Butterfly Fish (40 page)

I knew Anon was partially responsible for the state I'd found myself in but why did I deserve this? Hadn't I suffered enough? Why had I inherited one punishment after another? I thought of
calling Rangi or Mrs Harris but I'd left my mobile on the kitchen counter. I was in a world of strangers, listening through stethoscopes tapping against a God's chest. Nurses' smiles wavered as they lied to patients out of kindness. This was a country I came from. I knew the language of the damned. Through the rage, helplessness and despair, I spoke it to the ceiling.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, wrung my hand in the light bedcovering listening to an internal clock ticking. I cried when a silhouette from the ceiling leapt into black train tracks. Doctors and nurses came and went; cut-outs travelling on ripples. They hovered by my bed checking the stump. Pain medications with names I could not pronounce slipped down my throat. The withered old man in the next bay coughed out his insides, arms outstretched as if to retrieve them.

Pangs of jealousy shot through me. I'd been envying other people's movements, the fullness of them, their lack of concern that they could one day be taken away.
Even a simple action like coughing involved the arms.
I worried about the road ahead, learning to use my left hand. Who would be there when I landed awkwardly, couldn't put an item of clothing on properly or dropped things? I felt truly alone. The nurses changed my bedding, smiled patiently. “Is there anything you need? Anybody you want to call?” I looked beyond them, holding the gaze of my old body, trying to stop it from betraying me.

Once I'd seen a busker outside Angel tube station. He'd held his guitar like a lover. There was light in his eyes as he stroked the strings, voice cracking with emotion. He seemed rich with the complexities and shades of a human being collecting pennies. I'd envied his ability to connect with people so effortlessly. One day, I wanted to hold a lover the way he held his instrument, to know the notes they had within, to lose my fingers finding them. Now I grappled with the knowledge my embrace would be clumsy, unsettling and perhaps unknowable.

At night I dreamt of my missing arm. I longed for it, deep pangs that ricocheted through my body. What had the hospital done with
it? What kind of instrument did they use to chop it off? I pictured Doctors wielding small axes beneath the sleeves of their white coats, trying not to drop it into their strides. Was my arm in a freezer somewhere? With limbs from other bodies, long lost to the echoes of their previous lives or buried in the soil, travelling through the undergrowth towards a fragmented new earth. Under instructions from the land, it could conjure the rest of me for a new, less troubled existence. I saw my arm in the ambulance siren, catching old scenes of me able-bodied. I saw it on empty café seats, in window displays between mannequins. I saw it on routes lined with broken signs. I felt ugly. One day I'd make love beneath a low watt bulb. This was the inheritance my mother never warned me about. My arm floated in the sea of aftermaths, between murky objects that needed to be reclaimed. I shook in the bed, my absent hand wet from touching the sea.

Dr Krull came to visit. He sat at the end of the bed looking unsure, holding a paperweight of a woman standing reaching for snow, then sitting down as the season changed.

“I know you like these,” he said, placing it on the cheap looking set of drawers beside the bed. He cleared his throat unbuttoning his green suede jacket.

“I wasn't sure what to bring or whether to bring anything at all. It's difficult in a situation like this.” I liked him all the more for not bringing flowers.

Funny, despite the pain and discomfort I was in, I was conscious of how I looked. No matter the circumstances, women always wanted to look their best in front of an attractive man.

“The hospital called me,” he said. “They found my credit and debit card in your possessions.”

“I'm sorry,” I croaked pathetically. I wanted to say I didn't know what I was doing but that would have been a lie.
Can't you see I'm being punished enough
?

“It's okay,” he replied. “The important thing is that you're alright. We'll have to talk about it at some point though. You're very lucky to be alive. Do you remember what happened?”

I looked up at the faint shadows on the ceiling crossing white space. “I don't remember the moments before it happened. I think I was sleepwalking.”

