by Kate Sten
‘Yes that's me,’ I sighed impatiently.
‘Okay. Now that bit is sorted, I shall take you to the adult ward to see your Mom,’ the nurse said, placing a reassuring hand on my back as she steered my through the network of hallways, bounding towards the female patients wing of the hospital.
The nurse halted in front of a door which had been pushed backwards to rest against the wall. The wood on the door was worn down and had not recently been polished. There was a hulking tall guy blocking the entrance into the room. He had his back facing us and his hands sunk deep into his pockets. He had feet the size of a Sasquatch. He could easily have leaped over London bridge in a single bound without breaking a sweat.
He seemed to look more familiar now. The crimson scarf wrapped round his neck gave it all away. I remembered seeing him very rarely leaving his home to take out the trash. There were rumors circulating among the local kids that he was some sort of vampire. That school of thought did hold some water, as he was rarely seen doing any sort of shopping during the day, and when he did have to tend to the mailman there was always a baseball hat over his head, and a pair of shades hanging over his face.
His skin was a milky shade of pale and the guy had covered up all his windows with old news papers. He was certainly the most eccentric neighbour on the street. Freaky Henry - That was what the name kids whispered to give each other terrible nightmares. Yet, he did not seem so scary up close. He was rather unsure of himself in his mannerisms and didn’t seem to be the big bad that he had been portrayed as.
‘Forgive me for almost killing you. I uh... I wasn’t concentrating. Just got messaged by my mom. She has this knack for really getting under my skin. We just had this dum argument over nothing.’ Henry Winters scratched the back of his head, with his eyes fixated on his mucky pair of boots, avoiding direct eye contact with Molly.
‘And let me guess - You thought it would be a good idea to get behind the wheels with all that pent up anger weighing on your chest?’ Molly took the oxygen mask off her face to lob a sarcastic response at his candor.
NINE
JOHN
There was an indignant rage swelling up behind the awkward smile that pushed up on Molly's face. Her teeth gnashed in pain; her hands gripping the sheets beneath her back. Molly focused her gaze on the face of her not so august visitor. ‘You haven't come here for me to make you feel better about yourself, have you?’
‘God, no! I would never impose in such a thoughtless way!’ Henry dumped more of his weight on the door, as if he were about to retreat into some cleft in it that would have shielded him from the angry tirades that had been unreservedly launched at him.
There was a slightly bespectacled look on Henry's face. He could barely keep himself from muttering apology after apology. No matter what came out from his mouth, it would not be enough to assuage Molly's frustration at what he had almost succeeded in doing to her. To us. The fury in her belly was more than enough to cause the words rolling off his tongue to make a retreat back into the pit of his stomach.
‘You hear that?’ Molly shoved a hand against her earlobe.
‘Hear what, Miss?’ Henry Muttered, looking around him to find the source of whatever noise Molly claimed to have heard.
Molly totted and resulted to shaking her head sarcastically, ‘Nothing! The sound of nothing! It was peaceful for a minute when your lips weren't moving.’
Henry discarded a bunch of get-well-soon flowers at the foot of the bed Molly was sat up on, did a u-turn, and whizzed straight past me and the nurse who was stood right behind me. The glum, dejected look that hung over his face was telling. He had definitely felt hurt by the things Molly had thrown in his face.
In his mind, I was sure she was only trying to make amends. She wasn’t ready to hear his words. She wasn’t ready to feel anything but apathy towards him yet. Molly cared an awful lot for me. She certainly saw me as a son she never had, or could never have.
Even though, she never spoke of it, I had seen old photos of a wedding. A wedding ceremony in which she was beaming with smiles. The photos that followed showed less natural smiles and eyes that seemed laden with regret. I had wondered what had made her so sad in the photos that had been taken years after her wedding pictures had been taken.
I found the answers in a carelessly discarded scan photo of a baby that wasn’t fully formed. I pulled it away from underneath the base of a lukewarm coffee mug. Some of the contents had spilled over the top of the photograph. I remember wiping the dampness off the photo, rubbing it in circular movements on my PJ top.
