Читать книгу Through the Wall - Caroline Corcoran - Страница 6

I sit, listening to the drip, drip, drip from a shower that only runs for a short time to prevent me from trying to drown myself.

There is a loud, unidentified bang at the other end of the corridor. A sob that peaks at my door and then peters out like a siren as it moves further away towards its final destination.

I slam my fist down on the gnarly grey-green carpet in frustration. Pick at a thread. Trace the initial that is in my mind: A. A.

A psychiatric hospital is such a difficult place in which to achieve just a few necessary seconds of silence.

Nonetheless, I try again, pressing my ear against the plaster and shutting my eyes, in case dulling my other senses helps me to hear what’s being said on the other side of that wall.

It doesn’t.

My eyes flicker open again, angrily. I look around from my position on the floor and take in what has now become familiar to me after my admission four weeks ago. The mesh on the windows. The slippers – not shoes – that are never far from my toes. The bedside table up there and empty of night creams, of tweezers, of the normal life of a bedside table.

And then I go back to trying to focus on what they – my imminent visitor and her boyfriend – are saying. Because it’s too good an opportunity to miss, when I can hear them, right there.

‘Both of them again,’ announces the nurse as she flings the door open.

She looks at me sitting there on the floor, raises her eyebrows. I stand up slowly, move back to the bed. If she thinks my behaviour is odd, she doesn’t say it. I imagine she gets used to behaviour being odd. Gets used to not saying it.

‘Just sorting out the paperwork and then we’ll let her in,’ she says. ‘He said he’s staying in the waiting room again. Not sure why he bothers coming.’

But he does. Every time it’s the two of them, in a pair like a KitKat.

I press my ear against the wall again, so hard this time that it hurts. But since when did pain bother me?