A Question of Sanity: Chapter 3 B

‘Are you all right, dear? You look a bit peaky.’ A lady had taken her by the elbow and was looking into her eyes with concern. This woman bore no resemblance to Ellie. She was middle aged and overweight with a fleshy face and warm brown eyes that seemed to care. Ellie couldn’t trust what her senses showed her.

‘You’re not me, are you? But you were a minute ago. Yes, thank you, I’m all right, but I’ve seen myself in the strangest places and now I’m other people, too.’ It was the most ridiculous thing that she’d ever said. But before she had the chance to stop herself from talking more rubbish, and just as she was about to apologise to the nice lady for being nuts, the world went black. She never felt the pavement coming up to meet her as she wilted towards it.

Matt came out of the newsagents to see a crowd of people gathered further down the street. ‘Ellie!’ he yelled. He knew that whatever had drawn the crowd, it had something to do with his girlfriend. He set off at a run.

‘Excuse me. Get out of my way. Bloody move,’ he said as he pushed roughly through the tight wad of people and saw Ellie lying on the ground. A small river of blood pooled on the pavement by her right temple. A lady had put her into the recovery position and was trying to bring her round. Realising that Matt wasn’t merely another onlooker, the good Samaritan explained that an ambulance had been called and was on its way.

Ellie regained consciousness to an abstract collage of writhing faces that came—‘It’s that author isn’t it? Her what writes?’—and went—‘Yeah, I’ve seen her with an Alsatian by the river’—out of focus every few seconds. One face remained clear and steady in the throng of fuzzy faces. It was her own.

‘It’s her,’ she said weakly, trying to sit up and point. Matt pushed her back down, leaning forward to kiss her forehead and obscured her vision. She jerked away from him and the woman had vanished from the crowd gathering around Ellie.

‘It’s okay, sweetheart. An ambulance is on its way,’ Matt said. ‘I’m here and everything’s going to be all right.’

‘I don’t want a bloody ambulance,’ she said, trying to get up and instantly regretting the sudden movement. She felt her stomach rebelling and seconds later she vomited all over the kind lady’s knees. Ellie couldn’t apologise enough but she was so very, very tired. She heard the ambulance siren rounding the corner and summoned enough energy for a final protest.

‘I told you, I don’t want to go to hospital you stupid bloody idiot,’ she yelled at Matt. Even though it wasn’t him who’d called the ambulance, he was singled out to bear the brunt of her anger. ‘On second thoughts, yes I bloody well do. I’m going to get that bastard Fielding and rip his head off his shoulders. He said there would be no damage to my mind.’ This took the last of her determination. She closed her eyes and not so much lost consciousness as embraced unconsciousness with relish.

She woke up once in the ambulance, vomited, told the paramedic that he had ‘come to bed eyes,’ vomited again, asked for second helpings of morphine and then went back to sleep. Despite not being seen by the triage team, the paramedics made the decision to give Ellie a mild sedative as well as the pain relief. Her pulse was erratic and her respiration poor. In sleep, she calmed and her breathing and heart rate returned to something if not normal, then at least acceptable.

Matt explained everything in detail to Jeremy Fielding, who’d made himself available to see her. She was given an MRI scan and a CT scan, seven vials of blood were taken from Ellie’s precious supply for analysis and words were muttered about lumbar punctures and other tests that sounded horrific to Matt.

After all the tests had been done and the immediate results analysed, Jeremy Fielding came to sit on the stretcher bed that Ellie had been allocated. He took her hand in his. The man had hands the size of large baseball mitts and yet they were soft and smelled of antiseptic soap and somehow, when he stroked the back of her hand, he made her feel calm, as though he was in control and would make everything all right. She still wanted to kill the bastard for lying to her, though.

Fielding explained that they had found no sign of brain damage and no indication of mental retardation whatsoever from the results.

‘So what’s happening to me?’ she asked in a voice that was small and frightened but still managed to contradict itself with a hard-edged bitterness and anger that couldn’t be contained.

