Margaret4

There was only silence and the fly in the sick room at the end of the brown bevel of the foot stained stairs that ran thin, a lark’s tongue, that ended at the door of the old servant’s quarters hidden at the top of the house. The fly dotted, made the room its own; making its presence felt by absence. I matched the buzzing in my head with that outside and I’d surface from beneath the subterranean warmth of the blankets, with my feet pushed against the touch- board at the bottom of the bed in anticipation of it circling. I had nothing to hit it with. No newspapers or books. They were seen as too stimulating. Only a Bible. I looked for a weapon that was not a prayer.

Sister Rosemary had been seated in the hard wooden chair designed for longevity rather than the padded comforts of this world. She stepped, partially rose up as if to stand, when she saw my eyes open as if she had been caught dozing and was fleeing from sleep. Under the black hood of her nun’s habit she had a man’s face, until she smiled, with one side of her full lips crinkling up slightly higher than the other, as if in apology. She smelled sharp and stringent like a slither of carbolic, but also the fly-bait of something sweet. She was the tallest of the nuns by far, her back prone to sudden bursts of hump-backed dwarfism, in order to fit in with the others and be seen as small and humble. For an instant my head stopped pulsing like a phone left off the hook, and I imagined, underneath her habit, her long legs stretching all the way to eternity, but, of course, nuns didn’t have human legs, just bones with knees bolted on for kneeling.

‘Are you all right?’ Her voice was brown treacle and her hand shook slightly as she cack-handedly reached diagonally across and put her long nail bitten fingers on my forehead.

I shook her hand away and turned my head towards the pillow. My dull-eyed ears tried to block her out, but heard looped breathing and felt her presence looming over me, like a black shadow, deciding whether to go left or right. Her feet made the decision and banged out of the room, the door clicking shut like a single hiccup. The toilet in the landing flushed, reminding me that I was dying for a pee, and I heard the pipes banging as hot water ran through them into the sink, which was barely big enough to wash a tooth brush.

Sister Rosemary came bustling back, all business, batting through the door carrying a white tin basin with steam rising up off it and a blue mottled face-cloth perched on it like a holster. I turned my face towards the high window as she put the contents down, careful not to swish and spill anything.

‘Let’s get you washed.’ Her hand crept towards the blanket ready to pull it back.

I turned pulling the blanket up around my neck, securing it, setting my body to rigid in the middle of the bed. The cloth dripped an unsteady beat of mop-tailed tears onto the yellow patterned linoleum. She placed its gentle warmth on my forehead, drawing out the sting of bitterness. My grip on the blankets lessened as she ran it around my face as if I were once more a child in Doddie’s old kitchen, getting washed buck-naked for all the world to see, through childish laughter in the big sink.

There was a sense of hurt that flickered, like a mottled yellow lizard in the sun, in the outer greens, and sank into the brown of her hazel eyes, when my clenched fists instinctively grabbed for the muffled corners of the blankets once more, and stopped her from peeling them away and opening up my body. My lips pushed out in defiance, pressed together like pomegranate arils, bleeding into each other. Words crowded out my head. None of them found their way to my tongue, so I couldn’t explain that I didn’t know how I’d found myself on the top of the house, in the sick room. I also needed time to think over whether I was wearing any pyjamas.

‘Come, you’ve been in an accident.’ She stood with the facecloth poised, establishing a new tilt and equilibrium in her sick room; her words syrup for the soothing.

Gentle, the dappled crown of her fingers on mine, peeling them back from ignorance. Her touch was enough to loosen me. I sprang up into a sitting position, as if a marionette, and she’d pulled the right strings above my head. She aired the blankets, cutting them in half and folding them back across the bottom half of my striped pyjamas. You can never smell yourself properly until you are sick, an old man’s smell of decay eating into your pubescent body. She seemed not to mind. Her hands gloried in the wetness of the blue cloth and white dove-sized chunk of Lux soap, moved purposefully around my neck and underneath the cloth of my arms, around my back and paused over my stick-out belly button.

‘You need to do down there.’ She couldn’t look; her eyes finding a space on the crucifix and Jesus’ pain hanging on the white plaster wall. As she soaked the cloth and handed it to me, to use, her ring finger twitched and pointed, imperceptibly, to the black area underneath the blankets.

‘I need to go to the toilet first.’

She nodded in agreement, her nylon wimple made an unpleasant chaffing noise as the material stretched. ‘I’ll need to help you up and come with you. I don’t want you fainting, or falling down.’

She could tell from the expression on my face that I didn’t understand. ‘You fell down in the boy’s toilets about a week ago. Don’t you remember?’

‘A week?’

‘Yes eight days ago to be exact.’ She spoke in the way one would to a very small child. ‘You fell down in the toilets unconscious and we brought you here. We had to get Dr Fleming to examine you. From your injuries he thought you must have had a grand mal seizure. He didn’t think it worthwhile sending you to hospital, but gave you a very strong sedative and has been coming back to give you injections to help you sleep and recover. Nobody knew you were epileptic. But now we know we can make sure you get the appropriate medication.’

‘I’m not epileptic.’ I scrambled up out of the bed, suddenly and desperately needing to pee, but my legs felt funny and went from under me as if I’d been skating and fell through the ice.

‘See.’ Sister Rosemary helped me up. My falling added to her assessment of me as a chronic epileptic that couldn’t do anything for himself.

My legs seemed to find some purchase and I pulled away from her toward the closed door. ‘Sister Mary beat me. That’s why I collapsed. I’not…’ My tongue found it hard to even say the word.

‘Shush child. You know as well as I do that Sister Mary wouldn’t hurt a fly. You’ll be up and yourself in no time. Don’t you worry.’