Young Writers Society

I am immersed in the sterile stench of this place. I wish I wasn’t here. I wish I didn’t have to be. The noisy rush continues around my solemn stillness in slow motion – a blur of white and red. I wish it was the strawberries and cream I usually associate these colours with, but its doctors coats and blood. Soon I will have to take that long journey to where she lies, the high observation surgical unit I think it’s called. What a mouthful. I imagine her, bathed in a bed of wires and tubes sneaking in and coming out from every orifice. I try to prepare myself, but how can I prepare myself for the death of my mother? I hope she is okay. Perhaps I’m being overdramatic, but it’s never put her in hospital before.

I try for a moment to escape this hole, to revert to some white void where this isn’t happening, back into my tear stained cocoon. She’s on the floor. She’s mumbling something, like she’s in some kind of trance.

“Wake uuup!!” I plead, shaking her with all the adolescent strength I can muster. It goes foggy as I remember Dad coming in and lifting her up, like Superman, on to the bed and phoning the doctor. The memory flows into thoughts of that long hallway in our old house, filled with her poisonous smoke emitting from the white stick between her limp fingers. We’re laughing about something, sitting cross legged against the walls, like two friends, until suddenly I remember that she’s drunk. It falls on me like a tonne of bricks and I begin to cry, that loud wail of a cry that children do. She tries to touch me, those fingers, infected. I recoil. Her tiny pupils stare at me accusingly,

“I’m a bad mother, aren’t I?” she asks with that typical drunkard’s self pity.

“No, no, I love you, you’re the best Mum.” I say to her glazed eyes, trying to penetrate her shield of alcohol with my white lies.

“It’s time now.”

I’m shaken back to the present day. A soft featured nurse is smiling at me. I have a sudden urge to throw myself into her arms like a loony, to confess and apologise and beg for forgiveness, before I remember myself and get up and compose myself, ready to follow her, to take the long walk to her. This feels like a journey. I don’t want to reach the end. I savour each moment that I’m not there yet. I want to stay here in this disinfected limbo where answers and few and unwanted, like some kind of cancer. I try to avoid it but every sign seems to direct me there, “High Observation Surgical Unit”. Surely I’m not there yet, I think, perhaps this is the wrong one, this can’t be it already? Please no.

I continue, through the heavy double doors and past rooms of people, hundreds of them, hooked up to all sorts of machines and things that continually go ‘beep’. They stretch past me, pulling at the edges of my face like a mask, pulling me back to them, away from her.

The breath is whipped from my lungs. A flimsy figure is slumped over in a bed, unrecognisable. She’s the same as she was, except she wears a hospital nightgown, and tubes tangle around her – in her arm, in her wrist, in her nose. I rub the alcohol over my hands, and absorb the irony.

There’s still some there I think, a slight taint in her eyes. The nurse assures me it’s the morphine. She disgusts me, and I want to reach out and take that white hand and hold it all night. I want the perpetual beep of her monitor to drive me mad like I think she is sometimes. I want to experience her madness, if only for a little while, just to understand, so I’m not blind to her world and stuck in mine.

I pull myself away, to the shop down the road. I wander around the aisles in a downbeat daze, looking for something to cheer her up. I come face to face with them, her enemy, and I try to make it mine. I absorb the words, the colours, the different colours of glass bottles and try to feel something. Other than the dull burning in the pit of my stomach I can’t summon up the feverish hate I so wish to.