Tuesday's Gone

Forty-six

Michelle Doyce liked the hospital food. It was soft and greyish. It didn’t look like anything. There was something that tasted a bit like fish, with a thick grey sauce. But there were no bones, no shape. There was something that tasted a bit like chicken, also with a thick grey sauce, also with no bones and no shape. It never looked like it would move, like it would speak to her. She didn’t like the days. There were too many things all around her that felt like they were trying to batter at her head, colours and sounds and prickings on her skin, intertwining and tangling so that she couldn’t tell what was the colour and what was the sound. It was all just there, like a storm she was wandering around in, lost.

People came and went. Sometimes they moved so quickly and spoke so quickly that it was all a blur and she couldn’t make them out. It was as if she were standing on a station platform and they were on a train that wasn’t stopping, that was racing past at a hundred miles an hour. Sometimes they would try and say something but she couldn’t catch it. It had been the same with the other patients in the ward. She had seen them and heard them, like in the flashes of a strobe light, and they always seemed to be screaming, shouting in pain or anger or despair, and she felt their pain and anger and despair herself. It was like spending day after day surrounded by road drills and sirens and electric buzzers and flashing lights, with jagged stabbing knives in her eyes and her ears and her mouth. It was like a swarm of insects had got inside her body and were trying to scratch and chew their way out with their sharp jaws and claws. Every day she found things and hid them, then ordered them carefully. There were pieces of leftover soap from the bathroom, a little piece of silver wrapper from a pill container, a piece of sticking plaster, a screw. She arranged them in a pill box that had been left on the shelf by her bed. She would look at them and suddenly realize they were in the wrong order, take them out again and put them in the right order.

Mainly it was bad. She felt she had been put out on a rock in the middle of the sea where she was completely alone, too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet, and she could never sleep because if she slept she would be washed off and battered and swept away and lost.

But it had got better when she was moved into a room of her own, as if she had escaped into a little quiet hole, away from the drills and the flashing lights. There was a TV. She would sit there and at first the speckly light and the jagged sound would be a torment but it was also soothing, like something warm washing over her, and she would watch the moving shapes for hour after hour. There were magazines as well, bright, smiling faces looking at her, asking for her friendship and her approval. She could hear them talking to her and she would smile back and sometimes she would catch them talking about her and she would shut the magazine, trap them, teach them a lesson. And there was the nurse. Sometimes she was white, but with an accent; sometimes she was Asian; sometimes she was African. But she would lead her through a bright corridor, so bright that it dazzled her eyes, and sit her in a chair and lean her back and wash her hair. She could feel the fingers warm on her head. The feeling reminded Michelle Doyce of something long, long ago, deep down, when she was being held and kept safe. Then there were the two animals: the teddy bear and the dog. They sat on her bed; they slept with her. The dog had buttons for eyes. She knew they were only toys. But she had a feeling. She couldn’t stop the feeling. Like a child lying in bed with a heavy sleeping parent beside them. Not moving but warm and alive. They knew things; they were watching. When the noises and the lights got too much, she could look at them, feel them against her.

Best of all were when the lights went away and the noises sank like a storm blowing itself out. There would be a shout and a murmuring and a flickering and the lights would go out. It didn’t get dark straight away. The light stayed in Michelle Doyce’s eyes, like a dull ache, an after-light of sour green turning to dirty yellow, then back to green, gradually fading to brown and to black. The darkness felt warm. Now even the lights felt more friendly. They blinked outside, in through the window, from far away in the night. They blinked inside, lights on machines, red and green and yellow. Even the noises were friendly, beeps and meeps. Sometimes, far away outside her room, there were groan and moans and cries that reminded Michelle Doyce of all the pain, but the dark was like a big furry cloth that mopped up the messy noises and squeezed them out somewhere into a river that would carry them away. The day wasn’t for waking and the night for sleeping. It was all a sort of long doze and she wasn’t sure whether the pictures in her head and the voices were on TV or whether they were the people coming and going in the ward or whether they were stories she was telling herself, and what did it matter anyway?

But the nights were good. The lights became soft and the sounds softened, too, and the sharp edges of things became rounded. Michelle Doyce would have been happy for life to be like this always, and to go on for ever and ever, sleeping and waking, warm and safe.

Voices came out of the darkness. They were part of her dream. She had been walking in a street and then she had been back somewhere inside, somewhere that seemed familiar. She was making tea. She filled the kettle and prepared cups and saucers. A bear and a dog with button eyes were sitting at the table.

‘Michelle,’ said the quiet voice in the darkness. ‘Michelle Doyce.’

There were two shapes in the black night. Two dark shapes, dark against the darkness, moving around her bed.

‘Michelle,’ said another voice, right by her ear. A hiss, a whisper, but lighter. That had been a man. This was a woman.

‘Is it her?’

Michelle Doyce didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed but she saw a tiny light, a firefly, floating in the dark, at the foot of the bed. It showed up the ghost of a face, a man’s face. She felt something out there in the darkness, pain or anger or fear.

‘Yes, it is,’ said a voice. The woman’s again.

Michelle Doyce opened her mouth. She wanted to say something but it came out as a groan and then the groan stopped. Something was stopping it. The blackness had become blacker. She wasn’t making a sound. She couldn’t make a sound. There was a weight on her, heavy and black, and she felt she was sinking down under it, down into a dream that was itself becoming dark so that she was sinking out of the dream and fading and sinking.

Everything changed. There were lights, lights so harsh that they were like jangling sounds so that she couldn’t see anything and couldn’t hear anything. There were lights and there was shouting and she could cry out and breathe. She had been deep, deep under water, and now she been pulled out and was lying on the shore. Michelle Doyce breathed and breathed. She couldn’t. It was like she couldn’t pull the air inside her. Her breathing didn’t work. She couldn’t get the air in. She started to panic and flap and cry and shout. She flapped like a fish on the land, drowning in the air.

Then she felt a hand, cool on the side of her face, and a voice speaking to her out of the blinding light. She felt a breath on her face, a sweet and cool breath.

‘Michelle,’ said the voice, soft and close. ‘Michelle. It’s all right. It’s all right. You’re all right.’

The voice spoke like it was telling her a story, soothing her to sleep. She felt the cool breath on her face. She felt she could breathe again, as if she was breathing in that cool breath, as if it was going straight inside her.

‘Michelle, Michelle,’ said the voice.

Michelle Doyce opened her eyes. The light dazzled her so much that she could see nothing except blue and yellow dots popping her eyes. Slowly a face took shape. She heard the words and felt the voice’s fingers, cool and slow on the side of her face. She knew the face. The woman with the dark eyes and clear voice.

‘You,’ said Michelle Doyce.

‘Yes,’ said the woman, close, so she could feel her clean breath. ‘It’s me.’