Jenny Downham Before I Die

Twelve

I know I’m in a hospital as soon as I open my eyes. They all smell the same, and the line hooked into my arm is achingly familiar. I try to sit up in bed, but my head crashes and bile rises in my throat.

A nurse rushes over with a cardboard bowl, but she’s too late. Most of it goes over me and the sheets.

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘We’ll soon have that cleaned up.’

She wipes my mouth, then helps me roll onto my side so that she can untie my nightgown.

‘Doctor’ll be here soon,’ she says.

Nurses never tell you what they know. They’re hired for their cheeriness and the thickness of their hair. They need to look alive and healthy, to give the patients something to aim for.

She chats as she helps me on with a fresh gown, tells me she used to live near the ocean in South Africa, says, ‘The sun is closer to the earth there, and it’s always hot.’

She whisks the bed sheets from under me and conjures up fresh ones. ‘I get such cold feet in England,’ she says. ‘Now, let’s roll you back again. Ready? That’s it, all done. Ah, and what good timing – the doctor’s here.’

He’s bald and white and middle-aged. He greets me politely and drags a chair over from under the window to sit by the bed. I keep hoping that in some hospital somewhere in this country I’ll bump into the perfect doctor, but none of them are ever right. I want a magician with a cloak and wand, or a knight with a sword, someone fearless. This one is as bland and polite as a salesman.

‘Tessa,’ he says, ‘do you know what hypercalcaemia is?’

‘If I say no, can I have something else?’

He looks bemused, and that’s the trouble – they never quite get the joke. I wish he had an assistant. A jester would be good, someone to tickle him with feathers while he delivers his medical opinion.

He flips through the chart on his lap. ‘Hypercalcaemia is a condition where your calcium levels become very high. We’re giving you bisphosphonates, which will bring those levels down. You should be feeling much less confused and nauseous already.’

‘I’m always confused,’ I tell him.

‘Do you have any questions?’

He looks expectantly at me and I hate to disappoint him, but what could I possibly ask this ordinary little man?

He tells me the nurse will give me something to help me sleep. He stands up and gives a nod goodbye. This is the point where the jester would lay a trail of banana skins to the door, then come and sit with me on the bed. Together we’d laugh at the doctor’s backside as he scurries away.

It’s dark when I wake up and I can’t remember anything. It freaks me out. For maybe ten seconds I struggle with it, kicking against the twisted sheets, convinced I’ve been kidnapped or worse.

It’s Dad who rushes to my side, smooths my head, whispers my name over and over like a magic spell.

And then I remember. I jumped in a river, I persuaded Cal to join me on a ridiculous spending spree and now I’m in hospital. But the moment of forgetting makes my heart beat fast as a rabbit’s, because I actually forgot who I was for a minute. I became no one, and I know it’ll happen again.

Dad smiles down at me. ‘Do you want some water?’ he says. ‘Are you thirsty?’

He pours me a glass from the jug, but I shake my head at it and he sets it back down on the table.

‘Does Zoey know I’m here?’

He fumbles in his jacket and takes out a packet of cigarettes. He goes over to the window and opens it. Cold air edges in.