The Ward Read online

  I’ve never seen her before. She’s a spindly woman with cheap hair extensions and late-onset acne, and she doesn’t seem to be bothered that I’ve lied about my medical history. The doctor I saw yesterday just before the op was an ancient man with a paunch, and to be honest I hadn’t actually had to lie to him. The consultation took less than ten minutes. He’d peered at my face, asked me if I was allergic to anything, outlined the procedure, and the next thing I knew I was being prepped for theatre.

  I should have known then that I wasn’t going to get away with it. It had been way too easy, and it’s never that easy.

  ‘Ms Cassavetes?’ The doctor runs a hand through her plastic hair. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  I flutter my eyelids, pretending that I’m still woozy from the anaesthetic.

  ‘Before we can let you go, I’m going to insist that a CAT scan is done. Just to be on the safe side.’

  Oh God. That’s not good. How much will that cost? If they charge me extra, I won’t have the money to pay for a motel to hole up in while the bruising fades. If I’m forced to go home early, Dad will have a conniption when he sees the bruises. And Dr Meka will totally flip out. She’d flatly refused to condone any more surgery, even though she must know it’s the only way. Worst-case scenario I can phone Sharon, ask her to help me out. But after last time she’ll probably tell me to get stuffed and grass me up to Dad. I open my mouth to tell the doctor that I don’t want a scan; that all I want is to be let out of this hellhole, but I can’t get the words out and I end up just nodding meekly. Pathetic.

  Shaking her head in exasperation, the doctor chucks the file on the end of the bed and stalks off. The nurse with her – the one Gertie has nicknamed Lumpy Legs – glares at me and angrily whips back the curtains shielding me from the rest of the ward.

  Gertie looks up from her You magazine. ‘What was that all about, doll?’ she asks.

  I shake my head and shrug. Luckily Gertie isn’t that interested. I get the idea that she thinks I’ve had some sort of surgery on my sinuses and there’s no way I’m going to put her right.

  ‘Ag shame,’ she says. ‘Still feeling kak?’

  I nod. I’m usually pretty good at keeping myself to myself in hospitals, but my silence hasn’t stopped Gertie from going on and on about her ‘kak bowels’, the trouble she’s having with her ‘bitch’ of a daughter and how many months she’s spent in and out of various Joburg hospitals. This one, she insists, is the worst of the lot: ‘If you’re not at death’s door when you get here, doll, you will be when you leave.’

  But I don’t really mind her constant chatter. Listening to her is better than being alone with my thoughts, and she hasn’t tried too hard to pry any personal details out of me, apart from the usual ‘Where you from?’ and ‘What’s a chick like you doing in a place like this?’ And if she thinks it’s weird that I’ve chosen to have the op in Johannesburg instead of a hospital closer to home in Durban, she hasn’t let on.

  ‘At least they’re giving you some attention,’ she gripes. ‘Count yourself lucky, doll. I could die just now and no one would even notice.’

  I close my eyes and pretend to sleep.

  ‘Check it out, doll. New arrival,’ Gertie says, snapping me out of my doze. I have no clue how long I’ve been out, and for once I don’t remember dreaming.

  I sit up as a new victim is wheeled into the ward. All I can see of her is a lump under a sheet and a whorl of grey hair. There’s something about the way the nurses are uncharacteristically fussing around her that makes me think she isn’t going to last much longer. A middle-aged man with a face as round and flat as a plate follows in the gurney’s wake, and the nurses swish the curtains around the bed, leaving him stranded. He pulls out a Bible and starts mumbling under his breath.

  Gertie watches him carefully. She leans over to me and murmurs, ‘Don’t be fooled. He’s probably already plotting how to spend the inheritance. I know the type.’

  I try to smile at her, but the painkillers are wearing off and it hurts when I move my cheek muscles. My nose feels as if it’s blown up to the size of a balloon, and I have to keep reminding myself to breathe through my mouth. Did it feel as uncomfortable and painful as this last year? I touch my nose gently, trying to feel if the bump has gone, but unlike last time, when the doctors used a discreet sticking plaster, this dressing is bulky and attached to my cheeks with layers of tape. Still, at least the bandages hide most of my face.

