The Inconvenience of the Hospital Bed

It materialises in the upstairs hallway with all the smugness of an illegally parked car: a hospital bed, adorned with industry-standard linen.

          These past few days have been hard enough without something like this happening. The missing wheelie bin. Forgetting to buy eggs. Though I’m already running late for my lunch with Bethany, I know I can’t just leave it. No. I stop tying my tie and peel back the top sheet, revealing the face of a young girl. Her head looks like a coin. Glimmering on the pillow. Impossibly small. If I wanted to, I’m sure I could fit it in my pocket.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Excuse me.’

Nothing.

‘What are you doing in my house? Who brought you here?’

The girl responds with two sticky blinks. A faint whistle.

           I check my watch. If I don’t leave now, it’ll be impossible to make it on time. It’s taken weeks of pleading messages to convince Bethany to meet me, to agree to eat a sandwich with me, and if I’m just five minutes late it’ll be the only excuse she needs to cut off contact again.

I shove the hospital bed out of the way, cursing as its feet snag on the carpet, and rush down the staircase. I can still make it, I can still make it.

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*

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          When I return home, I discover the girl has relocated to the kitchen. In front of the fridge-freezer unit. I move the bed more carefully this time, keen to protect the linoleum floor. I lift from one side and swerve it out of the way. It surprises me, how light the girl is. I examine her again and my surprise dissipates. The sheet below her coin-head is completely flat, as though she doesn’t have a body at all. I consider pulling it back, just to check, but instead open up the freezer and retrieve a tub of chocolate ice cream. I go to the cupboard and deposit a scoop of peanut butter into the tub before retreating to my own bed

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*

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          I record a voice note for Bethany. Her preferred medium of communication. But the words come out wrong and I delete the message before she has a chance to listen to it.

Words to avoid. I make a list of words to avoid.

Mother, mum, mummy, ma. Please, please, sorry, sorry.

This time the voice note is just me breathing for twenty seconds. It isn’t clear what I’m trying to say anymore, but perhaps that’s a good thing. Bethany can decide which words I’m supposed to be saying and I can lie down and close my eyes.

I lie down. I close my eyes.

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*

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          At 5 a.m., as with every other morning, my bladder cries out. It tells me it can’t wait, and so I throw off my duvet and rush to the bathroom, ducking beneath the bedframe wedged in the doorway. It’s only when I return to the bedroom, ducking slower, that I take the scene in properly. It’s the same girl in the same bed. Despite being wedged at a forty-five degree angle, she hasn’t slid out. Her coin-head rests comfortable on her polypropylene pillow. Her eyes wriggle beneath their lids like two insects.

‘Who brought you here?’ I ask. ‘Who put you up to this?’​

Her mouth gurgles.

          I threaten to telephone the police but I don’t sound convincing. For fifteen seconds, I only make breathing noises, and then I remember that           Bethany hasn’t responded to my voice note.

          I crawl back into bed and put a pillow over my face. But I can still hear her. It’s the sound of someone trying to inflate a balloon, giving up, and starting over again. I go downstairs and fire up my computer. I google my name, purposefully limiting the search results to the past month.

It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search.

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*

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          There’s a little boy in the conservatory now. His head is shiny, red, swollen. A beef tomato. I come across him as I’m clearing out the last of her plants, the ones that managed to survive the winter, tossing them into a black bin bag.

‘Who are you?’ I ask.

          He doesn’t respond, so I gently shake the metal bed frame. His head lolls back and forth. Milk teeth chatter. A toy donkey rolls out from beneath the covers and thumps onto the floor. It stares up at me, button eyes alarmed, as though I’ve just triumphed in a game of hide and seek. 

          I add the donkey to my bin bag. Then I open the conservatory doors and push the boy’s bed into the garden, only to find the little girl out there, waiting for us. Lined up, they look like a matching set. A little boy doll, a little girl doll. While I’m taking them in, shivering, spilling my coffee over myself, they start to cough in time. Small wet pops. I begin to think about the neighbours and I wonder why I moved the beds out here.

I pull the covers up over their faces, muffling them slightly.

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*

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          Sometimes, before I go to bed, I’ll turn on the television downstairs, put on one of her favourite musicals (Funny Girl, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and lie down and listen to the familiar vibrations of their songs until other sounds emerge around them (her laughter, the click of a lighter, a wine glass being set down too heavily) and then, finally, without realising it, I’ll have drifted off to sleep.

