case he wakes up, disoriented, confused? She would have been overjoyed if this was her bedroom, full stop, much less in a hospital.
Hanna and Linus were standing by the bed, the doctors flanking them like bodyguards so that all she could see was the line of a leg beneath a sheet, a glimpse of an almost-shaved head, dark stubble grazing the shockingly white scalp. She saw the head move as the doctor in charge touched his arm – responsive, alert, functions which had seemingly been impossible even the day before yesterday.
‘I’ve brought a special visitor for you,’ she heard Hanna say, also in an altered voice. ‘Do you remember I said I would bring someone very special?’
On cue, Linus took a micro-step forward. His head was dipped and even from behind, Bell could see he was feeling shy and reluctant.
A silence billowed through the room, punctuated only by the rhythmic beat of machines monitoring his blood pressure, oxygen saturation levels . . . One of them started flashing, and the nearest doctor turned and began pressing buttons.
In the gap that opened up, Bell saw his profile. He was staring back at his son with a blank look, his skin pallid, the bony nub of his shoulders smooth beneath his hospital gown. She felt herself recoil. He was awake and he was alive, but he was not living. Not yet. His was a body that hadn’t seen daylight in seven years, skin that hadn’t felt sunshine or a cold breeze in almost a decade. For all those years, he had hovered in the realm of the unconscious, with only a hair’s breadth between the sleeping and the dead.
By contrast, Linus was overstuffed with life force – radiant and rosy, glossy and glowing from his run in the park. His curls shone like golden leaves, and there was something about the outward curve of his plump cheeks that seemed a rebuke to the sunken dip of his father’s. There was no mirror in the room, but his father’s hand must have travelled upon his face; he surely knew the hard shapes he made in that bed.
‘Hello, I’m Linus. I’m nearly ten.’ His arm rose like a lever, Hanna standing crooked and immobile beside him, like a twig caught in a frozen lake. The moment stretched out – elastic, expansive – as the small arm stayed pointing towards him until slowly, he lowered it again.
Linus looked up at his mother, a dawning look of panic on his face. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ he whispered. Bell felt a pinch of concern.
‘It’s okay, it’s fine,’ Hanna whispered, placing a hand on his head.
Another doctor, an Asian woman standing closest to them, crouched down and smiled at him encouragingly. ‘Don’t take it to heart, Linus, your father is still very weak –’
Silence cracked like a clap of thunder, a brilliant white light exploding in the room as the mistake was realized, and for several moments, the room was held in a suspended state. No one breathed, stirred, spoke. But then a sound started up – a sound made from fright, the moment before a scream – and the energy in the room shifted like a hibernating bear turning over in its cave, a great immobile mass suddenly moved and unsettled from position.
The sound yawned into the room, a moan that rapidly became a siren wail – and through the gaps, as the doctors suddenly converged, Bell saw the emaciated, atrophied body on the bed beginning to thrash with surprising force.
Linus gave a scream of fright and began to cry, but Hanna was rooted still, unable to tear her gaze from the unravelling scene on the bed.
‘Get them out!’ Dr Sorensen barked as the doctors all grabbed a limb and tried to restrain their patient. There were six of them, and still it was a challenge.
Hanna, somehow, bundled Linus to her and they staggered back two paces from the bed, watching on in horror as bed straps were buckled onto his wrists and ankles, pinning him in place. But it wasn’t enough. His body still writhed, his head banging against the pillow, screams and obscenities crashing around the room with frightening violence. The chaos bloomed into deeper colours, spreading wide its petals so that everything lay exposed and vulnerable, screams echoing in the stark space and raining down on them all, wails and moans and shouts blending into an indistinct maw.
Bell ran over to the mother and son, both of them frozen, Hanna’s body rigid in