He would come on Monday. It was just a matter of getting through the weekend. She did the rough calculation. About sixty-five hours. And half of that was numbed, medicated sleep.
On the Saturday morning, she ate porridge and drank tea at the communal table. The porridge was so overcooked and dry that she had to break it off in chunks. She could only swallow it if she drank the stewed, lukewarm tea at the same time. It was like eating damp cardboard, but she needed to put food into her body. Also, there was always a nurse somewhere around, watching, judging.
There was the temptation to stay in her room, pull the covers over her head, try to forget where she was and wait until Monday. But she couldn’t lock the door from the inside, and she was more vulnerable on her own, without witnesses. Mil Burns or one of the other male nurses might visit her. She decided she’d be safer staying in the public spaces as much as possible. Also, she needed her docility and compliance to be witnessed. She was an actor on stage, playing out her recovery to anyone she could find to be her audience.
There was no library in the ward but there was a TV room and a pile of magazines. Some women were playing a board game while half-watching a documentary about a boat journey down the Amazon. Nancy leafed through magazine after magazine, reading about developments in the royal family, advice on the best dating apps to use, recipes for spring, couples therapy, electric cars. They were like messages from the messy, noisy world outside.
Briefly, just before lunch was served, there was a row when someone changed the channel and someone else changed it back. It was almost turning into a fight and Nancy knew that the right thing to do would have been to intervene and try to calm things down. That’s what she would have done at any other time. But Nancy did some quick mental calculations of everything that could go wrong. One of the women might turn on her. Or there might be a fight and it would look as if she was involved or even as if she had started it. A nurse would arrive and think: there’s that Nancy North, causing trouble again. It would go in the file. It would count against her. She just kept her head down and read an article about the best herbs to grow on a town balcony.
After lunch she walked outside. It was a bright sunny day and in front of the building it almost felt warm. She was careful always to stay in full view of anyone who might be watching. Looking around, Nancy realised for the first time that a hundred and fifty years earlier this must have been an elegant country home, with servants and cooks and gardeners. The lawns led down to mature oak and ash trees that had been arranged in the garden for just this view from the house. There had been hundreds of estates like this and now they had become schools or old people’s homes or country house hotels or psychiatric hospitals. Here in the winter sunshine and clear air and the trees all around, Nancy had the brief, poignant feeling of what this place could have been: a comfort, a sanctuary. But it was already getting dark, turning cold, so she went back inside.
That night and the following morning were much the same. At the end of lunch, a male nurse she hadn’t seen before came and sat next to her. He started telling her a long, involved story about when he had left the army and the various jobs he’d done and gradually Nancy got the sense that he was sitting too close. She could see from his tag that his name was Terry.
‘You got a boyfriend?’ he suddenly asked.
‘Yes.’
‘It must be difficult being separated from him.’
‘He’s coming to see me tomorrow.’
‘That’s nice. But it’s not enough, is it?’
‘I’m looking forward to seeing him.’
‘You need someone to keep an eye on you in here,’ the nurse said. ‘Look out for you. Bit of TLC.’
‘I feel like I’ve got a lot of people keeping an eye on me,’ said Nancy, as calmly as she could manage.
It was nothing, she tried to tell herself. It was nothing worse than a hundred encounters she’d had like this in pubs and clubs and sitting on trains and planes. She didn’t tell Terry to shut up and she didn’t just walk away, but she didn’t respond to his flirtation either. She steered the conversation into as neutral an area as possible, avoided eye contact and then, after what felt like enough time, she pushed her plate aside and stood up. Terry put a hand on her arm.
‘Good to get to know you,’ he said.
She just nodded and made her way back to the TV room. She opened a magazine and pretended to be deeply engrossed in whatever page was in front of her but instead she was thinking about her situation. Had the word got around that she was vulnerable? When someone sat next to her, Nancy didn’t even look round. The less she engaged with anyone the better.
‘I like these programmes,’ the woman said.
Nancy continued to read – or pretend to read – her magazine.
‘Don’t you like them? Are you ignoring me? Don’t you like them?’
Nancy tried not to look irritated. She put the magazine down and looked round. It was Roxanne from the group session and she was watching a nature programme. It was about gazelles.
‘You see that one hanging back?’ said Roxanne. ‘The leopards are going to go for it. It’s the weak one. They can smell weakness.’
The leopards did indeed go for the smaller gazelle and there was a desperate chase but in the end the gazelle managed to escape and return to the herd.
‘They always do that in the documentaries,’ said Roxanne. ‘They like to give it a happy ending. It’s bollocks, though, isn’t it? Most of the time they get caught. Otherwise, the leopards would starve to death. They don’t like to show that, do they?’
‘It would be a bit grim, I suppose,’ said Nancy.
‘It’s nature, isn’t it?’
Nancy picked up her magazine again and pretended to look at the spring fashions in this eight-month-old magazine.
‘Time for your meds, Roxy,’ said a voice.
‘No, that’s all right.’
‘Now don’t mess us around, there’s a good girl.’
‘I’m feeling fine,’ said Roxanne. ‘The meds do my head in. I can take them later. I want to watch this programme now so fuck off.’
Nancy didn’t look round. She continued to stare at the magazine. She knew what was going to happen and within a couple of minutes she heard the familiar rushing of feet and the shouts as a group of nurses seized Roxanne and forced her down onto the floor. Roxanne was pleading and crying. She was too big to lift and they had to drag her across the linoleum. Nancy couldn’t stop herself. She raised her eyes from the magazine and as she did, so she met Roxanne’s gaze, tear-stained, her cheeks red.
Nancy turned back to the magazine. She heard the nurses shouting and swearing at Roxanne and she heard them laughing as well, making fun of her. The sounds receded as Roxanne was dragged out of the room and along the corridor, but Nancy could still hear them. There was even a scream. What were they doing to her?
She felt her face burning in shame. She had always thought of herself as someone who would get involved, who would help people, even if it was a risk. There would have been no point, she tried to tell herself. If she had tried to intervene, the nurses wouldn’t have retreated. Maybe it would even have made things worse.
That could have been true, but it wasn’t the point. The point was that it might also have made things worse for Nancy herself. She felt as if she was back in the school playground failing to intervene with the bullies because the bullies might turn on her. She had made a decision to stay out of trouble and this was the result. She couldn’t think of anything else to do, but she hated herself for it.