She can’t remember how she got to the hospital, only that John wasn’t waiting to pick her up so she had to find her way to this bus-shelter without a clue where she was going. Now her poor old chest feels hollowed out and she leans against the see-through wall to catch her breath. She wonders—Has the car broken down? Has he forgotten her? Maybe he mistook the time, and when she gets home she’ll tell him how terrible it was to be lost in the hospital, and how it had scared her. All those people being pushed along under stiff sheets with flaccid bags of fluid dangling above them, their frightened eyes trying to see where they were being taken and not knowing what was plain to her, that their faces were gaunt as corpses’, that there was no hope for them.
Her breathing slows and she touches the white plastic bag hooked over her arm. It’s new and gleaming but tiny raindrops are beading on it and sparkling under the murky sky. So it is raining, after all. She remembers noticing that when she crossed the road. This road, or perhaps another. It’s raining, and the wind’s rushing the rain along, yet she must stand here and wait in the shadow of a building that takes up half the sky. The hospital—it must be—though how bland it looks, like an office block.
She pulls back the cuff of her coat and glances at her watch. The hands are crooked to one side like scissors. She looks away to the timetable trapped behind plastic with its columns of tiny numbers, so many of them, a thousand ants stuck fast. The sight of it’s enough to make her shut her eyes. How much easier to stand here in her own darkness, and how pleasant except for the wind and rain slicing about her legs, and the smarting of her toes against her shoes as if she’s walked far. She could wait this way all day, she thinks—in fact, that’s what she’ll do. But she’s barely had time to let her mind settle when a noise startles her—a lorry snorting past, leaving a smudge of exhaust on the air. She puts her hand over her nose and mouth, holds her breath until her chest burns. Then she must breathe, and the air tastes of diesel.
Didn’t she call John from the hospital? Was she meant to, and he’s waiting for her at home as the day tips along? It must be afternoon, she thinks. She’s sure she has eaten lunch and that it was something bland on a tray, she knows she isn’t mistaken because her tongue finds a paste of chewed food caught along the edge of her top denture. Perhaps she ate at the hospital, and it’s odd to think of it because she has no urgent pain, no thick-headed feeling of having been sick. It could be that she was visiting someone, someone she had to ask how they were feeling, or to admire their baby wrapped up to its chin in a blanket.
Mightn’t John have told her where to meet him and she forgot? Mightn’t he be waiting in the hospital car-park, his hands on the steering wheel and the windows misting up because of the rain? By now he’ll be worried because he doesn’t know where she’s got to. By the time he finds her, the car will be warm and smell of worn plastic and the smoke from his pipe. He’ll drive home through the tangle of streets, and make her a cup of tea, and know what’s on the telly because he always remembers. He’ll have something in mind for dinner. Chops and gravy, or shepherd’s pie, served on trays so they can watch the news together in the living room. Before, they always ate in the kitchen. Before, she was the one who moved from the cooker to the fridge to the sink with a spoon in her hands or a plate. She remembers clear as day: John in his overalls at the table and the stink of engine oil about him, and a baby—their baby—kicking its feet in its highchair. Whatever became of it? She must ask John.
A bus shiny with rain huffs towards her but the front panel says
The plastic bag has a comforting way of sighing against her coat. Its handle clings to her wrist like a second skin. How long has she been standing here? Long enough for her hands to stiffen from the cold, and for that cold to crawl into her belly. She wonders if she left the house with gloves on and lost them. She reaches up and touches her hair. No hat either and the afternoon’s turned bitter, the rain coming down harder than ever. She steps back against the wall of the shelter and watches the paving stones darken where she was just standing. Her shoes and stockings are wet—she sees that now—and she stamps her feet to warm them.
She must have been shopping. The plastic bag. A heft to it. The hospital gift shop—did she buy something and forget to give it? The window onto the corridor was a mass of colour, of pink and blue teddy-bears and books with the authors’ names in gold and crocheted shawls in soft, bright wool, and she wonders—did she buy a shawl for herself? At home she’ll sit with it around her shoulders, her feet up on the stool and the gas fire on, and how comfortable she’ll be.
Her shoulders are hunched and she makes herself lower them. John says you don’t feel so cold that way, and it’s true, but she’s still cold. Wasn’t she wearing a hat earlier? She’d have put it in the bag to save getting too hot in the hospital. She tugs the bag’s handle loose and her wrist beneath it is hot and damp. The afternoon has dimmed and it’s hard to see what’s inside. With one hand she digs around. Her fingers pull out a safety razor dull with soap and dashes of bristle. A paperback thriller of the sort John reads. A red toothbrush that’s surely his because he always buys himself red and her blue. At the bottom she finds a cake of soap, still damp, and beneath it, John’s flannel pyjamas rolled up. Her fingers touch something else, something flat and round as a lens but with straps attached. She pulls it out and it rests on her palm. His watch. The band is bent to the shape of his wrist.
Was she bringing these things to him? Did she lose her way in the hospital and couldn’t find him? But there was a nurse with a sharp face who’d held her by the arm and asked, “Do you have someone to fetch you, sweetie? Someone to look after you now?” and when she’d told the nurse, “My husband,” the nurse’s face had rearranged itself into a look that told her she’d said something wrong. But the nurse had let her go because someone was calling from a doorway. The nurse had said, “Wait here—alright?” only she hadn’t. This was a terrible place—she knew that in her heart and had hurried down the corridor with the bag swinging against her hip. She’d pushed her way onto the lift as the doors were closing, and the nurse hadn’t been quick enough to come after her, and she’d lost herself in the corridors downstairs. She’d been scared. The reek of bodies unable to contain themselves, the dying faces turning towards her as she passed. What a relief when those glass doors had hissed open and she’d found herself outside where the air smelled of rain, and the world stretched right up to the sky.
The streetlights blink on. She waits, though soon the building across the road is nothing more than a few blazing squares high up in the darkness. She shuts her eyes. A bus will come, and she’ll know when to get off, and which way to walk to find her way home. She imagines John’s face when he sees her standing cold and wet on their doorstep, the press of his cheek against hers, his voice warm in her ear saying, “There you are, love—you had me worried.”