Grace worked for hours, on different casualties and in different parts of the ward. She fetched and carried and washed wounds and bandaged limbs. All the while, held in the space just behind her eyes, she carried the image of that first young woman. Later, when her shift had finally ended and the sister had raised her chin slightly and said, ‘I suppose you’d better go off-duty,’ in that grudging way she had, Grace expected to stumble towards her room and the hard narrow bed that had become like paradise.
She didn’t look for Evie, expecting that she was still in the doghouse, although the last six hours had erased a lot of Grace’s worry over that. She was just too tired and too sad to think about Evie’s bad mood.
Instead of heading out into the crisp, cool night air and crossing the quad to the nurses’ home, Grace’s legs carried her in the opposite direction, down towards the end of the ward. She was too tired to argue with them and she found herself next to the burn patient’s bed.
She was asleep, at least. The doctor had been in to see her and topped up her morphia for good measure. Grace stood beside the bed and watched the rise and fall of the thin blanket that covered her chest. Underneath, the sheet rose in a tent over the legs. Covering them, without touching. Her mother had always greased a burn. When Grace had been at home she’d never questioned it, why would she? She wondered if she’d dare correct her mother next time she went home. The thought pierced her. Grace hadn’t seen her parents for three months. She didn’t know when she would be welcome back. She was paying a penance with no clear rules or boundaries. When she’d left she’d had the vague notion that she would come home in a crisp uniform, her navy cape swirling about her shoulders and her cap just so. They’d open their arms to this fine young vision and all would be forgotten. By them, at least.
So, the woman in the bed didn’t have grease on her burns, and she had a drug that dulled her pain and she was in a scrupulously clean bed, but there was absolutely nothing else they could do for her. It was all in the waiting, as Sister Bennett would say. ‘We watch ’em, that’s all. Some of them live and some of them die and we just watch.’
Grace felt tears pricking at her eyes and she swallowed hard. She couldn’t cry here, on the ward. Just then, she heard footsteps, felt someone arrive next to her. Before she could find something to do, some excuse for drooping next to the patient’s bed, she felt a sharp dig in her ribs. It was Evie.
‘Buck up, old stick,’ she said. ‘We’ll go for a cream cake at the Blackbird tomorrow. Just think about that. You and me and a plate of buns the size of Brighton Pavilion.’
Grace felt the tears recede. The Blackbird Tearoom was lovely and just the thought of their cream cakes made her mouth water. She nudged Evie in return and they walked back to their room, arms linked.
MINA
On my third day on the ward, I was just telling the three (non-existent) siskins perched on the end of my bed to bog off, when Dr Adams paid me a visit. I must’ve been feeling better because I noticed how nice he looked when he smiled. His blue eyes sparked alive and he was in possession of what could definitely be called a cheeky grin. I’ve always been a sucker for a lovable rogue, someone with an optimistic, cheerful disposition. Opposites attract and all that. He grabbed my chart and flopped down into the chair next to my bed in a most informal manner. ‘You’re looking better.’
I felt a bit flustered by the reactivation of my hormones and, consequently, sounded even frostier than usual in my reply. ‘I would be a great deal better if you’d let me go home.’
He just smiled at me, though, his lips twisting up on one side in a way that gave me interesting feelings in my stomach. I decided that I was overreacting because I’d been under a kind of sensory deprivation. I was surrounded by geriatrics and the very ill, plus mainly female nursing staff dressed in navy polyester. That explained my reaction to the closest thing to an eligible man in the vicinity. It was an accident of circumstance. ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘This place is making me ill.’
‘I think the head trauma had a little to do with it.’ He held up finger and thumb a small distance apart and I tried hard not to notice how nice his hands were. Knotty knuckles, long-ish fingers. It was a short step to imagining what those hands would feel like on my own skin.
‘You’re a sarky bastard for a doctor,’ I said, trying to ignore my inappropriate thoughts. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be all soothing and full of platitudes?’
