Alice’s head was pounding. Broken fragments of memory kept swirling around her mind, making it impossible for her to think. She blinked her eyes open and saw two people hurrying towards her bed.
Please just tell me where the hell I am.
‘Hi Miss Gunnersley. Do you mind if I call you Alice?’
The doctor stepped a little closer to her. He had a face that Alice presumed was once filled with hope and enthusiasm for the work he was doing, but now appeared a little jaded and somewhat wary. Here stood a man well and truly hardened to death.
She shook her head very slightly. The only act of acknowledgement she could muster.
‘Fantastic. So, Alice, as the nurse has probably already explained, you’ve been brought into St Francis’s hospital because you’ve been in a serious accident. There was a fire in your office building and unfortunately you were caught in it. You’ve suffered some quite substantial injuries – we estimate about 40 per cent of your body has been burnt to varying degrees. We’ve already performed one surgery in an attempt to minimize the damage, but there’s still a long way to go. For now, I want you to know that you’re receiving the best possible care and we have a plan in place to support you.’ An awkward smile appeared momentarily on his face. ‘Do you have any immediate questions I can answer? I know it must be a lot to take in.’
The words washed over her, flooding her with a deep sense of dread. Surely this couldn’t be real? Was it some crueljoke? Her brain desperately searched for any other alternative than the one staring her in the face. But the pain was real. She knew that for certain. She looked down at her arm. The damage was unavoidably real.
Alice snapped her eyes shut immediately.
Don’t look. Don’t you dare look at it again.
She heard the doctor shift at the end of her bed. ‘It may be uncomfortable for a little while, but we are giving you pain relief to help. I’ll let you rest some more, Alice, but I’ll be back in the morning to check in on you again, OK?’
She nodded and then, without needing to be told twice, she fell back into a deep ignorant sleep.
*
Over the coming days, as she grew stronger, Alice found herself able to stay awake for more than only a smattering of time. Her brain had slowly come round to the idea of working, which in turn meant she was able to finally take in her surroundings.
Bleak.
That was the first word that came to mind. ‘Soulless’ was a fast follower. For a place constantly brimming with noise, it felt empty. There were always people busying themselves with one thing or another. Checking this. Reading that. Talking constantly. Alice knew she was alive but only by the grace of the machines she was attached to. There were so many wires feeding into her she started to forget where the flesh ended and the mechanics began. She let herself be prodded and poked and discussed, all the while taking her mind and most importantly her gaze elsewhere. Every time she looked down, the evidence was there. It was as if the fire had been so incensed that she had managed to escape with her life, that it had wanted to leave its mark on her indefinitely, and it had done its job well.The entire left side of her body was charred. Eaten up and spat out by the flames. In a bid to try and block out the state of her, she spent most of her time looking at the ceiling or at the inside of her eyelids. Sleep became the only place that felt familiar to her. The only place she didn’t feel pain and the only place left for her to escape to.
Sleep also meant that she avoided the influx of people constantly checking in on her like clockwork. Throughout her life she’d often wondered how it would feel to be looked after. How would it feel to be cared for with no questions asked or conditions to be met? Now it had become her reality and it made her want to scream until her lungs bled raw. She knew they were just doing their job. She was fully aware that the nurses and doctors wereobligedto care, but what wasn’t required were the tears that would well up in their eyes every time they saw her. Nor was staying after hours to try and talk to her because for days in a row there had been no visitors by her bedside. A bitter resentment ignited inside her, flooding her body with poison and spilling out on to those around her. She recoiled at their touch; she despised their pity. It was nobody’s job to take pity on her.
Often, if sleep hadn’t carried her away, she’d close her eyes and pretend during their rounds. She couldn’t stand looking at the same faces trying to disguise their shock. The same faces attempting to coax even a hint of a word from her mouth, but still she said nothing. At first it genuinely was too painful to speak. She’d breathed in so much smoke during the fire that, as well as a melted face, she’d won a pair of lungs fit for a forty-a-day smoker. No matter how many litres of oxygen she was forced to inhale each day, the entirety of her throat still seared with pain. She was charred from the inside out. A truly well-done piece of meat.
4
Alfie
When he’d first been admitted to hospital, everything felt alien. He didn’t belong there. Nothing fitted. Everything, from the chlorinated smell of the air to the feel of the scratchy starched bed sheets and the sounds of the people, was wrong. There was no space that was his and he was constantly being walked in on, interrupted, or woken up by the doctors and nurses. He could feel the frustration mounting with every passing hour and the unfamiliarity was overwhelming. Every night he prayed he could be back in his home. Back in his little one-bed flat in Hackney, surrounded by the safety of his life. Now he wasn’t sure how he could ever go back to it. How would he sleep without the meditative beeping of the heart monitors? How could he wake up in his bedroom alone? Where would the faces of the other patients be when he needed company?
One of the rare perks of being a patient for so long was that you got very familiar with the dos and don’ts of hospital life. Six weeks was long enough to know what to choose and what to avoid from the daily menus, to remember which porters hada sense of humour and which could barely even blink, let alone crack a smile. It was also long enough to know which of the nurses would slip you an extra pudding at dinner and which of them you needed to be on best behaviour for. Luckily, the Moira Gladstone ward contained more of the former than the latter. And none was kinder, more protective and larger than life than Nurse Martha Angles, aka Mother Angel. There was nothing small about her; she was a woman who could fill a room with just her bust and her laughter, and she oversaw the rehab ward with a keen eye and an open heart.
‘Good morning, my Mother Angel, how are you today?’
For the first time in a long time Alfie actually enjoyed waking up early. You couldn’t help but want to absorb every moment you could with Nurse Angles; she was one of those shiny people you only really found once in a lifetime.
‘Good morning, my love. Same old same old for me. Hank took me to the cinema last night – apparently I was asleep twenty minutes in! No clue what the film was about but it was a wonderful sleep, I can tell you that for sure.’
Hank was the love of Nurse Angles’ life. Childhood sweethearts, married at eighteen and with four lovely children. She adored him with every piece of her being, which also meant she moaned about him every waking hour.
‘He really must love you to put up with your snoring on date night! Also, when are you going to introduce us? I need him to teach me how to find a woman like you.’
She gave him an affectionate slap on the wrist. ‘Trust me, honey, finding them is the easy part. It’s trying to keep them that’s the hard work!’
‘Amen, Nurse!’ Sharon shouted from her bed. She was a recent divorcee and even more recent feminist.
Nurse Angles laughed a deep and chesty laugh. ‘Anyway,let’s see how we’re doing today.’ She glanced down at his bandaged stump.
‘Really? Again?’ Alfie knew he was being petulant, but quite frankly he wasn’t in the mood to have his wound pulled and poked at today.
