The Boy at the End of the Bed

Prologue

Although the room was completely dark she could still see him clearly. He stood calmly at the end of her bed. One arm was wrapped tightly around an old, dilapidated bear. Its left eye was missing, its ears and body were completely threadbare and one leg swung lower than the other following a feeble reattachment with rather poor stitching.

The little boy's face was pink, as though he'd just woken up. He stood in silence clutching the bear. His other arm hung limp by his side as it always did. An emaciated stump of wasted muscles, a grim reminder of the horrific accident that had swiftly severed all life from below the elbow with one merciless crush.

She pushed her arthritic frame up into a sitting position until she was more or less upright.

"Hello," she asked in a whisper, as if not to disturb, "is that you, Joe?"

The boy continued to stare ahead. She could see his familiar dimples and a hint of white as his mouth opened. Was he about to speak?

She leant towards him. He was wearing a pair of red pyjamas. They were hand me downs. She remembered how another girl in the home had given her the pyjamas for Joe. With Joe being so small for his age, anything that she had been given for him had been too big, these especially. But as he had loved them so much, she remembered how she had to turn up the trouser legs several times otherwise he would trip up when running up and down the corridor with the other children.

"Joe? Joe?" she repeated. But he remained where he was, in silence.

She frowned. Why was she able to see him? Her room was so dark. Yet there he stood. Was her elderly brain finally surrendering to the inevitable decline towards senility to which so many of her peers had already succumbed?

She shivered. Where were the cobwebs? Where was the network of skewed, distorted images that now plagued her vision every waking moment? All gone. Instead there was just Joe. Sweet Joe. Joe in his red pyjamas.

She reached for the bedside lamp and felt for the switch. Click.

Her bedroom flooded with light. Impulses raced between her tired, aged eyes and her brain. She moved her eyes erratically back and forth, trying to catch the one patch of useful vision she knew she had still hidden amongst the now muddled composition of her once perfect eyesight. Finally, she caught a brief glimpse of the end of the bed, but the boy had gone.

She slid out from beneath the covers and walked over to a dresser on the far wall of her bedroom. Five steps. Just five. She'd stubbed her toes often enough to know the number and length of strides she needed to make. She centred herself in front of the dresser by stretching her arms out on either side of her body and allowing her hands to find each corner. When she was in the right position she bent down and opened the bottom drawer. She started her search systematically from the left until she found what she was looking for. Under a pile of clothes she carefully removed a set of boys' red pyjamas and held them to her face.

Yes, they were still there. And they smelled just the same. After a moment or two she replaced them in the drawer and felt amongst the rest of the clothes until she found the bear. As her fingers rubbed the threadbare ears, a tear began to trickle down her face.

She picked up the bear and got back into bed.

With the light still on, she quickly fell back to sleep.