Molly wasn’t far off from where I was stood that night, gawking at the abandoned photograph. I had smudged the surface of the picture with my prints, leaving some delible marks on it. To my credit, there were already rip marks on the photo which I suspected had been made by nails that were a lot longer than mine.
I didn’t need to look long to find Molly. The carpet beneath my feet had turned soggy. I just had to track the wet patch to the corner of the room where I stumbled upon a hunched silhouette that appeared to be draped in a familiar white old fashioned nightgown with rose patterns emblazoned on the fabric.
‘Molly, is that you?’ I shrieked, my throat dry and voice shaky.
There was no response. Just faint whimpering and the nod of the head in the affirmative to the question that had been asked. Not that I needed much affirming. I knew that night gown belonged to Molly. It was one of her favorites. She had worn the damn antiquated thing on the first night that I had been kept under her care by the social worker who was keen to offload me from the roster of names on her rather overstuffed forms. Paperwork was signed and I was discharged into Molly's care with nothing more than a pat on the head and my light luggage box stuffed with tired old clothes and a single toothbrush.
She was in a puddle of ceaseless tears that had smudged her makeup the day I happened upon that baby scan image.
Inconsolable, incoherent, disheveled - these would be the best words that would describe the state of her. She was sprawled on the floor with a small bottle of gin, partially emptied in the cleft of her palm. Her hair was a frizzy mess, dangling loosely over her face. I could barely see her eyes behind all that hair.
‘Don't look at me! Go to your room!’ Molly sobbed that torrid Friday night.
She staggered to her feet twice, falling sideways on each failed attempt.
I had leaned in to offer her a hug. She recoiled into herself and would not let me near her. She would not have me ruin her drunken soliloquy; her boozy trip down the dark tunnel of tragedy which she wanted to experience all by herself.
‘Get off! Get off! Fuck off to your room already, and leave me be!’ Molly shoved me, causing me to stagger backwards, out of her personal space.
The heel of my foot crashed into the sofa behind me, breaking my backward spiral towards whatever worse thing I could have crashed into.
‘Ouch!’ I picked up my foot to examine the extent of damage to limb I had endured, if any had been done.
There was just light bruising on my heel. I could barely see the shades of purple and blue patches on my skin. I looked back at Molly, to see her head bowed and her fingers trembling as they combed through the clumps of messy hair draped over her face. She had lashed out without consciously meaning to.
I did not know what to make of her sudden outburst and how a usually sensitive woman could shed that softer side to reveal a hollow shell of a person bent on simply imploding on cheap booze, and giving the middle finger to everyone else that didn’t reside in the headspace that she was in at that point in time.
‘I am not that delicate, love. I don’t need saving. Got everything I need right here at the bottom of this bottle. Now, be a good lad and go tuck yourself in. I will be sure to clean up after myself in the morning,’ Molly giggled intractably, her finger pointed in the direction of the steps.
I knew I did not have a choice. She was in no state to listen to reason. I would have just been trying to crush a rock
with a paper hammer. That about describes the irony of that situation in a nutshell. Had I decided to ring up social services and have words with Mrs Rutledge, I would just have simply been bounced to yet another foster home, placed under some selfish ogre of a guardian that didn’t care much for anything more than using their next foster kid as a means to pick up a paycheck.
Sure, Molly had issues. Who didn’t?
I didn’t quite have El Dorado with Molly, but at least I knew there was a good person inside there, whenever she hadn't been weighed down by ghosts from her past.
Having weighed my options in my head, I walked past the phone and didn’t even think twice about pressing the panic button. My feet were dragged reluctantly up the stairs. I sank my tired body into the mattress and curled up into a tensed ball, gripping both sides of my arms tightly before forcing my eyes shut. I hoped to dream of something pleasant - Anything but what was going on downstairs.