‘I’m not your doctor any more. You are now under the capable care of,’ he glanced at the chart, ‘Manjiri Kanthe. I don’t know Dr Kanthe, but I’ve heard good things about her. You’re in safe hands.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘Just checking up on my miracle.’
‘Still miraculous,’ I said. I stretched out my arms and waved my hands to demonstrate my superior motor skills and knocked over the glass of orange squash. The liquid spread across table but the lip that ran around the edge mostly saved the bedding. It’s always surprising how much liquid a glass contains when you spill it.
Dr Adams sprang up and returned with a roll of blue paper towels, which he used to mop up the mess.
I hate the way women are always saying ‘sorry’ but I had to force myself not to apologise. It was my table after all. My disgusting orange squash. My bed.
‘Shall I get you a replacement?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘So, what do you do when you’re not in here?’
Chit-chat. Interesting. He only had to glance at my file to see that I worked in the hospital. We might even have crossed paths before, although I would’ve thought I’d have remembered his face. ‘I’m an international spy.’
He smiled. ‘You’re not a fan of small talk, then.’
‘I prefer telling stories,’ I said. ‘It’s more fun.’
His smile widened, but I was suddenly depressed by how easy the game was. Make a frosty joke or two, don’t smile too much. Act a little distant, even when trapped in a hospital bed, and men lift their heads and sniff the wind. I felt tired of it all. And I’d just remembered that I had a boyfriend. A partner. A live-in partner. Mark. I said his name in my mind again, just to remind myself. To try and cement it there. The good thing about the distance game is this: it’s extremely easy to sabotage. You can call time whenever you want. So I did.
‘When will I get my memory back?’
Dr Adams snapped into professionalism. ‘It’s impossible to say. The timing in these cases . . .’
I swallowed. ‘But it will happen? Everything will come back?’
‘The odds are overwhelmingly in your favour. People with post-traumatic amnesia almost always regain their entire memory function.’
‘Almost.’ I closed my eyes. ‘Why does that word seem suddenly very big?’
He didn’t answer and I kept my eyes shut. I expected him to leave but he said something that threw me.
‘Who were you talking to?’
My eyes wanted to open, instinctively, but I kept them shut. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just now.’ I felt him move closer, heard the rustling sound of paper.
‘Myself,’ I said promptly. I opened my eyes and looked him square in the face. I wasn’t going to tell him that I was hallucinating. That way talking therapy and psychotropic drugs lay.
‘I see.’ Dr Adams indicated the chair next to my bed. ‘May I?’
‘Knock yourself out.’ It sounded a little more aggressive than I’d intended so I attempted another smile.
‘You needn’t worry, by the way. If you’re seeing things. Hearing things. Hallucinations are very common after a head trauma.’
‘Hmm?’ I widened my eyes, trying to look interested but in a detached, ‘this has nothing to do with me’ kind of way.
‘Are you experiencing anything like that?’
‘No,’ I said promptly.
‘Well, as I say, it’s completely normal. There was a case of a man who, after waking up from a coma, had olfactory ha
llucinations. Potatoes roasting, rotten eggs, lemon, that kind of thing.’
‘And you call that normal?’
‘I’m not sure there is a normal.’ Dr Adams used his direct stare. The one that he probably used to get people to admit they’d snorted coke when they arrived in A&E.
‘Well, I’m not hallucinating. Unless you’re not really here, of course.’
He smiled, very gently. ‘You can trust me, Mina. I’m here to help.’
‘That’s nice.’ I smiled blandly. I wasn’t about to tell him that I was seeing the ghost of a nurse, or that I’d had hallucinations before I ever had my accident. I wasn’t stupid. ‘Do you know when I can go home?’
‘Not for a few days at least,’ he said. ‘I know it’s frustrating for you.’
‘I’m so bored,’ I said. ‘I might start hallucinating just to liven things up.’ Actually, that was probably the answer. I had conjured the nurse out of my imagination because of the boredom. I felt hugely relieved by this explanation.
