APRIL 20 Someone has left a radio here. It’s small and plastic, just like the one Lewis carries, only yellow instead of orange. Maybe Andrew left it for me. He hasn’t said anything to me, or checked in here again, but it could be his way of showing some kindness. Or it could be a trap. Someone checking, to see how much I understand. I found a station and then kept the sound right down low, so anyone listening outside wouldn’t know. I had to press it hard against my ear to make out what was being said. I must have looked like a real crazy then, all scrunched up in this chair, straining to catch the words, rocking backwards and forwards to stay warm.
The radio is still full of earthquake talk. It sounds like a total mess. At first just hearing the guy say ‘Wellington’ was almost too much. Thoughts of all the people back there, of what might have happened, of how badly I need to see them, ripped at my insides. But there’s the thing I need to do first, the thing keeping me here.
They’re saying the clean-up was a disaster in itself and people are starting to look for someone to blame. They’re saying people should have been better prepared but that’s not right. There’re some things you can’t be properly ready for, because being ready costs too much. Like dying.
The police are being criticised because it took so long for them to establish order but they had some guy on who said nobody had expected the looting. Apparently some people just went mad, grabbing whatever they could, and when others tried to stop them it turned into a riot. And all the time people were still trapped beneath the collapsed buildings.
They talked about the gas explosions too, which I already knew about because we saw them from up on the ridge, huge silent flashes of mayhem. Then they had some professor trying to explain why so many people went wild. She said a lot of things but mostly she just told us that sometimes people can go a bit crazy. I already knew that too.
Now they say things are slowly returning to normal, or as close to normal as you can get in a city where so many have died that they have to ship in coffins from up north. The sort of normal that sees a lot of low-life crawling back beneath their rocks, trying to pretend the things they did never happened at all, in that time when craziness got out into the open. Doctors going back to being doctors, carefully cutting out the bits of the past that might infect them, stitching over the memories and hoping they might heal. Not my Doctor though. Not this wound. I can see him, better than he realises, and I am going to make him pay.
Then I turned off the radio and tried to let my hatred rise. It’s the only way of keeping my mind off home, off Mum, the last time I saw her, when she dropped me off on her way to work, and told me to be careful. Off Duncan, who has to be okay, because little brothers always are. Off so many people, each one a face that can weaken my resolve. I shouldn’t even be writing this. I shouldn’t let these thoughts in.
I have to think of useful things, I have to make plans. It isn’t easy. I am still weak. A morning walking the wards exhausts me and writing this journal means pushing through the pain that thickens behind my eyes. Each morning I wake to see the world a little more clearly but, like a blind person learning to see, most of it only frightens me. And the things I don’t see frighten me even more, people acting against me, staying just out of sight.
I am sure now that Margaret is dangerous. Today she came to my bed pushing her nurse’s trolley, loaded up with all the usual things. She rummaged about in it for a while, for effect, then produced an unfriendly-looking syringe.
‘Just need to take some blood,’ she told me, wrapping a band around my arm and pulling it tight. ‘To check how the medication levels are settling.’ She may as well have said ‘I’m on to you, you know.’ She stared at me but I gave her nothing, and she gave me nothing back.
I followed her after she left, hanging in the background while she completed her rounds, watching her for clues. She is silent with some patients and chatty with others, the ones she thinks can understand. And she always chats to me. After the last room had been visited she wheeled her trolley back towards the nurses’ station. I could hear the test tube, still warm with my blood, clanking against the side of a metal dish the whole way down the corridor. Then it stopped, just outside a door I always thought was a storeroom although it has no sign. I can’t be certain, because her stopping there surprised me and I had to pull back into a doorway, but I think I saw her take my test tube and pocket it. She went in through the door and was back out almost immediately. Then she moved off.
I waited a good five minutes before I checked the room. It was home to three large wheelie bins, one marked ‘biological refuse’, the other two ‘general’. Each had a small deposit slot at the top and was padlocked shut, so all I have are my suspicions. Suspicions that Margaret threw out my sample. So why would she do that? Reason is slow to reveal itself here. Maybe the sample hadn’t been ordered at all. Maybe she was just testing me, looking for a reaction. There must be other possibilities, possibilities I can’t quite see, whose blurred, changing outlines keep me awake through the night.