The rumblings from the bathroom beneath me sent tremors up my toes. I could hear choked noises and rampant coughs coming from the floor beneath me. No doubt, it was Molly, discarding the contents of her bowels into the toilet - And not through the right orifice.
I later heard a thud on the steps. The thud turned into a series of bumps, getting louder with each bump that came after the one before. I knew I was forbidden to come out of my room after I had been banished to it for the night by the adult in charge of me but I wasn’t always one to stick to rules.
Sometimes the rush of getting caught flouting the rules was a massive push to do the opposite of what one was expected not to do. Curiosity was the opiate that blinded common sense when I decided against my better judgement to investigate the source of the disturbance.
Molly could have fallen over. She could have split her temple open and been in need of stitches. I threw the sheets that had been held over my head aside and strolled sneakily towards the door, in my bedroom.
Ears pasted firmly against the door, I listened for any further noise. There was nothing but eerie silence coming from beyond the flat pine wood in front of me. I could not bear the angst of just standing there and being non-the-wiser about what was going on out there.
I carefully pushed the door open as quietly as I could. Each creak from the dry hinges made my heart do backflips inside my chest. I paused for an instant and almost did not continue my descent down the stairs when I thought of how nice Molly had been to me from the start. If she needed me, I wasn’t about to let a small thing like baseless fear get in the way.
‘You can do this, John,’ I had whispered to myself reassuringly.
That said, I planted one foot after the other, as I crept cautiously down the dimly illuminated staircase. There only source of light came from the aquarium at the base of the stairs, streaking along the wall behind me, making tall straight shadows in the distance.
I clocked eyes on Molly's nightgown. It seemed steeped in red. Her hands were thrown over her face and seemed contorted in a position that wasn’t humanly possible to maneuver one's joints into.
I remember calling out to her only to find that my voice had been swallowed up by a vacuum of nothingness. My strength was sapped in an instant and I could barely move a single muscle. My muscles had been crippled by trepidation that felt unnatural.
My ears did not have the pleasure of going mute, even for a fraction of a second. I heard the screeching noises of something crawling up the stairs, pacing slowly towards me like a beast in the wild stalking hapless prey.
For what seemed to be a moment, I thought I saw Molly stood before me, her face blackened by darkness with only the white of her nightgown shinning through the haze of swirling black.
There were black holes in the figure's face, maggots dropping from those hollow eyes and teeth black as sooth. Brown water oozed from the haggard creature's mouth when it screamed loudly at me. If there were words lost within the screams, I had a hard time of making out what they were.
‘What are you trying to say? Why do you keep following me everywhere? You scare the bejesus out of me? Please just go away!’ I crammed both thumbs into my ears, attempting to keep the noise down, as the incoherent frightful noises rushing from the hag-like creature got unbearably intense.
I awoke in my bed the next morning with zero recollection of how I got there from where I was the night before. Unsurprisingly, the ever dutiful Molly was there by my bedside, pills in her left hand and a glass of clear, fresh water in the other. Her patience with everything she had to put up with where I was concerned was almost saintly.
She had ploughed a lot of manpower into making me less of a wreck than I was when she had first set eyes on me. All I kept doing on my part was to fall apart on her again and again like some broken down scrap of a car.
TEN
JOHN
‘Was that freaky Henry? Was he upsetting you?’ I frowned crossly, hands pressed on the railings of Molly's hospital bed.
‘Whatever gave you that impression?’ Molly cupped my chin playfully in her hand. ‘And yes, John that was Mr. Winters.’
I paused to process what had been said to me, locking both hands in deep concentration, as if I was divining some solution to a really complicated problem. Molly did not seem to be in completely bad shape. She hadn't broken anything. At least, I could not see any bandages on her limbs or body.
‘Ground control to John... Is there anyone home?’ Molly tapped faintly on my forehead with the tip of her finger, glaring at me through probing eyes.
‘I haven't completely zonked out, you know. I do know you are there,’ I snapped playfully at her, almost leaping into the air in excitement.
