Page 83 of The Secret Life of Beatrice Alright

THIRTY-FOUR

I sleep better than I have in weeks. I’m woken every couple of hours for observations – blood pressure, medications, that sort of thing – but I barely open my eyes and I fall straight back to sleep after. When morning finally comes round and the clink and clatter of teacups on trolleys wakes me, I ache for just a few more minutes’ sleep.

‘Breakfast,’ Tonya, the catering lady, chirps as she pushes her rattly trolley onto the ward. The smell of warm toast and melted butter makes my mouth water.

‘Bea!’ she says. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Dizzy spell.’ I blush.

‘Working too hard,’ she puffs out. ‘This place will have us all run ragged.’

I pull myself to sit up and stuff the pillow behind my back. ‘I’m going home today,’ I say.

Tonya slides the portable table waiting at the end of my bed over my knees and sets a tray down on top. Tea, toast, cornflakes and apple juice await. I cannot wait to tuck in.

‘Ah, I bet you’ll be glad to get home. There’s nothing like climbing into your own bed after a hospital stay, eh?’

Home. Own bed.

Tonya’s words are a like a punch to the gut. ‘Um,’ I just about manage to say.

She shifts her attention to the woman in the bed opposite.

‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ she says, waking her.

‘Not hungry,’ the woman mumbles, turning over and pulling the blanket over her head.

‘Okay, no worries. I’ll just leave it here for you.’

She doesn’t reply, and I think she’s gone straight back to sleep. Tonya places a tray, identical to the one she gave me, on the table at the end of her bed.

‘So much food gets wasted around here.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t know why they have us serve breakfast so early. No one is hungry.’

I. Am. Starving. It takes every ounce of willpower I possess to wait until Tonya leaves before I tuck into the breakfast feast before me. And then every remaining ounce not to hop out of bed and savage everything on the tray across from me too.

The doctor and a team of medical students come round after breakfast. Their youthful faces and unsure dispositions remind me so much of Cora’s and my time in college. We were in different departments but we’d meet on our break and keep score of how many patients we’d diagnosed correctly and how many we’d got embarrassingly wrong.

‘Anaemia,’ one of the students says.

‘Iron looks fine to me,’ the doctor replies, looking at the file he has picked up from the end of my bed. I don’t remember anyone taking bloods. And I momentarily panic about how long I was out of it. How long I left Ellie unsupervised. My chest tightens, and I’m glad I’m not attached to any sort of monitor right now or the alarm might start going off.

‘Eating disorder,’ another student, who is painfully thin herself, suggests.

‘Hmm.’ The doctor gives this one greater consideration. ‘BMI low, but not dangerously.’

‘Drug use?’ comes another suggestion from a student in the back.

‘Excuse me? I snap. ‘I’m right here, you know. I can hear you.’

‘Again, bloods clear,’ the doctor says.

‘You tested me for drugs?’ I am furious. And embarrassed. And furious again. ‘I work here,’ I say, as if anyone who works in a hospital could never fall victim to drug use. ‘And I have a young child. I do NOT take drugs. Jesus.’

‘No. No one is saying you do,’ the doctor says, softly and finally looking at me. ‘This is just a teaching exercise.’

‘Okay, well, I think we’ve learned enough now. I would like to go home.’ I swallow hard and correct myself. ‘To leave. I would like to leave now. Thank you.’

The doctor turns towards his students and he must mouth something, because they all turn and leave together like a collective of doves, flocking towards the door.

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