The Cinnamon Tree Read Free

turning. The fly buzzed, spiralling down. She knew it would be giddy.
    There’d been a power cut during her operation, too. She told the surgeon how she had woken to see them all crouched over her, faces masked, foreheads streaming with sweat, and how one of them had said, ‘She’s coming round.’ The surgeon had laughed when she told him this.
    ‘So you did wake? Yes, we had to put you to sleep again;we’ve so little anaesthetic, I’m sorry. You see the lights went out for half an hour and I couldn’t see a thing. Then they got the generator going. I’m afraid we didn’t save your knee,’ he added, smiling as he walked away.’
    They all talked like that, as if she had no leg, but she could feel it. Let them talk, secretly she knew that her leg was still there. If she believed that it was there hard enough, then it would be. But when the doctors came to work on her, she closed her eyes tight, she could not look, she would not look! Yet the questions came.
    ‘Which leg is it, Mother?’ she whispered for the twentieth time.
    ‘It’s your left, chook.’
    ‘It can’t be Mother, I can still feel it. It feels like it’s there.’ Her mother mopped her forehead.
    ‘The doctor says it will feel like that. He says you were lucky. Your body’s not hurt.’
    Yola noticed that Mother was crying quietly. She took her hand; it was rough with work. A surge of sympathy for that poor, worn hand tipped the balance – it was time for her to look at her leg. But how? There was a sort of basket over the foot of the bed, under the sheet. Probably to keep the weight of the sheet off her. It was no use looking to see how the sheet lay against her legs. She stared at the ceiling, grappling with the problem.
    The fly had recovered from its giddiness and began to work its way up the window to where a small flap was tilted open for ventilation. Yola watched its passage to freedom. She was a prisoner. Was she going to spend the rest of her life staring at the ceiling, too frightened ever to look down at what might not be there? The power came on again and the fan resumed its lazy turning. Someone turned on the lights; night was turning thewindows of the lighted ward into mirrors against the dark. The small window at the top was tilted at an angle, the fly had got to it and was walking about on its mirror surface. Yola noticed, looking at the reflection in the glass, that she could see the foot of her bed.
    ‘Mother,’ she whispered, ‘the basket thing over my feet is uncomfortable. Could you take it off for a moment.’
    Eyes tight shut, Yola wondered if she would be able to open her eyes when the moment came. She listened to her mother’s movements as she stood and began to turn back the sheet. For a second, Yola hoped that perhaps Mother wouldn’t bother to move the basket, but no, the basket was off and she could feel the movement of air against her skin. It was now or never.
    She opened her eyes and stared up, gazing at the window, now a mirror above her. What she saw was confusing at first. She could make out her right leg, black against the sheet; she wriggled her foot. Then she looked to where her left leg should be. She thought she could see it, like a ghost, beside the other one. She blinked and the image was gone, leaving just white sheet. There was nothing, no leg at all – she couldn’t understand , surely there was something left!
    Gripping the side of the bed and summoning all her courage , she struggled to move what she still felt to be her left leg. Then at last she could see it! It was swathed in bandages, white against the white sheet, which was why she could not see it before . Bandages covered her thigh right down to where her knee should be. But there the bandages stopped. Like a great, soft, overpowering weight the full calamity of what had happened to her hit Yola.

    She had never been in a taxi before. It bounced and bucketed in and out of the potholes on the way from the hospital and she had to brace