  The Bible-toting man glances around the ward, clearly trying to catch someone’s eye, but, apart from me and Gertie, the other patients are all comatose, sleeping or attached to rusting oxygen tanks, battling for each breath. His eyes drift to mine and I look away, feeling blood rushing to my cheeks.

  ‘Would you like to pray with me, miss?’ he asks.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Gertie says to him. ‘You won’t get a word out of her.’

  ‘Would you—?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Gertie says, cutting him off mid-sentence. ‘I’ll meet my maker soon enough. Then we’ll talk.’

  He swallows and nods at the body behind the curtain. ‘It’s my mother,’ he says.

  ‘Oh ja?’ Gertie says, radiating boredom. Leaving the new patient’s curtains closed, the two nurses emerge and murmur something to him. He nods his head, bites his lip and sits down on one of the plastic visitors’ chairs.

  ‘Hey!’ Gertie calls to Lumpy Legs. ‘Where’s lunch? I’m wasting away here.’

  ‘On its way, Mrs February.’ She waddles over and fiddles with Gertie’s drip. ‘Have you managed a bowel movement yet?’

  Gertie snorts. ‘You managed to stay off the doughnuts yet?’

  Lumpy Legs tuts. ‘I know you’re uncomfortable, but there’s no need for that,’ she says in her no-nonsense voice. ‘Nothing wrong with being a larger lady, is there?’

  ‘Obesity is the number-one killer in the world,’ Gertie says to her, winking at me.

  Lumpy Legs glares at me again as if it’s me who’s just insulted her. I clear my throat and force myself to speak. ‘Um. I’m supposed to have a scan. Do you know when it will be?’

  ‘When they’re ready for you,’ she snaps, before exiting into the corridor. I swallow the lump in my throat. If I start crying, that’ll be it. I won’t be able to stop.

  ‘Don’t mind her, love,’ Gertie says to me. ‘Miserable bitch. Shouldn’t let people like that be nurses. The caring profession, se gat. They’re all sadists.’

  I’ve done my best to be as cooperative as I can, but it’s obvious that the nurses hate me. I’ve heard them grumbling in the corridors about the hospital’s new policy to attract private patients by providing non-essential procedures. They wouldn’t know that I’m here because I don’t have a choice. Even if I had the cash to splash out on a private clinic, I’d have to find a doctor willing to perform the operation. And with my history I’ve run out of options.

  An orderly pushes a trolley piled with lunch trays into the ward.

  ‘Finally,’ Gertie says, clawing in the grubby water glass on her locker for her teeth.

  I’m grateful that I can’t smell anything; the sight of the food is enough to turn my stomach. It looks like minced roadkill, the cracked plates slopped with gritty-looking meat and a smattering of lumpy mashed potato. The thought of watching Gertie shovelling that down her gullet makes me feel instantly sick. I kick my blankets away. Even the juice they provide is the colour of bile; the cheap concentrated kind that comes in huge plastic tubs.

  ‘Where are you going, doll?’ Gertie asks.

  I have no idea where I’m going. All I know is that I have to get out of here. ‘Not hungry,’ I say.

  The religious man looks up from his Bible as I swing my legs off the bed. I can feel his eyes grazing my thighs, hovering over my stomach and my breasts, barely concealed beneath the flimsy hospital gown. I know what he’s thinking: ‘How can a monster like that show herself in public?’ I grab my robe as fast as I can, and wrap it around my body. D
ucking my head, I scurry out, slippers squeaking on the linoleum.

  ‘Hey, Lisa!’ Gertie calls after me. ‘If you’re going to the cafeteria bring me back a brandy and Coke.’ She roars with laughter which ends up in a coughing fit.

  I know she’s got a packet of menthols hidden in her bedside cabinet. But her secret is safe with me. If she wants to kill herself slowly that’s her business.

  God. This place is beyond grim. What would Dad say if he saw me here, shuffling down these crappy corridors, the green paint peeling off the walls, the linoleum on the floor scratched and worn with age and overuse? He’d probably say that it serves me right. That I’m getting what I deserve for lying to him again. At least the corridor is empty, the patients all tucking into their lunches, the nurses doing whatever nurses do when they’re not being mean – thinking up ways to torture the patients, or whatever.