Thoughts of Rangi's elegant butcher's hands cutting, slicing, and choking during sex, of the purple sheet slipping down his hips, the exposure of skin, the feeling of coming up for air after being choked and how my arms flailing felt familiar.

Dr Krull brought his chair closer. His hair was ruffled, giving him a more boyish look.

“Try to remember,” he urged. “Don't you think it's odd that your mother's been dead for months but we haven't talked about her? It's important you remember.”

I remained silent and dry mouthed, wreckage in an uncomfortable, adjustable bed.

Dr Krull continued to speak in his calm, measured way. Half of him morphed into the debris of my life.

Seeds

Mervyn came to the hospital, cut a weary and forlorn figure at my bedside. His grey, pinstriped suit was rumpled. He looked like he hadn't slept in days. His large hands trembled as he held my face, pressed a kiss on my forehead, smelling of alcohol mixed with aftershave.

“I'm so sorry this happened to you,” he offered attempting to steady his succession of facial expressions: concern, pity and guilt. I looked away; I couldn't bear the pitiful looks thrown my way.

“How did this happen?” he asked.

“They didn't tell you?” I croaked, clutching the soft bedding in my sweaty palm. The skin of a day old banana on the dresser was now partially black with spots of new darkness crawling upwards. There was a beauty in the way things decayed, nature taking its course. “They said I sleepwalked right onto the train tracks.” I thought for a while. “Why would I do that? What's wrong with me?”

“Oh God!” he answered, pacing back and forth. “I could throttle your mother. You've forgotten you did that as a child for a bit, right after-”

“Right after what?” I hoisted my body up slowly, sinking into the pillows.

“It's nothing, it can wait.” His eyes glistened; shoulders sagged in some kind of small relief. For a while, we occupied positions at
either end of a silence. Weakened from medication and the bleakness of my future, I lay there wrapped in blackening banana skin trying to hold onto a bomb.

When the nurses came to administer my afternoon meds, I willed myself to disappear under the bed, dragging my body on the floor towards the sound of wheels. Blood seeped through my bandages and into the nearest corners. The patient in the bed next to me had changed. I fell asleep to the feel of my camera in my hands. The lens whirred filling up with water, my hand caught in a flash mimicking fast moonlight. I thought about Mervyn and the anxiety he'd displayed. He was keeping something from me. I knew it. Why did it feel like everybody in my life had something to hide? Why would I have blocked out the memory of sleepwalking as a child when that was connected to losing my arm?

Then there was Anon holding the brass head from the ambulance bed. Where had she been going with it? Questions swirled in my head. The sound of stones infiltrated the lens; running water pulled the camera down. The stones rumbled in the slipstream. I tried to hold the boxy camera steady but couldn't. It flashed uncontrollably, blindingly, hiding those earlier images of the night in some grainy purgatory.

Days passed. A bright green apple replaced the black banana on my dresser. A small patch of brown, crinkly skin like a pockmark had began to spread on its otherwise pristine surface. I waited for the slow erosion to come. The routine continued. My bed sheets were newly changed: crisp and white. I listened to the daughter of a patient read her
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Her wrinkly, spotted arm trembled in delight. I was at my wit's end between the boredom and the pain. I woke up wanting to go back to sleep and went to sleep not wanting to wake up.

By the time Rangi arrived, the small TV set borrowed from another ward had begun to flicker and he looked as if he'd stepped right out of the black and white movie wearing clothes from the wrong era. There was a weight on my lids, a hovering shape I'd
turned into. It was dark, past visiting hours. I didn't ask how he'd slipped in. Instead, I lifted my body up awkwardly, slowly. Still tasting sleep in my mouth. My left arm ached from lying on it for too long. I could hear the hum of the fridge tucked behind the ward reception and stray heartbeats in stethoscopes tapping against glass mouths.

