Never Summer Again

Chapter Twenty Six - Sadness and Joy

Soundtrack: Dark Side - Bishop Briggs

Lydia

"Get that suitcase out of the way." I hear my mother's voice calling from down the hall. She is pushing a trolley full of suitcases my way in the hotel room, as we wait for the piccolo to come pick them up.

I push the suitcase away by the handle. My brother is playing some stupid game on his phone on the bed. Our flights are in two hours' time. She is flying back to France and we are going home to London. Our vacation in Italy has passed too quickly.

"Patrick and I are coming down in two weeks." I tell her. We are going on the sailing trip and his mom suggested we take my mom from France, as well.

"I know, Lyds, I am happy about it" she says, her voice flat. I still can't get used to the lack of emotion in her. No matter what we are talking about, from sweets to dead puppies, and from tropical trips to psychiatric clinics, it is all the same, all the time. She is talking in the same flat voice, lacking emotion.

I remember that, at the beginning, this was the scariest thing ever. It started after The Incident, after she was released from hospital. It was as if she was a robot. No emotion, no variation in her expression. Tears would start running down her face from time to time, but, even then, her expression wouldn't change. It was as if all emotion was so painful, that she actually asked the doctors to remove it all.

I have this image of an operating theatre in my head, and a surgical team around an operating table. A doctor, a surgeon, is hovering above my mother's sedated body...

"Scalpel" he says and a nurse hands him the instrument.

Another doctor points down at my mother, as the one with the scalpel aims to cut.

"Nice, clean cuts now" the other one says. "Cut right between Love and Pain".

The one with the scalpel focuses really hard, beads of sweat visible on his forehead. If he wasn't wearing a surgical mask, I would bet he is biting his tongue. Fuck it, this is my dream, so his mask becomes transparent and I can see his tongue poking between his lips.

He aims and cuts. A nurse swipes a cloth over his sweaty forehead.

"Good job!" The other one says. They keep on discussing and cutting, the one encouraging the other, as he removes Worry, Anger, Trust and Fear.

"Be careful now, you are really close to Sadness." The one, who gives the instructions says.

"It is huuuge, I haven't seen such a swollen Sadness before." The one, who does the actual cutting, says.

"Agreed. I haven't seen anything like it in all my twenty years of practice." The other one says. So, he is the more experienced one. The Brains behind the operation, pun intended. The other one must be the "Hands".

"We should take it out and preserve it to show to students."

"OK. I am going in now" the scalpeled one says. A tense silence falls. Suddenly, intense, "ER" music is playing. Drumroll.

"I am cutting really deep, but it seems there is more". The one with the scalpel reaches with his bloody gloved hands and extracts a huge, bloody blob, which he then carefully places in a metal bowl.