Pongo #59

Pila

I wake up again, and once more turn to face my neighbour's bed, only now the frail old woman is gone. In her place, a beautiful girl lies, flat-backed in soldier position on the sheets. Her hair is chocolate and the light dances on it. Her large, lidded eyes do not even flicker with dreams, she is so still. Above her head a canopy of glass, presumably some sort of incubation chamber or quarantine measure, seals her off from the outside world, while leaving her open like common land ' a scrap of green in the city to which everyone runs for picnics, exhibitions, firework displays.

Walking towards her, I realise my legs aren't aching anymore, and my back has straightened. It's as if she radiates an all-invading life tonic. I drink her in and creep closer, anxious not to disturb this china angel. Her skin is a freshly snowed mountainside, with shy poppies in the cheeks, and her lips are drawn slightly apart in preparation for a kiss.

This, I think, is what everybody's either waiting for, bending their bars to reach, or scrabbling to return to.

Then I see the handle. At the side of the glass box, a hinged section becomes visible, with a handle. Tied to this is a red ribbon. My hand, like a flesh torch, goes ahead, and clasps the protruding loop. Then a moment and hup! The flap is open! Still she lies there in state. My curious hand reaches in, strokes her smooth smooth brow with the delicacy of an archivist stroking the original pages of Genesis.

Like woozy kittens, her eyes snuffle behind their lids and slowly reveal themselves ' two blazes of duck egg blue. She smiles drowsily, and I bend down and kiss her, on fire beneath my hospital gown. Once on the forehead, once one each cheek, and finally once on the lips which have waited for so long

As soon as I draw back, I realise my mistake. At first she creases her eyes as if a bright light is hurting them, raising her perfect hands as a barrier to the glare. Then before both of our eyes those same raised hands fall off, bouncing onto the bedclothes like windfall apples. For a moment, neither of us move, our gaze torn between the two clean stumps still stiffly held in the air and the two curled hands in her lap. Then she opens her mouth wide in a silent scream and one by one, like a blossom shower, her teeth fall out. There is no cartoon tinkle to their cascade. They are too light to make so much as a dent in the hill of sterile duvet.

I draw back the cover. A sash of air whistles between her torso and the tops of her thighs. The bloodless components lie like elements of a doll autopsy. Dizzy, I look back up at her face. Her nose has fallen like a rusted pub sign into the folds. As I scrutinise her expression, partway between panic and catatonia, fronds of her chocolate hair flutter to the pillow, leaving patches of pink speckling her skull. She leans forward and I jolt back as though she is holding a gun, bashing into the glass case, which shatters into sand.

Then she sits right up, looks at me. Already her eyes have begun to cloud over, and in front of my own, they fall out like marbles, rolling wet red tracks on the floor. Then she smiles toothlessly at me, swings what's left of her body round, knocking hands and teeth to the floor as she does so, and reaches out those hideous stumps for an embrace. And I scream and run to the door, trying the handle, hammering it, because it is of course locked.

Behind me, she drops onto the floor like a Fiji mermaid and begins pulling herself across the floor towards me on the hocked-off remains of her arms. As she does so, smiling, her ears come away from her head like plasticine, and one of her beautiful lips is jogged off, swinging like a bracelet charm from her face. And I am hammering, hammering, screaming soundlessly as I listen to the shhh, shhh of her body, as the stumps drag it closer and closer to me for that embrace. And I am still hammering when I realise the door is my pillow and a nurse is standing over me, shaking my withered shoulder, and the bed next to me is empty.