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“I saw a boy pulling the wings off a fly today. It made me think of you.”
I remember how she just smiled warmly as if it was the best compliment she’d ever received. The accident itself is a blur, but I can still see her nose wrinkling as she smiled, as if she was sitting right in front of me. She laughed and said, “You’re a funny little boy Peter, what has that got to do with me?”
“He didn’t do it on purpose. It wasn’t his fault. It was wriggling around too much. The wings just came off. I imagined the sound in my head; ‘pop’. Do you think they grow back?”
“No I don’t think so. Maybe he had a spare pair?”
“Yeah he’d have a spare pair!” I exclaimed, laughing with delight. “They wouldn’t be his best, not his favourite, they were gone, he’d have to use the dirty pair with holes in. He’d have to stop every five minutes to readjust them. It’d take him ages to fly home, his mum would be worried: ‘Where is Lenny?’ she’d say, that’s his name: Lenny. ‘Where is Lenny? I was expecting him home an hour ago, his dinner’s getting cold.’ ”
My mother would have probably cut me off half-way through this fantasy. She would’ve told me not to bother Sam with such nonsense, but she knew I liked to talk to her by myself so she always went to read the newspaper while we had time alone. It was unusual for me to have an adult to play with who wasn’t family, and that was partly why I enjoyed seeing her so much. But mostly it was because she always played along with what I said; she seemed like she genuinely wanted to hear what I had to say.
“Dinner? What do flies eat for dinner?”
“Beans on toast, obviously. And then he’d come through the door, wings all in a mess, out of breath, tears in his eyes, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t believe I lost them’, the wings were a birthday present from his Nan who got the ones with the red stripe across the back, he’d been asking for them for weeks, and now he’d lost them; stupid, stupid, stupid, all because he wasn’t looking where he was going and went straight into this wet patch on the floor.”
I went silent as the doctor came over to check how she was feeling. I had been covertly watching him walk round the ward earlier asking the same questions, making the same banal small-talk, all in the same bored tone of voice, like an action figure that says a handful of phrases.
Once he had finished he checked the different machines she was plugged into, consulted his chart and left the ward. I hated those machines. I can remember one in particular vividly. It stood in the corner puffing and wheezing like some kind of animal. My mother told me that it was helping Sam to breathe; it was keeping her alive. But to me it seemed to be doing the complete opposite. It was feeding off of her. Every single breath it took it stole from her, slowly sucking the life out of her body.
Once the doctor left, Sam began to cough. She reached to get a tissue from the bedside cabinet but winced as she tried to grasp it, so I took the box myself and gave it to her.
“Thank you, Peter.” We sat in silence for a minute; the only noise coming from the tick and whirr of various machines around the ward. “I got you a present, well, I asked a friend to get it for you; I’m not going anywhere fast,” she laughed. “It’s not much, just something I thought you would like.”
“A present! Where is it? Can I have it now?”
“Yes of course,” she said, smiling. “That’s why I bought it for you. Okay, close your eyes and I’ll put it in your hands.”
I screwed up my eyes as hard as possible, as if if I caught even the tiniest glimpse of the present it would disappear in an instant.
“Can I open them now?”
“Wait.” She placed the package in my hands. “Okay, now.”
It was a rectangular box wrapped in red paper. I furiously stripped the box of its skin, wanting to get to the good stuff as fast as I could. For a moment, the boy in the chair disappeared and was replaced by an explosion of paper and sellotape; bits flying out all over the place like a firework going off.
Inside the box was a pair of shoes with a red stripe on the side of each one. My mother always told me to make sure that I tied my shoe laces properly, but instead I tucked my shoe laces into my shoes. She would say, “One day you’ll have an accident because your shoe laces aren’t tied properly and you’ll hurt yourself”, but I always tucked my shoe laces into my shoes, because it was easier. After the accident, she never had to tell me to tie my shoe laces ever again.
“Wow! Thanks Sam!” I said, turning them over in my hands and inspecting them from every angle. “Red is my favourite colour: my bedroom is red and my schoolbag is red and the planet Mars is red and strawberries are red and tomatoes are red an-”
“Yes, I thought you would like them,” she quickly said, but with a look of satisfaction on her face. My happiness was short-lived as a realisation came over me.
“But … but I didn’t get you anything.”
“Oh Peter, that’s ok. I didn’t want anything.” Once again there was silence. I now felt so crestfallen that I couldn’t bring myself to speak. The ticks and whirrs carried on like insects in the night.
“I know. Why don’t you tell me a story? And that can be my present.”
“A story, okay! A story, a story … um … I don’t have any stories, but I had a dream about you again last night.”
“Okay. Tell me about your dream. That would be lovely.”
“Okay. I’m floating around in a big swimming pool and it’s so big I can’t see the bottom or the top and I’m just floating around in it. And it’s really dark and it’s cold but I feel like I could float there forever and I wouldn’t mind. But then there’s this huge rumble and I realise I’m not in a swimming pool at all, I’m really floating around in the stomach of a huge monster. And then I want to swim away, but I’m stuck, and then you are there too and you help me and you protect me and then I wake up.”
At this Sam’s usual ever-present smile cracked, just for a second, and I could see water begin to leak out of her eyes. Never having seen an adult cry before I wasn’t sure what to do, but she stopped herself with a tissue before I could do anything. Soon after my mother came back and we said goodbye and left.
That day was the last time I saw her, and it has always haunted me. Even now I can’t enter a hospital without feeling nauseous. I walk in and all the people I see have her face; they laugh like her; their noses wrinkle when they smile. I play the accident over in my head again and again, but I still trip over my laces; she still pushes me out of the way and the car still hits her instead of me.
