on my spine? Thank you for the medicine. Thank you for the clean sheets. Thank you for drawing the curtains back so light comes through the gauzy lining.’
The sister talked to Dot about when they were children and picking snails out of the letterbox and racing them along the painted concrete fence. She laid a hand on the blanket above Dot’s scaly shins, purple yellow with bruises and veins and stuck with white medical tape where she barked them on the tea tray and the blood didn’t clot well, and she patted and squeezed Dorothy’s feet. Her sweater was the colour called jade and her hair bobbed above it soft and blonde. She removed one of Dot’s feet from beneath the blankets and from the ticklish pressure and clicking sounds she must have been cutting the toenails. She was slow with the clippers and Dot squeezed her fingers together in sympathy but nothing moved.
‘What are you doing community service for? If I may ask?’
The boy in the blue jacket stopped wiping the windowsill and looked towards Dot but he didn’t answer. In the hospital with her baby the orderlies wore blue jackets. Amy lay flat on her back on a bed with sides, her face swollen from one of the things they were putting into her, the morphine or the ventilator. Lines into her legs, her neck. Her eyes swollen shut while the machine breathed for her. Windows at one end of the room, the other end, past more beds, each the centre of its own pod of drips and monitors and LED displays and sensors attached to little finger pads with band-aids, reading heart rates, oxygen percentages, sending the information in a flashing line, a series of rising and falling numbers, to a screen. Thank you. In the family room a woman prayed in the direction of Mecca. It was Ramadan and she was going the day without food. Dorothy pumped milk into a bottle and stored it in the fridge for the nurse to attach to the drip that would feed it into Amy’s stomach. Thank you. A woman leaned her elbows on the table in front of her and held her face with fingers on her eyebrows and thumbs on her cheeks and sighed in and out before she cried silently, her stomach shuddering. Crying here was bad news. Two girls had been struck by lightning. Dorothy’s friend visited and looked at the baby and walked straight back out into the corridor. A minute later she returned, her eyes bloodshot, and she sat beside Dot until it was time to express milk again. Thank you. In the family room some new people played cards, the blue rectangles glowing like lapis lazuli on the green table. A doctor changed one of the artery lines and the baby’s leg went whitish grey, and a vascular surgeon with a moustache explained that Amy’s body was too small for the bypass operation that was required, that the ratio was beyond the capability of the human hand. There was a meeting in the consultant’s office and papers appeared and Dot and Andrew were asked to sign them and they did, and a portable X-ray machine was wheeled in and an image was captured and everyone waited for someone to say something, and they didn’t know who it was that they were waiting for. It was a game where nobody wanted to be the one to say. Thumbs to the forehead, bags not. And then while everyone was standing around the bed, looking, the leg changed colour again, becoming rosy, so slowly that it might just have been something wished for. The sweating surgeon disappeared. The promises they signed to were not invoked. Amy was miraculously small and growing, she was inside Dot only days ago, and she cured herself. Thank you. Days later they returned home and the envelopes in the letterbox were lacy where snails had eaten them.
It was dark and her sister wasn’t there. In the light that crept from under the door the outline of the corkboard appeared to float just in front of the wall. The pillowslip felt fresh and soft beneath Dot’s head and the mohair blanket the sister brought her was warm and light. The spiky irises had gone; daphne smelled thickly, spriggily sweet. There was a vague pressure on her hand and when Dot try to raise her arm it increased, and panic pierced her – ‘Don’t strap me down,’ but when she turned her