The Imaginary (20 page)

‘
Shuffleup? Does it have a room?'

‘Shuffleup? Do you have a first name?'

‘Me?'

‘No, the patient. Common name, you know?'

‘Oh. I see. Yes, of course. It's called…
Amanda
Shuffleup.'

‘Let me see.'

The receptionist ran his finger down several sheets of paper before he found what he was looking for.

‘Fourth floor,' he said. ‘Room 117. But visiting hours aren't until after lunch. It's family only in the mornings. Or…are you family?'

‘No,' Mr Bunting said, shaking his head. ‘I'm not family. Just a family friend. This afternoon, you say? 117?'

‘Two o'clock onwards.'

‘Very good. I'll wait.'

‘Okay,' the receptionist said, looking down at his paperwork.

After a few seconds he looked up again.

‘Is there something else I can help with?' he said.

‘Smell?' Mr Bunting said, sniffing. ‘I smell something. Can you smell something?'

‘Oh, that's the new cleaners,' the receptionist said. ‘They only started on Monday and I've told them not to use the lemon fresh stuff. Some people are allergic, aren't they? Peanuts and the like. I mean, this is a hospital, isn't it?'

‘Mmm,' said Mr Bunting, ignoring the receptionist and talking to himself now. ‘Not lemons. It's…nothing.'

After
another moment he walked away. Rudger heard the heavy footsteps retreating. There was a biro on the floor by the receptionist's foot. He picked it up and wrote, ‘4' and ‘117' on the back of his hand. Mr Bunting had been helpful.

But why was
he
looking for Amanda?

And what had he smelt? Was it Rudger? They'd said he could smell Fading. That's how he'd got what's-her-name the other day.

Rudger peeked round the edge of the information desk. Mr Bunting was sat on a bench by the doors looking through a newspaper.

Rudger ran, as quietly as he could, over to a door labelled
Stairs
.

Rudger walked past doors that opened onto colourful wards full of poorly kids and past rooms filled with beeping machines and grim-faced grownups.

In one room a little girl sat on a chair by a bed. She looked up and saw him looking at her. She smiled.

Rudger smiled back.

He almost went in to talk to her, to say something like, ‘Look out for yourself. There's a man downstairs in the lobby who eats people like me and you,' but he didn't want to worry her. Mr Bunting was here for Amanda and that meant, Rudger knew, that Mr Bunting was actually looking for
him
. He hoped it meant the others were safe for now.

He smiled at the girl again and looked at the room number: 84.

He
carried on up the corridor.

It was long and smelt of cleaning chemicals and bandages. Porters pushed trolleys into lifts and a cleaner lazily mopped along the skirting board. None of them saw him.

Still, he had the oddest feeling he was being watched.

He looked behind him.

There was no one there. The little girl hadn't come out of her room to look at him. No one was looking at him. The only people he could see were all real.

But still, as he walked down the corridor the oddest feeling tickled at the back of his neck.

He counted the doors on either side, watching the numbers grow bigger.

Round a corner and there was a storeroom on the left labelled 109. He hurried on and, four doors down, there was 117.

Rudger opened the door. Amanda's mum looked up as he came in.

‘That door again,' she said, getting up and shutting it behind him.

Amanda was lying in the bed, a small shape under the blankets. There were machines to one side that had little red lights that blinked on and off. Her head was bandaged where she'd hit it and her left arm was in plaster. It must have been broken. Rudger remembered how strangely twisted it had looked when he'd last seen her.

She was sleeping.

He
couldn't tell if his heart had stopped or was beating so fast he couldn't feel the beats, just a hum like a hummingbird caught in his chest. He was light-headed. Here was Amanda. Here he was and here was Amanda. After days apart, they were together again.

Rudger wept. (Just one tear. Any more and Amanda would take the mickey.)

There was a magazine on the chair by the bed. Amanda's mum picked it up as she sat back down. She held it flat on her lap but didn't look at it.

