Butterfly Fish (41 page)

The train wheel, black and heavy burst through the water onto flesh and bone, crushing it. The pain was so deep, so agonizing I would know it forever. I screamed, falling from the wheelchair onto the wet, shower floor. The nurse scrambled to her knees. I cried into the plughole, into the train tracks. Anon turned up the noise in the steamed mirror and the surfaces of water we shared.

Home

On the day of my release, I woke up to discover the man three beds down had died in his sleep. All evidence of him had been removed, only the crease in the silence indicated he was gone. I felt guilty sleeping through a death like that but he must have passed quietly, without any fanfare. It was a cold and surprisingly bright morning. Sunlight streamed through the small window. From the bed, I saw people milling about outside, facing the start of their working day. I was nauseous with dread and anticipation. The last time I'd been out in the world, my life had been different.

I sat up in bed cursing things I'd taken for granted in the past. Even the dark had been a constant companion. My body had adapted to it's modes of infiltration; it's silencing of stones in the jar on my kitchen desktop, it's power to hold my limbs hostage on those heavy days I could barely crawl out of bed. The dark treated Anon like a prodigal daughter, allowing her to spring in pockets around me, carrying bits of a puzzle that disintegrated whenever I reached for them. I missed the movements my body used to make without a careful thought but how was I to know what was to come? Now, I was an injured woman wandering through a collection of battlefields, feeling the softening skin of rotten fruit in my fingers. Frustrated, my eyes swam.

The Doctors took ages making their rounds so I didn't get discharged till after midday. I left one rotten pear and a leaking blue biro on the dresser as gifts for the next patient. A white napkin I'd fashioned into a plane was hidden under the pillow, already touching the edges of another life. The nurses had given me fresh clothes to wear; new cotton underwear, a pair of black jeans a size too big, a grey t-shirt and a snoopy sweatshirt, its long right sleeve dangling pathetically. As if it was waiting for my right arm to come back through the human traffic surrounding us.

The Doctor, a severe looking auburn haired man with a dented nose had informed me that due to my “history” they'd assign a health worker to my case to check up on me every now and again, help me adjust to living with my disability.

“Just for some support,” he added diplomatically. “So you can transition back to living on your own with these changes. It can be… emotionally overwhelming at first,” he said, smiling distantly, tapping his pen against the clipboard, mentally already onto the next patient. I sat there picking lint from my new jeans, blinking up at him as if he were a mirage in the wrong setting. Soon enough, one of us would shrink into a slithering of light.

“You've prescribed more sleeping pills?” I asked, weary of the constant cycle of medications.

He nodded patiently. “Yes, to help you in the meantime. Your body needs rest. If you'd been consistently taking the pills you were originally given, you may not have had that unfortunate incident I'm afraid.”

“But what about finding out why I've been sleepwalking?”

He sighed audibly, rocked back on his heels. There could be all sorts of reasons. Dr Krull knows your history. He can advise you best.”

I stuffed coins slick with sweat in my pocket. “What do I do if I lose time again?” Panic seeped into my voice.

“Take the pills Joy,” he instructed patronizingly, as if I was a small child who couldn't quite grasp the obvious.

Dr Krull knows your history
. I imagined the ink pen he held scratching one pale, blue iris out, a stethoscope strangling his neck and the struggle to breathe making him take some other form. The paper plane beneath the pillow sprouted an extra wing.

I sat in the compact, white, waiting area downstairs by the sliding doors. Tiny wax women bearing injuries hitched rides on the wheels of ambulance beds, headed towards death or reinvention. Only a handful of people were sitting down, in varying stages of illness. My left hand was jittery. I caught the tail end of a conversation a rail thin blonde was having at the phone box. She puffed on a cigarette in between gesticulating wildly. Smoke curled around the outline of a scorpion tattoo on her exposed midriff while a haggard man in a worn, black leather jacket with thinning, dark hair rushed by holding a bouquet of daffodils. I pictured the recipient, a wife or lover sitting on an uncomfortable bed eating the petals.

Then that image was replaced by one of a brown-skinned woman swimming in a river, kicking hard against a tide. The blue petal in her mouth floated like a rootless tongue. My chest tightened. My mouth became dry. The man was a fleeting thing who'd brought an unlikely passenger through the sliding doors. He jangled a set of keys nervously in his pocket. I pressed my ears against the sound, still gripped by the knowledge that unsettling things could slip into moments of weakness and holes in your day. A trickle of blue water ran down the middle of my vision, bookmarking the two worlds.

An ambulance van pulled up outside by the kerb. The doors slid open. An empty bottle of rum rolled towards heels clicking. The sharp clicking heels trapped a crinkled Trebor mint wrapper, a five pence coin with the Queen's head spinning, a torn multi-coloured woven bracelet. My mother had made a bracelet like that for me once, weaving the material between her fingers expertly, and humming.

The cracked ambulance siren was silent. Its doors smacked open and closed. Inside the ambulance were future scenes waiting to find their way into my life; trying to tie my laces one handed, cracking eggs on a shiny black desktop, watching the yolks slide down to
the floor, becoming small chickens clucking erratically. I saw myself lying on the ground by the open freezer door, a cold mist on my face. I cried over the ache and loss of my arm. My body shuddered. I reached into the freezer pulling out yellow fish whose mouths kept moving after they spat out the same brass key, before melting into bright water in my hand.

The woman with the clicking heels showed her face, gaunt and knowing in the gap. A hospital ID hung from her neck. She squinted, scribbling notes in a pad. She knew she couldn't help me. I was a lost cause. She took a deep breath, released the wind from her mouth, scattering the scenes inside the ambulance. They fell into each other, changing to some unlikely animal. Yellow chickens became yolks again, I smacked a brass key repeatedly against the desktop, and fish carried untied shoelaces in their mouths. My mother's bracelet fluttered at the edge just as the siren came on, wailing in my ears.

