I didn’t fight at first. But then, about an hour later, as I sat swinging my feet from the edge of my bed, thinking about my purple octopus and staring at the cover of Christian Today, I realized that I didn’t have time to be quite so yielding. Having hardly any time left generates this itch inside my ribcage.
I walked up to the desk. The nurse, Jacky, whose sour face met mine, said, ‘I don’t want to hear it, Lenni, we are really busy today.’
‘What does she want?’ Sharon asked, as she folded her jacket over her arm.
‘To go to church,’ Jacky said.
‘Tuh.’ Sharon rolled her eyes, picked up her mug and her lunch bag, and made her way out. ‘See you tomorrow, bab!’ she called to Jacky behind her.
Once Sharon had gone, Jacky turned to me. ‘You need to go back to your bed, Lenni.’
‘But I’m dying.’
Jacky met my eyes.
‘I’m dying,’ I said again, but she didn’t even acknowledge that I’d spoken.
It was daytime by then, so there were people buzzing around – porters wheeling cages of wild bed linen towards the laundry room, visitors bustling in wearing far too many layers for the tropical climes of the hospital, old people practising walking in the corridors.
‘I’m dying,’ I said more loudly. Jacky didn’t look at me.
‘I’ve already explained that there’s nobody available to take you to church today. There are fifteen other people on this ward who need care and attention. Now stop embarrassing yourself and go back to your bed.’ Her skin was wrinkled around her mouth with the early ageing of a regular smoker, but I imagined that beneath her skin was nothing but granite – hard stone that no heat could melt and no light could brighten. If you peeled back her skin, you could scratch your name into it.
I could have walked back to my bed. In theory. But in practice my feet were heavy, pulled by a force stronger than myself to stay where they were. It was beyond my control. My body was taking a stand, and I had to stand with it. We’re a team. Sometimes.
‘We can discuss this later,’ she said. Now there were more eyes on us.
‘I want to see Father Arthur,’ I said.
She peered around for backup – a passing doctor or another nurse would do.
‘I’m not discussing this any further. I have a lot to do.’ And then she went back to the spreadsheet on her computer. Clicking and dragging and clicking and dragging and then pressing delete several times in quick succession. Ha, I thought, you made a mistake.
I think she hoped that if she ignored me for long enough, I would go away. Like a wasp. But I still couldn’t. She did some more clicking and dragging, and even though she was staring at the screen, I could tell her peripheral vision was on me. I stayed there, wondering if I, with my light hair and pink pyjamas, resembled a child in a horror film. She clicked and typed and I waited.
Finally, Jacky looked back at me. This time with fire in her eyes. ‘Do you know what? If you don’t move from this desk right now, I will call security.’
‘I don’t want to be at this desk, I want to go to the chapel and see Father Arthur.’
‘I’ve told you, you have to wait.’
‘I don’t have time!’ I let out a growl of frustration which drew the attention of a passing set of parents.
‘To be honest, Lenni, I don’t have time either,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time for your theatrics and I don’t have time for this ridiculous stunt.’
‘But you do have time.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve probably got a good forty years left. Well, maybe more like twenty-five or thirty if you keep smoking, but you’ve still got more time than me.’
Without my consent, a tear broke free from my eye and decided to make its own way in the world, rolling down my cheek and hitting the floor. I hoped that it would keep going, roll on and on, all the way to the chapel to find Father Arthur and tell him I was being held prisoner.
‘That’s it,’ she said, and she picked up the telephone and dialled three numbers. She waited, and I waited. Another renegade tear made its way to the floor, in hot pursuit of its comrade.
‘Security to the May Ward please,’ she said when someone finally picked up on the other end, ‘I have a patient who is obstructing the nurses’ station.’ She waited again, sternly said, ‘Okay,’ and then put down the receiver. I said nothing.
She shuffled some papers on the desk and clicked off the lid of a green highlighter. When she started highlighting bits of her paper, I was sure that she was just pretending to be doing something so it would seem like I wasn’t annoying her in the slightest.