There was a little washbasin on one wall and a large cupboard next to it with a label saying,
For patient use only
.

They were deep inside the hospital here and the room had no windows, only a poster with a picture of a sunny forest scene pinned up beside the wardrobe. It wasn't the prettiest of rooms, but it had Amanda in it.

Rudger stood at the foot of her bed and looked at her.

She looked peaceful. The noise of her breathing was the same as the noise she made at night, in her own bed. It reminded him of being in his wardrobe at home. He wished he could ask her mum (Fridge's Lizzie, he thought with a smile) how she was. He longed to know exactly what had happened.

At the foot of the bed, hanging on the metal frame, was a clipboard with notes on, but it wasn't this that caught Rudger's eye. Instead it was the slender sapling growing from the bed-frame's corner, like a single post of a four-poster bed. It grew straight up,
only
a metre or so into the air, but it had a couple of thin branches coming off it with a few leaves growing on each of them.

Importantly, it wasn't real.

Even while she slept, Amanda's imagination was making her room her own.

Rudger was proud of her. This was why he wanted to be
her
friend, not John Jenkins' or Julia's, but Amanda's, because
she
had a real gift.

‘Amanda, darling,' Amanda's mum said to her sleeping daughter. ‘I'm going to get a cup of tea. You stay there. I won't be long. Do you want anything from the café?'

Amanda said nothing.

Her mum smiled a thin smile as if Amanda had said, ‘No thanks, Mum.'

She looked ever so tired, Rudger thought. There were dark bags under her eyes and her hair wasn't as neat as it usually was. It looked like she'd been here at the hospital all night. He wondered who was at home looking after Oven, the cat.

She went out.

Rudger dropped her magazine on the floor and sat in the chair. It was warm. He put a hand on the white sheet of the bed by Amanda's shoulder, and brushed his long red hair out of his face with the other.

‘Amanda,' he said. ‘It's me, Rudger.'

He
said it quietly, so as to not wake her. Which was silly, because he wanted to wake her, just for a moment, just to let her know he was there, that he'd come all this way and that he'd found her at last. Then she could sleep for as long as she wanted.

He prodded her softly.

‘Amanda?'

Had she stirred? Had her breathing changed? Had her eyelid flickered?

He leant over, leant on the bed and put his lips right up next to her ear.

‘Amanda,' he said, squeezing her hand gently. ‘I'm so sorry I got you hurt. It was all my fault. If you hadn't imagined me, Mr Bunting would never have chased us and you…you wouldn't have got knocked down. It's my fault. All my fault. I'm so sorry. Wake up soon. I miss you.'

It felt good to have said all that. It was a weight off his shoulders, though he'd have to say it again when she was actually listening.

He sat back in the chair and looked around the room.

One corner was darker than all the others.

It looked odd.

And then there was a flicker and a crackle and the lights went out.

Although the lights in Amanda's room had gone out, there was still a shaft of light shining through the window in the door.

Rudger saw the girl, the dark-haired silent girl, Mr Bunting's ice-fingered friend, as she stepped out of her cloak of shadows into the rectangle of light.

He was on his feet in an instant, leaping to the foot of the bed, putting himself between Amanda and the girl, which was both brave and foolish, he realised, since it wasn't Amanda she was here for, but he didn't care.

The girl tilted her head to one side with a bony clicking sound and stared at him as if she didn't know who or what he was. He was, he remembered, dressed as a girl himself, all in pink.

She sniffed twice, then lowered her head and nodded. He
was
what she'd been waiting for after all.

What
was Rudger to do?

‘Amanda!' he shouted. ‘Amanda, wake up!'

There was no movement behind him.

And then the girl pounced, fingers out like talons (even the finger he'd bitten off in the alley was there, he noticed, stunted, stubby, but already re-nailed like a claw), and she was on him, hissing and grasping and struggling with him, and all the time staring her blank-eyed stare.