Her Living Image (3 page)

“Ah no, not now I’m here, now I have arrived here at this perfect place. Don’t let me die.” She was scared, the change from joy came cold over all her flesh.

“This is where there are no marks. Boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“But,” she cried like a child in a tantrum, “I’m not going to leave any marks. I don’t
want
any marks.”

The sand led her eye away across its emptiness, its perfect cleanness, and the wind scoured in her ears, “You are a mark. You. You.”

She looked down at her body, and the squat black shadow it made on the sand, and she thought that it needed food and water, and shelter from the sun and wind. She was pierced by prescient
disappointment. “Can’t I stay here then?”

If you die. Boundless and bare, you can join the lone and level sands, stretch far away.

Stretching her with impossible longing to stay forever in that pure and empty place, stretching her taut as a bird-pulled worm, her body called her back to its living, moving,
hurting, drinking, eating, excreting needs.

It called her back to a world of horrors. Of random senseless pains and a rain of things which hurtled down upon her, determined to crush and confine. She saw the wet red metal
charging at her, dark ceiling coming down on her, hands briefly winding a bandage which blinded her. People – shapes moved above, between her and the light, hovering like birds of prey. Once
as she lay half drugged, floating on the surface of pain, a dark shape interposed itself between her and the light and fell right down on her blackly, smothering her with its hot breath, awakening
pains that shrieked like alarm bells.

Meg, who’d just been told that they’d taken Carolyn off the critical list, had gone into the room weak with relief. When she saw her daughter’s lips move, knew that she would
live, she couldn’t help but embrace her, trying to hold in the sobs that were choking her.

All the time, it seemed, they were tormenting Carolyn. They would never leave her in peace. One after another they grabbed and pushed and pulled, pierced her skin with needles and her throat
with tubes, bound her down with tight white blankets like bandages to the bed so she could not escape. They moved near her, spoke, clanked instruments. She could get no peace.

In between waves of panic she was floating, still and lethargic. Heavy timelessness and helplessness, nothing to be done. No energy to burn, just keep still, hold together. The blank peace was
interrupted by pain, or an insistent voice requesting – requesting something, God knows what –

“Do what you want!” Her first feeble querulous words in response to her mother’s daily greeting. The nurse had told Meg that Carolyn had been more wakeful this afternoon.

“Carolyn! Oh Carolyn!” Meg burst into tears and Carolyn closed her eyes again.

While she was critical, and for a time afterwards, she was kept in an ante-room on her own. Once it was clear she would live, and that healing would take a painfully slow time, she was
transferred to the end bed on Women’s Surgical. It was a long dim high-ceilinged ward with two large windows at the opposite end. She did not ask what was wrong with her until so many days
after it had happened that her mother couldn’t believe she didn’t know. The whole hideous sequence was etched vividly in her own brain, and repeated so often to friends and relatives,
that it had become a chant:

“In a coma for two days, fractured skull, broken ribs (five), fractured right femur, severe bruising and laceration to right side of body, twenty-seven stitches –” and, most
poignantly horrible to one who remembered playing “This little piggy went to market” with Carolyn the baby’s tiny perfect toes, “three crushed toes on the right foot.”
The doctor had said, “I doubt if we can do much for them. We’ll probably have to amputate. But it’s not the end of the world – after a few months, she won’t even
notice. Just a question of adjusting her balance slightly. They’re not enormously useful things, toes.”

Carolyn spent a short time absorbing the information, then said, “I could be dead.” She thought about the toes when Meg had gone. It seemed to her that she could feel them, that they
were all right. The van must have run over them. She remembered quite clearly the sudden closeness of the hot engine, and thinking (or had she thought it since?), “It’s going to run
over my head.” But it had only run over three toes. Idly she considered which bit of your body could you most easily do without? Apart from inaccessible bits like tonsils and appendix, toes
came top of the list. She supposed she must be very lucky.