I wanted to tell him I'd been waiting, that sometimes I could taste him in the small hours before dawn. Pain in my head had created a path littered with shattered reflections. My brain had landed on black tracks, then separated into frantic, blue-eyed gulls on plumped, white pillows, scraped with thin, sharp instruments. Sickness and excitement rose in my stomach as he approached. The air between us crackled with haphazard electricity. I recognised the distance in his eyes, watermarks from rain leaping off rough surfaces. I stretched my hand out to know it again, to rub my fingers in its spotted areas. My body throbbed. Then, he was beside me. How was it possible I could hear stones rolling down an echo, Anon's heartbeats between clock hands, small versions of her breathing against the hemlines of nurses' uniforms, yet Rangi's feet barely made a sound? He drew the curtains around us carefully, leaving a tiny crack. His breath on my face was warm and alcoholic. Red scratches on his right cheek were rough. I pressed my mouth on them. His hands flew to my neck, holding it tenderly. I cried into silent footsteps as he undid his zipper urgently. And those creatures of dawn, carrying gutted spaces we drank from surrounded us like quiet grenades waiting for the pull of our fingers.

He was heavy against me afterwards. He hoisted himself up, careful not to make too much noise. My nostrils were clogged with his smell of faint cologne, weed and sweat. The taste of sweat lingered longest in my mouth. He sat down gingerly, took my hand, releasing a slow breath as though tension had left his body.

“What happened to your face?” I asked. Footsteps in the hallway petered off, made me more alert.

Rangi rubbed his face, threw a worried look my way. “You don't
remember this?” He pointed at the scratches, fixed me with an intense, loaded gaze.

I shook my head, closed my eyes. Tiny nuclei of colour slid beneath my lids, split then disappeared.

His eyes went to my stump. “I'm sorry Joy. That night… we argued. You weren't yourself. You were wild. I've never seen you that way. You hit me with that ornament, that brass head your mother left you.”

My eyes flew open. “No, I'm sorry. Of the two of us, I think you got the better deal.” A slight resentment slipped into my tone.

A throbbing in my head began to spread, till I felt like a big, pathetic ball of nerves and anxiety. “What are you saying?” I asked, my voice tiny in the dark.

He didn't answer. Instead, he rubbed a finger up and down the back of my hand slowly.

Outside, fireworks cracked and popped in the night skyline. Somehow, Rangi had slipped one into my hold. Bits of sky attached to it were gaps we could fall into. It sparkled against my fingers. And between his gestures of consolation, I wondered why he came to the hospital already smelling of sex and why this only registered with me later. I waited for the firework to go off, toppling the dangling ceiling above our heads.

The nurses became interchangeable, bearing half smiles as winter set in. They brought cups of tea, terrible, tasteless sandwiches and no hope of my life ever going back to what it was. When they washed me, I avoided looking in the mirror. I couldn't bear to see my bandaged stump, still covered to protect the skin. Sometimes I saw it uncovered, leave my body; roll around near the plughole on the grey floor. Once Anon wore it in the mirror. I spotted her through the steam in the glass crying, her moist, pink tongue heavy with some knowledge. She knew something and she wouldn't tell me. Flecks of gold spun in her dark eyes. Her crying became so loud I felt my
heart stop. Rivulets on the mirror watered her stump that cruelly grew whole again before my eyes.

An image flickered in my mind's eye. Anon and I were walking on the darkened train platform, the sound of an approaching train surrounding us. Two pigeons at the far end of the platform were losing their colouring to a sky she'd already built. She pointed to a gap. I edged forward into a heat so palpable, my skin burned. The tracks became hot soil beneath my feet. I was caught in a procession of some sort. Men dressed in traditional African clothing were dragging a bound man and woman through a trail. Stray branches snapped. I tasted a metallic flavour in somebody's shortness of breath. Sweat slicked trembling hands, a rope dug into skin. Short glimpses of light between trees were blinding. Suddenly, the sound stopped. As if I'd gone temporarily deaf. I imagine pressing an ear against a surface of water must be like this; faint, traceable, individual murmurings but you cannot make sense of the whole.