When I didn’t reply, she carried on anyway. ‘It’s Swedish that you can speak, isn’t it?’
‘The Lord speaks in all tongues.’
‘Can you translate? You know, from Swedish into English?’
‘I can. In fact, I was the official translator for my parents’ divorce.’
‘We can’t get hold of our Swedish translator, and there’s a man who’s in a bad way. I know the doctor treating him, I said you might be able to help. Would you mind? As a favour to me?’
I shrugged. I couldn’t understand why she was so nervous. Even when I told her I would do it, the guilt didn’t release her face. I shuffled to the edge of the bed and put on my slippers.
The source of her guilt made itself apparent then. Black, wide, consuming. It came before her, stealthy and silent. I understood why she couldn’t meet my eye as she made her way to my bed. And there I was thinking her a friend. When this whole time she had been Judas – a slithering traitor in waiting, her weapon of choice sliding across the floor to the end of my bed.
‘I thought it would be quicker,’ she said quietly, evidently now wishing that she had chosen tardiness over betrayal.
I didn’t say anything. Sometimes it’s better not to. Silence can be more powerful than speech when trying to convey abject treachery and disappointment. Anything I said would only make her feel better.
I slipped on my slippers and stood. I kept my pace slow and dignified, making sure our eye contact never wavered.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sweating under the heat of my fury. ‘You don’t have to use it, we can walk!’ Her voice was strained. But it was already there, waiting for me.
‘I just thought,’ she said, faltering, ‘it’s a long way. The other side of the hospital, you know …’
I raised myself up with dignity and turned, letting her help me down into it – black and wide, not built for one so slender as me, but wonderfully impersonal, one size fits all. It had the hospital name and a reference code written on the seat in case anyone should want to steal it. Why anyone would want to do that, I don’t know. I lowered myself down and was surprised to find how much it gave way to me. I rested my hands on the arm rails.
‘Are you sure?’ New Nurse asked.
I lifted my feet up onto the foot rests.
‘Okay, here we go,’ she said with false cheer. I wondered if she would start crying. She pulled it back so that she could swing me round and get us on our way. I knew without asking that it had come from the May Ward, meaning it had been waiting for me this whole time. Destined to be mine when I, or in this case, a friend, deemed me too broken to even walk. When my final shred of independence was torn from me like a septic limb. When they finally admitted that all they could do now was make me as comfortable as possible.
There’s nothing worse than being made comfortable.
Not even my most ardent supporter still believed that I could make it to the other side of the hospital without dying.
As New Nurse wheeled me out of the May Ward and I avoided making eye contact with Jacky as she sat eating crisps behind the nurses’ desk, I thought about a story I once heard. Maybe I didn’t hear it, maybe I read it, but however I came to know about it, it’s a good story. There were two men in hospital. Both of them were ill. One man was told that his condition was going to improve, that he had a life expectancy of many years, and that with time he would recover. The other man was told that he was going to die within a year.
One year later, the man whose death had been predicted was dead, and the man who was told he would survive had survived and reported feeling well. It was then that the hospital realized there had been an error and the two men had been given the wrong information, each hearing the other’s fate. The man who passed away had in fact been healthy, and the man who had lived was the one with the fatal illness.
If I am the only one left who still believes I might live, then it is only a matter of time before I accept my doom and I end up dying. If I had had my test results swapped, would I be out there somewhere now, at college or working, or wandering the streets of Sweden searching for my mother, feeling well and looking rosy? If the mind is so powerful that it can kill a man with no illness and save a man who’s dying, I would never want to give my brain the opportunity to kill me by not believing that I might get better.
When I’ve passed people in wheelchairs in the hospital before, I have never really considered that they are low down. Very low down. I never realized how small it could make you feel to be half the height of everyone and not even strong enough to generate your own motion. Everything looked bigger from the chair, like I was a child again.