  I keep my head down to avoid catching a glimpse of myself in the glass that surrounds the nurses’ station, concentrating instead on the floor, the walls, the sounds of lunch being trundled into wards and forced down. My gaze is drawn to the sluice room; the door is propped open and the shelves are piled with overflowing bedpans and sputum bowls. I pass an abandoned cleaning trolley parked at an angle next to the shower room, the mop head thick with filth, a muscular cockroach skittering under its wheels. I’m glad I have the dressing over my nose so I don’t have to confront what it smells like in here.

  I need to find somewhere quiet, somewhere private, so that I can go over my options again. But where? I can’t leave the ward – it’s blocked by a rusty security gate. The sight of it totally freaked me out when I arrived. I mean, I know that Joburg is a violent city, but this is a hospital, not a prison. When I was still able to convince Dad that the only way I was going to get better was to have another op, he booked me into a series of private clinics which specialised in cosmetic procedures. They were more like hotels, with private rooms, satellite TV and nurses who didn’t treat me like crap. A million miles from this dump.

  Just past the men’s toilets there’s a grubby ‘Waiting Room’ sign tacked next to a door, and I creep towards it. I hesitate, then turn the handle and peer inside. I’m hit with a waft of smoky air. Two wizened patients are sitting puffing away under a huge ‘No Smoking’ sign, their drips standing behind them like disapproving relatives. They immediately stop speaking and stare at me in disgust, and I scuttle away as if it’s me, not them, who’s been caught doing something illegal.

  Stiff with self-consciousness, I walk on. I’m nearing the end of the corridor, and the snoozing security guard jerks awake, glances at me distrustfully, and then rests his head on the gate again and closes his eyes.

  I’m about to turn around and head back when I spot a narrow alcove diagonally opposite the security gate. There’s an open door leading into what looks to be a small, darkened storage room. Maybe I can hide in here. Gather my thoughts.

  I head towards it, the sound of a cough stopping me dead.

  No ways. There’s a man in here, lying on a narrow bed, a drip snaking out of his arm. What the hell is a patient doing in here? The cot he’s on barely even fits into the room. He’s one of the few people under sixty I’ve seen in the ward and he’s lying there, eyes closed, his face covered in a fine sheen of sweat. I creep closer, careful not to wake him. Even though he looks like he’s at death’s door I can’t tear my eyes away from his stubbly face and his shock of black hair. He reminds me of someone, someone familiar. I edge even closer. That’s it. Robert Pattinson. That’s who he looks like. But not like Robert was in Breaking Dawn, more like when he was in—

  ‘Ms Cassavetes!’ Lumpy Legs calls.

  I jump guiltily and turn to face her.

  She’s striding towards me, puffing with exertion. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  A bored-looking orderly is trailing behind her, pushing a wheelchair. I drop my head, hiding my face behind my hair.

  ‘Are you deliberately trying to make my life difficult?’ she says.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘They need you in X-ray,’ she snaps, gesturing to the wheelchair.

  ‘I can walk.’

  ‘Hospital policy.’

  I glance back at the storeroom. ‘There’s a man in the—’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s none of your concern. Now please,’ she says, voice heavy with sarcasm, ‘if it’s not too much trouble.’

  I do as she says. The chair is surprisingly comfortable and I lean back and pray that the orderly won’t try to chat to me. Thankfully as soon as Lumpy Legs is out of sight he plugs earphones into his ears and pops a strip of gum into his mouth. He mutters something to the snoozing security guard, who yawns, stretches and takes his time unlocking the gate. The orderly wheels me through it and into a lift, its stainless steel walls smudged with fingerprints, a wad of filthy tissues balled in the corner. We rattle down, my empty stomach turning in on itself, the orderly humming along to ‘Beautiful’ by James Blunt, popping his gum every so often. The lift shudders to a halt and he sweeps me out into another long corridor, this one painted a tired yellow, a stretch of wall scored with deep circular marks that look horribly like bullet holes. The strip lighting crackles and hisses, and we crawl along for what feels like miles, squeaking down corridors lined with foldaway beds containing passive patients, weaving around a woman in a wheelchair stranded outside the open door of a filthy toilet, and trundling past a group of skeletal, yellow-skinned men and women queuing patiently outside a barred dispensing window.

