“Please God,” she prayed, “I am sorry I was so angry with him. I promise if you let my brother live, I will never be cross with him again. I will do everything he tells me and do my very best to be a good sister and make him happy. Just don’t let him die. That is the only thing that matters. If he dies, I’ll be all alone, so you might as well kill me too.”
Marion sat up rigid all night on the little orange sofa, too frightened to cry or sleep. Every time she heard footsteps from the corridor, she dreaded it was a nurse coming to tell her he was dead. By morning, no one had come and Marion wondered if they had forgotten she was there at all. Her bladder full, she left the Family Room and walked around the hospital looking for toilets. Eventually she followed a sign for the facilities that took her down two flights of stairs and along another corridor. Then, when she had finished using the toilets, she realized she didn’t know how to get back to her small sanctuary.
? ? ?
AFTER WALKING AROUND for a while, she came to a café but had no money to buy a sandwich or drink. Her handbag, along with her mobile phone and purse, had been left at home. Thoughts of the mobile hurt because John had bought it for her. “You have to have one, Marion. Everyone has one these days. You can’t live in the past forever,” he had told her. Even if she had it with her, there was no one to call apart from Judith, and she would probably be too furious about the wall to want to help. She was so tired and cold and hungry. Her back and her feet hurt, her clothes felt grimy and itchy, and she longed for a hot bath. If only Dad were alive and could bring the big, safe Bentley to take her home.
As long as I can’t find out where he is, then no one can tell me he has died. So if I stay lost, he will live, Marion thought. Then Mother’s voice scolded her for being so silly. He’s your brother, Marion. He needs you. You have to find him. He is depending on you.
She wandered around, feeling too timid to ask anyone for help; she trudged down long corridors, not knowing if she had been down them before or not. Endless wards, clinics, waiting rooms, one place in the hospital looked exactly like another. At least if she could find her way back to the Family Room, she could make herself a cup of tea and eat some of those biscuits. How precious those biscuits had suddenly become—why had she ignored them earlier? Finally she came across a map, and after squinting at it for a long time (her glasses had been left at home too), she managed to work out directions back to where she came from. She must have walked a long way, because it took her nearly twenty minutes to get there. When she opened the door, she was surprised to see a young couple sitting on the orange sofa. The woman was holding a naked baby doll by one leg and weeping while the man had his arm around her shoulders. Their heads were lowered, and they were too involved in comforting one another to notice Marion.
It was rather a nasty-looking doll, one of those bald, plastic things that Marion had never liked, even as a child, since they weren’t soft enough to cuddle. Wasn’t it rather unseemly to bring it to the hospital naked? Though of course they had probably left their home in haste and grabbed anything that might be used to comfort a sick child. The man had a shaved head and a tattoo of a skull on his hand. The woman’s hair was dragged back in a scruffy ponytail. They both wore tracksuits and trainers, and Marion thought they looked like the sort of people who claimed benefits.
The doll, hanging upside down, glared at Marion with a surly expression on its plastic baby’s face as if to say: “A child is sick. Your problems are nothing compared to that. Go away and leave us alone.”
Of course she ought to feel terribly sorry for them, but under the circumstances, she could not find even a scrap of compassion to spare for anyone else. And at least they have each other, she thought with a pinch of resentment.
Having the Family Room occupied by strangers distressed her. She felt, having spent most of the night there in a state of extreme anxiety, it belonged to her. Still, it wouldn’t be right to go in and start making tea and eating biscuits with those people weeping on the sofa. Instead, she found a little garden where she sat for a while until she got cold, then she went to read the magazines in the shop. The afternoon she spent watching TV in the waiting rooms of “Fracture Clinic B.”
One of her Heartfelt Productions, Always Trust a Stranger, was playing on the small television monitor bracketed to the clinic wall. She had watched the film at least twice before, and it felt like bumping into an old friend. Of course the sound was turned to mute, but that didn’t matter because Marion remembered most of the dialogue.
People came along and waited in the seats for a while before getting called for their appointments.
“How long have you been waiting to see Dr. Palladine, then?” an elderly woman in a blue head scarf and shiny green mackintosh asked her.
“Oh, nearly an hour,” answered Marion, too embarrassed to explain her predicament, yet feeling a little guilty for lying to the nice old lady.
The woman shook her head in sympathy. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? I had to wait nearly two hours the last time I came. So much for this so-called NHS.”
Then the old woman told her about her husband who had been a fireman and her children who both lived in Australia. “They begged me to move over with them, but I wouldn’t leave my home for the crown jewels. I go to see Eric’s grave every Sunday. I haven’t missed a week since he passed. You won’t get me on that plane unless you dig him up and put him on it too,” she said rather sternly to Marion, as if she were colluding with the daughters to whisk her over to Australia away from Eric’s precious grave.
When the clinic closed and all the patients had been seen, she was forced to leave the waiting room. While she was sitting by a vending machine in a corridor looking hungrily at the sandwiches, an African cleaning woman asked her if she was all right. The woman’s eyes, deep brown wells of kindness, brought Marion to tears.
“Not really,” said Marion. “I need to find my brother, John. He’s had an operation.”
The young woman left her cart of cleaning things to take Marion to an information booth near the front entrance.