‘I’d put it down to the stress you’ve been under. There’s nothing wrong with your brain but your mind is tired and overworked.’ The calm that he’d instilled in her left through a side window, leaving her feeling terrified.

‘Oh, well, let’s just have a party then. You’re the bloody doctor, the Great I Am, and from the gumph you’ve just given me, you haven’t got the faintest bloody idea what’s sodding well going on. I might as well go and ask the lady who cleans the toilets what’s wrong with me. She’d have a better idea than you and she might just have the guts to tell me straight that I’ve lost the fucking plot and fallen into a slimy hole of insanity. And that’s a damned sight more than you’re telling me, you useless bloody tosser.’

Fielding had to turn his face away to hide the smile that threatened to crack not only his face but also his professional demeanour. Nurses, doctors and the general public bowed and scraped to him, fawning and cowing to his every word and whim. He was the demigod of St. Joseph’s and nobody ever contradicted anything he said. To have this feisty little woman call him a tosser was like a stab of blinding sunshine breaking through the clouds on a grey and dismal day. It stung, but with the initial sting came the pleasure of new experience.

‘Ellie,’ he began, hiding his smirk behind a small cough and trying to remain professional.

‘You have to understand, this is all new ground to us. There have been so few recorded cases. There is no such thing as a textbook case because there’ve never been enough cases to write a textbook about it. I said there probably wouldn’t be any mental retardation because we have no reason to suspect there would be. The effects in the previous cases pertaining to adult sufferers have been isolated physical symptoms rather than any mental impairment. Only in many classic TSD sufferers—that is the juvenile case scenario—are there histories of violent mood swings and dementia. From what we’ve been able to read up on, the adult form is a completely different fish-dish.’ Fielding finished his lecture as he saw Ellie’s eyes glazing over with exhaustion. She’d heard enough for one day.

‘For Christ sake, just stick me in a cage and call me Gus the Guinea pig.’ Ellie was pouting. She was exhausted and her good humour was low.

‘Now, young lady, what I suggest is this.’ Fielding’s voice had taken on an air of knowledgeable authority. He knew what was going to happen next and he was back on familiar ground. Or at least he thought he knew what was going to happen next.

‘I think you should stay in here for a couple of days to get your strength back and we’ll use that time constructively to run a few more—’ He got no further and his familiar ground was about to be trodden underfoot by Ellie’s steel toe-capped boots with soles of stubborn defiance.

‘Oh no you don’t, I’m not staying in here. There’ll be plenty of time for that later, when I’ve progressed to seeing flying elephants and hearing voices telling me to kill my consultant because he’s the Anti-Christ. I’m going home.’

‘Eleanor, I really think—’ said Jeremy Fielding. Ellie’s face was grim, determined and set in an expression that would brook no argument.

‘Oh sod it,’ he continued, for the first time in his life talking to a patient as he would an irritating, but loveable teenage daughter. ‘I can see I’m wasting my breath. Go on, bugger off home. Try not to worry and I’ll get back to you if I find anything new to report. I’ll let you know when I get the blood test results and I’ll ring to get you in to see me at my clinic next week. The only other thing I can say, and I can’t stress this strongly enough, is—rest.’

Matt half carried Ellie from the car to the front door as she leaned on him, grateful for his support and strength and she wasn’t just thinking of the physical arm holding her up. They talked in the car about everything that had happened over the last fourteen hours, since leaving the house that morning, so long ago. It was almost midnight. Jake had been alone all day. He was whining as they tumbled from the chill of the night into the warmth of the hall. Ellie’s green Adonis jacket hung on its usual hook behind the door. It mocked her as she thought about the footage plainly showing her coming out of the bank, when she had absolutely no recollection of being there. She shivered and Matt led her through to the lounge to sit down before he sorted Jake out and made them a hot drink.

On the table beside the settee lay the lost purse. She must have left it there the previous day before she went to take back the costume. That would explain why it hadn’t been in her handbag. She felt stupid and deeply ashamed. This was the last straw. She hung her head onto her arms and used the last of her energy in a good self-pitying bawl.