  At last we draw to a stop outside the X-ray department. The wooden benches outside it are full of patients in hospital gowns waiting for their turn, but no one looks up as the orderly parks me behind a gurney containing an elderly man with a dried-up face and clawed hands. His mouth is open, revealing stumpy blackened teeth. A middle-aged nurse with bloodshot eyes pushes through the black doors, and for a second or two our eyes lock. Then she flinches and turns away, just like I knew she would.

  ‘You took your time,’ Gertie says, as I’m wheeled back into the ward. ‘You’ve been gone for hours. You missed all the excitement.’

  She points to the bed opposite. It’s empty. The blankets are puddled on the floor, the mattress covered with a yellowing plastic sheet. It had once held a woman with swollen, blue-veined feet, dyed red hair and a hectic cough. ‘Another one bites the dust,’ Gertie says. ‘Off to the great morgue in the sky.’ She cackles.

  I’m relieved to see that the religious man is gone, although his mother is still hidden behind the curtains. The woman on the other side of Gertie farts loudly and then moans in her sleep.

  ‘Charming,’ Gertie says.

  Lumpy Legs bustles in. ‘Doctor’s on his way,’ she snaps in my direction.

  ‘Twice in one day, hey, doll?’ Gertie says to me. ‘I’m lucky if they remember to change my drip.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs February,’ Lumpy Legs tuts, whipping the curtains around my bed.

  Another doctor appears behind her, this one an Indian man with tired eyes and a worried expression. He glances down at my chart.

  ‘Ms Cassavite,’ he says, mispronouncing my name. ‘We have your scan results here.’ His voice is high and girlish, heavily accented. ‘I am sorry to have to inform you that the news is not so good.’

  Lumpy Legs looks at him with a mixture of reverence and fake concern. She fiddles with my sheet.

  The doctor rattles off a flurry of medical jargon. ‘Are we clear?’

  I shake my head, doing my best to smother the growing excitement. I understand exactly what he’s just said, of course, but I want him to repeat it. I want to be sure.

  ‘In the terms of that of a layperson, Ms Cassavite, if we do not operate again, you could have serious complications.’ He checks his notes again. ‘I see here that this is not the first time that you have been having this procedure. And that you were not informing this hospital of these facts. It is pertinent that you must sign another consent. And we must also be sure that you will
be liable for the extra expenditure.’

  ‘When will you operate?’

  ‘In a few days. As soon as a theatre is available.’

  ‘And afterwards? Will I… will I look… different?’

  ‘Different? I am not understanding you fully, Ms Cassavite.’

  ‘Will I still look like the same person?’

  ‘We will not know for sure until the operation is over, Ms Cassavite,’ he says. ‘But you must prepare yourself for the worst. The shape, it could alter quite radically. The damage is extensive. Much reconstruction might be necessary.’

  Okay, a couple more days in this horrible place, but it will all be worth it. The doctor’s eyes widen in disbelief as he takes in my expression. I’m not surprised. He wouldn’t know why I’m smiling.

  Chapter 3

  FARRELL

  I know it’s night because the ward sounds different, more subdued. No ringing phones, no clattering carts or running children.

  I listen to the quiet conversations of the nurses, the old women moaning in pain like mourners at a funeral, the building breathing, the stale air circulating, the tick of the drip machine. And underneath it all, a distant thrum, like the hospital is built over a massive beehive, or a full stadium buried hundreds of metres deep.

  I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep all day, my rest more like a series of naps than the dead semi-coma I was in before. I’m more alert now, feeling more, and I scan my body: the ache in my right arm, the jag of the drip in my left, the pinch of the catheter, a sharp pain in the palm of my right hand. My lower back feels bruised and my throat is still acid-burned. My hands and toes are freezing and I can rub them together for a few minutes before I grow tired again. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty – the drip has kept me hydrated – but my lips are dry and cracked. My hair is filthy, unwashed for days. I must look and smell like shit.

  I test my eyes compulsively, but I can’t get past the count of eight before they sting shut again. And while they’re open, I can’t really see anything, just blurred shapes as if something’s grown over the lenses. Christ, I can’t go blind. I can’t just lie here and lose my sight.