‘Sometimes I wonder what goes on in that head of yours. It would make things a lot easier between you and I if I knew what was bugging you half the time.’ Molly groped her side, grimacing uncomfortably.
Her lips had flattened out and her eyes were almost wet with tears. She ached both physically and on the inside. She wasn’t as good as hiding the invisible hurt as she thought she was. I didn’t need to be sheltered from her vulnerabilities. I wished I had the courage or words to tell her that.
‘What is wrong with your sides? Should I call a nurse?’ I lunged at the exit, looking back at Molly for acknowledgement.
‘The buzzer! I can't reach the buzzer!’ Molly's face tensed as she strained to reach a distant chord that seemed to be just beyond her fingertip, her chest crashing roughly into the metal railings of her bed.
I heard her reel in agony, letting out some groans. I ran towards her to see if there was something I could do to ease her pain. Her finger pointed straight at the chord, her hands seeming too heavy or difficult to raise.
I looked behind me to find a white buzzer at the end of a long gray chord. My finger slammed into the switch on the buzzer several times. I clutched the damn thing like my own life depended on it, and sat on the floor beside Molly's bed, my eyes focused on the open door.
‘Miss Radcliffe! Miss Radcliffe! Can you hear me?’ The attending nurse came rushing through the door, darting towards the left of Molly's bed.
I was ushered to a corner, outside the room, but I lounged about outside the door. I stuck my face against the glass of the door, intently observing what was going on inside the room. The nurse rolled back Molly's eyelid and flashed some light into her eyes. I saw the nurse also grip her wrist to feel for a pulse.
There was a sigh of relief seeping from the nurse's lips, as she poked a cannula into Molly's arm. Satisfied that there was nothing further to be done, the nurse marched straight through the door, almost hitting me in the face, as she came through. ‘You haven't returned to your ward?’
My eyes caught the name tag on her chest, pinned towards the right of her, as I struggled to spell out her name “Nurse S-a-n.”
The shimmering lights in the hallway bounced intermittently off the reflective white plastic which the name tag was made from, making it hard to read the small print.
‘That's nurse Sanders, young man,’ The at
tending nurse laughed at my futile attempts at pronouncing her surname, letting out some fleeting gasps of disappointment as she looked down at me.
‘I need to know - will Molly be fine?’ I looked up expectantly at the attending nurse.
‘She is going to be just fine. She was just dehydrated and suffering from aches as a symptom of that. I have set her up with fluids to perk her up,’ The nurse smiled, glaring sympathetically at me. ‘Have you stood outside that door the entire time?’
‘Yes. She would do the same for me,’ I responded snappily without giving the words that fell out of my mouth much thought.
‘You deserve a sticker for being brave and calling for attention the way you did.’ Nurse Sanders slapped sticky paper unto the pocket of the PJ top I was decked in.
‘Let's get you back to your room. Molly will need all the rest she can get.’ Nurse Sanders took my hand in hers and led me away from the adult ward.
I was casually dispatched to the flimsily covered bed which I had awoken in. The nurse disentangled her fingers from my wrist and urged me to climb into bed.
‘Would you like some coloring-in books or maybe a sketchpad to draw something in?’ Nurse Sanders brimmed brightly at me, revealing all thirty two of her gnashers minus one of them that seemed to have been replaced with a false silver tooth. ‘You could do something for Miss Radcliffe. I am sure she would love that. You can hand it to her when she wakes up.’
I sat in a relaxed yoga position on the bed, crossing each foot over the other, then stretched both hands out expectantly. ‘Okay, can I have some crayons and a sketchpad?’
‘I shall see what I can find for you. Don’t wonder off anywhere,’ Nurse Sanders took a few paces backwards, popped her head back into the room to make sure I hadn't suddenly done a disappearing act, and shut the door gently behind her.
I held my breath and waited rather impatiently for nurse Sander's imminent return. I could scarcely disguise the abject boredom that was slowly sucking the life out of me in that place. It was little wonder that people lost the will to live when they had to be stashed away in boring hospitals.
