The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 29

Some people fantasise about being rescued by firemen.

The fantasy perhaps involves muscular men, faces coated in a manly quantity of soot and sweat, pushing bodily through the flames that dare not touch them in their heavy boots, to sweep the invalid victim off her feet and carry her, slung across one shoulder, bosom heaving, hair flapping around her curiously untouched face, to moonlit safety.

Having been rescued by the fire services of Istanbul, I can report that this is not the case.

Smoke inhalation rendered me unconscious; I woke in pain, on a bed in an ambulance, to find a woman with a face like a rotting potato cutting my trousers away from my legs. I tried to speak, and my lungs were full of flame. I tried to move, and my arms were fallen ebony. Another woman, this one younger, brown-black lipstick, heavy shadow around her eyes, stepped forward and said, in Turkish, a language I do not speak well at all,

“Can you hear me, ma’am?”

She gave me water. The water burned, and I wanted more.

“Ma’am, can you tell me your name?”

“Hope,” I said, before I could remember to lie. “My name is Hope.”

The elder woman continued cutting at my clothes, oblivious to the activities around her. The doors to the ambulance were open, and I could hear fire still raging, see its light cast across the tarmac of the street, hear the sounds of men rushing, masonry crumbling. Who had called the fire engines in? Unlikely I’d ever know; a stranger without a name, who’d saved my life.

“Are you experiencing…” A series of words that I didn’t understand in Turkish, accompanied by careful gestures on the paramedic’s own body, indicating places perhaps where I should be feeling pain. I stared at her uncomprehending, tasted soot on my teeth, felt the air rush through my suddenly hollowed-out, suddenly scorched nose. I shook my head, and the young paramedic smiled awkwardly, trying to find different words, in an easier language.

With a sharp tear the elder removed the last of my severed trouser leg, ripping it up the seam. The flesh beneath seemed remarkably unburned, save for a patch around the back of my left calf, though I couldn’t remember how that part had been injured.

The junior listened to my heart, my lungs, took blood pressure, put a mask over my face. I understood very little of the conversation that ensued, the junior uncertain, the elder uninterested, until at last the latter looked up and barked in strict, unyielding English, “Nausea? Blurred vision? Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Hospital: we go to hospital now. You family, friends?”

“No.”

“Embassy?”

“Is that necessary?”

She stared at me like I was a fish too stupid to swim, then turned away. “We go hospital,” she barked, and as a final thought, “You okay. Very okay.”

In the hospital they put me in a booth cordoned off by sky-blue curtains. A nurse plugged me into a heart monitor, took my blood pressure again, an EEG, put an O₂ monitor on my finger. As she worked, a doctor appeared, and listened to my lungs, listened to the paramedics, shone a torch into my eyes, examined numbers on a screen, looked at the burn on the back of my leg, another on my left shoulder blade, another down the side of my left arm, tutted, then smiled at me and repeated the motto of the moment, “You okay! You very okay.”

Then he turned to a junior doctor, a girl in a grey headscarf, a doll with a painted face, gave her orders and marched away. She turned to me and said in flawless English, “Ma’am, you have suffered some mild burns and smoke inhalation. We are going to put you on a nebuliser and keep you in overnight for monitoring. Do you have health insurance?”

“Yes,” I wheezed.

“That is good; I will fill out a report for you, you will need it to make a claim.”

So saying, she marched away.

I stayed in the hospital until the first dose of nebuliser ran out. No one came to check on me, except the evening porter to see if anyone needed a cup of tea. He was used to meeting strangers; my presence was no surprise.

After five hours in the hospital bed, a nurse pulled back the curtains and found me, and was surprised. She looked at my chart, looked at my face, smiled uneasily, and strode away. A few minutes later the matron appeared, and went through the same procedure, smiled as uncertainly as her colleague, turned her back on me and exclaimed, “Who signed in this patient, please?!” in a voice that rang across the floor.

I considered trying for another dose of heparin on the nebuliser, making a bigger meal of my burns, but the hospital had already forgotten me. Sometimes it’s only paperwork that keeps you alive — without it, even the memorable can die of forgetting.

Clothes in tatters, stuck in a tea-stained gown, I hobbled through the slumbering corridors of the hospital until I found an in-patient ward where the night nurse was sleeping and the lights were dim. From a woman lying on one side, a bandage around her head and hands beneath her cheek like a child, I stole a pair of trousers and some slightly too large shoes. From an ancient lady with pipes taped to the end of her nose and corner of her mouth, I stole seven hundred lira in mixed notes. I changed in a toilet, and sat on the cold floor and shook for a while as waves of nausea rocked the world beneath my feet. I drank a sip of water, and it was good. I drank another sip and almost choked on it, head down in the toilet, heaving, gasping for air.

When I could stand, I washed my hair in cold water from the tap, slicked it back over my face, scrubbed with tissue paper until my eyes were red and my skin was raw, water running away grey from my cleaning. I shuffled my feet around the palaces of my shoes, pushed the door open, stepped out into the hall.

No one shouted; no one called my name.

The morning prayers sounded from the minarets.

I let the sound fill me, and carry me away.