Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs

by G J Lee

  Chapter 21

  Back to St Mary’s

  I had to take the next day off school. I was nervous and shaking and didn’t want to eat. I stayed on the sofa watching daytime television as my bedroom was becoming a scary place for me to be in. I was jumpy. I didn't know what was what anymore. I didn’t know to expect Lizzie, a bad dream or more visions from a different time or place. I looked in the mirror in the front room and realised that I looked tired and thin. Worse. To my horror I realised that I had developed two spots, one on the side of my nose and one on my chin. The one on my chin was angry red and the other one a proper whitehead. I pinched and poked at the one clinging to the side of my nose for a good five minutes and made the area around the spot sore and even redder. I attacked it so violently that it began to bleed. I gave up, washed my face and returned to the sofa and my duvet. I was totally miserable.

  Dad popped in twice during the day to make sure I was OK. The first time was around midday and he ate his ham sandwiches with me. But I ate nothing. Then he reappeared at three with some tomato soup but I didn’t feel like that either. Something was happening. I was feeling worried and agitated again.

  After Dad left I tried to nap but every time I closed my eyes I found myself back in the cupboard, with the bucket, coats and cat pee. The feeling of terror, of loneliness, of fear, followed a second or two afterwards. Like thunder follows lightening. I snapped my eyes open and the vision and fear dwindled away. So I made sure I stayed awake. It was exhausting. I felt tired enough anyway.

  At about five ‘o’ clock, just before Dad came home for the evening, I tumbled into some sort of trance and the dark and the smell and the fear came again. This time I was listening at the cupboard door, at the noises from the outside, and was certain I could hear low moans distantly. It pumped more distress into my already fragile system. I felt like a matchstick tower in a sharp wind. Another gust and I’d just collapse and crumble from pure terror.

  I woke up, went back to the bathroom and plunged my face into a sink of freshly run cold water.

  Dad was going to give the hospital a miss this evening but he wanted me to see Mum within the next few days. She wasn’t any better and Dad said that she was missing me. I wanted to see Mum but, as you know, I wasn’t keen on hospitals and was scared of what condition I’d find her in. I hadn’t seen her in a while. Still, I agreed and we watched awful TV whilst Dad wolfed down sausage and mash. I just had a few spoonfuls of tomato soup.

  Lizzie stayed away.

  I had mixed feelings about this. I had grown fond of the little grey girl from 1946 and when she didn’t visit I felt like I had said or done something wrong. Maybe. Or maybe Ernie had been found and they didn’t need me anymore.

  I hoped that this was it. But if it was then the visits by Lizzie and the trips to 1946 might come to an end. I had grown fond of the Raynors. They had been through a lot. The war, the shortages of food. I remembered the way Lizzie had wandered with wonder and astonishment through our house. Like a child in a toy shop. In fact that was exactly what it was like and I wondered how I would react if I visited a future decades away. I decided that I wouldn’t want to. I was fascinated by my trips to rusty old 1946, where the absence of plastic, microwaves and TV made things so much simpler.

  Grown-ups were always going on about how things were more honest and less confusing when they were children. I remembered Mum telling me about the evenings that she spent with her Gran and Granddad when she was seven or eight. Television and radio was a big part of her life and most people had them by then. But when Mum stayed at her Grandparents they didn’t have a television so they listened to the radio. They talked and played simple board games brought out of dusty cupboards. Games like Draughts, Ludo, Snakes and Ladders. They would slurp hot cups of weak, sweet tea with sugar on toast and listen to the BBC World Service. Whatever that was. Her Gran and Granddad would tell her stories about the war that included their wider family. They even told her stories from the first war. One tale from the second war I remember. So the story goes an Uncle or Cousin or someone had refused to go to their shelter during a German air raid and a big bomb had crashed down through the chimney. The bomb completely destroyed the chimney and one side of the house. But it had landed, dusty and dangerous, in what was left of the fireplace. Apparently this Uncle or Cousin wrapped the bomb in a blanket. With help from another Uncle or Cousin or someone they managed to remove the bomb into the street. Funny that both Mum and me should remember this story. And even funnier that the Cousins or Uncles or whoever should wrap a bomb in a blanket.

