Picture This - short prose

PICTURE THIS.

I.

Picture this – standing in the doorway of your kitchen, in your left hand a plastic carrier bag just bought from Tescos for 5p. A thin, inadequate carrier bag, the handles stretched to breaking point, full of tins of soup and sausages and cat-food, eggs on the top. One of those carrier bags. In your right hand a door-key, with which you’ve just opened the front door, held between thumb and first finger. The other three fingers on your right hand are holding two pint bottles of milk against your chest, with difficulty because you didn’t open the door, put away your key, and then pick up the milk, you picked up the bottles first and then juggled with them while you opened the door. You do things like that.

And now picture this – the kitchen table in the middle of the room, radio on one side, things from breakfast – teapot, marmalade, butter, bread, all sat in the middle of the table, because it’s Saturday and you didn’t get up till twelve, and then you had breakfast (on your own because everyone else is away this weekend) and then thought of doing Tescos before the match, and rushed off to get some shopping, only stopping to put your plate and cup and things in the bowl in the sink, and not bothering to clear the table.

Now, finally, picture this. Standing on the other side of the table, Sue. In her right hand, the bread-knife. One of those quite expensive knives you get called Kitchen Devils, one side with sort of wavy serrations, very sharp, good for cutting things like meat. Surgical steel, made in Sheffield. You know the sort. And in her left hand?

Nothing. Nothing at all. Just blood, because she’s cut across her left wrist with the bread knife, and there’s a spurt of bright red blood, arterial blood, that happens every time her heart beats, and it goes quite along way really, a couple of feet, and there’s lots of it. Sue’s standing by the sink. Sue’s very tidy.

“Oh Jesus Christ.” you say, and you drop the bag of groceries and the two bottles of milk and your door-keys, and you start walking towards Sue, and your head is going chunkety-chunkety-chunk through all those totally forgettable things they tell you on first-aid posters in factories, and the things you did to get your first-aider badge how many years ago? Fifteen? Really fifteen? Fifteen years ago in the scouts. And all you can think of is the recovery position and how to do the kiss of life and how to do emergency tracheotomies with a pen-knife in expensive restaurants when your boss starts choking to death on toast and pate, and none of those things help at all. “Gently, love,” you say, and you sit her down at the kitchen table, and you take the knife out of her hand with your left hand and put it down gently on the table, not looking at it, while you take the left arm, the bloody one, the sticky, wet, bloody one in your right hand, and you try to cover the spurting with your fingers, to make it stop, and it doesn’t, and now your hand is wet and slippery and you still haven’t looked at her face or at anything except the wrist and your right hand, which isn’t your right hand any more, it’s just a right hand that does more or less what you tell it to do. You grip harder, just below the slash, on the other little cuts, hesitation marks they’re called, how do you know this crap?, and the spurting eases because you’ve got a couple of finger tips on the artery, luck not judgement, and you think “There’s a pressure point where you put tourniquets and you have to release tourniquets or they get gangrene and I don’t know where the pressure point is. Oh shit why doesn’t someone else come?”, and you know that no-one else will. And now the bleeding is less dramatic, it isn’t jetting out from her wrist, just sort of seeping, and you still haven’t looked at her, so you do. Very slowly, you raise your eyes to her face, and she’s very wide-eyed; not crying, staring at you, and she doesn’t say anything, she just stares.

You’re calmer now, working on automatic. While your right hand hangs on, you think “Get an ambulance, get someone who knows how to stop her dying. Don’t let her die on me, get an ambulance.”

You take the tea-towel off the hook under the draining board, it’s horrible and grey and greasy but you can’t help that, so you take your fingers off her wrist and the blood squirts right across the room, and you whimper. Not Sue. Sue doesn’t make a sound. And before it can happen again you wrap the tea-towel round her wrist, round and round, and it’s turning red as you do it, Sue’s blood turning it red, you wrap the wrist and close your hand on the bundle, and then you get Sue to stand up, which she does, she still hasn’t said anything, she stands up and you put your left arm round her shoulders and walk her slowly across the kitchen, your right hand holding her left arm across your bodies.

You pick your way over the groceries and into the corridor by the stairs, and up to the phone by the front door, and sit her down on the stairs. She still hasn’t said anything. You reach for the phone with your left hand, it’s awkward, almost too far, but you get it and pull it towards you and take the receiver in your left hand. You think “My right hand’s going numb. I can’t feel my fingers, I’m going to let go of her wrist.” but you don’t. you dial three nines with your index finger, you didn’t realise how much you were shaking, you can’t get your finger in the hole, then you do and you dial. Then you wait.

“Hello, Emergency. Which service do you require?” A voice, calm, anonymous. She doesn’t care what’s happening.

