‘It’ll be more difficult for you if you refuse. This will all take longer,’ he says, gesturing around the room.
He should have made it home already, long before the sun outside turned orange and the sky beneath it went from blue to grey to black. His hair, brown and floppy – not unlike that of the boy who’d been my first frenzied obsession back in junior school – grazes the lids of his eyes as he blinks slowly, looks away, over my head, anywhere but at me. I try to make contact, convinced that once we lock eyes he’ll see the truth, as opposed to what presumably currently looks like manic terror, madness given voice. Can’t both be real? Both are real, to me, right now.
My fingers, freed after being strapped to the stretcher under blankets in the ambulance that conveyed me here, move up inside the sticky brown beehive pinned to my head. A habit which only a few – and certainly not this man, a stranger, yet one who already has such power – know to read as fear, my nerves prickling, rising, pressing against, needling my skin. I have a hospital bracelet on my left wrist, bearing a bleached-out picture of me. I know it’s me but I don’t recognise the face that stares back. The patterned hospital gown doesn’t quite reach my elbows but does reach past my knees; it’s tied at the back with three ties. The thin cotton socks from the previous hospital are still on my feet, which turn inwards as I stand, trying to think fast, not fast enough.
I make a small concession and take the forms and the pen, hands shaking, see the X where my signature is meant to go, the blank spot for my name. I don’t bring pen to paper. Instead I say, ‘Thanks! But I really want to talk to somebody. You know, now.’ I’m attempting a tricky balance between begging and assertiveness.
He looks at me finally, confused by the words I’ve just said.
‘Well,’ I say, in answer to the question he hasn’t asked yet, ‘about going home today. I just need to talk to someone quickly. It won’t take long. I’ve been in the other hospital for five days and want to arrange my discharge.’
I try to keep the panic out of my mouth and the edge out of my words. I’ve been planning this speech all the way over in the ambulance, not to mention for the last five and a half days and five nights I’ve been in another bed waiting for this one. The precise words and how they rise and fall and land in his ears. I can’t blow it now. He must see how sane I am. I try to ignore the mounting alarm, regulate every beat and breath as I realise that I only have seconds, not even minutes, to show him, convince him, make him understand who I am and how all of this is the most terrible of mistakes. I don’t belong here. Surely he can see that. Surely anyone could. I’m not entirely sure what a crazy person is supposed to look like, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this; it’s not me.
A small, bemused shake of his head and his stare disconnects, a light, my hope extinguished. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to arrive. I should have left already,’ he says. ‘There’s no one here to talk about it now. We can talk about it tomorrow, properly, but for now, you just need to sign. You can’t just go home.’
The spit of his impatience sticks to me, even as his gaze doesn’t leave the heavy air by my ear, where his eyes have moved once more. I think about the wife who pushed the golden band onto the second finger of his left hand, of their children, the calls to let him know that yes, they are still waiting for him and why hasn’t he left yet? The dinner bubbling in the oven, getting hard and losing flavour with each minute I delay him further. Around the table later, water glasses filled, ice melted, he’ll say how sorry he is, that the latest mad girl was admitted super late and he was the only one who could stay and she started asking to leave and he knows it’s only twelve hours until he has to be back there and he’s already said he’s sorry.
I start to read or, more specifically, push my eyes backwards and forwards, left and right across the page, slowly, hoping to buy even just a small fistful of time to think. I need it all to stop so I can just fucking think, press pause for a minute, make the world, this reality, stop. I sit on the bed and try to work it all out, so that when I press play again it will all be fixed and I won’t be scared.
But I am scared. Terrified. Because right now, none of this is going how I’d planned. I’d run this scenario in my head a hundred times or more and in each story, each sequence of events, I’m released back onto the city streets down below, relieved and, most importantly, free. Once I’m safely home, I put all of this down to a momentary silly slip, followed by an official overreaction, and within a few hours I’m eating alone in the bar of a restaurant, my third martini kicking against the back of my throat – empty and open.
The story in my brain sends the signal to my mouth and it floods with water, my tongue lapping against the wet waves. My