  Then I thought of Mum and I felt sad. I remembered what we were doing when she told me all this. It was Christmas. Me, Mum and Dad were stuffed round with turkey and my Dad’s Mum and Dad, my Gran and Granddad, had just left. We had waved goodbye at the window as their little red car drove through the drizzle and cold wind that was Christmas tea-time. After their car had bumbled around the corner at the end of our street we returned with a tin of Quality Street chocolates to the TV. But we had had enough of television. Although Dad had grumbled, Mum turned the TV off and got some old board games that had been left in the bottom of an old cupboard somewhere upstairs. We played Tiddleywinks for a bit then had a game of Cluedo which I loved and for a long time afterwards I got my friends at primary school to come around and play. But the days grew longer and warmer and we spent more time in the park playing football. So the games were returned to the old cupboard somewhere upstairs and forgotten. They are probably still there now and I had a sudden impulse to go and dig them out. But I didn’t. Although I felt sad at the memory I found that I was smiling, smiling at the thought of one damp Christmas afternoon.

  The memory stayed for a bit, like heat held in an oven turned off. And I fell into a deep, long and much needed sleep.

  The following day was a Saturday so I didn’t have school but Dad suggested that I really should go with him to visit Mum. I smiled half-heartedly but agreed.

  At St Mary’s I was again intimidated by the train station busy-ness of it all, the broken limbs, bandaged arms and general feeling of human beings in trauma. In trauma because they’re not working properly. Like broken machines. We hurried past the knickknack shop and the nearly empty cafeteria then made our way to Waltham Ward. This time we took the lift. We shared it with a man in a suit and a nurse with a tea-trolley. The china rattled madly as she got in and out of the lift. It seemed that Dad was in no mood to take the stairs. He was preoccupied, had something on his mind. He was reluctant to make small talk.

  The plump Karen had been replaced by a female nurse. This nurse was thin and angry with big round glasses and feint white whiskers sprouting from her chin. No warm welcome from this one. She was abrupt and got straight to the point.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  Dad was in no mood either. “Mrs Webber. We’ve come to see her.”

  It seemed like she was looking for escaped prisoners or something as she looked us up and down and referred suspiciously to some bits of paper on a counter in front of her.

  “And you are?”

  Dad was impatient. “I’m her husband and this is her son.”

  Still not totally convinced the hairy nurse looked at us a moment longer. Then she beckoned Dad to follow her. They moved away and whispered together like snakes. The hairy nurse didn’t smile and when she spoke she kept a serious face. When she’d finished speaking the nurse looked at Dad over the top of her specs, making sure he’d understood. Dad nodded. Surprisingly the nurse placed a gentle hand on his back. She stroked his jacket tenderly. They both turned to me at the same time. The nurse to smile weakly at me and return to her bits of paper on the counter and Dad to put a reassuring hand in the middle of my back. I wasn’t sure if it was to start me off in the right direction.

  Or something much worse, like a comforting hand.

  Whatever it was I had to admit things didn’t look good.

  The short distance was an example of just why I didn’t like hospi
tals. I caught a glimpse of a man being sick into a cardboard bowl from between drawn curtains. Next a woman asleep but with all sorts of tubes coming from her. These tubes were connected to a series of bleeping machines placed around her bed. She looked so pale that I had to keep looking just to make sure she hadn’t given up and given in to the D Word.

  I still wasn’t sure when we arrived at Mum’s bed.

  After that I didn’t particularly care.

  To say that Mum looked ill would be an understatement. She did look ill. That was for sure. More than last time.

  But I wasn’t prepared for just how much.

  Mum seemed to be asleep. She had her eyes closed in the same way as the woman I had just seen. And, again like the woman I had just seen, I had to look closely to see the hospital blankets drawn up to her chest move as she breathed. Mum had her arms stretched out beside her on top of the blankets. I couldn’t believe how still more thin and pale they had become. Where once Mum’s arms were golden brown, cuddly strong and smooth they now looked like pale sticks and her fingers long and crab-leg thin. In fact she hardly filled the bed at all. She had become a slight bump underneath the blankets.

  We both stood looking at her and that gave me a chance to look a little closer at her face.

