bears. Over-stuffed with stuffed bears and other creatures. They feel like friends to me. Their softness makes the room feel like a play pit. I could sink in here and sleep. I walk along the wall and reach out and pick up a bear in yellow dungarees. His fur is the colour of my hair, his eyes are black and shiny. As I pull him away from his friends, dust coats my arm and I cry out as a big black spider with thick legs drops on to the carpet. I drop the bear and the spider scuttles away, somewhere underneath it. The thickness of the legs, their silent emerging from behind the bear, makes my skin creep as if the spider crawls upon me. Its blackness is a trope, a trick of the light, my mind. In real life I know the spider is not black. It is more sinister than that. It is brown, a particular shade, grown over time to be camouflage against dark wood and shadows. It grows like a skin on undrunk coffee. It is the colour of the underside of a picture frame. It is the exact shade of the darkness between the bear and the carpet. Indistinguishable from shadow. I raise my foot, hovering it over the bear’s face. I am ready to stamp the fucking daylights out of that spider. I am ready to see the vile oozing from its hideous fat body, see a leg or two detached and splayed. The bear stares up at me. There is sadness in those shining eyes. I think about the child who once loved that bear, squeezed it tight. I bring my foot back down to the floor and step back from the windowsill. I didn’t see it before, but I see it now. I tilt my head so that the light catches the little creatures in a different way. They are now all illuminated. They have a sickly sheen from fine layers of silver dust and cobwebs. I step back and look at them. They are not friends any more. Hundreds of pairs of black shiny plastic eyes stare. Worse than that, some of them have buttons for eyes. They are empty. Their empty stares cast a spell of sadness over me, I have to sit down on a pew. I finger the cover of a colourful children’s prayer book, my fingertip falling into the groove of the letter ‘P’.

  These bears all used to belong. They were loved, hugged, dropped and caught. They were tucked up in bed and sat down to tea. And their love was cut off and they were brought here, set on the shelves as tributes. Dust clings to them desperately like children used to. And with the children gone they sit here and wait, love and play stored up in them, the energy from them is palpable, they bristle, their eyes staring, they look at me longingly.

  I flip open the prayer book and find a verse for friends. I whisper it with my head bent, the words fizz and dissipate in the air. I hope the prayer finds the bears or the lost children. I close my eyes and say words for Danny. I ask God to hold him tight, to take him and to love him, to draw the pain out of him. I ask Him to place the pain on me instead. I am shaking as I speak. The blackness behind my eyes is vast, I fall into it, trembling.

  When I open my eyes I am startled because the blackness is still there. A silent swish of black material, swiftly shifting and then sailing on the sea of green carpet. I look up and see the black robes swaying. The chaplain is moving towards the altar. With another person present, the chapel seems bigger. The robes are strangely black and strangely formal for this tiny children’s church. With their head bent towards the glowing Baby Jesus, it’s hard to tell if the chaplain is a woman or a man. I think to speak but I don’t want to disturb their prayers, so I sneak out of the pew and tiptoe across the carpet. As I walk I wonder where the cemetery is now. I step carefully as if over tiny graves. I glance back at the altar as I open the old oak doors but the chaplain is no longer praying. The chaplain is no longer there.

  It Took Your Blood on My Blood to Believe

  For the rest of the shift I’m wearing scrubs the colour of dried blood. Deep red and rusty. The waistband is tight and itches. My belly shows when I stretch my arms up to hang the fluid bags on the hooks that dangle down from the ceiling. I am disturbed by these hooks, how they look, too large, too shiny, how the chains clang together when I reach up to hang, my arms together, my belly showing, skin scored with pink scratches, my body marked with irritation, from head to toe in this old red starched cloth, I look like a dead animal, hanged to dry out. Jennifer stares through the glass at this slaughterhouse scene. She enters as I finish hanging the last fluid bag.

  ‘Do you need me?’

  Yes.

  ‘Dr Lucas has stopped the nutrition, but said I could put up some slow fluids,’ I say, uncertainly.

  ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ says Jennifer. ‘I can check them for you and do you want to do his pain meds too now?’

  ‘Yes, can we get them out of the way? I was going to wait for Rudy but he’s been a real dick today.’

  We stand side by side at the bench, reaching for syringes, unwrapping needles, little wrists flicking as we dissolve the drugs into salt-smelling solutions. Our movements are mirrored perfectly. Jennifer smiles at me and does a little twirl.

  ‘Who says nursing isn’t an art?’

  Who does say that?

