by Anna Taylor
And then the lawn. The lawn, and her feet moving across it, faster and faster, pounding across the grass, leaping over the fence. The blue of her nightie slipping through the crack in the beekeeper’s door, the swirl and hiccup of the fabric as she throws herself inside, slamming it shut behind her. And that man, bandana still over his face, hurrying through the house, back out onto the lawn, vinegar bottle in one hand, knife in the other, his frantic eyes searching for her across the grass, out over the hills, up into the sky; finding that she has flown away, that she is gone, that she is gone.
Panic
Greta and Mrs O’Brien are in an ambulance outside the Medical Centre.
‘You have had a seizure!’ the officer says to Mrs O’Brien, a little too loudly. He flicks his eyes over his checkboard, finds her name. ‘Mrs O’Brien!’ he calls. ‘Can you hear me?’
She cannot, or perhaps she isn’t listening. She lies, now, on the green vinyl bench where before she had sat. She had sat quite upright with her handbag on her lap, arms crossed over her chest, covering the buttons of her blue gingham shirt, the fabric bulging outwards slightly, displaying pockets of white skin underneath. In a soft American drawl she had said, ‘The more the merrier.’ Another patient was coming in the ambulance too. There would be three of them then: Greta buckled up on the stretcher; Mrs O’Brien on the bench opposite; one more.
The officer had squinted at them from the doorway.
‘I reckon we can squeeze one more in,’ he said, as if they were fillets of mackerel in a can.
Greta tried to nod at him brightly, though she didn’t feel very bright at all.
Mrs O’Brien nodded too. ‘The more the merrier,’ she said, quite chirpily, and then she started.
It seemed like nothing at first, as if she was just cold or a little frightened, her eyes fixed on one spot on the wall, her body shivering all over. Then her neck flopped and her head started flapping around above her chest, her legs and arms going too. The wire-framed glasses she was wearing nearly took out an eye.
The officers took one end each and tried to hold her down. A slick of sweat covered her face, and her body seemed slippery too as it jerked around.
And then she stopped, dead still.
‘You have had a seizure!’ the officer says. His voice is tight, disapproving.
Mrs O’Brien’s light blue eyes are like milk. She stares at the ceiling.
‘Do you have epilepsy, Mrs O’Brien?’ he calls. ‘Do you have seizures?’
He grabs his clipboard and flicks through the pages. There is a Medic Alert bracelet on her wrist. He twists it towards himself, and frowns.
‘Can you hear me, Mrs O’Brien?’ he says. ‘Hello?’
She doesn’t look at him. She seems achingly calm, washed clean.
‘Hello,’ she says, as if she’s just popped in for tea.
He smiles. ‘Hello there,’ he says. ‘Good. What day is it, Mrs O’Brien?’ He begins to feel for her pulse.
She hesitates and her eyes shift slightly from side to side.
‘Sunday,’ she says breezily.
‘You have had a seizure, Mrs O’Brien,’ he says. ‘Do you know that?’
She turns her head and looks him right in the eye. Her voice sounds puzzled.
‘I don’t know you,’ she says.
Outside is a dead autumn afternoon. Mrs O’Brien is right; it is Sunday, and even though they’re in town, parked by After Hours, there is hardly anyone around. The doors of the ambulance are flung open. Mushy leaves fill the gutters. Cars roll by.
Greta tries hard to keep her breathing steady and she tries hard not to look at Mrs O’Brien. If she wasn’t all buckled up she would get the hell out of here, she thinks. If she could walk, she would just get out.
‘You do know me, Mrs O’Brien,’ the officer is saying as if she’s a stupid child. ‘You were talking to me a few minutes ago.’ His tone is incredulous. Then his voice lifts. ‘What just happened?’ he says. ‘Do you know what just happened?’
Mrs O’Brien closes her eyes and makes a gurgling sound in her throat. One foot starts tapping against the vinyl.
‘Here she goes again!’ he says. He places his two hands firmly on her body.
