And Beatrice? What was the world like now, for her? Most of the time she seemed as if in a trance. Eyes large, rocking rocking herself, and her ears filled with her own sounds. A roaring in her head, torrents of blood rushing like the river at home; eddies and whirlpools of thick blood; blood spilling over bone seeping into sandy flesh. And a thudding, like footsteps of giants pursuing her endlessly. Great hairy beings, their feet pounding, worst at night and early morning.
It might be that sometimes she felt squashed flat and fat like the plasticine puppets you sometimes see on television, and unable then to correctly move even a finger, or lift a heavy foot from the ground so much did it weigh. Her facial features were disappearing into a swelling face, flesh closing over her eyes, over her nostrils. While the black sky grew higher she was crushed beneath it like a figure in a comic strip, the ink running from the top of the frame.
Another time she became pale and thin. A grey mist hazy world. She felt pain when a breeze brushed her thin brittle limbs, when her clothes touched her skin, and she made the tiniest careful movements lest she snap something with the mere leverage of feeble straining muscles.
Voices rushed around her, a cassette tape speeding up and about to break, spinning tighter, screeching at her, voices of enraged cartoon chipmunks and ducks, but grown large and shouting spittle into her face. People rushed toward her in a video fast forward, and then went past, or away, and rapidly became tiny figures shooting away down long corridors. Nurses’ uniforms walked to and away from her, the fabric noisily scratching and grinding. Doors slammed and echoed as if the room was a steel drum. But then in all this frenzied din a door would suddenly slam, silently. Silence would begin...
She found that by concentrating she could change her perception from fast to slow, and vice versa. But she then went from one extreme to another, and could not halt as she went desperately past the correctly paced world. So she went from gross to brittleslender. And from a frenzied rushing world to one in slow motion where speech became a succession of spastic groans and she helplessly watched events occur. Watching waiting for a cup to fall, watching it fall slowly unable to move to catch it, watching it fall waiting for it to hurry up and reach the floor, watching it break into pieces, counting the pieces as they bounced, waiting for them to reach the floor again, again.
Sharp things moved inside her body, through her blood, stabbing inside her foot, shoulder, stomach, head.
Snakes winked at her, tongues flickering before slipping behind doors, into briefcases and boxes.
Faces changed as she spoke to them. She couldn’t trust. Faces even changed from human to animal. Limbs grew out of walls, pockets, clipboards. Smiles held knives in their teeth. An offered hand became a fist or boot which struck. Eyes detached from faces and became glaring groups, satellites spinning around her head and flashing blue bolts of hatred.
She watched the sun fall from the sky each day, and catch in the fork of a tree away past the car park. It stuck there, bleeding its colours until dark.
One night she saw the moon tumble across a cloud torn sky. It fell and spilled over two figures lying on the grass far below her. In the morning she saw that sculpture there.
Stella returned to Karnama. She thought she was going mad, and would, for sure, if she stayed with Beatrice in that hospital with all them strangers.
She had got fat, and couldn’t smile any more.
And, at last, people told her that someone did sing her daughter, because she did not do the proper thing after Walanguh’s death. Fatima should have told her.