I hadn’t had the best night’s sleep when an unwelcome visitor appeared. Parveen. Having kept a strict separation between all the different areas of my life, having my laboratory buddy take a seat next to my bed was a new experience and not a comfortable one. She’d brought a helium balloon with ‘Get Well Soon’ on it in pink letters and a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums from the shop downstairs. Chrysanthemums have a bad reputation but I quite like them. Still, it felt odd. The kind of gift you’d get someone when they’d had a baby or something. Cheerful and innocent. Although, maybe that’s what she’d expected to find. If she’d heard about the amnesia, maybe she expected a whole new Mina. A shiny new girl, who clapped her hands for balloons. I all but snarled in my attempt to disabuse her of any such notion. ‘They never have enough vases around here,’ I said, pointing at the flowers. ‘They’ll die.’
‘Ah-ha,’ Parveen said, and bent down to delve in her tapestry rucksack, producing a clear glass vase and a pair of scissors. She trimmed and arranged the flowers, filled the vase with water and put it on the locker at my side, next to the ones from Mark, which were already wilting.
She sat back on the visitor’s chair and folded her hands neatly in her lap. After a long silence, in which Parveen regarded me, I said: ‘Aren’t you going to talk?’
‘You always said you hated small talk,’ she said. ‘Which kind of makes it difficult in situations like this.’
I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. ‘How’s work?’
Parveen smiled back and then launched into a description of everything I’d missed. I hated to admit it, but it was nice. Dispatches from reality. Apparently Paul was working as slowly as usual and a funding application had been approved. Parveen assured me that I’d been instrumental in completing the application and that I should feel especially good about this bit of news. As I couldn’t remember a bloody thing about it, I didn’t.
My cognitive impairment made the conversation a strange and disorientating process; some snippets of information were like keys, opening doors to things I knew, but hadn’t been able to see, while others just led to blank walls. I had no idea what was new information, old memories coming back or just plain wrong.
Parveen began to talk about Mark. I knew that I wouldn’t have told anybody about our relationship, but it was still a relief when she confirmed this by the way she spoke about him. Every day was a fresh opportunity for unwanted surprise and confusion and it was nice to know that my sense of self wasn’t entirely compromised. There was silence and Parveen was looking at me, waiting. I had let her run on and had drifted away. Maybe even closed my eyes. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I missed that last bit.’
‘They said you’d be very tired.’ Parveen fiddled with the zip on her bag.
‘Lying in bed is surprisingly knackering,’ I said. ‘So, we’ve covered work. How are things with you?’
Her hands went still on the zip. Her eyebrows lowered and I thought for a moment that she was angry. Then she smiled and said: ‘You’ve never asked me that before.’
‘I’m a bit of a grumpy bitch, by all accounts.’
Parveen tried, and failed, to hide a smile. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Her black hair was cut just too long to be called a bob and she had a metallic red hair clip on one side. I had a memory of her niceness and of being irritated by it. Thinking it was fake, the way I automatically did with anything pleasant.
‘Mark,’ I began, a strange urge to connect to another human being bursting out. I was going to say ‘Mark’s my boyfriend’ but that seemed ridiculous. The man was so old. That thought surprised me. He wasn’t old. He was forty-one, but very well maintained, and it wasn’t as if I was exactly a babe in arms. I felt ancient. Correction. I had felt ancient. I realised that despite being laid up in bed and every bone in my body aching, I felt younger than I had in years. I felt reborn. I winced inwardly. I should watch that crap. Being a bit nicer was one thing, joining a religious cult was quite another.
‘He’s been lost,’ Parveen said, surprising me. ‘He keeps wandering around the department.’
‘Doesn’t he always?’ I said. It was a genuine question. My memories were still so sparse, I just had fragments – inklings, really – of what constituted normal life and routine. I was hungry for hard facts.
‘He misses you,’ Parveen said.
