In the next bed there was a young girl who seemed to sleep most of the time. Thin and yellow and still, she lay surrounded by grey equipment and colourless tubes, all of which was circled by a thick plastic curtain. To Sam, the girl’s skin seemed even waxier behind this shiny surface, and on the rare occasions she sat up to watch television or greet her family when they came to visit, he could see the slow way that she moved—her bony arms stiff and heavy. She was always cold, she said, and Sam wondered if it was because she was bald. He could see the bare skin beneath the knitted beanie she wore, and whenever she was awake he wanted to tell her that he knew how it felt, that he remembered the way it had been after each of his treatments, back before the operation: the strange tickling feeling of air across his scalp, the bruises, the vomiting, the dizziness. Sam wanted to tell her all this as they lay in the quiet, but he couldn’t. And it didn’t seem important enough to bother writing down.
Twice, when their dinner trays were being gathered before lights out, one of the kitchen ladies offered Sam the girl’s untouched jelly. He didn’t eat it though. Jelly felt good, cool and soft, as it slid down his throat, but it always seemed like the girl was watching. And anyway, after the bowl had been behind her curtain it reeked of antiseptic.
It was the quiet that made the hospital worse. Or rather, the beeps and hisses that filled the quiet. Sam could never sleep. The rough cotton of his pillowcase. The heat on his legs and the chill on his cheeks. The sizzle of fluorescent light from down at the nurses’ station. The way the orderlies plodded along at such a hulking pace. The ward seemed hollow and ominous, the white walls pressing in on him, stark and cold; and whenever he closed his eyes he felt that he too was somehow going stale, stiffened and empty and sterile.
On the fourth night he was woken by the hiss of his curtain being pulled closed, but as he snapped awake there was no one by his bed. Instead, as he rolled over, he could see past his fabric curtain and through the girl’s thick plastic one to where three figures surrounded her body. Two orderlies and a doctor were checking her monitors and talking in hushed tones. Sam watched them raise her slender arm, hold her wrist a moment, then set it back down. After a few minutes of the doctor thumbing through her chart, flashing a small light in her eyes, the orderlies kicked the brakes loose on her bed and wheeled her out from behind the plastic, over towards the hall. As they passed his bed, Sam propped himself up on his elbows. He could just make out the girl’s face, still moving, her head rolling back and forth, one hand rising and falling.
One of the orderlies noticed Sam while he was pushing aside some detached cords with his foot.
‘Shhh…It’s okay,’ he whispered, sliding the girl’s thick curtain back against the wall. ‘She’s just getting her own room. That’s all. Go back to sleep, little guy.’
But Sam watched the bed glide around the corner and out of sight, still trying to listen for the sound of the girl’s breathing, wet and small.
He lay back down, and for the rest of the night stared into the dark, chewing on the corner of his pillowcase. For the first time, it seemed, he could hear a high-pitched ringing in his ears—faint, but everywhere. A ringing like he’d never heard before. Had it always been there? Had he simply never noticed? Had he never been quiet enough to make it out?
He closed his eyes. Nestled his face further under the covers.
It was still there—that ringing. It was only broken by the sound of his stiff sheets rustling as he moved. Or the occasional distant thud of a door being pushed through down the corridor. The buzz of a small fluorescent light near the nurses’ bay.
Everything else was that ringing. All around him. Inside him. Through him. Him and this ring. The ring he’d never heard before, but suddenly felt he’d be hearing forever. Ringing and ringing and ringing. He chewed harder. The boy in the bed opposite stretched and gave a small moan in his sleep, rolling his face further into his pillow.
The ring in Sam’s head settled deeper. Louder. Everywhere. He wanted to shout. To scream. To drown it out. He breathed instead—hearing that whistle, that suck of air, as something at least. Anything to fill the void.
The next morning two more orderlies came to push the remaining equipment out into another ward, and the cleaners arrived, chatting loudly, to mop the floor.