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*

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          Because of all the beds, the living room looks like a bumper car arena. I think about the funfair in Tidworth I used to take Bethany to. I think about the crude paintings of Disney characters. I think about the way she used to look at me back then, eyes twinkling stars

         Slipping in-between the beds, I examine each child’s face in turn, searching. A boy. Too chubby. Too many freckles. Not enough hair. Finally, I find a girl who looks similar enough. I pry open one of her eyes to check the colour. Brown. Still, I decide to make do. I lift her out of the bed and set her down on the sofa. She’s wearing pyjamas, which suits the scene, but she’s also abnormally thin, as though her bones are made of matchsticks. I flip on some cartoons and go to the kitchen, where I prepare two bowls of chocolatey cereal.

         The girl’s eyes open to watch a cartoon rabbit bludgeon a cartoon pig with a mallet, but she doesn’t touch her cereal. I’m about to spoon some into her mouth when the children start coughing in time again.

         ‘It’s Sunday,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything?’

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*

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         Of course, every day is Sunday now. I consider texting David to ask how the old ward team are doing, but when I open up our conversation I’m greeted by a hall of mirrors. The same messages from me, over and over again.

How are things?

How is it going?

How are you?

How are the team doing?

I have to scroll up quite a way to locate a message from David.

Good luck.

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*

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         An experiment.

         I spend the morning taking apart one of the beds. As the metal poles topple one by one, screws and bolts scurry beneath furniture like startled mice. From the sofa, a boy with onion-coloured skin watches as I demolish his home. He seems unphased. Wears an almost drunk expression. Once it’s done, I take the mattress and the bigger pieces of metal out to the front of the house. The small parts I put in the kitchen bin. When I return to the living room, however, I find the onion-boy tucked snuggly into a new hospital bed. Identical to the one old, right down to the scabs of rust. He makes a low gurgling sound as I approach.

         I consider trying again. But my hands hurt. My shoulders hurt. My knees hurt. My back hurts. My chest hurts. Dismantling all seventeen beds, I reflect, would also involve dismantling myself.

         I retrieve four biscuits from the kitchen cupboard and return to my own bed.

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*

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         ‘Sorry for all those voice notes. And for what I said at lunch. I didn’t mean to imply you were a bad person, things have just been difficult without your mother. Would you like to meet for dinner this weekend? My treat.’

YOUR MESSAGE WAS NOT SENT. Tap ‘Try Again’ to send this message.

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*

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         I have never actually watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg before. I have only listened to her watch it.

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*​

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         The older, heavier hospital beds, the ones from the eighties, only fit through the front door if I really force them. So I force them. Paint breaks away from the doorframe in big clumps, decorating the grass like snow. I worry about what people will think when they see what I’ve done. What a damaged front door signals about our street. About me.

         Once all the beds are out on the grass, my chest settles slightly. I finish my coffee. I run my fingers through my hair and pretend my hand isn’t my hand. I return to the house. I enter the living room, only to discover it's refilled itself with new children, new faces – I know they’re new because I came to know the old ones so well. Though my hands, my knees, my shoulders, my back all feel like they’ve been bludgeoned with a cartoon mallet, I attempt to move these new beds out to the front garden as well. However, it quickly becomes clear that there isn’t enough room. I try to pack them tightly, but still, it’s not enough.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

It’s Mrs. Hillgrove with her dog. A seed of panic sprouts in my chest.

‘I’m just, it’s –’

‘You’re going over the line.’ With her cane, she taps the boundary between her garden and mine. The contrast between wild and trim grass makes it quite apparent. Next, she clangs her stick against a leg of one of the hospital beds. ‘And anyway, these are a bit of an eyesore, aren’t they?’

         I go back to the house. I head into the kitchen, craving something sweet, but the empty cupboards remind me that it’s been weeks since I last went shopping. I make a bowl of porridge and pour half a bag of sugar into it. As I eat in the living room, I hear Mrs. Hillgrove chatting with someone outside. Perhaps the man from number fourteen. I crouch beneath the windowsill and listen to them talk.

         They’re discussing bin collection days.

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*

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         The living room is a packed pen. A West End show on opening night. A drive-in cinema screening the latest blockbuster. Only the film we’re watching tonight is sixty years old.

         I examine the back of the DVD case as the opening titles play. I read out the names of the actors (Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Nico Castelnuovo, Marc Michel) and imitate her lilting accent, pretending she’s sitting here instead of me. I sip my wine. Light a cigarette. When the film starts properly, I find the brightness of it all staggering. Every clothing item matches the colour of a sweet and sugary food: custard raincoats, apricot dresses, caramel shoes. Compared with the greys and browns that populate the house, it looks like an alien world. The children respond with a similar reverence. Not a single cough bursts from their lips.

         Once or twice, I swear I see her in the background of a scene, wearing her red – no, raspberry – dress and I feel the urge to pause the film and verify my hunch.

But each time I decide it’s better not to know.

What good would it do?