0.00
(0 votes)
You must login to vote
|
|
|
I crash through the entrance doors, heaving for breath. If I could see my eyes, I know I'd see them bloodshot; my face is raw, red from cold and blue from last night’s bruises, and my appearance is so wild as I glance at sign after sign that people are muttering and staring, but they don't know that I'm calm. I'm calm. I'm calm. I'm only here to get a mistake corrected. Such a stupid mistake! I have to keep from laughing out loud. It's so banal!
Signs. Signs. Signs! There's too many damn signs! Where the hell do I go?!
"Er... sir, do you need help at all?"
I spin so fast that the girl who spoke struggles to keep her smile intact; she's dressed in starched white and seated behind -
- a reception desk! Thank God! I rush over. "N -” A spasm of coughing tries to strangle me. Too much running, I'm not damn fit enough and it's costing me too much time! But I should stop being so worried: it's all a mistake. I try again. "Nancy Clark! Please!"
The girl clicks at the keyboard, frowning. "Um, do you know what the ward number is -”
A woman sorting through a file cabinet behind the girl leans down and whispers something. The effect is instantaneous: her eyes brim with a dreadful horror, and just for a second I realize that God, no, it's true, it's all true - but it isn't, it can't be, because this stuff doesn't happen in real life. It doesn't. It's movies and computer games only and I should know better than anyone here, because most of my life's been spent in front of a screen; they probably pulled a games console out of the womb with me.
"Y... yes," she says, struggling to regain composure, "I'm so sorry, you must be - I was there when they came in, I - here, let me print you directions, it's room fifty-six -"
"No, you're thinking of someone else," I pant. The printer spits out a diagram. I seize it and run.
Corridor. Long, long corridor, corner, door, corner and I dodge around two men, careening from the wall and scattering files, corridor. Doors on either side, nice wide swing-either-way doors that doctors can get through as fast as possible when the alarms go. Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven-
I make it all the way to fifty-five before I stagger to a halt, wheezing. By now I’m only held up by desperation: my chest hurts so badly from breathing I'd scream if I could only get enough air, and my heart thunders like a mad thing in my chest. Still, if I'm going to collapse I couldn't do it in a better place, right? I resist crazy laughter. Got to stay calm. Catch my breath. Got to stay calm.
Breathe deep. Catch my breath. I don’t want to be bursting in on some injured girl and looking like a crazed madman or something.
Calm.
I move forwards.
Fifty-six.
I push open the door.
In the silence, the heart monitor goes ‘beep’.
The patient in the bed... the first thought that flashes through my head is: shattered doll. Some child smashed their doll and the bits they can find have been vaguely reassembled with sellotape. Her left arm is bandaged, her right wrist in a cast. Tubes run from every part of her - arms, nose, and several trailing from beneath the lime-chalk bedcovers. One eye is black; her nose is swollen; her cheek looks like a tiger slashed it. Most of her head is swathed in a thick wrap of bandages - it almost looks like an Eskimo parka.
... ‘beep’.
I laugh.
I have to laugh. My god, it’s dreadful of me to do so when I'm staring at such a wreck of a human being, but I can't help it. I just can't. I barely manage to make it back into the corridor before collapsing against the wall in fits of giggles.
It's not her. It's not Nano. Even through the damage I can tell: it’s not her face, and besides she always wears her hair long. She's got the most amazing hair, ringlets vying with sleek strands, dark as Coke. This girl's hair is cut short, shaved almost to the scalp like a fresh-mown garden, and reddish-brown.
I laugh and laugh. I’m going to kill whoever it was that told my mum it was Nano. Seriously.
"James..?"
I start as someone speaks. From the patient’s room steps a woman I hadn't noticed when I was in there. She's clutching a handbag and it takes me a second to place her because her face is smeared from crying, her eyes raw and her hair dishevelled.
"Mrs. Clark?" I can't help but feel confusion as she hugs me, because she's Nano's mother. Surely she's realized the mistake by now, why hasn’t she gone home - ?
My head wrenches round as the realization seizes me - seizes me and drags my eyes through the door to the bed again, to the bed where the girl who isn't Nano lies, to the jawline that's not hers, the hair the colour of dirt and blood-
"Th-they had to cut her head open," a voice from far away hiccups, "She had bleeding in her skull, they had to reduce the pressure..."
No. No, that's not her.
That's not her! I tear away from the woman holding me and now I'm at the bedside looking at this girl -
It's Nano.
Oh God, it’s Nano!
|
