IT WAS HER NOSE THAT WAS CAUSING ALL the trouble. That’s what you get for poking it where it doesn’t belong, thought Joanna. Isn’t that what Jan would say? The nasal tip cartilage had been shunted up and over to the right-hand side, fragmented and scattered. The rest of her was wrung out like James’s facecloth, sodden and reshaped, as if someone had tried to rip her head from her shoulders. She kept thinking of Morph, that little Plasticine person who had had a guest slot on Tony Hart’s art show when she was young. The Deerhunter. That was the theme music that played when Tony did his tours of the viewers’ art. It was so thoroughly attached to the programme that she could never separate them again.
There wasn’t a single part of her body that didn’t burn or tingle or ache. Don’t look down, she told herself. You’ll be fine if you just don’t look down. She kept her eyes on Doctor Kevan, who stood at her bed, a foot further away than was comfortable. He had to speak loudly; Joanna knew that her wardmate was listening. Kevan was small and balding, near retirement, and he referred to himself in the plural. She was a matter of public record, an article in The Lighthouse, fodder for the fogies in the Spar.
She concentrated on how his face was striped by the shadows of the blinds in the heavy afternoon light. A chunky nurse simpered at his elbow – “Yes, Doctor! No, Doctor!”– like an Egyptian scribe. No wonder they had affairs. Who could withstand the laser of that beaming obeisance? Joanna felt that she should also have been taking notes. Jan would be doing that, though, wouldn’t he? He had gone off to find some coffee, but he’d be back any moment. Joanna was glad that he hadn’t brought James. The idea of her little boy seeing her so monstrously bandaged was sharp as a splinter of rib in the lung. He would have nightmares for months.
Kevan looked at her over his glasses. “We’ve rebuilt your septum.”
Her nose didn’t feel as if it had been reconstructed. The site veered between dull throbbing when the PAINBLOK – NO MORE THAN FOUR DOSES PER TWENTY-FOUR HOURS – was working at full strength for the first hour, and then a miserable moaning pain for the rest of the time. She wanted to scratch the splinted dressing right off her face and sneeze and sneeze until it was clear again. She remembered her mother irrigating her own sinuses in the Kimberley heat, inhaling salt water and then coughing and streaming as the burn began.
“We’ve packed it with gauze to stop the bleeding. That’s what that stuffy feeling is. You’ll have to leave it in for about a week, and then we’ll take another look at it, okay? We can just do that in my rooms. It will feel like I’m pulling your brains out through your nose, but that’s perfectly normal.”
A week.
I just want to go back to the way things were. I want to be able to eat, and I want to be able to sleep.
She thought of something she had once read about Sigmund Freud and Emma Eckstein, a woman who had allowed her nose to be operated on. Freud had told her that her bleeding after the cauterisation was hysterical; another ear-nose-and-throat man had found half a metre of putrescent gauze still stuffed in the nasal cavity, a blockage in the storm drain.
It seemed to Joanna that the heaviness of her head was an extension of the way it had always felt, ropey as the hangman’s noose, more so since she’d had a baby. This damage – the damage that could be codified and agreed upon and claimed from medical aid – was only the natural conclusion of her worries and her fright.
“For now, because you don’t want the tube, you can try clear soups. But nothing that will retard the healing process of your cartilage. The internal damage isn’t too bad.” He cleared his own throat to make sure it was functioning properly.
Really? I was going to hop right down to Valleyland and load up on Bounty bars, Doc! And Corn Flakes! That’s what the hospital makes you eat after a tonsillectomy, right? That was the next course!
“You may have some difficulty sleeping,” Doctor Kevan was saying.
You think?
“You might have to invest in a reclining chair, or something similar.”
How about a La-Z-Boy? I know just where to find one.
“All in all, we’ve been lucky, haven’t we?”
One of us has, you fuck, she thought. Isn’t that right, Doctor Renfield? What do you think of this guy?
But as Joanna listened for the answer that didn’t come, she realised what was well and truly different.
She hadn’t heard Doctor Renfield since the attack. Her head was empty except for a single high note like the test pattern on the TV. There was no one else with her at all.