Once Loved

Once Loved - Annabel Church

Shattered fragments of memory flash like the buzzing hospital lights on her ward. On. Off. Why doesn’t somebody just turn them off? No. Not the dark. Dark is dismal without dawn. The dawn would never come to ward number sixteen. The patients lie still, their decomposing bodies cruelly juxtaposed with the pristine, superfluous sheets that cover them. Why try to keep a person warm when they have been touched by death’s icy finger. Sheets cannot protect them from the chill of knowledge, the knowledge that they will die alone just as they were born. Alone.

The young woman had been dying for seven and a half months when her memory started to return. For it to return at this moment may have been a twisted joke played on her by the one that knits our life stories together. The yarn used for hers was red and her little thread had been picked and unpicked so many times that it had worn too thin. It was so thin that it would only have taken only the prick of an everlasting star to break it and let it fall forever into the emptiness of the heavens. Yet, it was not time for the thread to be broken, the agony of living off a thread when she once had a whole ball of yarn was not due to be over until she had remembered the memory.

Only one nurse suffered on ward sixteen because there seemed little point in administering care to the ones who had one foot in this world and one arm in the next. The nurse did not know the patients names. With a name comes identity, with identity comes intimacy and with intimacy comes suffering. But the nurse did pay special attention to the young woman who had been dying for seven and a half months on a certain day, the 26th day of June. The nurse was administering painkillers to the young woman which we all know are no cure for an illness and certainly for this patient whose pain cannot be touched by the dissolving of a substance in her sated blood. The young woman has her eyes closed. There is nothing to see.

The nurse supposed she had been beautiful once before the disease had come and ravaged her soul. The nurse imagined the blue veins that littered her eyelids were not there. She imagined the wisps of hair left on her scalp had been replaced by a head of brilliant shining ringlets. She imagined the deep lines on her forehead had been smoothed out like running your foot along the uneven dunes of the desert. She imagined that the hundreds of round marks on the young woman’s arms and body had been erased, leaving no trace of the months, the years spent in the company of metal instruments and fleeting hopes. But if imagination was enough to bring back the beauty of forgotten years then the human race would be the loveliest race that ever walked the universe.

The young woman started to remember.
A boy. She tries to picture his face but she can only remember his eyes. His golden brown eyes clash with the grey eyes of the nurse peering down at her. She hears breath in her ears. Her own? Or is it a remnant of the memory she must remember?  ‘Calm down,’ the boy says. She’s in a room, a small room with a window that looks out towards the centre of the biggest lie. ‘Calm down,’ was it the boy or the nurse? Reality threatens to break her hold on the past but she clings on with the edge of her fingers, gripping the corner of the memory. She folds it back slowly, covering the present. Hiding the lights of the ward and the groans of the patients who have already let their books close with no hope of turning back a page.

‘I love you,’ she hears his whisper in her ear. The memory is coming alive; it is all around her like the incessant swirling of a snowstorm in the night. She sees his smile, feels his touch on her face. Remembers. She is remembering love although the chill of death saturates her bones, she can move. Her heart is remembering. Her heart is beating. ‘I trust you,’ it’s her voice this time, before it was cracked and broken by months of thirst. Now it flows melodiously over the words as if they were made for her to say them. She can see the sunlight and feel her legs. Walking, she used to walk so far and now she could walk to the other end of the earth and back again if only she could find the way out. The key to escape the never-ending cycle of nothingness, she needs to find the door to escape from the waiting room of death.

‘Please don’t break my heart,’ her voice again. It is quiet, tender and secure. She recognises her own confidence that he will never do it. She recognises her former self much more that she recognises the rotting body of a young woman who has given in to the inevitability of decay. ‘I’ll never hurt you.’ His voice. The key is in the memory, the cycle can be broken in the act of remembrance.

The young woman opens her eyes and sees everything clearly. She sees the metal rails keeping her in her bed; she sees clones of the dying on each side of her. The nurse jumps back in astonishment. ‘I need to make a telephone call,’ the young woman croaks. These are the first words she has spoken in seven and a half months so her voice sounds like a seagull’s call which has been denied the open waves. ‘To whom?’ The nurse is used to the dying wishes of the patients of ward sixteen. The young woman tells her the name and tells her to do it immediately with perfect clarity. The nurse leaves.

The young woman has let go of the page of the past and believes her book to be closed and bound. Yet suddenly in her mind it is flung open as if caught in a leaf storm. Pages and events of a long suppressed memory are flung before her eyes in a series of words and pictures. She’s crying in the memory. Irrepressible tears of loss and agony, the pain is almost too much to bear. It is more painful than the chill in her bones, than the weight of her blood. ‘Grow up!’ He shouts. The words come from far away yet it is as if somebody has screamed them in her ear. ‘Please, please,’ she sobs, over and over again. She knows all is lost, she knows a part of her soul is drowning. Later in the memory her heart breaks over and over again as he breaks his long-forgotten promises. One. Two. Three. The one in control of the thread of life snaps it in three places, diminishing her ball of yarn to nothing but a single red line.

‘I have the young man on the end of the telephone,’ the nurse is back. She is holding the key to escape in her hand. The exit out of the waiting room of death and back into the dawn. ‘Hello? Hello?’ The receiver is speaking. The nurse’s arm is outstretched and all the young woman has to do it take it in her withered, blackened excuse for a hand.
His new indifference. His new laughter. His new morals. His new cold eyes. Four images hit her simultaneously and the young woman still hesitates. The hundreds of un-said good mornings, the un-said good nights and the unspoken apologies. The silence has been left unbroken and walking through it may be enough to wake the dead. The young woman opens her eyes and asks for the phone.

‘I’m sorry but he said he didn’t have time to wait any longer. He said he had to go. You took too long and he’s a busy man.’

The young woman’s arm falls heavy on the bed and she breathes in and out for the last time like Desdemona in the presence of her own murderer. She is peaceful. She should have realised long ago that her salvation did not lie in the present but in the past. She should have realised when the past was the present and the present was the future. Her last thought was that she would have liked to hear his voice, just once more. But in a voice there is identity, in identity there is intimacy and in intimacy there is suffering.

The young man did not hear about the death of the young woman because he was too busy. Or perhaps he did hear but he didn’t care enough to see her pass from this world to the next. Or perhaps he did not want to go and see the words written on the gravestone.

Once Loved.