Phyllis woke early every day. The night nurses always came to the laundry cupboard outside her room, pulling out the sheets, clattering the stiff doors and gossiping in their loud voices. Bored and wanting their shift to end so they could go home, they didn’t give a thought to who might hear their raucous laughter. They always reminded Phyllis of the magpies outside her window, loud and rude. The cupboard door was banged shut at last and the voices disappeared down the corridor. Her door was deliberately left ajar and the wedge of light from the corridor shone dingy yellow through the gap. The venetian blinds shut out the daylight until other hands came to pull on the cord. Until then, Phyllis had to content herself with this half of her world. She thought of it as Inside now. Never as home any more. Inside was normally boring and predictable.
Her room lay swathed in darkness, only the corridor light picking out familiar shapes. The high bed dominated the room with its special mattress that moved in constant undulations to prevent bedsores. A hissing sigh from the pump mechanism below the bed repeated itself over and over, a sleepy rhythmic sound that Phyllis didn’t notice any more. On her left was a chrome stand holding a plastic bottle that dripped fluids into her unresisting body.
The tubes disappeared below the white sheets. Other tubes led outwards and away, discreetly hidden by the folds of bedding. To the right of the bed a grey plastic chair gathered dust. It was for any visitors who might come at the appointed times. Phyllis no longer expected visitors from the outside world. Only the nursing staff attended her needs with monotonous regularity.
The window was on Phyllis’s right. In the daytime she could see her lawns and flowerbeds, some shrubbery and the sky. Birds came pecking around the borders, friendly chaffinches or the robber magpies. Sometimes a robin trilled its distinctive note, and Phyllis tried to remember what cold, frosty days were like. The birds were highly satisfactory, but she liked the sky best of all. For hours she watched the cloud shapes slither and change; her imagination creating Gods and chariots, characters from mythology, maenads with streaming hair. She rarely saw the stars except in winter when Venus rose in late afternoon on a velvety blue sky. Then hands pulled the blind cord, shutting off her Outside with a sharp metallic snap. For now the sky was dark and shuttered from her sight.
In a corner of the room a small wardrobe held Phyllis’s few clothes. They were all cotton for she never left the heat of this room any more. In earlier days when she could still move her arms and turn her head the nurses would heave her into a wheelchair and push her down the corridor to what they now called the day room. There she had been parked in her old lounge with its egg and dart plaster coving around the ceiling. The other residents had upset her with their staring or feeble attempts at one-sided conversation and she’d always preferred the relative peace and quiet of her own room.
Nowadays there were directives about lifting patients. It took two nurses to sit her upright. And they were always short of staff. So Phyllis was left with the television for company. She rarely permitted the staff to switch it on these days. They always asked first, thank God, and her tiny shake of the head allowed her room to stay silent. Once, long ago, she had watched the quiz shows, but nobody came to switch the thing off and she had tired of the interminable soaps that followed, invading her space. The programmes had been punctuated by advertisements reminding Phyllis of so many things she would never need again.
The yellow light flooded across the linoleum floor as the nurse pushed open the door. It wasn’t Kirsty, her designated nurse, but one of the others whom she rarely saw.
‘Morning, Phyllis. Time for your pills.’ The nurse barely made eye contact with Phyllis, turning her attention instead to the glass of yellow goo and the plastic phial of assorted tablets. Phyllis watched her face as the woman concentrated on tumbling all the pills onto a spoonful of the thickened liquid. The nurse’s eyes never left the outstretched spoon on its journey to Phyllis’s open mouth. She felt the metal spoon then the saliva began to ooze from beneath her tongue. One swallow and it was over.
‘Right, then.’ The nurse flicked the residue from Phyllis’s lips, leaving a smear behind that would feel sticky and uncomfortable until someone else came to wash her face. It was strange, she reflected, that she could still swallow a mouthful of medication like that in one gulp when a few drops of water would have set her choking. This disease had taken its toll on her throat muscles as well as so much of the rest. Speech was impossible now, and she rarely tried to communicate beyond a shake or nod of the head.
With a clack, the blinds were opened and weak daylight fell onto the objects in the room. Now the daily routine began. The first nurse was joined by a small, stout auxiliary with dark hair.
‘Morning, Phyllis,’ she swept a practised eye over the bedclothes, resting for a moment on the patient’s face. Phyllis was heaved into a sitting position to participate in the ritual of blood pressure, temperature and removal of her bodily wastes. She watched, detached, as if it was happening to someone else. She endured the harsh wet flannel on her face and body while the two women carried on an earlier conversation as if she wasn’t there.
‘Did you see her being carried away?’
‘Sh!’ the nurse frowned at her, nodding her head towards Phyllis, belatedly acknowledging her presence.
‘Oh. Right. Och, she’ll never know. Will you, darling?’ she smiled a pasted-on smile in Phyllis’s direction.
Phyllis closed her eyes as the hook pulled up the sling and raised her off the bed. Below her the two women pulled at the sheets, dashing the soiled linen onto the floor then smoothing on the fresh bedding with an expertise born of much practise. At last she was lowered back onto the cool sheet and the perpetually moving mattress. The ritual was completed by the auxiliary spraying the air with the scent of roses.
For a while this would serve to mask the unpleasant smell of human urine. Left alone, Phyllis watched the spray, like mist catching the light as it fell. Her day could now begin. The sky with its ever-shifting shapes was there to see; and imagination, if not memory, would people her hours.
Now she could banish the memory of that nightmare in the dark. She closed her eyes but heard again the cry that had left her shivering. Had she really seen that shadow of malice falling against the cupboards outside her room? And those hands reaching to pluck a flower from her vase? No one would ever know what she had seen.