Just got home from the hospital. Spent four days there. My pneumonia wasn’t going away. Breathing was like sucking air from nails and bolts. Lungs and airway felt rusted. My coughing wouldn’t stop. Maggie was concerned and took me in. I was hesitant. Didn’t want doctors prodding me again. My coughing decided for me.
Shared a room with a six-year-old boy with devil’s grip. The paediatric ward was full. Was strapped to an oxygen tank. As soon as the nurse put the mask over my mouth and nose I shook my head and thought, Old Scratch, you leathery bastard. Felt like some strange justice had just been accomplished. For me it was an embarrassment, an outrage. Wondered if Dante’s kicked off yet. Wondered if Jeeves is getting bored. Was suddenly disappointed that neither Gertrude nor Stefan has tried to contact me.
The boy had a fever and severe chest pain. He lay on his side most of the time. He’s from Cudworth. His mother came every day, a thin woman who somehow managed to look round. She said hi to me, asked me how I was doing. I’d tilt my hand in reply. Then she’d attend to her son. A quiet boy. Dark blue eyes. He looks suspicious even though he doesn’t mean to. When he speaks he speaks quickly, gathering his breath and then letting it all out. Like he feels he doesn’t have enough time to get out what he wants to say. His mother often told him to slow down because she couldn’t understand him. Said that he was mumbling. I studied them. He studied me. When his mother was out of the room he spoke to me in a slower voice. Asked me what was wrong with me. Asked me if I was dying. I shook my head. How old are you? he said, hugging his flank and speaking through his teeth. Forty-seven. My aunt was forty when she died. Okay.
I often fiddled with the tube leading up to the needle that fed medicine into my hand. A bag of transparent fluid hung above my bed. Made me think of catheters and colostomy bags. I groaned. Fuck you, Old Scratch, I thought. May the fires of hell tickle your ripe old ass.
My last night in the hospital, the boy’s mother read to him from a book of fairy tales she’d plucked from the paediatric ward’s bookshelf. I followed along. From where I lay, I saw it was an older hardcover volume; the mother held the book so that it faced me. The illustrations were dazzling, even haunting in their clarity, placed on glossy pages in between the crisp leaves holding the text. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood had an enormous head with grizzled, matted fur; I could almost smell its wet-dog musk. Red Riding Hood was drawn in mid-cower, in the act of turning away from the wolf, her face arrestingly sly yet vulnerable.
The mother read an unusual version of Three Billy Goats Gruff. The goats, as the story usually goes, convinced the troll to let them pass on the bridge by each saying that his older brother was bigger and beefier. The difference was the troll himself. Rather than the usual ugly little son of a bitch, the troll had a pronounced limp with sharp knobby limbs. The illustration was a full-page portrait of the troll leering in the middle of the bridge, heavily favouring his right leg and pointing a bumpy yellow finger at a goat, whose nose and face poked out of the corner of the page. The illustration was so detailed that I imagined the troll sucking on his lips and spitting as he spoke, his words spurting out from between his few, clumsily distributed teeth.
When the mother finished reading the story, the boy looked over at me. He’d seen my foul rag-and-bone body whenever I went to the washroom. I widened my eyes and took off my mask and smiled at him. I am absolutely a troll, I said, but don’t worry, I don’t eat goats. They taste too furry. The mother chuckled, and the boy smiled a little, but with his suspicious eyes I couldn’t tell if he was comforted or uneasy.
Came home just an hour ago. The boy was still there when I left.
I’m better now. Definitely tired of hospitals. Breathing more or less regularly, though my lungs still feel partially deflated. Arms a bit stronger. Wrists aching now, though. Haven’t written like this for a while. Then again, there wasn’t much to report until now. What am I to do about that?