I must have fallen over because the next thing I knew, I had both of my hands out on the smooth plastic floor of the May Ward.
‘Shit!’ Jacky ran towards me. ‘What is it?’
I shook my head and tried to breathe in. She heard my breath get so far and then stop.
‘You need to calm down,’ she said.
I tried to breathe again and it got stuck. I was in trouble, I knew it.
‘Lenni, you have to calm down!’ she said.
I felt a tear run down my cheek, and all I could think of was the fact that I couldn’t remember how many minutes without oxygen it takes for people to die. Was it two and a half? I was sure I must be well into my second minute.
Jacky, cruel mistress of the May Ward, knelt beside me. ‘Have you swallowed anything?’ I shook my head.
She placed both arms on my shoulders. ‘Look at me,’ she said. I tried another scuppered breath that got stuck. ‘You’re going to be okay,’ she said. ‘You just need to clear your airways. Try to cough.’ I did, but I couldn’t cut the glue and it made me gag, lurching forwards.
Jacky got up and disappeared for a moment.
‘Here. Swallow.’ She shoved a plastic cup in my hand. I filled my mouth with water, closed my eyes and swallowed. It went down and the glue moved. I could breathe. I gasped in the air, but the glue moved back in place. ‘Again,’ she said. I swallowed more of the water; the glue lessened and I could breathe again.
‘Now breathe in gently,’ she said. I did – a gasp of air was mine, and another and another. The glue was still clinging to my throat. I breathed in again, thinking about my brain cells. They die without oxygen. Perhaps I had just killed several thousand of them. ‘Good girl,’ Jacky said, coming to sit on the floor with me. She put her hand on my shaking knee.
‘When you feel ready, you need to do a big cough,’ she said. ‘You have to clear that phlegm out.’
I was enjoying breathing far too much to do that.
‘Lenni, you need to cough now,’ she said. I hated her for it, but I coughed as hard as I could. At first it blocked my throat again and my breath stopped, shuddering at the closed border of my larynx.
‘Swallow again,’ she said. And I did.
I coughed hard, and some of the glue rose up into my mouth. I spat it out.
Jacky wiped the phlegm and blood from my hot hand.
I took another sip of water and tasted metal.
Trouble.
For the crime of coughing up blood, Lenni Pettersson was sentenced to bed rest lest that pesky larynx of hers tried to close again. She was blacklisted from going to the Rose Room, the chapel, or anywhere that might bring her happiness. And all she was invited to do was sleep.
While she tried to sleep, she thought about all the other people in the world who were, at that moment, on that evening, trying to sleep. People in waiting rooms, at boarding gates, sitting all crooked on an overnight train. Clutching newborn babies. All just trying to slip into nothingness.
‘Lenni?’ came a little whisper.
The curtains round my bed opened just a peep, and in the gap was Margot’s face. I beckoned her and she scuttled in, pulling the curtain closed behind her. She was wearing a lilac quilted dressing gown and a pair of purple slippers. I’d never noticed how tiny Margot’s feet are before. A child could have worn those slippers. And it made her seem even more precious.
‘Are you all right, Lenni?’ Margot whispered. I nodded. She came up to me and gave me a kiss on the top of my head. Then she pulled back and regarded me with a look of mischief. ‘Lenni,’ she asked, ‘shall we get ourselves in trouble?’
Like the most vulnerable, least conspicuous bandits, we escaped from the May Ward, creeping past my wheelchair because Margot still believes.
Margot didn’t tell me where we were going but I enjoyed the mystery. Maybe she’s kidnapping me, I thought, as we wound our way through the hospital corridors. Although it would be a mostly voluntary kidnapping, as there is no way she could possibly overpower me. For starters, she only comes up to my shoulders. I wondered what picture they would use on the news. Swedish-born terminally ill teenager kidnapped by older, also terminally ill Scottish woman. They probably wouldn’t be able to get a picture of the two of us together. Instead we are using a file photograph of some geese on a pond. It is likely they will both die before they are found.
‘We need to take a photograph,’ I said as we walked along.
‘Now?’
‘No, just soon. Of the two of us.’
She led me into the main entrance atrium, with its huge overhead lights and high glass ceiling. There were hardly any people around, but there was a cleaner with a big round floor polisher.