A nurse gave me a pencil and a pad. I couldn’t write properly. The words came out wrong. I wanted to write my father’s phone number. I couldn’t space letters. Dr Javid brought me an alphabet board so I could point to the letters. The first words I spelt out were ‘father’ and ‘country’. The nurse told me I was in Birmingham, but I had no idea where that was. Only later did they bring me an atlas so I could see it was in England. I didn’t know what had happened. The nurses weren’t telling me anything. Even my name. Was I still Malala?
My head was aching so much that even the injections they gave me couldn’t stop the pain. My left ear kept bleeding and my left hand felt funny. Nurses and doctors kept coming in and out. The nurses asked me questions and told me to blink twice for yes. No one told me what was going on or who had brought me to the hospital. I thought they didn’t know themselves. I could feel that the left side of my face wasn’t working properly. If I looked at the nurses or doctors for too long my left eye watered. I didn’t seem to be able to hear from my left ear and my jaw wouldn’t move properly. I gestured to people to stand on my right.
Then a kind lady called Dr Fiona came and gave me a white teddy bear. She said I should call it Junaid and she would explain why later. I didn’t know who Junaid was so I named it Lily. She also brought me a pink exercise book to write in. The first two questions my pen wrote were, ‘Why have I no father?’ and ‘My father has no money. Who will pay for all this?’
‘Your father is safe,’ she replied. ‘He is in Pakistan. Don’t worry about payment.’
I repeated the questions to anyone who came in. They all said the same. But I was not convinced. I had no idea what had happened to me and I didn’t trust anyone. If my father was fine, why wasn’t he here? I thought my parents didn’t know where I was and could be searching for me in the chowks and bazaars of Mingora. I didn’t believe my parents were safe. Those first days my mind kept drifting in and out of a dream world. I kept having flashbacks to lying on a bed with men around me, so many that you couldn’t count, and asking, ‘Where is my father?’ I thought I had been shot but wasn’t sure – were these dreams or memories?
I was obsessed by how much this must be costing. The money from the awards had almost all gone on the school and buying a plot of land in our village in Shangla. Whenever I saw the doctors talking to one another I thought they were saying, ‘Malala doesn’t have any money. Malala can’t pay for her treatment.’ One of the doctors was a Polish man who always looked sad. I thought he was the owner of the hospital and was unhappy because I couldn’t pay. So I gestured at a nurse for paper and wrote, ‘Why are you sad?’ He replied, ‘No, I am not sad.’ ‘Who will pay?’ I wrote. ‘We don’t have any money.’ ‘Don’t worry, your government will pay,’ he said. Afterwards he always smiled when he saw me.
I always think about solutions to problems so I thought maybe I could go down to the reception of the hospital and ask for a phone to call my mother and father. But my brain was telling me, You don’t have the money to pay for the call nor do you know the country code. Then I thought, I need to go out and start working to earn money so I can buy a phone and call my father so we can all be together again.
Everything was so mixed up in my mind. I thought the teddy bear Dr Fiona had given me was green and had been swapped with a white one. ‘Where’s the green teddy?’ I kept asking, even though I was told over and over there was no green teddy. The green was probably the glow of the walls in the intensive care unit but I’m still convinced there was a green teddy.
I kept forgetting English words. One note to the nurses was ‘a wire to clean my teeth’. It felt like something was stuck between them and I meant floss. Actually my tongue was numb and my teeth were fine. The only thing that calmed me was when Rehanna came. She said healing prayers and I started moving my lips to some of them and mouthing ‘Amin’ (our word for ‘amen’) at the end. The television was kept off, except once when they let me watch Masterchef which I used to watch in Mingora and loved but everything was blurred. It was only later I learned that people were not allowed to bring in newspapers or tell me anything as the doctors were worried it could traumatise me.
I was terrified that my father could be dead. Then Fiona brought in a Pakistani newspaper from the week before which had a photograph of my father talking to General Kayani with a shawled figure sitting at the back next to my brother. I could just see her feet. ‘That’s my mother!’ I wrote.