Miss Webster and Chérif Read Free Page A

her bed of death and hit them. Her anger was transparent, articulate, vivid – like a falling sheet of clear water, but it had no channels in which to flow. She tried to bite her silent tongue and discovered that the nurse had removed her bridge. One half of her mouth gaped empty of teeth. They were taking her apart, like a dilapidated robot, piece by rusting piece.
    She slid back into the dream time and saw an angel, all feathered wings, white robes and androgynous Pre-Raphaelite sweetness, lurking above the waters. As she watched, the angel descended and dipped its long silken sleeves into the pool, stirring the surface into choppy froth. Quick, lift me up. Carry my bier to the brink of the flood. Lay me in the foaming whirlpool before the angel goes. Bring me to the waters she has touched and I shall be healed. I need water, not the Word of God. Bring me water.
    Burr, burr, burr.
    But this was the first clear word that the nurse could discern:
    ‘Water.’
    She at once tipped the baby’s plastic cup on to the old woman’s shrivelled lips. A trail of sweetened dribble ran down her chin. The angel hovered, glimmered, vanished. And the night staff standing there in the wake of its vanishing were left puzzling over her notes.
    ‘She’s been out of intensive care for ages. No change.’
    ‘She hasn’t had a stroke.’
    ‘Dr Broadhurst is coming tomorrow.’
    ‘Oh. It’s heart then, is it? He’s the big white chief in cardiology.’
     
     
    Dr Broadhurst was a very ugly man. He had oily thinning hair and heavy glasses. His suit didn’t fit and his baggy white coat was stained with blue strokes from a leaking biro. He flirted with all the nurses. He remembered every name and details about each colleague’s family circumstances. He brought real Swiss chocolates for the entire ward and had a wicked funny leer. Everyone adored him.
    ‘This is Miss Webster. She was brought in on the morning of Tuesday 19 March. She came out of intensive care about a week later and has been here with us ever since. You’ve seen the blood test results? And the scan? She’s anaemic. High blood pressure in the past. Not drastically high now. We don’t really have a firm diagnosis. She’s semi-conscious most of the time. How are you today, Miss Webster?’ The blurred white mass loitering above her clearly did not expect an answer and so she refused to respond. Then the heavy frames and oily clump of hair loomed into view.
    His hands were the first things she saw clearly since the dead halt in her sitting room. They were hideous, deformed. The livid skin was peeled back over the knuckles, the scar tissue spattered with puckered spots of brown. The flesh bunched and shrivelled, as if he had fought off a napalm attack with ungloved fists. He placed one hideous scabbed palm upon her wrist. She flinched at once, as if she had been stabbed. The doctor’s jowly face broke into a huge gap-toothed smile. He raised both tortured hands in a gesture of acceptance and defeat. And then he spoke directly to her, and only to her.
    ‘I know. Horrible, aren’t they? I had skin cancer and this is what severe radiation burns look like close up. I don’t ever wear gloves. I never hide them. It seems like cheating.’
    He turned his hands over, as if admiring the damage. Elizabeth opened her eyes wide. She wanted to acknowledge this gift of candour. But how? She coiled up all her strength and sent the message to her fading brain. Nod. Smile. She had no idea what happened on her face, which had detached itself from her skeleton weeks ago and now floated at a little distance, like a dancer’s mask. She felt nothing, but the doctor squeezed her fingers in his grotesque and puckered hands, leaned close to her and winked. She caught the flash, magnified in the right lens.
    ‘Put her in a room of her own. Let her sleep as much as she likes. Keep her very quiet. I’ll come and see her again tomorrow.’
    The way back towards movement, sight, speech, the