The toes were amputated later that week. It made no difference at all to the way she felt, or to the pain. She wanted to see them, but refrained from asking out of a sense of embarrassment. The
doctors would think she was peculiar. But they are my toes. Were. She wanted desperately to see them and worked herself up into a state of sweaty frenzy to ask, never mind what they thought, as the
anaesthetist bent over her. She heard the doctor laugh. “We’ll have to see,” he said. She realized that her embarrassment had been pointless because of course he wouldn’t
show her them. When she woke up in her own bed again she didn’t even bother to ask, though her memory later cradled the pathetic image of three squashed little toes in a sauce of blood in a
kidney-shaped bowl as tenderly as if they had been a stillborn child.

She was more and more awake, lying still and dull-headed, not in control of her body. All she could do was stare. She could half turn her head and stare through lowered lashes at the thing in
the next bed. She watched it without interest, just as she would have watched a tree or dog or anything else that happened to be there. It was soothing to watch because it lay quite still. There
was a metal thing over its face, a sort of cage stuck on to its head. It was rather horrible, but so inhuman that it didn’t matter. Its hands were bound round and round with bandages. It was
always propped up on its pillows and had a contraption like a music stand across its bed, upon which rested a book. Clumsily yet delicately, with its bound paw the monster turned the pages of the
book. Carolyn watched it sometimes succeeding easily, sometimes having to move both stiff paws to the elusive page, turning its caged head to left and right as it started and finished each line of
print.

One day as she lay staring at the paws she noticed them become still around a half-turned page, and moving her eyes on up, saw that the thing was facing her.

“Hello.” The voice was muffled. Carolyn realized that it could not open its mouth properly. Its cage was stuck into its teeth.

“Hello.”

“How’re you feeling?” asked the voice kindly.

There was no point in replying. Instead Carolyn said, “What happened to you?”

“I had an accident.” The voice was very dry, the accent peculiar. Carolyn stared at the metal contraption – it looked like nothing so much as scaffolding – and began to
laugh. She stopped straight away because it sent fire through her ribs. The monster seemed to snort.

“Me too,” said Carolyn.

The thing nodded. “Clare,” it said, using a paw to point at itself. “Does it hurt?”

“When I laugh,” Carolyn whispered helplessly.

“I had two hundred and thirty-five stitches,” pursued the disembodied voice.

“Poor you –” Carolyn started to giggle again. “Don’t make me laugh –”

“I’m not.” The thing’s voice was indignant but still humorous. “Two hundred and thirty-five stitches isn’t my idea of a joke.”

“Why?” said Carolyn.

“The stitches?”

“Mmn.”

“Cut. All over.”

Carolyn spat out “Why?” again.

“Glass.” The monster nodded sagely. “Sharp glass.”

Carolyn in control now; “Where?”

“Well, everywhere, really. I walked on to a roof of it, fell through it, smashed my face on a ledge and landed on a broken heap of it. Silly really,” it said reflectively. As
Carolyn continued not to be able to speak, it added, “It was a conservatory. I was trying to repair the roof.” Then it asked Carolyn for the details of her accident. “Less
ridiculous. Less messy. You should have seen me when the ambulance came. I was coated in blood – like a used Tampax.”

Carolyn’s weak hilarity was checked by this image, which she found shocking. The funny accent, she realized, was American. The acquaintance developed in little hysterical bursts, from
which each sank back into her book or helpless weakness respectively.

Carolyn’s mother visited her every day. Arthur came with her on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Meg brought grapes, oranges, chocolates, peppermint creams, magazines, freesias,
fruit cordial, knitting, books of puzzles, talcum powder, Carolyn’s old teddybear, a transistor radio, a little photo of herself and Arthur, and a new turquoise blue bedjacket which she had
crotcheted. Carolyn seemed so weak and weepy that Meg didn’t know how to treat her and tried anxiously to think of things that would amuse or console.

