The corridor is a long one, and in such relative quiet
at so late an hour, when the overhead stretch of fluorescent tubing is at its
loudest, the closest thing to organic sound the hospital offers is his own
shoes’ uneven and repeated shriek, weighted off the bad ankle.
An empty wheelchair is pushed around the far corner,
approaches on a crescendo of interstiticial ticking, and is past, its four thin
lines of less-damp crawling beside Brother Skunk as he walks on along the
newly-mopped floor.
A knock upon
the classroom door, and
cog: Sorry.
Skunk, I wonder if you could come through to the office please
and he quits
the day’s last lecture for the news he has known to be coming.
With latent in his odd gait the suggestion of less
than the habitual nothing between his feet and the floor, the idea that at this
moment he is subject to a gravity of greater density, he clums on along the
tiles at some remove from distant and muffled clang, establishing the route to
ward 36, a number provided him at the front desk and twinned for now until
December with his mother’s name. (Next year on her re-admittance, she will be
allocated a room in one of the hospice buildings as a perpetual-maintenance
patient.)
cog (pulling
at the flesh of her forehead): Um, right, now there was a phone-call for you
from um, from the hospital
Skunk (making
of his face what he feels they ought to see): Oh Jesus is it my mum?
cog: They
don’t, he didn’t actually say, but you’re to call him back. That’s his name
there
pointing to
the words on the Post-it she hands him
cog: and
that’s the number. If if if you’d prefer you can use the phone in Don’s office.
and he calls,
and returns to the class for his bag, and excuses himself from
nineteenth-century photography’s dry-plate process.
Her name in the slot of an open door, and enough light
from the ward corridor for recognition: the eyes closed in sleep; her face
still cradled in the torment of its memory; the breath textured, audibly
granulate, and his shadow balloons with it.
He feels he is watching himself from the bed, his eyes
now her eyes and open, but knows this not to be and so staring waits,
wondering concurrent at all the spread and convergence of their lives to this
final seesaw tilt of responsibility, one to the other, until the scene indeed shifts
and it is her peering in on him through a fraction of bedroom doorway,
the hall light stretching her shadow across the littler him, lost to his
childhood’s careless sleep.
(Insert
italicised exit route from ward 36.)
Two years an aphasic hostage, awaiting the eventual
spark of cheap bay rum stink inhaled into her brain and snatching her back from
the past, restoring her to a present-tense motherhood from which, intact, she
might make her peaceful exit.
And
less than three years now to when her son will admit himself as an out-patient
through this very building’s accident
and emergency entrance, his fore-arm bearing a self-inflicted scalpel wound
that will require two shots of anaesthesia directly into the cut, and ten
stitches to hold the flesh together while it scabs and heals.