“Ambulance.” you yelp, your voice won’t behave, and then there are lots of whirrs and clicks and another voice says “Ambulance Service?” and you say “There’s been an accident, there’s a woman losing blood fast, can you come quickly please?” and you’re gibbering. Then the voice on the other end, so calm, so patient, all the mothers in the world rolled into one, says “Yes, dear. Just give me your address.” and you do, and the phone number, and she says “Thank you.” and she goes away. Then there’s just Sue sitting silent beside you, and the phone buzzing in your ear, and you’re lost.

That’s all there is for eight minutes, because you can’t think of anything to say and Sue can say nothing, and you put your arm round her and hold her while your right hand squeezes her wrist and the sodden tea-towel drips on the carpet.

Then the ambulance men come and they take charge. They aren’t kind or unkind, sympathetic or not. They just take charge, do what they have to do, throw away the tea-towel and put something else round her wrist. You can’t see what they do, they just do it, and Sue is sat in a trolley affair and taken away.

II.

Then the policemen who came in just behind them say; “Can you tell us what happened, sir?”

You tell them all this, which is a lot more than they want to know, and you take them into the kitchen, which looks like an abattoir, you hadn’t realised how much blood there was, and puddles of milk and broken eggs, and one of them says “It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” and you laugh. Why did you laugh? Then the young one with acne says to the older one with a moustache “She must have waited till she heard someone come in.” and you think “Yes, she must.”, and you wonder how long she stood there, waiting for someone, waiting for the slipping sound of a key in the lock, before the knife slashed down across her wrist.

Then the older one with the moustache says “Can you give us a few details about the young lady? What is your relationship with her?”; and you have to sort it out in your head, sort out just why Sue was here.

“She’s a friend, she was staying here for a bit.” you say finally, but it isn’t true. She isn’t anyone’s friend, she’s just someone you know, and it isn’t you that knows her, it’s Laura, and it’s bloody unfair and you didn’t want her here in the first place. Tell them she’s gay, they’ll like that. Tell them she doesn’t want anything to do with men, that she brings home a succession of strange women, all of whom hate you for being male. Then you can tell them about how they all hang about in the living-room so you can’t watch television or use your record-player, so you wind up in the pub on your own. While you’re at it, tell them about the time she came into the kitchen straight out of the bath, and you couldn’t look at her although she’s lovely, because fancying her and disliking her was too confusing, and anyway, Laura was there. Go on, tell them. It’ll make you feel better. You don’t though. They want to know where she comes from, and you say Leicester, then think perhaps it’s Bedford or Hertford, or one of those cities you don’t want to go to, and then think that it doesn’t much matter, that Sue doesn’t come from any of those places in any way that matters, not in the way of going home. She just moves from place to place, using up the tolerance of a string of acquaintances until they ask her to go, and she moves on to the next address in her diary.

When the police have gone, you ring the hospital to find out when visiting hours are, and how she is, and what’s happening to her, and they say “Are you related to the young lady?” and you say “No, just a friend.”, and they say “Well, she’ll be discharged at seven o’clock, if you’d like to come and fetch her.” And they hang up.

That’s when you start crying, sitting on the stairs, holding a dead phone, shaking with tears at the unfairness of it all. Why is it happening to you?

III.

You pick your way through the mess to the kitchen, and put the kettle on. The clock says 5.45, which means it’s been an hour since you got in. if it takes half an hour to get to the hospital, you’ve got till 6.30 to work out what you’re doing. You run water in the sink to rinse away some of the blood, and pick out your cup from breakfast, washing off the blood. You make yourself some coffee, then realise there’s no milk because the bottles got broken. The glass is all over the floor, and the cat is lapping round the splinters to get at the milk.

Then she treads very delicately over the scattered tins and starts to lick at a pool of Sue’s blood drying on the floor, and you pick her up by the skin behind her neck and throw her out of the back door, as she screams at you and bites your hand.

You pick up all the tins, wipe off the milk and egg and stuff, and put them away. Then you sweep up all the glass and broken egg shells, and split paper bags and the milk-sodden loaf of bread, and the other bits you can’t rescue, and put them in the bin. Then you clear breakfast off the table, very methodical, putting away the pot of marmalade and the box of cornflakes. You wash all the crockery and put it away still wet, getting it out of the way, and then you start cleaning.

You fill the washing-up bowl with water and you pour in Dettol, and then you wash the blood off the kitchen table. You wash the blood off the cooker and the sink and the draining-board. You sponge down the walls and the dresser and then you scrub the floor, and you put Ajax on the wet patches and scrub again, and you change the bright red water and you rinse it all again, and mop up the milk and egg, and change the water and wipe it all over again, until there’s no more blood in the kitchen. Then you clean the hall and the passageway, and then when you’re sure there isn’t any blood left anywhere, you wash the bread-knife very thoroughly, and take it out to the dustbin and throw it away. You feel a bit sorry about that, because, sharp as it was, it was a very good knife, and expensive.