Greta looks away, but on the polished white of the ambulance walls she can see the reflection of Mrs O’Brien’s legs. They slice at the air. The whole vehicle shakes: a drum-beat played out by her limbs. When she looks back, one of Mrs O’Brien’s trouser legs has ridden up, and the veins on her thick white calf seem to be pushing against the underside of her skin. A flap of stomach jiggles around like hard-set gravy.
The other patient appears at the ambulance door with an oxygen mask on, and then is bustled away. Greta holds tight to the edge of the blanket.
Over on the other side of the road she can see a motorbike shop, all closed up for the weekend, and beyond it a small hill with scrappy grass, a slice of sky. She counts to 10 in her head, and then back again: 8, 7, 6, 5 . . .
The shaking stops, abruptly.
‘What’s happening?’ the officer says. ‘You’ve just had two seizures in five minutes, Mrs O’Brien. What’s going on?’
She makes a wordless gabbling sound, her mouth opening and shutting on her tongue, and then she bursts out from under his hands and, choking and gasping, throws herself out the ambulance doors into the white afternoon.
___
Mrs O’Brien is making a fool of herself out on the street in front of everyone. She screams and cries and tries to pummel the ambulance officer with her fists. She collapses into a seizure again, and then out again, and then in. Two police officers stop to try to help, and she wails at the top of her lungs.
‘What have I done?’ she cries. ‘What have I done?’
Another ambulance comes, and they take her away.
‘She doesn’t have epilepsy,’ one officer says to the other as they stand by the open doorway. He laughs almost bitterly. ‘Panic attacks,’ he says. ‘Panic attacks. That’s what the Alert says. It’s in her head.’
He runs his hands through his hair.
Mrs O’Brien had climbed on board and had said to Greta, ‘An ambulance party!’ and had said, ‘The more the merrier,’ quite happily, and then, Greta thinks, she just went under a wave. Just held her breath, and under she went.
*
Mrs O’Brien and Greta are in the corridor of the hospital. They are in their beds, lying on parallel sides, waiting to be seen. Mrs O’Brien’s husband has arrived, and he stands by the bed, holding onto the bars on its side. Her black shiny handbag is slung over his sloping shoulder, and his head is large and flat like a squash racket.
Greta’s mother has arrived too. She sips water out of a plastic cup.
‘Imagine the poor man’s life,’ she says to Greta, so loudly the whole corridor must hear. ‘Seizures caused by panic attacks? Whoever heard of such a thing?’ She clacks her tongue.
Mr O’Brien does not talk to his wife and does not hold her hand. He holds so tightly to the metal bars that his knuckles are bone white. He seems dwarfed, like a child on the wrong side of his cot. His wife’s flighty brown hair and moist head poke out from under the blankets, shuddering back and forth on the pillow.
The hospital staff come and go, dressed in their green plastic uniforms. The lights are bright with a yellow tinge. Doors swing open and shut again.
Mr O’Brien finds the water cooler, and begins trotting back and forth, the rubber from his small black shoes squeaking against the linoleum. He takes water to his wife like an animal might, almost senselessly trying to nudge her back to life. He tips the cup towards her mouth, and her juddering head knocks it, the water slopping out and over onto her neck. She doesn’t seem to notice and he, undeterred, goes back for a refill.
Greta closes her eyes.
‘They’ll see you soon,’ her mother says. ‘Promise.’
But right now they are trying to talk to Mrs O’Brien.
‘Do you know where you are?’ a nurse asks. ‘Are you liste
ning?’
Mrs O’Brien’s voice, light and soft as a child’s, rises off the pillow.
‘Truck,’ she says hesitantly, as if it’s the only word she knows. ‘In a truck.’
‘No, Mrs O’Brien,’ the nurse says. ‘You’re in the hospital.’
Greta keeps her eyes closed, and senses the corridor as something fluid, a body of water. The doors swishing back and forth, the rolling of wheels, the green-uniformed staff like pebbles being rushed along on a current. She and Mrs O’Brien have been struck dumb, she thinks. Stopped short in the middle of an ordinary day. They lie on opposite sides of the corridor, two bloated bodies washed up on the tide.
