The Bed Book of Short Stories

Crazy

152 Crazy Helen Walne It’s 5am and the boy with the breaking bones has just come in. I will have to pretend I’m not chain-smoking, and I won’t be able to just sit, twirling my hair in my fingers, being lulled by the stutter of the heater beneath the yellowed-out window. He makes me feel like a fraud, with his scars and stitches and slings. He has a beautiful face and the torso of a swimmer, and I know he is an orphan and his only brother lives in America. One of the other girls told me. He is twenty-two and his bones are collapsing on him. In ten years, he had said, he will probably be dead. I feign a yawn and flip through an out-of-date décor magazine. There are tips on how to set a summer lunch table, and people smile in front of houses. Everyone looks unfettered and expensively casual. They all have happy teeth. In my dream last night, my teeth were tender and thin; a pair of geckos were living in my back molars, lodged there, waiting to grow. One was bigger than the other, and even in the murk of unconscious, I recognised the creatures as being you and me. Then the little one exploded. I had felt it get hot. There was skin and bits of lizard all over the floor, and I gestured to someone to bring a glass of water so I could rinse out my mouth. Then someone removed the remaining gecko, and when it came out, it was flattened and grey. But it was alive. I am alive. The boy is smoking and sitting, one bare, hairless leg stretched out on a chair in front of him. The small room feels too intimate to be sitting with a stranger, in my pyjamas. I’ve worn the same grey ones for five days now, and my body has become pale in them, the hair on my legs growing. 153 I get up, smile, make a weak joke about getting back to the excitement of bed, and leave the room, my mouth sour and ashy, the passage quiet except for a faint clattering and rustling from the kitchen. The gathering of trolleys. As I pad past the nurse’s station, I feel like an intruder, or a child who has woken too early on Christmas morning. The nurses are too busy to notice me. I don’t feature in their routine. The fat one with the Irish accent is gossiping about someone, the air filled with ‘she’ that and ‘she’ this. I wonder what they think of us – the uninjured, the unable, lying in our bony beds with our limbs intact. I want to tell them I am not like the others. It wasn’t that I couldn’t cope with work, or that I panicked in a supermarket, or that my boyfriend dumped me. Something real happened to me. I am normally very happy. The ward is dark and blank with the soundless slumber of my two inmates, the curtains around their beds drawn, impounding them in cream-coloured crypts. Back down the passage, a nurse stacks plastic cups of pills on a trolley. She is chattering in her uniform. It’s almost surreal to think that beyond these peach-coloured walls, people in their homes will be stirring, rolling over, choosing their uniforms for the day: stockings; scarves; chinos; ties; mini-skirts; pashminas. There is nothing left to do but lie down, and I climb into the bed, wincing as it squeaks and the plastic-covered mattress crinkles. With my head turned to the side, I can make out the shape of a suitcase on the floor beneath the gap in the curtain. The woman next to me had been admitted during the night. The nurses had snapped on the fluorescent lights, and there was a lot of curtain-shuffling and bustling. They had measured her blood pressure and filled in the forms – the same ones they had filled in when I was admitted. The nurse had asked me how many times I went to the toilet each day. ‘Probably about fifteen,’ I said, and her eyes had widened. I had laughed, and corrected it to ‘once’. There is so much ambiguity in the world. You never spoke in code. You made yourself perfectly clear. It was me who had listened in code. Hoping. I had watched as the woman...