Ellen, an elderly patient, had her quiet, doughy-faced grandchildren with her for a few minutes on Christmas Day. She must have been unconscious. She started her bloody wailing while they were with her. ‘No! No!’ she called. ‘The siren!’ They left a few minutes after she started, their faces singed a sunset pink, probably worried the nurses would think they were doing something to upset her. They shouldn’t; she calls out like that all the time.
Today, I watch Lizzie across the ward tuck in the sheets in the bed opposite with aggressive movements. She’s not tall; she has to stand on her tiptoes and lean over the bed to pull the sheets taut. She reminds me of one of Luce’s friends from school. Her cheeks are freckled and pillow-like, and she has round hazel eyes that look like they’ve cared for people for many years already. There’s a well of feeling in those eyes. She still jumps every time one of our alarms goes off. She’ll get used to all the noise soon enough. It won’t take long for her to know which alarms are normal and which alarms mean someone is trying to escape. When she’s finished, the bed looks like it could be on a barracks not a ward. She sees my eyes are open and she smiles.
She comes over to me and says, ‘Morning, Mr Ashcroft’, before she moistens my eyes with a cotton bud soaked in saline solution. My eyes burn with relief. Because I don’t blink, my eyes have to be moistened when they’re open, at least every hour or so, otherwise they’ll dry up like raisins. Alice asks all the nurses to moisten my eyes whenever they see them open. I’m troublesome like that; it’s why some of the nurses will stroke my eyes shut when no one’s looking, as if I’m dead already. I’ve heard Sharma call my eye opening an ‘involuntary spasm’ and I’ll give him the involuntary – my eyelids do seem to follow their own laws – but Alice said it can be a sign of getting better too and although I don’t often let myself linger on the thought, this morning, as a treat, I rest there for a while, letting myself believe that it might be true.
Lizzie comes over to me some time during mid-morning, when the sunlight has settled into its space on the ward. She piles towels, waterproof blankets, soap and extra blankets in front of me.
‘Alice is busy, Mr Ashcroft,’ she says. ‘She asked me to give you your sponge bath. I hope that’s OK.’
To be honest, I’m a little disappointed it’s not Alice, but I’m in no position to make demands. Lizzie has forgotten to draw the curtains and I’m just bracing myself for a new humiliation, imagining Ellen’s kids and grandkids arriving and seeing Lizzie cleaning my arse like a toddler when, with a titter at herself, Lizzie remembers, and draws the curtain around us, saying, ‘Better to have some privacy, eh, Mr Ashcroft?’
Lizzie moves a soapy cloth methodically over my skin, over every inch of me. She talks about the weather. The water is warm. I feel each individual skin cell react to her massage, each pore opening like a starved mouth to the cloth. She moves me onto my side to wash my back. Every bed bath feels like the first time I’ve ever been touched, like an entirely new sensation.
‘So my dad reckons this cold snap is going to last for a few more weeks, like last year, remember?’ The water runs over me, sheds my old skin, makes me new. Lizzie glances over an area on my back with her sponge. It doesn’t have as much feeling as the rest of me. ‘Oh, you’ve got a sore here, Mr Ashcroft. I’ll pop a dressing on that later.’ But now that she’s touched it, even so lightly, I can feel the skin around it start to pucker and burn, and I know what’s coming and I’m swearing and fucking livid that this moment is going to be ruined and here it comes, the lightest tingle at first, increasing in waves before the whole area explodes in a tsunami of itchiness.
‘Of course all my mum can think about is her bulbs; too much cold can kill them off apparently …’
The itch burrows itself into my back like a maggot in an apple, the flesh around it rotting with longing, longing to be scratched.
Dear God.
‘… and all my brother can talk about is getting a day off school if it snows.’
Please, Lizzie, please
The itch spreads; like an army of ants marching, it branches from the base of my spine up towards my shoulders
Scratch it!
I can’t enjoy her washing the backs of my legs or my feet; I can’t even think about it. I start counting with my breathing machine. It’s all I can do to distance myself from the million tiny feet drilling the itch deeper into my back.
SCRATCH IT!
‘I don’t really care either way, I like snow but I can’t stand slush!’
Finally, at count fifty-six she rolls me from my side onto my back and the relief is like a blanket on a fire. I can still feel the itch, licking up the base of my spine, but the worst of it has been snuffed out for now.
The last thing she does is move my head, rub the cloth behind my ears and gently dab my neck, avoiding the hole where my tracheotomy disappears into my throat. She rests my head back on the pillow, at the usual thirty-five-degree incline, and then she says, ‘That’s better isn’t it, Mr Ashcroft. Nice and clean.’
I hear a crinkle as she drops the sponge, soap packet, plastic apron and gloves she just used into the waste bin.