In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,67

my most vulnerable spot, the truth that will hurt me for ever. My voice is choked when I answer. And you, you’re not responsible, I suppose. The fact is, you didn’t care about anybody else, you just did what you wanted.

I couldn’t, because you stopped me.

And I’ll keep on stopping you. You’re going back to South Africa alive and after that you’re not my worry any more.

You’re not worried about me anyway, you just care what other people will say.

Right now that’s true. Right now I hate you.

So what, I hate you too.

These ugly words have come from a deep core in me, part of the destructive essence that Anna has pared us to. It takes an effort of will to understand, even in a theoretical way, how very sick she is. It will be years before I’m able to acknowledge that she is psychotic, her mania full-blown, with no medication to subdue her and with a raging fever from pneumonia, and even then it’s hard to forgive her. Because from long ago, even in her sanest moments, she wanted this and worked hard to reach it, her toxic, terminal rapture. The rest of us are just walk-on parts in a drama centred only on her.

I remember every accusing word, including my own, like a knife in the guts, like something that has shamed us both. Yet she herself is untouched. Later that same day, for example, Sjef and Paula and Caroline all arrive together to help me. In an attempt to bring down her temperature we buy ice from the canteen downstairs and press it all over her body. She wails and protests but also smiles, look at me, she says, I have a whole team working on me, and in that moment she is angelic again, my coy and flirtatious friend, and the awful exchange of that morning has disappeared. She remembers none of it, nothing of what is said and done, even by herself. She floats above all the pain and grief and guilt that she’s created, looking down on our scurrying and striving. There is a very real element of contempt in the way she treats us now, a quality of mocking laughter at our concern. She is far beyond us all, because she’s not afraid of death any longer, which is both her weakness and her greatest strength.

And it only gets worse. Every day she is more powerful and wily, more resourceful in her self-destruction, and her demands become more insistent. I want my money-belt, she announces one morning, and when I tell her that I’m taking care of it she accuses me of stealing her money. Another time she wants her shoes. Look at me, she cries wretchedly, I have to sit here with nothing on my feet, you’re so cruel to me. These appeals move him not at all, with money and shoes she will be able to escape, he knows what she’s after. But when he refuses she starts to repeat it like an hysterical child, my money, give me my money, give me my shoes right now. He just keeps shaking his head. No. There is perverse pleasure in wielding that word, in being able to withhold death from her.

But he’s also aware that time is short and that she might outplay him yet. In a few days Sjef and Paula will be going home and then only he and Caroline will be left. He doubts that between them they’ll be able to keep her covered, it will mean shifts of twelve hours each, and she can’t be trusted for a moment. She’s out of bed and heading towards the door as soon as anyone’s back is turned. He has spoken to the nurses at the desk and implored them to keep an eye, but they are busy and distracted and also not that interested, what do they care for this rude foreign woman and her overwrought minders.

Most alarming of all, as her physical condition improves she is shunted to more general wards in the hospital. Fewer nurses are in attendance here and the wards are fuller. After three or four days she’s taken to a room where two people are sharing each bed and some patients are lying on the floor. She begins to weep and rave, this is unacceptable, I refuse to stay here, I demand you take me out of this place.

He would like to comply, but it isn’t so simple. She is supposed to pass through levels