I felt a hand on my shoulder; its broad, firm grip was familiar. “Hey, have you been waiting long?” Mervyn asked, face full of concern. He helped me up. The man in the chair opposite coughed into his chequered handkerchief. I managed a half smile that felt more like a grimace. “Thanks for coming,” I answered, trying to wrestle the sinking feeling in my stomach, the panic I was feeling at the thought of being out in the world again.

“No problem. You knew I'd come. Anything for you, you know that. I'm just happy you reached out to me. We haven't seen each other much since Queenie died.”

He blew a breath out slowly, as if trying to compose himself. Damp spots had spread on the collar of his crisp, blue shirt. Maybe he didn't know how to comfort me, what to say. Sometimes, people struggled in these situations. I almost told him I didn't know what I needed to hear. And Queenie? What would she say seeing me like this? It was partly her fault for inconveniently dying and leaving me alone. Anger bloomed in my chest, followed by sharp, painful pangs of longing.

“I brought you here once as a kid you know. You'd stopped breathing. Your mother was beside herself, hysterical. I'd never seen her that way.” He rubbed his face, grappling with the memory. “When you finally came round, it was as if… You'd been somewhere. You were a strange child, otherworldly at times.”

We crossed the stretch of gleaming, pale aisle, leaving behind groaning lift doors and the constant patter of footsteps. He'd parked his black Mercedes Kompressor right near the entrance. I slid in carefully. It smelled of mint and leather. He turned the engine and radio on; set the car into gear before expertly moving off. The bulldog on the dashboard began to nod at the panic and fear growing inside me; Anon caught the bulldog's head during two pit stops. Tears ran down my cheeks. I rolled the window down partially, leaned against it to feel the cold air on my face and the city shrinking beneath the fingers of my lost arm.

Queenie 1980's: Born

The hole came attached to the baby's ankle, just after it was born. At first it was barely the weight of a breath. Then it became dense and unknowable despite the irony of the baby who arrived into the world howling at the pale, blue ceiling, blinking frequently as though adjusting to her new setting, clenching and unclenching a demanding fist, being named Joy.

Motherhood Na wah oh!
Queenie thought lying in the hospital bed, drenched in sweat and bone tired.
I don suffer for this child
she muttered, the comment barely passed her lips. The Doctor and nurse smiled at each other. After cleaning the baby up, the flaxen haired, pudgy-faced nurse handed her over wrapped in a light cotton blanket.

“Oh she's a beauty!” the nurse remarked, glancing at Queenie for a reaction. Queenie gave a wobbly smile. “Thank you. I thank God for this blessing.” She felt as though she was on the edge of the moment, floating beyond the emotional connection the situation called for. What was wrong with her? Why couldn't she be overwhelmed with the depth of feeling other mothers' spoke of? Instead she was relieved. Soon she'd be able to fit into her clothes again, hold down food. Her morning sickness had been morning, afternoon and evening sickness. She'd found herself embarrassingly vomiting into a bin on the street, throwing up on a bus, darting into pubs as quickly
as her unsteady legs could carry her; vomiting so much it seemed she'd lost organs in the process. They surrounded her while her head bobbed above putrid, urine stained toilet bowls. She checked they were hers by the weight of a lung in her hand, a heart circling the bowl, its ventricles flooded by flushing water as she rocked back on her knees cursing.

The baby was at her breast. Queenie felt nothing except pangs of hunger and a doom she couldn't explain. She wanted to ask the nurse why the baby's shadow was in the doorway. The small mass in her arms screamed. She knew the nurse wouldn't be able to tell her. She closed her eyes, a gauzy haze descended. Her lids flicked open. The shadow was at her breast, sucking greedily on a large brown nipple. She looked into Joy's knowing brown eyes, her irises orbited darkly. Queenie sighed, sinking into the hole. The ceiling fan spun between prior scenes of the birth.

Queenie didn't call him to see the baby those first few days. She'd refused to tell him her due date in response to feeling like an afterthought in his neat, well-organised life.
I don walka into this situation well well!
Queenie thought, chiding herself.

She missed the smell of him, that warm, earthy scent that had a hint of exoticness. She missed the feeling he gave her, the softness of her malleable body beneath his broad, steady hands. Sometimes, she pictured an atlas of their times together rising from his shoulders, that he held that world in his hands during quiet moments. It had been difficult giving birth alone, panicked and half out of her mind.

She'd been in the supermarket when her water broke, clutching a bottle of vegetable oil that fell, missing her feet by an inch. She'd called out, heart racing, mouth dry. The realization she'd be giving birth alone sank into her caving body. Somebody grabbed her arms from behind, pulling her up. She saw him then, in his other life, sitting at a wooden dining table, holding cutlery, covered in birth water.

At the nurse's station, Queenie held the black phone receiver, the dial tone a new heartbeat. Life-sized worker bees; the nurses flitted
to and fro in all directions. And the faint jangle of medical instruments, footsteps and fast instructions seemed like some unlikely symphony a Doctor had concocted. What had she been thinking keeping this baby? How was she going to cope?
You should have thought of that
, she mumbled internally. Tears ran down her cheeks. The faint ache in her grew. She took a slow breath and looked around, trying to still her trembling body. An eggshell coloured desk sat in the centre, stacked with notes. Next to a watch a silver stethoscope borrowed breaths from a concave chest in the distance, trapping an international calling card, the zip from a polka dot dress, a brass head bearing the memory of a father's touch, the blueprint of a baby from the blue. A swear jar with the note fu**! was perched in the middle. Queenie resisted the urge to pick up the jar and walk the sterile aisles rattling coins, until the delicate knot of her loose hospital gown came undone.