Last Train from Liguria (2010) by Christine Dwyer Hickey Page A

inside
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    Bunty’s voice comes into the ward. ‘Oh!’ she goes, when she sees me (as if Thelma hasn’t told her I’m here). ‘Oh, long time no see, indeed.’ She breezes by and it could be a snarl or a smile on her lips but either way I sense disapproval. When she comes back there’s a stack of files in her arms. ‘So’, she says, looking down at the suitcase beside me on the floor, ‘are you moving in - or what?’
    ‘I was in London,’ I say. ‘I came straight from the airport.’
    ‘London!’ she goes, as if I’d said the moon. ‘Imagine that now - business or pleasure?’
    ‘Neither,’ I say and for some reason find myself standing up.
    She barrels off up the ward and I feel myself boil up with rage. I long to shout after her, to say something like, ‘Here, you - I have my own problems, you know, I have my own life. And what about all the other weeks, days, hours, when I was the only visitor in this kip? I didn’t hear you asking too many questions then!’
    I imagine her stopping in her tracks, turning to look at me, the drop of her fat little mouth, a slow blush pushing north from her chest up her neck. Then just as she’s getting ready to move off again, I hear myself continuing: ‘And another thing - I wasn’t the one who left the door open. I wasn’t the one who let her escape. I’ll be speaking to the registrar shortly by the way, and can’t wait to hear what he has to say about that!’
    In my daydream Bunty lowers her eyelids, her already red enough face darkening to a guilty purple. In reality she couldn’t give a fuck, while I stand like a fool watching her move from bed to bed, fussing and fixing, checking on charts, yapping at patients - there she goes. Even those who are sleeping or in other ways beyond listening will be addressed: briskly, loudly, a touch of tolerance bordering, it has to be said, on genuine kindness. As she always does at the start of her shift and again when it comes to an end, the way a primary school teacher might speak to her pupils at the start and finish of the day.
    It was never my idea to put her here in the first place. I sit back down and remind myself of this now, as I used to do every time I came up here for the first year or so. This was not my idea. It was that other place wanted rid of her. The so-called ‘perfect place’. A few weeks, they had assured me, a few tests, a rest. That’s how they got around me.
    The truth was they just couldn’t put up with her. Couldn’t have her sullying the atmosphere of their veranda with her carry-on and dry-crying. Couldn’t have her pacing the halls and landings, leaving the echo of that one repeated phrase in her wake, ‘I can’t, I can’t. I’m not able. I’m not able.’ On and on, she just wouldn’t stop saying it. Until eventually they had stopped asking, ‘Not able to what, darling? What are you not able to do?’ But most of all they couldn’t have her disillusioning the well-heeled relatives that their money had been wisely spent. She had simply become bad for business, I suppose.
    Behind me there’s the squeak of shoes and I turn to see Bunty. ‘You have an appointment to see the registrar, I believe?’ She looks amused. No, more than that, she looks as if she has to restrain herself from bursting out laughing in my face. The brazen cheek of me really, a mere mortal, to question the hospital authorities. Bunty obviously finds this a scream.
    ‘That’s right,’ I say.
    ‘It’ll be Mr Brook who’ll see you. Do you know Mr Brook?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Oh, a lovely man! I can’t begin to tell you. Actually he used to treat your grandmother, when she came here first. You know where to go then?’
    I stand up and nod and go. Thelma is waiting to let me out. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘you missed it! All the excitement your nanny caused. The police and all. You want have seen the state of her when they brung her back in. Ah you missed it, you did.’
    I can never stand at the mouth of this