  Her sweet smelling, long brown hair had gone. It was now very short, only an inch or so in length. And I couldn’t believe just how clear the shapes of her bones were. I could now see her for what she was. In fact, what everybody was! Just thin skin strung out over a white frame. It reminded me of bed sheets put on a radiator to dry. You could see the shape of the metal poking through. In fact her skin was bed-sheet thin. It was grey with pale red blotches on her forehead and on her small neck. Even her once great black eyelashes had become pale.

  I felt afraid.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off of what was left of my Mum.

  Without thinking my right hand felt for the fabric of Dad’s coat. Mum was so unfamiliar. So strange. I needed the reassurance of something that had kept its shape. Something solid. Something that hadn’t changed. Would always stay the same.

  Even if it was Dad’s coat.

  The truth was that the person lying in the bed in front of me looked like my Mum. But wasn’t. It resembled my Mum. It resembled my Mum in the same way a shadow resembles the person who is casting it. That’s where the phrase a shadow of their former self comes from, I suppose. I know Dad felt the same as we just kept standing and looking.

  After a while I felt Dad’s hand brush my back again. Adults weren’t that different to us kids after all. Everybody needed somebody sometime in their lives.

  And while we stood and watched hospital life talked and walked and bleeped on around us and I had a feeling that the people who should care didn’t. My Mum was lying ill in front of us and life carried on. It didn’t stop. But then I remembered the people I’d seen in the hospital, people with their own problems. I realised that, to them, we didn’t matter. They were all having a little battle of their own. A battle with the dreaded D Word. All desperately wanting a little more of that fragile thing called life. And so I looked on at Mum and realised that life was fragile and it was special and I tried to work out what life actually was. How we got it. How it might go away. I thought of the Raynors again and their ‘gifts’ and how they were fighting to keep Ernie alive so they could all spend more time with him.

  I frowned in thought. I realised that time was what we all wanted. More time. Extra time with the people we liked the most in life. I had a feeling that we were all living in one huge egg timer. Like the little grains of sand inside we were all slipping through to who knows where. Mum and Ernie Raynor were both struggling to stay in the top bit, helped by the people they knew and loved. As I looked around the hospital I saw some people that were slipping away into the bottom bit. Slipping away towards the D Word and into who knows where.

  At that point I selfishly wanted Mum to wake up so we could go. And I felt really bad for having that thought. Inside my head I told myself off.

  But it wouldn’t go. I wanted to be away from all this pain and suffering, away from Mum and Dad. Decades away in fact.

  I longed for my new friend Elizabeth Raynor.

  It was then that Mum’s cat-like eyes slowly opened and she saw us and smiled and what I knew to be my Mum was poured back into her like jelly into a mould.

  “Hello you,” she said to me weakly and held out a thin arm.

  So we stayed for forty-five minutes exactly. And although that need to escape never left me, things got easier. Mum sat up and a little colour returned to her cheeks. She talked and smiled and even chuckled here and there.

  Just like my Mum used to.

  And I was glad Mum had replaced the stranger I had seen earlier. Dad held one of her hands constantly. It seemed like if he let go she would slip back into that pale sleep, towards the bottom bit of the egg-timer, towards who knows where and the D Word. I felt like I should hold onto Mum’s other hand. Just to make sure. But I felt embarrassed at the thought so I didn’t.

  Before we left I had that feeling of someone looking at me. Of someone interested watching me closely. I had remembered the strange old man from the last visit and had cautiously looked out for him. Although his bed had shown signs of use he wasn’t to be seen. But with that feeling of being watched I glanced around knowing full well what to expect.

  And there he was.

  He was lying flat on his back in his bed with covers pulled up to his stubbly chin. His head turned towards me. Wide eyes staring hard. In fact, throughout what was left of our visit he didn’t move, just stared blankly. Unblinking. I didn’t like it one bit and I got goose-pimples and now I really wanted to go.

  Although I loved my Mum and wanted her home I wanted to get out and was glad when Dad fished in his pockets for some change so I could buy the cokes in the cafeteria. I gave Mum a cuddle goodbye. She smelt clean but no longer of strawberries or those shampoos, shower gels or perfumes that girls use.

  Just clean.

  So I left and looked back and Mum was smiling. She raised one weak arm in goodbye. Dad was smiling too.

  And so was the old man in the bed. Warm. Playful. Familiar.

  He was smiling at me.