  She holds the tray whilst I wash my hands. The skin on my knuckles isn’t broken yet but it’s red as red, as red as my scrubs. We are close together in the antechamber, I feel her breath at the nape of my neck. She watches me washing and I feel self-conscious, like she might scold me at any moment. Although my hands are so sore, I wash again, in case I have missed a spot and she wants to tell me so. When I have put on my gloves and apron, I take the tray from her to decontaminate. When the water starts flowing from the tap her words begin to pour.

  ‘I’ve been watching you today and I know you’re hurting you take it all on but you can’t one day it will catch up with you and crush you you need to tell Rudy to stop stop making tea for everyone because although you are kind they don’t appreciate it and will take advantage the doctors especially because they don’t know that you’re being kind they think it is your job and it isn’t they think you are there to put actions to their words but it’s much more than that and always double-check Wilf’s calculations because he is a baby and he is cocky and if he makes a mistake you will get the blame I want you to protect yourself please and what else is going on with you because you are always late and your hair is a bit of a mess and you don’t smell but it’s a slippery slope I am always here for you you know that don’t you?’

  I don’t know what to say so I nod. She is kind but confrontational. I feel angry that she waited to tell me in a tiny room, where we are being quiet. I turn to her before opening the door into the cubicle and say I always check the drug calculations, no matter who prescribes. We stare at one another, eyes shining in the dark. Her lips are a perfect line and I know that we will talk more later.

  Tracy is huddled in a heap on her bed. She has a blanket wrapped around her. The TV is on, blaring, some loud talk show shouting, she is absorbed, the light bounces off her cheeks, her skin taut and shiny from the earlier deluge of tears. She doesn’t turn around when we come in. Jennifer opens her mouth to speak to her but I shake my head and gesture towards the cot where Danny sleeps. She is best left to her grief, whichever shape it takes.

  Closer to the cot, Danny’s breathing is more audible. He is chugging, his chest is quaking. Jennifer rushes to suction him. I work around her, whilst she expertly assesses him, listening with the stethoscope against his chest, feeling his fingers and toes. I disconnect his old fluid lines and reattach new ones. I check the pain-relief prescription against the programme on the pump. I push the button for a bolus of morphine, I wait to watch his face unscrew and soften, imagining the morphine as a white light working through his veins, wiping out the pain. After a minute or two, he settles. Jennifer changes his nappy whilst I caress his cheeks and coo to soothe. She tells me to stay with him, she is going to speak with Dr Lucas.

  I silently, secretly say prayers over him. I am saying goodbye. Just i
n case. Sadness, coldness, darkness settles in my heart and dries it up like a stone.

  Jennifer taps the window and beckons me out of the room. I look at Tracy as I leave, she is unchanged in her pile of tissues and television. I go to her and put my arm around her. I give her shoulder a little squeeze. She looks up at me with watery eyes and nods.

  ‘I’m back in tomorrow night,’ I say. ‘He’s fast asleep now and comfy.’ She nods again, opens her mouth but is choked, so she just nods, tears steadily streaming. I give her another little squeeze and go.

  The lines in Jennifer’s forehead are deep, she is worried.

  ‘The doctors don’t seem concerned about his breathing. They said the higher dose of morphine will help. They aren’t doing anything further and they don’t think it will be long. They said they’ve explained everything to Mum, does she even know? She’s just sitting there watching crap TV.’

  ‘They did. They did explain. I think she’s just trying to digest it all. But I didn’t think Dr Lucas thought it would happen so quickly.’

  ‘I know you’ve had a crap day,’ she says, ‘but can you do one last thing? I need to go and prepare handover. Please can you find the box?’

  The box.

  The box. I nod and the movement makes my heavy heart drop down into my empty stomach.

  ‘I think it’s only fair to prepare the girls coming in on the night shift. They’re going to have their work cut out for them. Rudy has been in with Florence all this time, she’s been nauseous all afternoon.’ She smiles at me with sad eyes. I nod. Nothing to say other than this is all really shit.

  I Don’t Know Where to Look

  The baby next door. I am relieved when I look through the window and see Wilf in the room talking to Dad, who seems to be ignoring him and playing a video game. Wilf comes out as I go in. He waits for the red light in the antechamber to stop flashing. He catches me as I draw breath between my front teeth when the water hits my chapped skin. My tsssssk concerns him, he reaches into the basin and takes my hands in his, water still running, spraying his shoes. He doesn’t notice. He holds my hands up to the little shred of light falling between the gap in the curtains drawn across the window. The light is all colours, flickering from the video game on the television. The colours make my hands look worse, like they are bleeding, dark fluid pouring from the knuckles. But it’s just water, mirroring the gore from the game. I hear the faint sound of erratic gunshots. How can the baby sleep through that?