Because We Could

by katybettany

 

My Round 2 Entry into Flash Fiction 2019! I placed second in my group with this one.

Genre: Drama

Location: Parking garage

Object: Tennis racket

 

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The hole in my tights scraped the skin from my inner thigh like a vascular debridement with every step I took towards the hospital car park. It must have been there for hours, but it was only in the silence of the night — the absence of the burning wall of noise — that I noticed it. The pain elicited more emotion from me than I would normally have expected. I felt like a wounded animal; but I resisted the temptation to lift my dress and stroke the wound to comfort myself. 

As I approached the multi-storey, I heard a distant ‘thwack-thwack’ sound. I couldn’t work out where it was coming from, but I assumed that one of the neighbouring houses had a tennis court, and imagined a middle aged, middle class couple drunkenly having a tennis match after one too many glasses of Chianti. But then a piece of apple hit me across the face, and I looked up. There was a figure on the roof of the car park, launching apples from it with a tennis racket. He was using such force that the fruits exploded on contact with the strings, spraying out little apple chunks into the wintery air.  

I took the lift to the roof. Across the concrete stood a man in a pale green hospital gown tied at the back. One of his sleeves was heavily blood-stained. On his other wrist was a red allergy band. I approached him slowly as he continued to serve apples over the edge of the building. “Are you ok?” I called out ahead of me. 

“Bugger off,” came the reply. 

I grabbed the railings five metres or so down from where he was standing. As his face came into view, I recognised him as one of the patients I had admitted several nights before. His face looked hollowed out in the orange fluorescent lights. 

“Do you know where you are?” I asked him, assuming he was delirious. 

He started to laugh — but it was half consumed by his clenched teeth. “Why do you doctors have to medicalise bloody everything? I know you think I must have lost my mind but you’re wrong.” I told him I didn’t think he was out of his mind, and gave him my usual patter about people in hospital often getting muddled, especially at night. 

He was defiant. “I’m doing this because I can. I have breath in my lungs to power the muscles in my arms, and my mind is working to tell my arm what to do. I’m not a prisoner. I can do what I want.”

“I agree you are not my prisoner.” I tried to get him on side. “But it’s not safe to be up here on your own, and I’m sure your nurse is worried about you. And you appear to be bleeding from your cannula site.” I asked him to come back to the hospital with me, but he pretended not to hear me. 

After a while, he tired. Grabbing the railings, he pulled himself up over them and sat on the other side, his legs dangling out over the edge. The panic was evident in my voice when I pleaded with him to come back over to safety. I threatened him with calling security. He told me that if I did that, he would jump. Those words made everything silent and still, all I could feel was the burning pain in my thigh. 

“Do you remember me?” He was looking at me intently. 

It had been late on a Monday night — the worst time to come to hospital. I don’t know why — perhaps people put off coming over the weekend and present more sick and in larger numbers on a Monday. He was the last patient of my shift. He had a progressive neurological disease — one that would eventually rob him of his capability to do anything for himself; that would eventually rob him of his life. I had seen the chest infection on his radiograph — the white fluffy cloud in his right lung. But I had not seen this coming at all. I suppose I hadn’t really seen him. 

Glancing back at my car, I wondered whether I shouldn’t try to grab him and pull him back over. I could sit on him until security arrived. It wouldn’t look good. It wouldn’t look good if I did nothing at all either. I pictured myself in Coroner’s Court recounting this moment. Or in front of the GMC. I felt safe inside the minutes where neither of us moved and neither of us spoke. 

“What is your plan here?” I asked as gently as possible. 

“I know what your plan is. Get me back into my bed so I can have the predictable death you all expect me to have; and you’ll get back in your car and to your life and this will all be a funny anecdote you can tell at parties.”

I smiled wryly. Half right. “I don’t go to many parties.” He laughed, mouth open this time. The darkness swallowed the sound. “You should. You can!” 

He gestured towards the tennis racket. I picked it up, and he held out an apple to me. I pictured myself grabbing his hand instead of the apple — feeling his pulse slink away under the tendons. Would I be strong enough to haul him over the railing? What if he threw himself off as I grabbed him — would the momentum pull me over too? 

I took the apple. Our fingers briefly touched, like communication across the void. I threw the apple in the air, and ‘thwacked’ it as hard as I could. A spray of juice jettisoned out into the cold night, and I watched as the mulch fell in the streetlight like snow. My laughter followed it. “You were right.” 

I looked across at him. He looked back at me sadly. We both breathed in the night air, filling our lungs. Because we could.