Free Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer Page B

I really hit ice while fiddling with the radio? Or did somebody run me off the road? Did somebody plan all this, to get me here, away from the people I love, where I can be experimented on – murdered! – without anybody knowing, anybody caring? It happened to the man in the next bed, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just next in line.
    Or maybe they don’t come because of the same elusive reason why Alice has sad eyes.
That
fear is so great that sometimes it makes me cry, which is my only outlet for any emotion.
    The nurses make up their own reasons for my tears.
I’m crying for my old life
is their favourite. They mean well, I suppose, but I still hate them for not bothering to understand.
    When my eyes are open, I try to watch everything – not just the top of the TV. When I’m on my back, I can only see the top third of the screen anyway before my own cheeks get in the way, and that has to be the worst third of all. The top of
Bargain Hunt
is all squinting through jewellers’ glasses at unseen treasures; the top of the rugby is only the stands and the occasional up-and-under, and the top of
Top Gear
is basically Jeremy Clarkson’s head.
    Every other day they turn me from my back on to one of my sides. On my left side I get a much better view of the ward. I watch the nurses eating chocolates at the station outside the door, and Tracy Evans making eyes at that tall, well-dressed man who comes in at night to ignore his wife. I follow the cleaner halfway round the room with my eyes. He’s slow as treacle and misses loads, but the floor is still smooth and shiny enough to make me want to skid about it in my socks. I can see the fancy little white stereo I’m attached to by white wires. There are maybe fifty tracks that I used to love, and it takes about three hours to run through them. And start again. Three hours into twenty-four is eight. I listen to each track eight times every twenty-four hours, fifty-six times every week, two hundred and twenty-four times a month, until I feel I’m going mad.
    When they turn me the other way – towards the window – I can’t see anything but sky and wall, and it makes me so frightened I shake.
    He’s still incredibly vulnerable
.
    The doctor’s words run through my head on a loop. Incredibly vulnerable. That’s how I feel every second I spend on my right side. With my back to the room, the world sneaks around behind me. Anything could happen. A mad axeman could be slaughtering the other patients; a wolf might slink into the room and pad silently towards me; a nurse could inject something into my saline drip: insulin, or rat poison, and I would never know. Not until the agony started.
    Incredibly vulnerable
.
    I stare at the wall and long for Jeremy Clarkson’s repulsive head.
    The only good thing about the right side is seeing the sky. Summer must be coming, and I count the days when the sky is blue instead of grey or white, or spitting rain. Once I get to three. Three whole days of blue! People at work would be making crap jokes about it by now.
Hot enough for you? They’ll be banning hosepipes next. Did you enjoy the summer?
    Yeah, this is one hell of a summer – lying in my own shit, aching with stillness, fed through a cold tube in my side.
    Sometimes Tracy Evans brings me a little alphabet screen called a Possum, so that I can write a novel. Ha ha – it takes me a week of blinking in time to her random pointing to ask her to turn off the
fucking music
. Then I feel bad because I should have been using that energy to tell her to call 999 and report a suspicious death, but now I’m exhausted, and she’s gone all tight-lipped.
    At least she turned the music off. And now that the babbling, crying man has been murdered, there’s often a soft and wonderful silence like big powder puffs over my ears, so I can think of anything that floats into my head. Like the time Alice bought that slinky little green dress for the works Christmas party, and how I got a payrise a month