• • •
I knew I wasn’t at the house before I opened my eyes, because the bed underneath me was dry. The bed was never dry when I woke up at the house. I moved my legs around under the sheets and listened to the noises wrinkling the air—clanks and rattles and women’s voices. The smell of cleaning was sharp in my nose. When I opened my eyes a woman in a white cap and apron was looming over me. Her head was right below a bright white light in the ceiling, and the glow around her face made a halo.
“Hello, Christine,” she said. Her teeth were as white as her apron. “How are you feeling, pet?”
I tried to sit up, but pain twanged in my head like a snapped elastic band. My mouth tasted of dead things.
“Thirsty,” I whispered.
“Yes, pet. I’m sure. Let’s sit you up and I’ll fetch you some water. And some breakfast, too? Does that sound good?”
I wasn’t hungry. It felt so odd to be not-hungry that I wondered if I had been magicked into someone else while I was asleep. The woman told me her name was Nurse Howard, and she put her hands under my arms and lifted me up to a sitting position. I saw I was in a room full of metal beds with white sheets over small bodies. There were other nurses walking around in click-clack shoes, talking in voices too quiet for me to hear. In the bed opposite mine a little boy was chasing cornflakes round a bowl with a spoon, one arm wrapped in plaster.
When Nurse Howard had sat me up she tidied my sheets and click-clacked out of the white room. I looked down at myself. My belly stuck out in a pregnant dome, and the dome was full of sickness. Green and swirling. It didn’t feel part of me. My skin was so tight I thought it must be close to splitting. I wondered what would happen if it split—whether I would spill out all over the bed, all my guts and sickness and secrets.
Nurse Howard click-clacked back with a tray, which she put down on my lap. There was a cup of water and a bowl of porridge gritted with sugar.
“I’m not very hungry,” I said.
“I think you should have a go at eating something, pet,” she said. “You haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday. It’ll be good for your sore throat and your poor belly.”
I thought about shouting and swearing and throwing the bowl on the floor, but I was too tired to be bad. Nurse Howard click-clacked off to another girl and I scooped up a gob of porridge. It was jellied, holding its shape on the spoon, but I put it in my mouth and it tasted less sicky than it looked. When I swallowed it my throat was coated in a gluey layer of thickened milk, and it didn’t hurt my rotten tooth because it didn’t need chewing. Nurse Howard came back as I was picking up the last sparkles of sugar with my finger.
“Hungry after all, were we, pet?” she said.
“Why am I here?” I asked.
“You know you’re in the hospital, don’t you?” she said. I nodded. I hadn’t really known that before she had said it but I didn’t want to look thick. She put my breakfast tray on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re in the hospital because yesterday you swallowed something you shouldn’t have. Some tablets. Do you remember that? They were in a sweetie packet. You might have thought they were sweeties. Do you remember?”
“They were Smarties,” I said.
She nodded. “Well, actually, they weren’t Smarties, pet. They were tablets. Some grown-ups use them to help them go to sleep. They’re not for kids at all. So when you swallowed them they made you sick.”
“Oh,” I said.
She licked her lips. “Did someone give you those Smarties?” she asked. She touched my hand. I looked at her nails, short and rounded. My nails were different lengths, some of them snapped off low down, others so long they nearly curled over, all of them caked with dirt. I bent my fingers to hide them.
“I don’t remember how I got them,” I said. “Must have found them somewhere. Maybe on the ground somewhere. I don’t remember.” Nurse Howard looked disappointed. She picked up the tray and stood, leaving a dent in the bedsheets.
“Well,” she said. “Maybe you can have a think about it. Hmm?”
“Was I dead?” I asked. “Before I came to the hospital. When I swallowed the tablets. Was I dead?”
She laughed. “Of course not. If you were dead you wouldn’t be talking to me now, would you?” She was obviously another one who didn’t understand about the different kinds of dying. Thinking about people coming back alive again gave me a grasping feeling in my throat, and I looked on either side of my bed.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Where are my clothes?”
“The clothes you were wearing when you came in? We’ll have kept them somewhere. Don’t worry. They won’t be lost.”
“I need them now,” I said. My voice sounded full and wet, and I hated sounding that way, but I had to carry on talking. “It’s important.”
“Why?” she asked.
“There was important stuff in my pockets,” I said.
“Was there? Well, I expect it’s still—”
“I need them now,” I shouted. Nurse Howard made her eyes very wide, then she click-clacked off. She disappeared through the door at the end of the white room and I was going to run after her but
