Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  This had been my comfortable spot. My hideaway. It didn’t feel like that anymore. Now it felt claustrophobic. Stale air that was depleted of oxygen. Thinking of that made me feel like I wasn’t getting enough, like I might pass out from breathing air with no oxygen. I got up and opened the window that Dell had shut.

  I had a sudden urge to climb back through it. I couldn’t do this, couldn’t be here again. But Dell was coming down the stairs, balancing two plates, so I sat back down. He glanced at the open window, the blinds clattering against it with each gust of wind, but he didn’t say anything.

  He didn’t say anything at all. Just sat down and started to eat. It was the kind of pasta you made from a package. Shrivelled brown specks that were supposed to be mushrooms floating in the watery sauce. I couldn’t eat it. I watched Dell’s plate instead. He was silent as he ate, his fork hitting the plate each time he shovelled up a bite sounding like a bell ringing out. There wasn’t even the soundtrack of a game to drown it out.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Dell.’

  Finally, he put his fork down, and I still couldn’t look at him. Not his face.

  ‘Are you staying? Are you back?’

  When I raised my eyes to his face I couldn’t stop the memory from flooding back, exploding in full colour.

  ‘Dell, you came and got me!’ THAT memory was starting, like I’d just pressed play and couldn’t reach the stop button.

  ‘What?’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’ It was all flooding back. All of it.

  I had stood there, frozen. It was like liquid nitrogen had been poured over me, making it impossible for any bit of me to move. Except my eyes. And what I saw hadn’t made sense, not in a way you can think about. It was like the awful, horrendous scene in front of me could not be real. I didn’t want it to be real. But I couldn’t stop seeing it. Couldn’t stop seeing it, but couldn’t make it real, tangible, something that actually existed.

  It seemed ages before I began to thaw. My phone had been in my pocket, and that’s when I rang Dell. Feet still frozen, the splattered blood nearly reaching them, Grandad’s body, and half his head in front of me, I pulled out my phone and rang Dell.

  ‘Can you come and get me in Kendal?’ I’d asked.

  ‘I’m at work.’

  ‘I know. But I really need you to come get me right now.’ My voice had been so steady, so sure, that it felt like it wasn’t my own.

  ‘I’m off in an hour. Can you wait until then? What’s so important?’

  ‘Trust me, it’s pretty important, Dell. I really need you to pick me up right now.’

  And he had. By the time he had come for me, I had been standing on the front porch, key put under the flower pot where it was always kept. But that was as far as I could get. I’d stood there for nearly an hour, not even able to go back into the entrance way where it was warmer. That image of Grandad’s room had refused to get out of my head.

  Dell had saved me. Seeing him had made it go away. He had let me walk away. Let me pretend that I had never found what I did. He didn’t ask questions; he didn’t want to know. He let me leave and let the home care lady, who would be in at five, find him instead.

  Only, she wasn’t the one who came. She called in sick, and there was nobody to cover. Mom went instead. I made Mom have to live with that image. I made Mom, who had only had her dad for a small part of her life, have the last image of him be that.

  And Dell had let me. Even when I tried to tell him what I’d found, and couldn’t, he had let me not tell him. Finally, when I couldn’t get any other words out I just said he was dead – nothing more. And then I had begged him to not say that I had been there, that I couldn’t be the one tell my mom about it, and he had let me just leave.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, remembering this. Maybe not long, but I knew what to say now.

  ‘Dell, I was never here in the first place. Not really.’ I tried to say it kindly, even though I’m not really good at that sort of thing. It was the truth. I had sat here, in this room, several evenings a week for almost a year since then, but I hadn’t been here at all. Because how could that have been me? How could it, if I’d spent all of those nights without a single word, without a single thought about that day?

  I wanted it to end that way. It felt as true, and right as it could be. But of course, I was only one half of this break up. This being my first one, I didn’t have a lot of experience with them, but I’d heard enough to know that they were not always pretty.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Jane?’ That was enough to make it impossible for me to contain everything that wanted to spill out.

  ‘What is wrong with me? How can you ask that?’ I could barely hear myself above the buzzing in my head. It was there as suddenly as if someone had turned a volume control on an amp too far. ‘How could you let me forget? How could you not ask me one single thing about that day? Didn’t you wonder what was wrong? This room is like a black hole, sucking everything from me. Who knows what I’ll forget next. I could have almost forgotten Emma, sitting here talking about nothing, doing nothing. Rotting. Rotting. Rotting.’ The words brought pictures of rotting flesh flashing, flashing through my brain.

  ‘Stop shouting,’ Dell’s voice sounded more like a whisper. ‘My dad is sleeping. Let me––’

  I wanted to let him finish, I wanted to shut up; I just couldn’t. The words at the back of my brain were pushing and shoving to get out.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Everything is wrong, really wrong, because I shouldn’t be here while Emma is in that torture chamber. How is she there when it should be me? Because I would have figured it out, if it was me. I’d know that something is fucking wrong when you have your body pumped with drug after drug for three years and yet you are still getting worse and worse. I would have known there was something wrong with that. I would have looked into it, would have figured out the drug companies were controlling the hospital, the doctors, all of it. But instead, here I am, doing nothing. And you are letting me.’

