Christina's World
"Life's a voyage that's homeward bound "
Herman Melville
Kings College Hospital, London.
Jane Molyneux's mind and soul was shifting between this world and the next. She stood atop a small dark hill, craned her neck upwards and glared into an inky black night sky. Soft, dull, rumbling sounds - emanating from the western hemisphere – seemed to grow in intensity and pitch. Her flesh trembled with the cold; she rubbed moist palms on the side of her dress, and a thought took hold in her ethereal mind.
"My name is Jane Molyneux – and I am dreaming!"
She waited for the inevitable; for the transformation of dream into nightmare. The sound overhead, in the blackness, became deafening. Terrifying. The girl screamed and leapt upright – her being transported back at light speed into the comfort and safety of this world. One half of her thin sweat soaked frame was tightly enveloped between crisp, starch white hospital bedsheets. Her fists were clamped to her ears; her pretty features contorted with pain and fear.
In the early morning gloom of the special recovery unit at King's College Hospital – Jane screamed out loud. "The noise! The dreams! I can't take this any more! I just can - not - take - this - any more?" Two medics rushed into the ward and went through a well rehearsed proceedure, clasping her frail wrists and stabbing a sedative into her soft flesh. Within seconds Jane Molyneux was drifting back - back into yet another deeply troubled sleep.
A dull grey morning light washed over the clinical spaces of the SRU. "I'm frightened," whispered Jane. "I'm very, very frightened..." She pursed her fingers and pressed them to her pale lips. "It comes from across the sky - that terrible, terrible sound - like long drawn out rumbles of thunder, drawing in; getting closer and closer, louder and louder..."
The young girl brushed back thick golden locks of hair with one trembling hand and reached out to clutch the smooth, cold white hospital bed rail with the other. Her father looked directly at her, his narrow eyes and thin lips registering little emotion.
"I wake up in the dreams, and I am in another world; a world I don't like. Dad – I need help!"
John Molyneux sucked in his lower lip and glanced out of the hospital window – his mind on more worldly matters. High Finance matters. "Can they do something for me? Can they stop the dreams?" Jane leant over and buried her head in both hands. Droplets of tears seeped between the spaces of her long tapering fingers, falling off and splashing gently onto thickly starched white sheets.
She glanced across the room towards a Fine Art print hanging directly above the foot of the bed. The picture - Christina's World - by the American artist Andrew Wyeth, portrayed a slim, sylph-like youth in her early twenties, her face partially obscured from view as she gazed across seas of golden corn. On the brow of a hill stood a modest wooden farmhouse, every detail meticulously rendered in mellow drypoint umbers and creamy ochres.
"That's me!" she said, matter-of-factly; "I was Christina in a previous life; in the life I had before all of this!" She briefly surveyed the claustrophobic interior. She hated the smell of the place: the reek of pungent clinical antiseptic and newly laundered bed-clothes. A bunch of vermilion red roses provided some relief, tracing a delicate, natural fragrance in what would otherwise be an entirely alien environment. She gestured towards the print on the wall.
