For Real

“How did you get in here?”

She scowled and looked quite annoyed.

“No really, you shouldn’t be in here, you know that right?”

She blasted out a jet of air and put her hands on her hips in something approximating consternation.

I looked around me as though this was going to present me with an out, or rather an idea of how she managed to get in here.

“Look, you’re not staff, so who are you?” I asked her.

“As if you don’t know!” she poked her tongue out at me and then she did something extremely disconcerting, so disconcerting in fact that my blood ran cold and I staggered sideways with no warning whatsoever.

I’d heard that blood running cold description before, but never fully considered it. I always thought that blood running cold would create a chill and illicit a shiver. Job done, move on, nothing to see here. In reality it was a lot, lot worse than that. Blood is not supposed to be cold and the shock to the system is total. I was all over the place.

I had to take a moment.

“You!” I gasped eventually.

“None other!” she said triumphantly.

“But you’re the reason I’m in here!” I hissed.

“No, I think you are the reason you are in here, not me,” she said in a haughty voice.

“OK, but that’s splitting hairs isn’t it?” I asked her.

“No, what it is, is wasting time!” she spat these words as though I’d been dragging things out for an age and she’d just about had enough.

I was incredulous and at a loss as to what to say.

“Look,” she said, “you’ve dragged things out long enough and I’ve just about had enough, OK?” 

“I think I need to sit down,” I told her, and without waiting for an answer I staggered towards my bed and dropped my bum upon it. It didn’t help all that much, but it did reduce the impact of any collapse I may experience in the next few minutes. I thought I was about due a collapse, and now I was on my bed, a collapse would be thoroughly welcome.

“Are you really?” I said this as I repeated the disconcerting actions she had so undone me with.

Using my index finger and the adjacent middle finger split into a V, I pointed first at my eyes and then at her. You know, the universal signing for I’m watching you or I’m keeping an eye on you.

She grinned, “of course I am. I’ve been following you for an age!”

“By an age,” I said, “the last six months?”

“Much longer than that!” she guffawed.

“I really began to notice you in the last six months though,” I told her.

“Yeah,” she huffed and puffed for a moment before continuing, “but why didn’t you do anything about it?!”

“What could I do!” I protested far too loudly, lowering my voice I continued, “I had this inexplicable and quite frankly, creepy feeling of being watched and it intensified to such a fever pitch that I thought I was losing my mind, that I was completely paranoid, and then I found myself here!” 

“At last!” she proclaimed.

“You what?” I said to her, “are you saying this is what you wanted? Me here?”

“This or something like it,” she told me.

“Why?!” I whined. 

“Because we’ve not quite perfected this interface, so you need to take a cocktail of drugs in order for me to manifest,” she explained.

“Oh,” I said in a sarcastic manner, “now it all makes perfect sense. Thanks for clearing this all up. It turns out that I am not paranoid after all.”

“Yup,” she agreed, “you are not paranoid. Not one bit. You of all people. You’re the last person I could imagine being paranoid.”

“No,” I said sternly, “not me. No. It turns out that its worse than that. I am quite, quite mad!”

“No you’re not!” she chuckled.

“We’ll see about that,” I said this as I got to my feet and without further ado, I poked her. With my finger. In the arm.

“Ow!” she said, “can you at least warn me if you’re going to do something like that?!”

“Did you feel that?” I asked her.

“Of course I felt it!” she told me, “you poked me!”

I sat back down. Then I went to rub some form of sanity into my face with the palms of my hands, only I paused as I saw my finger. The finger I had poked this strange apparition of a woman with.

I held my finger up to her, “what’s this on my finger?”

“Oh dear,” she said.

“Something’s wrong isn’t it?” I said to her.

I can tell when things are wrong. I have an affinity for that sort of thing, especially when someone says oh dear. Those two words, spoken in a particular way, well that usually gives the game away.

She nodded solemnly, “when you poked me, what did it feel like?”

I thought for a moment. It hadn’t felt like nothing, and yet it didn’t feel like something. It certainly didn’t feel like someone.

“It was like…” I almost had the words, but then I didn’t.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Give me a moment,” I said.

“That’s just the thing,” she said sadly, “I don’t think we have a moment.”

“What?!” I cried, “but you only just got here! Look! I have it! It was like poking jelly, only the jelly was barely there. Like the memory of poking jelly, or the echo of the sensation.”

She faded.

“What’s happening?” I said, panic lacing my voice.

“Is that better?” she asked me.

“No!” I said to her, “it’s worse!”

“This?” she asked.

“No, now you look like a TV picture from way back when TVs had cathode rays,” I told her. 

“Ooh! You’re quite the one aren’t you?” she grinned and as she grinned, she came back into focus.

“That’s better,” I told her.

“OK,” she said, “now try poking me.”

So I did.

“Ow!”

We said this in tandem. She was not rubbing her arm and I was nursing the finger I’d just bent backwards.

“You were closer than I expected,” I told her, “and firmer.”

“I work out,” she said reproachfully.

I raised my uninjured index finger to her and tentatively and carefully moved it towards her arm.

“Amazing,” I said as I watched the air distort a centimetre from her arm and a depression appear on the surface of her bicep, “is it a force field?”

“Not quite,” she said as she watched my finger and the reaction on her arm, “we call it a disparity,” she sighed, “I was supposed to be there with you, but something has gone wrong and you’re going to have to do this on your own.”

“Do what?” I asked her.

And so she told me.

Then she left.

*

“So, can I leave now, please?” I say to the woman in the white coat.

She’s holding a tablet. I wonder when they switched clipboards for tablets. I think I would have liked a clipboard better, but I don’t tell her this. I also don’t tell her that she is the spit of my saviour. I know that divulging such information would be unwise and may even put her in danger.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” she tells me, “not until we’ve, erm… run a few more tests and you have responded to the treatments.”

“Good,” I say to her.

“Good?” she echoes my word questioningly.

“I knew you were going to say that, now I need to tell you a couple of things,” I smile and beckon her closer.

Curious, breaking protocol, and risking her personal safety, she leans in so she can hear me whisper those couple of things.

She is smiling and crying as she walks me out of the secure wing of the hospital and out into the car park. 

For my part, I smile. 

My crying will come later.

I’m just glad that I got to meet her and tell her how very proud I am of her.

She watches as I walk across the hospital car park and I fade away, one last memory, carried away on the summer breeze.