  ‘Please, Jane, stop.’ I knew I was out of control. I knew he was right, but I couldn’t stop.

  ‘I can’t do this anymore …’ Seeing Dell’s dad at the top of the stairs, looking like he wanted to kill someone, did stop me. There wasn’t much guess work in figuring out who he wanted to kill.

  ‘You bloody well WON’T do this anymore!’ he boomed. He came charging down the stairs.

  ‘Dad, hold on,’ Dell pleaded.

  For a moment I thought he really might kill me, when he grabbed my arm. I would have deserved it. Waking someone working night shift at the mine was about the worst thing you could do.

  It turned out he wasn’t going to kill me, but he wasn’t going to put up with any more noise either. He started to march me, bouncer-style, up the stairs.

  ‘Dad, I really think there’s something wrong with Jane,’ Dell shouted up the stairs, as Alan opened the door and shoved me out of it, with not a word. It wasn’t until the door slammed behind me that I understood what Dell had been trying to say.

  I stood on the doorstep, trying to slow my thoughts to process the last fifteen minutes. I wanted to feel relief at having ended it, but all I felt was dread, and fear. The horrible, hurtful words wouldn’t stop hurling through my brain. For once I was glad that Alan was such an ass. He’d saved me from attacking his son any more than I already had. What is wrong with you, Jane? That was a question I just couldn’t think about.

  I went to the park instead of going home. I couldn’t go home. I felt too jumpy for that.

  The night before, sitting with my drawings and notes, I had felt focused and sure. Now everything felt wrong and upside down and I couldn’t stop the pictures in my head. I felt like crying it was hurting so much trying to keep them out.

  I sat down on one of the swings and tried to put my sweatshirt over my hands so I could hold the chains without touching the freezing metal. As
soon as I started to pump my legs, pulling hard on the chains to reach the highest point I could, I started to feel like I could breathe again. I was a kid who had spent hours on swings and I still secretly loved them. I’d never grown out of that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you drop down, falling, with only a bit of old tyre under you to ensure you don’t hit the ground.

  The pictures faded. The buzzing quieted. I closed my eyes and let myself get lost in the pendulum.

  I’d meant to waste an hour or so, and get in the door just about the time my parents were falling asleep in front of the television. I was pretty certain that’s where they would be.

  Somehow though, it was now 11:30pm and all of the lights were off in the house. Something was happening to the time. I was so used to there being too much of it, and now suddenly it was disappearing.

  The door was locked and I had to find the key under the mat to let myself in. Mom didn’t know that Dad and I never locked the door when she stayed at the hospital. All of the things that she was usually in charge of just didn’t happen at all when she wasn’t here. It had begun to feel weirdly like I was a guest the nights that she actually was home, like the dishevelled mess Dad and I usually lived in transformed itself into a Bed and Breakfast, with its list of rules to be followed.

  I wanted to sleep, to fall into nothingness. I got into bed and tried to do that. But there were too many images when I closed my eyes. Too many words still running through my brain. About Grandad. About Emma. About Dell. Nothing would stop.

  So I turned on the light again. There were so many papers all over the floor. Mine had been the only room I hadn’t cleaned. I was certain there were patterns there; and I hadn’t wanted to move the papers in case I covered up the links. It had felt like I was close to finding what Dr Jonathan was trying to tell me I should find. I just needed to put the pieces together, to find an alternative to what the hospital was saying was going to happen. I knew what was coming. Of course I did.

  I tried to pick up my notes, to make sense of them, but my hands weren’t working so well. There seemed to be red blotches all over them. Jesus, of course they weren’t working well, I had been outside for hours.

  I hadn’t had gloves, or a jacket. How many hours had I been outside? I wanted to worry about this. What was I thinking? And how hadn’t I noticed that it was cold; that my hands were losing all feeling? People lose fingers to the cold. These thoughts went through my head, but it was like they couldn’t stick long enough for me to really process them.

  I just needed to focus. The pictures would stop when I got back to the research I had to do. It was up to me to find out what the hospital was hiding. Now that I had dealt with the Dell situation I should be able to do that. There wouldn’t be any more messages and phones ringing to interrupt me. Sleep was just going to have to wait.

  I was up early, but Dad was up earlier. He didn’t follow the routine that Mom and I did. I hate morning people, even when they happen to include Dad.

  ‘I was just going to wake you.’ He was making pancakes. I looked at the time on the microwave to make sure I wasn’t confused again. Nope, it really was only 7:30am, far too early for food.

  ‘What’s the rush? It’s Sunday.’ I poured myself a cup of coffee and stuck my nose over it, trying to block the sickly sweet smell of the pancakes.

  ‘We’re going early. Emma wants to talk to us all, to you mostly.’

  ‘What is there to talk to me about? It isn’t like I am going to have a say, is there? It isn’t like Emma even has a say, not that she would ever go against what the almighty doctors tell her she has to do.’ I didn’t want to have this conversation – with Dad or with Emma. It was pointless, because it was just going to lead to talking about something that wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t let it happen. I just had to figure out exactly how I would stop it.

