* * *
The moment Daniel answers the phone Alex knows it’s his dark haired nurse. And even before the call has ended he’s sussed out that she and Daniel are an item. Looking back, their behaviour towards each other in the hospital should have been a dead giveaway. The thought of seeing her again pleases him greatly. But the way Daniel is now talking to her on the phone doesn’t please him at all. Such ludicrous accusations. Alex has seen that nurse at work on the ward. He knows she’d have made every effort to see him off if humanly possible. Held up in the children’s ward, was she? Well, a nurse can’t just walk out on a child mid-feed or mid-bath, or halfway through reassuring them that their surgery is safe, or promising them that their hair will re-grow, that their scars will eventually heal, that the pain will soon fade. And now she’s on her way over. He rather wishes she wasn’t, not while Daniel is in this vindictive mood. She’d do well to stay away.
There are no raised voices as such when she arrives. Her voice is focused and professional; she virtually ignores Daniel and comes straight through to the sitting room – it seems her business is with her patient, not her boyfriend. She tries for the same old comforting smile, but her look of anxiety gets in its way.
“Hello, Alex. I’m so sorry I didn’t catch you before you left this morning,” she begins. “But then, you know what it was like in that place.” Her eyes search the room for a while; she then sits on the arm of the sofa, hands on her lap, facing him.
“I’ll be helping Daniel look after you while you’re here – while you’re getting back on your feet.” With a smile she adds, “I’m Gulnaz, by the way. I think first name terms from here on, don’t you?” Her face turns serious again. “Of course we’re hoping that you’ll soon be able to tell us where you live. We’re worried for you, and for anyone who might be back home, desperate for news.”
She waits, as though her prompt might just free his tongue. He grunts a weak negative and hopes that his eyes will do the rest in saying that even if he could speak he couldn’t tell her.
“Well, we don’t expect you’ll be here long,” she continues. “Still, I think we can do rather better than this, don’t you? Let’s get you a decent bed, and some entertainments. You need quality rest, but you also need some stimulus. Is there anything I can be getting you now to eat or drink?”
Alex moves his head and tries his best to return the smile, but his heart is no more in it than hers. She stands up to go. Daniel is calling from the kitchen.
“Oh! I nearly forgot. A message from your physiotherapist. Seems you two rather hit it off. He said to remind you you’ve promised to dance and sing at his wedding. So you need to get practising. Working your voice. Building your muscles.”
She feigns bemusement, chuckles and leaves him to ponder his orders. She’s careful to pull the door closed behind her, but it doesn’t stop the ensuing argument from reaching him. Nurse Gulnaz, it turns out, does not approve of him being here. She doesn’t trust in Daniel’s competence. Or his patience. If only she’d witnessed the incident with that child’s pram. Their voices begin drifting away from the flat. Alex’s instinct is to follow. The front door is still open, the lobby entrance door as well. Still blockaded by the bicycles, he can go no further than the stairwell, but it’s enough to catch the gist of their quarrel. They’re parting. Alex spins round in the chair and takes the corner just fast enough not to be seen. He’s back in the lounge by the time Daniel slams shut the front door.
Good god.
His illness.
All in the mind.
That’s what the nurse had said.
Could it really be that? They were not real memories. They were nothing more than some quirky side-effect of his injuries, or the coma, or the alleged drug-taking. Not only did the attack on that woman have no connection with Daniel or this place, it had never even happened. Alex has never been anywhere near these streets, never seen that pub before, never set foot in this flat or any other similar, never met that poor little cat before now. It certainly gets Daniel off the hook: his version of events, their years of estrangement, no longer needs jaw-dropping coincidence in order to hang together. All very tidy for Daniel. Not so tidy for Alex. For Alex it means facing his entire past as a totally blank canvas once more.
Hardly surprising then, that when their rooms are swapped he has little enthusiasm for television or reading. The last thing he needs is a head filled with more fictional drama. He lies back on the bed, turns to one side, eyes picking over the details laid bare by the solitary streetlight. A fitted wardrobe, a chest of drawers, the TV, and his wheelchair with crutches propped against the handles. The space is carved into trapeziums of light. No need to look to the window to tell him why. No need to be reminded of his sick fantasies filled with prison cells and desperate escapes. He rolls over and buries his face in the pillow. This is no time to be letting the despair back in.
But in it comes, regardless. In his next dream he is back behind bars, this time alone. Either the woman has gone or she is dead. He lies on his back, naked, paralysed by the terror of the approaching figure from the doorway. His captor, an ugly giant of a man, carries a bowl of steaming soup in his oven-gloved hands, each step weighed with the exactness of a tightrope walker. As he comes alongside he smiles, extends his stubby arms and slowly pours the boiling liquid over Alex’s belly. Alex wakes with a cry, still clinging to the horror of the moment, before a griping abdominal pain rudely puts him straight. It wrings him out, hand over fist along his gut – one potato, two potato, three potato, four. For all his nurses’ conditioning, nature has chosen to kick in twelve hours early. He rolls over with cramps, allows himself a controlled fall from the bed onto the floor and manhandles himself backwards into the chair. An unstoppable shift is already underway inside. Experience tells him he has about four minutes. The old board Daniel had found for sliding him between his wheelchair and the bed, though it had proved unusable due to their difference in height, for this job would have done perfectly. Too late to wake Daniel now and waste time trying to communicate the nature of his crisis. His only hope is to reclaim the board from the hallway and somehow get it up onto his knees.
The board has been upended against the coat rack. Luckily, it’s long enough to reach without him needing to bend more than a little, and light enough to grip between the wrists and raise over one armrest. In tandem with some deft reverse steering, Alex finally gets it across his lap, still just enough room to squeeze through the bathroom door, and with a minute or so to go before disaster strikes. With the chair forty-five degrees to the pan, brakes firmly on, he pushes himself as far forward as possible and eases down his pyjamas. He makes a bridge of the board, resting one end on the toilet seat and pushing the other beneath his right buttock. Heaving on the handrail, he shuffles along until the toilet has his full weight, withdraws the board, and blissfully lets go…
…So, now for the one job that remains beyond his powers. He’s been through this so many times with the nurses. But it’s in their job description to deny patients their dignity and privacy. Out of hospital, with a brother who is still a relative stranger, what he’s about to do remains deeply humiliating. But that’s the deal. He closes his eyes and draws as much air from his lungs as possible. He feels sorry too for Daniel, rudely awoken and dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, only to be confronted by this.