She can hear the squeaking of shoes going past her bed, and then the slow glugging of the water cooler. Mr O’Brien is going back for more, she realses. Helpless in the face of things, he’s going back for more.
*
Two orderlies come, and they wheel Greta away. She counts the turns by watching the corners on the ceiling twist sharply above her. The orderlies’ shoes squeak and the wheels hum; they are pushing her along, fast, as if she is a trolley in a race.
They wheel her into a booth, her own little room with an animal-print curtain, and her mother sitting beside her, holding her hand. Greta notices the dampness of it—her mother’s hand, normally dry and strong—the slight pulse, deep under the skin.
‘Look at the curtains!’ her mother says. ‘Do you think they’re intended to appeal to the child within?’
Greta is only nineteen, but she doesn’t know if they appeal to her child within, wherever she is. If she were here she would probably kick and scream, so she must be someplace else.
‘Probably,’ says Greta.
Her mother squeezes her hand supportively.
‘What’s that animal?’ she says, pointing to something with spikes and a cartoon nose.
‘An armadillo?’ says Greta.
‘Is it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Really?’
This could go on all day.
The doctor comes. He pulls up a chair, and sits down, and places one hand in the other. He tells Greta and her mother that they will have to do some tests. He says it as if it is neither a good nor bad thing; as if it is the thing he says over and over again, every day—which it probably is, of course. He has a tight, pointy face, and glasses propped right up against his eyes, but his body is lanky and relaxed, like a puppet, or Big Bird.
‘So tell me again what happened,’ he says.
‘She collapsed,’ says Greta’s mother, ‘in the doctor’s surgery.’
‘And you were at the doctor because of back pain?’ he says to Greta.
‘Yes,’ say Greta and her mother at the same time.
‘We’re having trouble reading the doctor’s writing on the notes,’ he says. ‘But it’s kidneys. That’s what we’re thinking?’
‘Yes,’ says her mother. ‘That’s what the other doctor thought. That’s what I think too.’
He turns to look at Greta’s mother for the first time since he started talking, and pushes his glasses further up his nose—which doesn’t seem possible—and he just looks at her for a moment, wondering, perhaps, where she’s come from, how she got here. And then he nods, and smiles.
‘We’ll do some tests,’ he says again, and gets up to leave.
And so that’s what they do. Tests. They know nothing yet, they say, but the tests will tell them everything. All of them, the doctors, the nurses, Greta, her mother—they’re all in the same boat; they’re like children waiting to be taught how to spell; they don’t know yet.
‘I think we know as much as they do,’ Greta’s mother whispers to her. ‘Maybe more.’
The tests begin. A nurse comes and collects blood. The little vials click as she does it. She takes Greta’s blood pressure.
‘Gosh,’ she says brightly, ‘isn’t it low?’
‘That’s why she had to come in the ambulance,’ Greta’s mother says, quite assertively. ‘It’s so low she can’t stand up!’
‘Well, I guess that means you can’t run away,’ says the nurse.
‘Yes,’ says Greta. ‘I would if I could.’
And they all laugh. Ha! Ha! Ha! Greta, too, although actually she meant it.
They need to do a urine test, the nurse says. ‘This is going to be tricky!’ She has a bright, bouncy ponytail and dark rings under her eyes. She and Greta’s mother help Greta into a wheelchair and wheel her down another hallway. Greta’s head lolls pathetically down by her chest. She cannot control it; it is a disobedient dog. Her knees knock against each other, looking for support. She started the day like a normal girl—dressed, shoes on, hair done—and now she is just a jumble of bones and flesh, badly put together, unraveling round the edges like a piece of unfinished knitting. Her skirt rides up around her waist, and her cardigan is tucked in at the back, by mistake.
‘Are you still with us?’ says the nurse from behind.
Greta gives her the thumbs-up. Sure am.
When she’s back in bed—the curtain pulled, her mother sitting beside her, expectantly, like someone waiting for a bus—the doctor comes to visit again. He has a stethoscope hanging round his neck. Under the fluorescent lights, a few hours gone by, he looks tired, his head small and pale like a peeled egg.