  ‘I know this isn’t easy for you, Jane. Mom and I are really worried about you.’ He put a plate with two banana pancakes in front of me. The smell was nauseating. I was certainly not going to eat them.

  ‘I can’t talk about this. If I do, we are both going to regret it.’ I got up to leave the room, but Dad put his hand on my shoulder, stopping me.

  ‘Jane, you are going to the hospital with us and you are listening to your sister.’

  I was all nerves on the drive. People use that saying, ‘all nerves’, but I’m not sure they actually know what it means. Today I could feel those nerves firing. Hundreds and thousands of them.

  It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to hear whatever it was that Emma was going to tell me. I pretty much knew what that was anyway. I was afraid to see Emma because for the last day I hadn’t been able to see her as whole. She was this jumble of words and pictures. Words and pictures that were making me excited and scared all at the same time. She was a network of cells that were struggling to free themselves from the poisons that invaded through the portal of a needle. I could see those cells shrinking away from the invaders, but I couldn’t see Emma in my head anymore.

  Only, now I was pretty sure that if the invaders were stopped the damage could be undone. I had a backpack full of notes that had solutions. I just needed help to make sense of them. Dr Jonathan could do that. I knew he could.

  Of course, this wasn’t something I could share with Emma until I was certain. Today she needed me to keep lying to her, to comfort her about what they were going to do to her. I needed to be her big sister. And I didn’t know if I could do that. Everything in my head was moving so fast.

  Dad tried to prepare me as we walked through the lobby of the hospital.

  ‘I know you have opinions on this, Jane. But can you just listen to Emma today? Just this once?’ Dad had a way of saying things, like nothing else in the world was as important as what he was asking me to do. It always made me want to do what he asked, even when I wanted to do the exact opposite.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I answered honestly, but the buzzing was coming back. It was this building. I couldn’t think straight in it.

  ‘She is so afraid, and we need to be strong for her.’

  I couldn’t do this yet. I would. But not yet.

  ‘Have you got some coins? I just want to get Emma a Fanta.’ I tried to sound as casual as I could. It worked. He fished some money out of his pocket.

  ‘I’ll meet you up there, okay?’

  The words and the pictures were crashing through my head again. Only this time they were chased by Emma’s fear. I needed to hurry. I needed to find Dr Jonathan and make him tell me how we could stop Emma from losing her leg, how we could make her better. She couldn’t lose any more.

  It took me a long time to find him. I walked down every corridor on every floor. He was nowhere.

  Then I took out my jumble of notes and I organised them in chronological order. And then I went through them again with highlighters, until the pattern was clear.

  It was the pattern that was reassuring me. I needed reassurance. When I was moving or letting the thoughts go, I could see it – that every treatment Emma had undergone in three years was systematically making her worse. Number of drugs administered: increasing in numbers and complexity of regimes. Continuous days in hospital: increasing. Drug companies supplying said drugs: all traced to not more than three. I had dozens of printouts from websites attesting to the detrimental effects of chemotherapy. I had details of two previous lawsuits brought against the hospital. The highlighter showed me the path through all of this.

  But when I stopped, I started to doubt myself. It seemed more confusing. I couldn’t remember what Dr Jonathan had said to me. I felt like I was missing a piece. I needed to find him.

  So I walked again. I walked faster, in case I was missing him, or he was ahead of me and I couldn’t catch up. And I let the thoughts crash and crash around my head until the pattern was crystal clear. Of course I could see the pattern no one else could. No one was brave enough to look for it.

  No one but myself and Dr Jonathan. When I spotted his bl
ue coat ahead of me on the very bottom floor—the basement – I couldn’t stop myself from running. It was perfect. Nobody would overhear our conversation on the morgue floor.

  Time had sped again. Two hours gone. Two hours spent in conspiratorial bliss. Everything was so clear now though. It was unbelievable that nobody else could see it.

  There was another option for Emma. It had been there in plain sight, but none of the senior doctors wanted to go against the powerful drug companies. It was up to me to fight them. Fight them for Emma’s sake.

  ‘Jane, where on earth have you been?’ Her question stopped me from feeding another coin into the drink machine. I hadn’t expected Mom to come up behind me like that. I had kind of forgotten where I was supposed to be.

  ‘Just a minute.’ I couldn’t concentrate on putting the right money in the machine and answering her. And I really needed a drink.

  ‘Your sister is beside herself worrying about you. You can’t just disappear on her. Not today.’

  ‘Sorry, I just got a little caught up talking with Dr Jonathan.’ I thought about telling her what we had been discussing, but it didn’t seem like a very good idea – not yet anyway.

  ‘What is he doing here on a Sunday, with time to chat?’ she said. ‘I thought the only place you’d find a doctor here on a Sunday was the emergency operating theatre.’

  Mom was not letting me out of her sight again. She even followed me into the toilets when I asked to make a stop on the way. I couldn’t blame her I suppose.

  I was ready to be there for Emma now though. I was armed with ammunition. I could take it. I just needed to get through this day. Monday couldn’t come soon enough.