And then I realised. ‘You know about us.’
She bit her lip. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s okay.’ Another wall down. ‘Does Paul?’
‘I don’t think so. We haven’t spoken about it and he’s kind of oblivious. You know?’
‘Good.’ I felt surprisingly calm about Parveen knowing one of my big secrets, but I didn’t relish the thought of being the subject of office gossip.
‘How did you—’ I stopped, waved my hand. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Before you started, we had a PhD student. She was in the department for a few months and she and Mark went out a few times.’
I kept my face carefully neutral, waiting for this to hurt in some way. It didn’t.
‘He kept hanging around the lab. Had the same expression. Happy.’ Parveen shrugged. ‘When he started it again I figured it was you. I mean, it wasn’t me and I doubted it was Paul.’
‘I didn’t realise it was so obvious,’ I said.
‘It’s none of my business.’ Parveen shifted slightly, suddenly looking like she was about to get up and leave. I didn’t want her to go. This day was just full of fucking surprises.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For visiting. It’s been really weird. I have these . . . gaps. I remember lots of stuff but I’ve got no idea what I haven’t remembered because, well, I can’t remember. It’s frustrating and I really—’ I broke off, wiped my cheeks with my hands. They were dry, thank God.
‘We miss you in the department,’ Parveen said. ‘We’re all hoping you’ll be back soon.’
‘You see, that’s another thing,’ I said, happy to be on more familiar ground. ‘Either that’s a gap in my memory or I’ve got false memory syndrome or brain damage or something.’
‘Well, obviously,’ Parveen said. ‘You know you’ve got brain damage. I mean, you must’ve looked at your chart?’
‘I meant, my memories don’t tell me that the department would have warm and fuzzy feelings about me. But here you are. I’m surprised, that’s all.’ I paused, another thought hitting me. ‘Please don’t be offended, but had we become friends or something? Have I forgotten?’
‘No,’ Parveen said, her lips compressed. ‘We’ve never been friends. Just colleagues.’
‘Okay.’ I felt a funny mixture of relief and hurt. Relief that my memory wasn’t hiding a best mate from me, hurt at her emphatic tone of voice.
‘Maybe it’s the grit in the oyster,’ Parveen said. ‘In the department. I miss the grit. Plus,’ she was smiling now, ‘you made me look really nice just by comparison. It’s harder to maintain that on my own.’
I was surprised into laughing and Parveen�
��s smile grew wider, her eyes bright and suddenly beautiful.
‘Can you tell me more?’ I hated needing people, I hated needing full stop, but this situation was forcing it upon me. I was the Grand Canyon of need and it terrified me.
‘Like what?’
‘Just describe a day in the office. Anything. I want to match things up.’ Please.
Parveen nodded and began.
Sometime later, I opened my eyes and realised that I’d drifted off. Parveen was gathering her stuff together, moving quietly as if not to wake me. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I stayed too long. Tired you out.’
‘Will you visit again?’
Parveen hesitated.
‘I know we’re not friends and there’s no obligation. But I’d like it.’
She gave a quick smile. ‘Maybe. If I’ve got time.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Can I ask you something before you go? It’s about Mark.’
Parveen stiffened. ‘He’s my boss.’
‘I know. It’s just—’ I didn’t want to ask the question, felt vulnerable even thinking it, but there was a niggle in the back of my mind that wouldn’t go away. ‘You know, you said that Mark seemed happier. Have I?’
Parveen gave me a look of pure panic.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Not really. To be honest, you always seemed kind of tense around him,’ she said. ‘But, like I say, I don’t really know you and I certainly don’t know anything about your relationship.’ She stood up and I felt panic that she was leaving. Parveen felt like a real link to my old self, more real even than Mark. Which was odd.
‘Can you get something for me? I’ll pay you.’ As I spoke I realised that I didn’t know if I had any money. I didn’t know where my clothes or handbag were.
In the Light of What We See Page 8
