Читать книгу Falling out of Heaven - John Lynch - Страница 6

I remember how the room they had put me in smelled of disinfectant and crisp sterile sheets. I was wearing a white gown. I knew that I was in trouble, that I was in a place where broken men like me came to be mended. I had lost track of time and I recall being grateful, but I also knew that there was a price to be paid, there always is when a man renounces the hand he has been given to play. They left me alone for long periods, calling in only to make me swallow a pill or to readjust my bedding. But I knew that they were never far away. I was highrisk and they were watching, they always were. When I see him now, that man lying in that white room, his mind tearing him apart, I have trouble believing that it was me, but it is something I must never forget. His forehead glistens, his mouth is dry and he craves the one thing that has almost destroyed him, a drink. He is shivering but it is not from the cold. He believes he is in danger, but he will not ask for help. He will not admit that he is beaten, no matter what they say or do to him.

How I came to be there and the prisoners I took along the way was not something that was available to me as I lay in that bed. My curse will be that as the days pass I will fall in and out of memory, good and bad, terrifying and benign. My name was the last thing to go and as I sit here now five years later, healthy and in good spirits, I feel pity for the animal I had become.

A doctor came to see me shortly after I was admitted, she was young and I remember her breath falling on my face as she bent down to me, it was cool like summer lemonade.

‘You seem a little better,’ she said to me. ‘A little less agitated.’

I saw that she was not alone, two men stood behind her, their arms folded.

‘Please…Try not to upset yourself…It serves no purpose…’

Then she wiped my brow and smiled at me, and for a moment I wanted to trust her, but my heart was too sore and too poisoned.

I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to tell her that I feared my mind and that when I was alone I lost sight of myself, and that I was at the mercy of the past with its dark assassins. That’s why they tell you to live a good life, because there is nothing worse than a bad memory, it will grow a mouth and sing cruel songs.