I tried to remember if anyone else had visited me but it was all just a blur. I looked back at the clock. I waited every day for the line, the perfect straight vertical line that denoted six o’clock, expecting something to happen. Expecting relief, expecting silence, expecting a feeling of peace. But it never came, and by five past six every day the process of waiting had begun all over again.
The clock said twenty past eleven. I felt like going to sleep properly, but soon it would be lunchtime, and in any case every time I tried to sleep during the day someone came by and woke me up. There were rules on this ward, and one of them was that sleeping happened at night. Despite the noises, the shouts and the cries.
‘He told me they really need you back, Annabel.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ I said.
‘There are so many questions they need to ask you. What happened to your phone? Who gave you the other phone?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must have met someone, Annabel. You must have met a person who gave you a mobile and took yours away. Can you remember?’
I tried to concentrate because maybe he would stop asking if I gave him the right answer, but there was nothing there – just a comfortable blackness, a warmth, a space in which everything had been fine until I was ripped out of it and brought to this white, loud, cold place.
‘I can’t remember anything.’
‘Did you go out? Did you meet someone while you were out?’
The nurse came then and interrupted him. He sat quietly and smiled at her while she checked on me. ‘You’re talking to us today, Annabel? That’s really good to hear. Would you like to go outside for a walk?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Maybe your friend could take you.’
Sam said, quickly, ‘Yes – I could take you out for a bit. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘It’s a lovely day. It would do you good to get some fresh air.’
The nurse put me into a wheelchair even though I could have walked. Maybe she knew that if I’d not been in the chair I would have kept on walking right out of the doors and away.
Sam pushed me out of the fire door and into one of the quadrangles. It was surrounded by buildings; there was no way out even if I could have managed to stand up and run. He sat me in the sunshine and I tipped my head back and felt the warmth of it on my face. A breeze lifted my hair, which was greasy and itchy. The rest of me was clean, though – they’d made me take a shower yesterday and I’d stood there until they came to take me out again.
‘There was a rainbow,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I saw a rainbow. It’s the last thing that happened. And the angel.’
‘The angel?’
He must know I was talking metaphorically, I thought. The angel was my angel; he wasn’t going to appear to anyone else. As far as they were all concerned the angel was a figment of my imagination, only I knew he was real. He was the one who could change everything, who came to me when I most needed him, when I was desperate and lonely and sad. He came to me and showed me the path to take. Sam clearly didn’t have an angel and it made me sad for him.
‘It’s not real,’ I said, trying to console him. ‘None of it’s real. You know that.’
‘How do you know it was an angel?’ he asked. His voice was calm, quiet.
‘He made me feel better. He took all of the bad stuff away.’
‘What did he say, do you remember?’
‘He said I was fine, that everything was fine. He told me to go home and that I didn’t need to worry about anything.’
‘Did he give you something to drink, something to eat?’
I started to laugh, which made me cough. ‘He wasn’t that sort of angel.’
‘I’m worried he wasn’t a good angel, Annabel.’
I opened my eyes and squinted at him, my eyes adjusting to the bright light until I could focus on his face. It was the first time I’d looked at him properly for a while and I had a sudden recollection of meeting him outside the hospital, how annoyed I’d felt at that intrusion, but how afterwards he’d made me feel better about Mum, about what had happened to her. He