"When you're black and white there's no use hiding in a field of colours," his umber eyes so solemn, "Anthony T. Hincks."
But when Cillian looked at Oliver, he couldn't help but disagree, because to Cillian, Oliver was all the colours o...
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I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine. William Shakespeare
II HE CARRIED a small tissue-wrapped bunch of pink and white carnations. The stems were still damp, he could feel the wetness seeping through the thin membranes of tissue palming his hand. He noticed the flowers were tight-budded, as though stuck in a straight-jacket, but one was beginning to open, wriggling out of its restraints, and a transitory evocation of flight came to him. He was not allowed the small glass vase the florist had given him into the inpatient wing of the hospital. The psychiatric nurse had said it was a hazard; glass was a hazard, it can be shattered.
When the doctor told Cillian on his last visit to his mother that she might soon need to be admitted to a different department within the hospital, with the objective of keeping her body functioning (they had apparently given up on her mind), he was not surprised. It was not that he had anticipated this turn of events; in fact, he had imagined instead that his mother might remain indefinitely in her current position and state, and it would seem entirely natural. In his mind he was convinced of the fallacy that after his mother had reached her mid-forties she had simply ceased to age any longer; she had stagnated, like a plant that grows still without enough nutrients in the soil.
"If she continues along this trajectory, and if we cannot get her to eat on her own accord, we will have no choice but to put her on enteral feeding. Your mother will be treated as an anorexia inpatient."
Today he brought with him watermelon, which earlier this morning he had diced into bite-sized cubes and put into a translucent tupperware container. It wasn't the right season for watermelons, but they used to be his mother's favourite. The doctor said that if they cannot get her to eat, she will be force-fed. They said that she was not capable of rational thought, that was why they could justify force-feeding her. Cillian was not surprised by this either, but he had taken watermelon with him today, so perhaps he really was. When he brought the cubes of watermelon to his mother's lips on a fork, she did not open her mouth. He waited for the sweet scent of cut fruit to reach her nose, but it elicited no reaction in her. She was staring straight ahead, but there was no recognition in her eyes. You had the impression she wasn't seeing anything at all. He pressed the watermelon to her lips, but the fruit was past-ripe; when he tried to part her lips with it, it disintegrated into a fine red powder at her teeth and a pink juice poured from it over her bottom lip. Cillian caught the mess in his hands before it could drip onto his mother's hospital gown. He dropped it into the tupperware container—it splatted alongside the other fleshy piles of watermelon, forming a saccharine stew of crimson entrails—and wiped the sticky residue from his hands onto his jeans. On her bedside table was a white plastic cup filled with water, inside it the straight-jacket carnations floated. When he glanced back at his mother, her lips were stained in a scarlet slurry.
