“Here you are,” she said, dropping them onto my bed. “Better now?”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy digging my hands into the pockets of my skirt. My fingers closed around the marble and I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Better.”
Now that I knew my marble was safe I didn’t really want the clothes anymore, so I pushed them onto the floor and pushed myself back up to the head of the bed. The boy with the broken arm had had his breakfast tray taken away and was turning the pages of a picture book with his good hand. On the floor next to him was a shopping bag bulging with toys and books and packets of sweets. I held my marble on my palm, so if he looked over he would think someone had come to bring me toys too.
It was boring sitting in bed with no one to talk to and nothing to do, so I was glad when a white-coated man and his click-clack nurses swept in. He had a stethoscope around his neck, which I knew was called a stethoscope because there was a stethoscope in the doctor’s set Donna’s nana had given her last Christmas and she never let anyone else have a turn with it. The white-coat doctor didn’t speak to me, just to the nurses, who nodded and twittered and scribbled things on pieces of paper. He had dark hair and thin fingers, and I thought he probably didn’t ever let anyone else have a go with his stethoscope either.
“Flat on the bed, please,” he said, snapping on a pair of stretchy plastic gloves. Two nurses came forward, stripped the sheets away from my body, and made me as flat and straight as I would be in a coffin. The doctor pulled up my smock and pressed on my swollen belly with his thin fingers. I didn’t have anything on under the smock, not even any underpants. My body felt bare and my face felt hot. He took out a pencil-shaped stick that lit up with a click and shone it straight onto my eyeballs. The blob of light floated in front of me for a long time after he took it away. When he had listened to my chest from the front and back with his stethoscope, he snapped off his white gloves and gave them to one of the nurses. She took them with her fingertips and threw them in the bin at the end of the bed, like touching me had made them dirty.
“Now,” said the doctor, “you’ve been very lucky, young lady. If you hadn’t been brought to the hospital so fast, you wouldn’t be here now.”
“No. Obviously,” I said. “I’d still be in the playground.”
He lifted up one dark eyebrow and one corner of his thin pink top lip. “You won’t be so silly again, will you?” he said. I knew he wanted me to shake my head, but I didn’t. I stared him straight in the eye and squeezed my marble under the sheets until he swept away in a flourish of creases and nurses.
Once he was gone time curdled again, lumpy like my porridge. I looked out of the window at the end of the white room, but all I could see were rooftops and rain. I told a nurse I needed the toilet and she brought me a cold metal pan. She pulled up my smock and helped me to sit on it, there in the white room with everyone watching. When the pee trickled out of me it felt like pushing out razor blades. I didn’t cry. I never cried.
After years of curdled time the doors of the white room opened again and Mam was there.
“Chrissie! My Chrissie! My precious girl! My poor little lamb!”
She was at the bed, throwing herself forward, wrapping me in her arms. I had been eating rice pudding and jam from a china bowl, and it fell off my lap. I watched it splatter across the floor in gummy pink clots. I hoped someone would bring me some more. Mam smelled of perfume pasted over dirt, and at the edges the other smell, the woman smell that made me heave. My smock got wet from the rain on her clothes. Over her shoulder I saw Nurse Howard coming toward us.
“Hello,” she said when Mam let go of me. “You must be Mrs. Banks.”
“Yes. Yes. I am,” said Mam.
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Banks. We’re taking good care of Christine.”
Mam nodded and stroked my cheek with one finger. “Thank you, nurse. I’ve been so worried. I came here as soon as I heard. I’ve been away working, and my sister only called to tell me this morning. I came straight here. My poor, brave Chrissie . . .”
Mam didn’t have a sister. Not one we went to stay with at the seaside and not one who had told her I was in the hospital. She was a big fat smelly liar. Nurse Howard smiled, because she didn’t know about the big fat smelly lying. Mam moved up the bed and snaked an arm around my back. Her hand rested just above my elbow, where my smock sleeve ended.
“Christine has been ever so brave,” said Nurse Howard. “As your sister may have told you, she was very poorly when she came in. She’d somehow managed to get her hands on some tablets—sleeping tablets—and she’d taken quite a few of them. We think she may have thought they were sweets.”
Mam’s arm tensed behind my back. “That would be just like my Chrissie,” she said too loudly. “She’s a greedy girl. And careless. She’ll put anything in her mouth, anything she finds, things from the medicine cupboard.”
“They were in a sweet packet,” said Nurse Howard. Her voice was much quieter than Mam’s, but it still made Mam stop talking. “Christine’s had her stomach pumped, and she seems much better this morning. Obviously we want to
