Maya- Chapter three

Chapter Three

I recall when it went to darkness; when night enveloped me and held me captive for what seemed like an eternity. How can it have been anything but real? The vice like grip of frustration, my lead body cemented to the abrasive, inhospitable bed and the sterile, objective voices…. I remember the voices…

“It is better this way; this is the right thing. You cannot cope…”

“I…..I….want…..”

“You need to rest, regain your strength. You’ll be fixed soon. Just rest.”

“I…..plea…….her…..want”

“She’s completely out of it. The exhaustion. She doesn’t even know you’re here.”

“She doesn’t know what’s happened?

“She has no idea.”

“Please….Listen to me. I don’t want this.”

Silence. I am mute.

“Come back and see her in a day or two. She’ll be as right as rain.”…

How did I get there I wonder? How did it happen that my voice stopped working and I couldn’t utter audibly the anguished cries of the mother I longed to be? It was as though the blackness had manipulated in her seduction all normality of time. I was not aware of how long I lay in the hospital bed with the occasional shuffle and jab of rough hands the only reminder that I was a living thing. In fragments, I remember a conversation but the speakers don’t always look or sound the same, simply they become distorted, like muffled distant utterings…

“This journey seems different,” I think I say sleepily as the trees speed by outside the steamed up window.

“Does it? Ollie may ask, the response a little high pitched perhaps.

Here, a silence fills the car and I feel myself succumbing once more to sleep.

“Things often appear different in the winter,” is the final faded sentence of my murky recollection.

Now, from what the sliver of a high sunshine on the window suggests is noon time, I watch the curtains where two yellow flowers, entwine and then release, wrapping themselves and then parting on the light cotton. As the breeze whispers at the window, they flutter slightly and their elegant forms twist, blurring their definition.

As if it is anchored down, a hand that looks like my hand, yet somewhat older, struggles to reach over to the wooden disinfectant smelling cabinet next to me. The hand searches for a few moments, pushing this way and that, as far as it can, but the cabinet is bare. I try to twist but cannot as my body is made of stone. No sweet coldness of the silver packet and twinkling of the bright colour is there to greet me.

They have gone. They have taken them. I need them.
I twist again, with concentration now and reach my hand out to the red cord that hangs, solemnly on the far side of the cabinet. Enclosing my fingers, I pull weakly.

My hand has fallen back down onto the table as I lie there spent and wait.

It takes a short time, a long time, an eternity, I can’t tell, for the doorway to be filled by the bulk of a blue and white clothed nurse.

“Yes?”

“My tablets…”I manage.

“Your tablets what?” she says in a pseudo-soothing voice.

“Gone,” I explain.

She moves to hover over me, peering with her eye-brows raised and creases covering her pale forehead as a result. She is around 40, blond haired with its shine fading and dull greyness mere months away. She is a natural cynic, only hardened by years in the profession yet proud to think she knows how to play the patients.
“You’re not taking those tablets anymore, doctor’s orders. Your new ones will be administered to you shortly,” she tells me firmly.

“Why?” I ask, my voice sounding raspy.

She frowns even harder since I am being ‘difficult’. “The doctor explained to you this morning Miss. Those tablets affect your memory.”

“But I don’t remember that…”

She smiles smugly. “Exactly Miss Parkes, exactly.”

But my memory is not affected. I can see her, I can. She is all I envision when I close my eyes. She is all I smell when I inhale and all I feel when I sob. She is dark haired and has beautiful long lashes. She has a high pitched, gurgling laugh. She is good at painting and keeps her bedroom neat. Her favourite pair of socks are pink with yellow flowers. She gets freckles in the summertime and burns easily. She has to wear a high factor sun cream like me. She does not like the taste of garden peas but will happily eat them mushy. She is double jointed in her right arm.

I saw her once, away from this place at a time I know was real. I was awake; alive…It was a flash of brown wavy hair and the way she looked at me in the post office queue that made me know she was mine. She wasn’t screaming like the boy next to her but thoughtful and contemplative like I knew she would be. She was wearing the pink socks I knew would be her favourite. She stared hard at me, quizzically, like she felt it too. I came alive.

Rush hour on the busy high street and she kept glancing around at me as I pursued them in a daze, my savings book still open on the cashier’s desk, my shopping bags disregarded at the foot of the divider that keeps the Post Office workers from the public. Their bus arrived. People pushed and shoved and an elbow caught my arm and I lost my footing and stumbled and time vanished. The bus doors closed. Her face became a blur. I remained fixed to the spot for 2 hours and sobbed into a napkin left over from a Costa Coffee.