Then you go to Sue’s room, and look through her diary, being careful not to read the pages of tiny neat writing, till you find her address list. There’s the number of a group of women you know she visits, so you ring it. The first time you say “Hello, could I speak to ….” the woman on the other end hangs up, because there’s nothing you can do to stop your voice sounding male, but that’s not unexpected so you try again after a minute or two, and finally speak to Amanda, who you thought was a friend of Sue’s. Amanda, it seems, doesn’t care for Sue at all, and suggests it was a pity you found her so soon. She isn’t helpful. You say thank you, and hang up, and then you ring for a taxi to take you to the hospital because now it’s half-past-six.

IV.

You arrive at the hospital in ten minutes, since the taxi came much quicker than you thought it would. You ask the man to wait, and go in to give your name to the woman at the desk and tell her who you’ve come for. She doesn’t respond at all, no smile, nothing. Just a couple of flicked switches and crisp things said into the phone while you stand there, lost. When she’s finished she looks up and winces to see you still stood there, intruding on her space. She gestures to the plastic stacking chairs round the coffee-machine, and tells you to sit down and wait.

For half-an-hour you sit there, worrying about the taxi costing more than you have in your wallet, worrying about what’s happening to Sue, worrying that they’ve forgotten you’re here, and no-one will ever come to find you and you’ll have to sit here for hours drinking rotten vending-machine coffee until you find the courage to leave, which would probably be some time around midnight. Then they bring Sue down the corridor. She’s very pale, but she’s not looking manic or strange, or anything much. She has very neat cream-coloured bandages on her wrist, and other than that, there’s no sign. You stand up when you see her, and she smiles, very slight but it is a smile, and you feel a bit better. The nurse who is walking with her looks stern, but quite nice. She says “Goodbye. Let’s not see you in here again” to Sue, then she goes. You take Sue’s arm. It’s the most intimate thing you’ve done ever since you’ve known her. This touch, your hand on her arm. You held her arm this afternoon, of course, but that was different. She doesn’t mind you holding her arm.

You go out to the taxi together, and you sit her in it, very solicitous. The taxi-driver takes you home and charges you three pounds fifty for two ten minute journeys and a forty minute wait. You don’t know if that’s a bargain or a rip-off, you can never tell with mini-cabs. It’s difficult to know what to tip him. You give him four quid and see how long it takes him to get the change. If he’s quick he can keep it, if he takes his time you’ll have it back. He gets the fifty pence out without a pause, and you tell him to keep it. Sue’s standing by the door. She’s holding her arm away from her body, as though it belongs to someone else. You go in, and Sue wants to take a bath, so you go upstairs to run it while she goes into the living-room where she sleeps. You ask if she wants a coffee, and she says she does so you go downstairs to make it. She’s in the bath when it’s done, and she asks you to bring it in. She’s lying in the bath with her bandaged left arm propped on the side, clear of the water. Her eyes are shut and her hair is floating round her head like seaweed, like Ophelia in that painting. Ophelia dead. She looks up. “Thanks” she says, and asks if you’ll put it down on the side of the bath. You put it down and go, proud of yourself for not looking at her body at all. You go into the living room, turn on the fire, turn down her bed. Her clothes are over the arm of the chair, her trousers with dried dark stains on them, her blouse crusted with blood. You take the blouse down to the kitchen and put it into a bucket of detergent and water. The soap suds turn pink. Sue is out of the bath, so you go to see if she wants anything, and she doesn’t. She gets into bed; “I think I’ll go to sleep now” she says, so you turn off the fire and the light at the switch by the door. You feel so responsible, so depended on, standing in the doorway looking at the shrouded shape in the bed, the dark hair spread across the pillow. When you baby-sit, you can stand for hours listening to the little pops and mumbles a sleeping child makes. Little noises, while the night slows down and you focus in and in and in on the creature in the cot. Now you’re doing the same to Sue, who is twenty-six. Odd. Very odd. And you didn’t like her.

You go down to the kitchen to make another cup of black coffee, to look at the book you meant to read today, still sitting on the sideboard. You haven’t eaten anything since noon, so you think of toasted cheese. Toasted cheese doesn’t really need much thought. Yesterday’s bread will have to do, but you can’t cut it, there’s no bread-knife. The cat starts twining herself around your legs, prepared to forgive you for throwing her out if you’ll feed her now. You give the cat her supper, then go out to the dustbin, take out the knife, take it back into the kitchen, and wash it. While you’re eating the toasted cheese, you notice a spot of blood on the top of the cooker. Leave it, go to bed. You go to bed.