Chapter 21
NATALIE
A loud bang wakes her and Natalie sits upright in bed.
Is the nurse coming back to feed her? She’s starving and she’s desperate for the loo.
There is a small, windowless en-suite, which she’s been using, even though just walking across the room to the toilet is enough to shatter her.
She doesn’t understand why she has no energy.
With every movement she feels like she’s walked ten miles across a desert and she’s never slept so much.
The strange nurse has been in a few times but mostly Natalie’s been too out of it to have a conversation with her, and any interaction has had a lucid-dream quality.
Once she was sure she saw the rabbit move on the rocking chair.
She’d only ever felt this way once before, when an old boyfriend had convinced her it would be a good idea to drop an acid tab at Glastonbury.
Natalie reaches underneath her to feel the mattress. To her shame it’s wet and so is the back of her hospital gown.
She thinks she’s been here two nights now.
But it’s hard to know exactly because for most of it she has been in a fug.
Why won’t the nurse talk to her and explain what she’s in for?
What happened at the park? So many questions swarm in her mind, and fear is creeping in as the blackness again wipes everything away, like an eraser to a pencil sketch.
In the early hours of the morning she was awake long enough to lug herself from the bed to the window.
Not that she could see much, just the glimpse of a garden and a house opposite.
And then the nurse had come in. The nurse who doesn’t speak.
She’s always masked but there is something familiar about her eyes, which peer at her with such hostility.
She’s not seen any other nurses or staff since she arrived, and it adds to her impending panic.
‘Eat up,’ she always says, after unveiling another dish. Despite everything, Natalie finds she’s unusually hungry so she does as she’s told and then, straight afterwards, always feels ridiculously tired and heavy-limbed, but the fear has abated and the hours drift in a wash of darkness.
She has no idea what time it is now, but that bang: it sounds as if someone is right outside her door. If only she could drag herself out of bed. If only she didn’t feel so tired.
The trolley by her bed is empty. The nurse hasn’t come to collect it. Usually after she’s woken from one of her heavy sleeps everything has been cleared away.
Natalie concentrates on trying to listen for sounds beyond her room.
There is the creak of footsteps and a shadow moves along the narrow crack at the bottom of the door.
With all the energy she can muster, Natalie swings her legs out of bed and crawls across to the door, not helped by the hospital gown she’s been dressed in.
She tries the handle. It’s locked. Why is she locked in?
She’s all alone. The only patient.
And then, with a sickening moment of clarity she acknowledges that she’s not a patient at all – but a prisoner.