Free Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop by Amy Witting Page A

weakness without pain was a rather enjoyable sensation. She must get up soon and have a shower. It was the familiar problem of accumulating enough strength to perform the task ahead, but how much easier that would be lying comfortably in bed.
    She was getting a lot of sympathy she didn’t deserve. People generally expected her to be overcome by the news. They could not know how happy she was to have all horrors assembled under the name of an illness, represented by a baby’s hand-print on her lung. This thing is not I. This thing is visible and can be fought.
    What better news could one have, than the hope of a future without madness?
    She would do everything they told her, she would eat whatever they gave her, beginning with breakfast.
    A new orderly appeared at the door, this time an older man, short, sturdy and grey-haired. He looked to be one of the kind ones.
    ‘Want a cup of tea?’
    ‘Yes, please. No milk or sugar.’
    This time the tea came in a cup.
    ‘Is it all right for me to use the china?’
    ‘Special issue. You have your own. No need to take too much notice of her.’ He didn’t have to identify the woman behind the pronoun. ‘We don’t mind looking after you. Keeping the china separate is no trouble.’
    Isobel smiled at him and accepted the tea, which came with two biscuits. She would eat them both.
    ‘Is that right, the police picked you up in the street and got the ambulance?’
    She nodded. There was always the same price for kindness.
    ‘How did that happen?’
    ‘I live by myself. I ran out of food. I went out to buy some. I don’t,’ she said boldly, ‘really remember much more.’
    That would be it from now on. I don’t know. I must have passed out.
    He nodded sympathetically and left her to her tea and biscuits.
    The story would not cover the absence of knickers but it would do for most occasions.
    After breakfast—she managed half the cereal and most of the milk it swam in, being determined to drown that hand-print in milk—she showered, clinging to the chrome bar, and managed to scrub some of the hoarded salt along her teeth. She walked back into the smock and collapsed again. How odd to be inhabiting this flaccid body. It sprawled limp on the bed and she had the greatest trouble in urging it under the covers.
    The blonde nurse who had winked at her came in, pulling on a face mask.
    ‘It’s just while I make the bed, dear. Rules from the TB Clinic this time. That’s when the bugs fly, apparently. Matron’s been on the phone to them, carrying on, asking what measures she should take to protect her staff. Honestly! You don’t want to pay too much attention to Matron. We all think you are marvellous to be so game. Eric said you even raised a laugh when he was wheeling you back. Could be shock, of course. But you’re just as good this morning. Hanged if I could take it like that.’
    Meanwhile she had hoisted Isobel’s limp body out of bed, had sat it in the armchair and was making the bed.
    How could she explain the relief she felt at learning that this thing had a name and a location, that there were people whose business it was to deal with it? That she was no longer alone in the grip of something she could not understand? That there was even hope for the future? Her troubles were embarrassments only, bodily weakness, lack of knickers and kin; they could not dim her joy.
    ‘Do you think somebody could get me a toothbrush and some toothpaste?’
    The nurse looked startled.
    ‘Somebody should have thought of that. You’ve set us all on our ears. Real tragedy queen, you are.’
    ‘I’d better make the most of it. It’s not likely to happen again.’
    ‘That’s the spirit!’
    The nurse helped her back into bed.
    She produced the thermometer from her breast pocket, saying, ‘Put it under your tongue and keep your mouth closed. And what on earth are you grinning about?’
    Impossible to explain while she was keeping her lips closed on a thermometer, that a memory had