“You
will
be all right, love, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it? In a few months time this’ll just be past history. When you come home we’ll go for a
little holiday somewhere nice and restful, by the sea for a few days. Whitby or Scarborough. That’ll be a tonic, won’t it?” And “Father and I are thinking of getting a new
carpet for your room for when you come home. Would you like that, love? I went down to Whitefields and that nice woman, you know the one with the grey streak in her hair, well I told her what I was
looking for and how you were you know, in hospital, and she said, ‘Well you take the sample book to her, Mrs Tanner,’ she said. ‘I’m not supposed to let it out the shop but
if you promise to get it back first thing on Friday why don’t you take it and let her choose herself.’ It was nice of her wasn’t it, thoughtful, people often are you know when you
have trouble. So here it is, careful, it’s a weight, I’ve lugged it all down Plantain Street off the bus – but anyway, let me show you. This is the one I was thinking about, but
what do you –?”

Carolyn turned her heavy-as-lead head sideways and let her sight fall on the thick rectangles of carpet. Buttermilk. Mushroom. Sahara. She couldn’t care less. “Yes,” she said.
“Sahara.” She could feel her mother looking at her, and feel the oppressive weight of her anxiety. Sound more – enthusiastic. “Yes, it’s nice. Thank you.” She
watched her mother purse her lips, close the heavy carpet book and wrestle to get it into her bag again. Her mother looked up brightly.

“Well. What’ve you been up to since yesterday?”

Carolyn felt terribly miserable. She felt like crying. She wished her Mum would go away. “Nothing much. I had some ice-cream at dinner time.”

“That’s nice. The food’s not really so bad is it, not compared to what it used to be. They’ve got it quite nice in here really. There’s a good view you know, from
that window down there – when you get up and about.”

Pause.

“You don’t mind your Dad not coming with me today, do you love? He sends you his love and everything, but he’s not too good in hospitals, he really isn’t, they get him
all jittery. Men, eh? And there’s not that much room for two visitors anyway, is there? We can make it nice and cosy with just the two of us, and have a bit of a natter. No point everyone
sitting round like lemons with nothing to say, is there?”

Pause.

“Anything else you’d like me to bring, Carolyn? The sister says you can read if you like, they’ll do you one of those frames – you know, like –”

Carolyn moved her head once to the side, shorthand for shaking it, and tears started to roll down her face.

“What is it? Carolyn? What’s the matter? Does it hurt? Where does it hurt you?”

She was miserably hopelessly alone and afraid, and her mother’s worried face and kind offers were so far away they seemed like mockery. Her mother couldn’t help her, couldn’t
touch her. Would go home and leave her here. Her mother didn’t know what it was like.

As Meg came day after day trying more and more anxiously to cheer Carolyn up and get her out of herself, with news of the outside world and comings and goings at the woolshop, Carolyn became
more and more unresponsive, sullen or weepy. She didn’t want her mother to come. Obscurely, she blamed her. Carolyn had never been away from Meg so much as a night, before.

She had other visitors. Alan came with a great bunch of roses. He sat by the bed and smiled at her and held her hand. The A levels were in full swing, but once he had told her about the
questions there wasn’t much to say. His roses wilted overnight and died without opening. It was the same with Mandy. She came full of gossip about who was going out with who and what
so-and-so said they’d put in the such-and-such exam, and it was all tiny and quite unreal to Carolyn. She couldn’t be bothered with it, they seemed like small yacketing dolls. She had
missed her exams, school was over, their lives were all going on and she was stuck here. None of them knew what it was like. She didn’t care what they were doing. She felt that she would
never escape from the hospital. They were doing different things to her all the time. They put her leg in traction then they took it out. They operated again on her foot. They gave her different
drugs. They were going to do a skin graft. She didn’t want them to keep chopping and changing her, she wanted to be left alone. No one ever seemed to tell her what they were doing, they were
evasive and in a hurry when she plucked up the courage to ask. It was nothing to do with her, her body. Once when she and Clare were discussing their respective injuries she confessed how much she
wanted to see her foot. “I feel as if I don’t know what’s there – I don’t know what I’m like any more.”

Clare snorted. “Miracles of modern medicine. You can come in here a human being, and go out as Frankenstein’s monster. No –” she corrected herself, “You do come in
as a squashed human being –”

“And get remade into a monster,” repeated Carolyn. “Sewn together with new bits.”

“Well look at me,” said Clare.

“I can’t. What will – what’s that for?”

“This?” Clare raised a paw towards her cage.