‘So we’re waiting for the test results,’ he says, standing awkwardly by Greta’s bed.
‘You know nothing yet?’ says Greta’s mother.
‘No. Not yet.’
He gives them a wavering smile.
‘I want to do an ultra-sound though,’ he says, ‘to eliminate a few possibilities.’
‘An ultra-sound?’ says Greta’s mother. ‘Why?’
‘Standard procedure,’ he says. He smiles encouragingly at them again.
Greta suddenly imagines him getting out of bed, brushing his teeth, eating cereal, watching TV. She sees him as he is—just an ordinary, small-headed, rubbery-limbed man; almost a boy, really, despite his uniform and his stethoscope and the Dr in front of his name.
‘An ultra-sound,’ says Greta’s mother when he’s gone. ‘How ridiculous.’
‘What do you think it means?’ says Greta, trying to keep the anxiousness at bay.
‘Oh, they just like to play with their shiny new machines,’ she says. But after she’s said it, she pulls her lips in tight across her teeth and looks into the distance, as though she can see something there, far away.
Two orderlies come, skimming the curtain briskly back on its rail, undoing the locks on the wheels of Greta’s bed.
‘This one’s off to Radiology?’ they say to the room, themselves, each other: it’s hard to tell which.
They wheel her off into the hallway, and then leave her there.
Greta’s mother says she needs to go to the toilet. Her face wrinkles as she says it.
‘What if they come and take you away while I’m gone?’
‘Just go,’ Greta says. ‘I’ll be fine.’
Her mother bustles off round the corner, one shoe squeaking desperately.
Greta lies looking up at the ceiling for what feels like a long time. Doctors and nurses fly past her and don’t even look twice.
Far off, she can hear something wailing—is it a child or a woman? She would think it was an animal if she didn’t know better. It ebbs, the sound—loud, soft, loud, soft—and then stops abruptly.
Greta holds her own hand, and looks down the corridor; wills her mother to appear around the corner. But she doesn’t. Not at that moment. A small parade comes towards her instead—orderlies, a bed, someone trotting beside it.
It is Mr and Mrs O’Brien.
Well, Mr O’Brien, at least. Greta cannot see Mrs O’Brien at all. The blankets are pulled up tight over her chin, and she is lying still: just a hump under the fabric. Mr O’Brien trots beside the bed, keeping up like a dog on a leash. His enormous head jolts slightly as he walks; he’s almost in a half run. His wife’s black handbag is still slung over his shoulder
—is simply a part of him now—and it swings rhythmically against his leg. He carries two plastic cups, one for himself, one presumably for Mrs O’Brien. He holds them purposefully, out in front of his body, like two trophies, keeping them steady so they don’t spill.
Greta feels glad to see them.
She smiles and lifts her hand up in a half wave.
Mr O’Brien doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t look until he is right up close, passing right beside her bed. He turns his face towards her then, just for a moment. His hair is lifting off his forehead, as though he is walking into a head wind, but there is an expression of buoyant certainty on his face. He nods at Greta earnestly, holding the cups out in front of his chest as if to say—Don’t worry. As if to say—Everything is under control.
History
I.
Lola is on the front porch, saying goodbye to Jack Wright.
The door is ajar behind her, and she leans against the edge of the frame. Jack shifts from side to side, and his eyes shift constantly too. But Lola feels calm, eerily calm, as if a disaster is about to strike, a huge wave perhaps, and she is ready for it. Ready to be dragged under by its great noise.
‘Well, I guess we’re all done,’ Jack says to her, though he turns his head when he says it, out towards the street, the row of roofs, the potted palms by Mrs Jones’s front door.
‘Yes, Jack,’ Lola says. ‘That’s right. All done.’
It is almost evening and the street lights are coming on all the way down Anderson Terrace. Traffic can be heard building up on Mayfair Road. Birds call out faintly, and Lola notices that the sky is a dull heavy grey, almost green, as it sinks down towards the roofs. That greyness is spreading, she thinks, up and out and down. Everything is getting darker.
