A AND E MONDAY

     Insomnia.  A cloud over my brows.  I wake with the alarm but I am already awake.  Or close to it.  Insomnia is an unreliable witness.  I carry my dreams into the shower with my eyes still closed.

Monday morning.  I fiddle with oil in the garage and go inside the house again for whatever I forgot.  Then lock the door with paranoid deliberation.  The cat is at the front window on the sill looking up at me with yellow eyes and I touch the glass where his nose mists the glass and the world flashes white and goes red and then black.  I am on my back on stained block paving, glasses tumbled into my lap, thick blood running into my eye.

     I ran my head into the sharp corner of the open garage door.  Where the metal folds meet and the rains flaked the paint into pointy rust. 

Insomnia.  A cloud over my brows and sludge in my limbs. 

I check my glasses for damage and I put my glasses back on and I drip blood to the front door and dab my head with a red towel.  In the mirror the gash starts on my eyebrow and goes up from there.  It looks a foot long and deep as a deep-sea canyon and red as volcano lava.

I get out my first aid and tape white gauze over the damage.  I work in the hospital so I figure I go to work like I was anyway and go into A and E first.  Let a pro probe the gore.

At work I make a coffee in the office and leave a note for my boss and walk over to A and E slowly, clocking in on the way. 

It is not busy and the sunlight thru the tall windows makes it welcoming.  Two smiling Filipino children in blue take my details.  They list my wound as superficial tho I tell them it feels more than that to me.  They hand me a form to fill out in red ink even tho it says use black.

I wobble up against some metal chairs and fill out the form slowly.  Handwriting increasingly childlike.  I hand it to a blond woman with a warm smile thru a vertical space in the glass and I go to sit and wait.

I sip my coffee with low lids.  The paper cup looking hyper real in the clear sterile air.  My hands shine with detail I seldom notice.  The bright morning fills me up like a dream.  Insomnia.  It’s Another Place. 

The coffee doesn’t clear the cloud over my brows but it sharpens my eyes crisper. 

A young man in a coat too warm for the day drags a big backpack behind him muttering to himself asking for a cigarette from anyone.  Mine are in my bag in the office so I tell him sorry.  He flicks his lighter till a Filipino child in blue tells him not to.  Tells him there is medical oxygen stored in this facility.  He mutters on to himself about his 8.25 appointment.  It is 7.20 now.

In front of me a small woman in pale clothes has puffy red eyes and visits the ladies to come back with her pale cardigan inside out.  Just seen the tickets sticking out she says, at least it made me laugh.   

A council estate dolly with big hair and clumps of gold comes in on crutches with tattooed feet.  Her face the picture of suffering.  Her mother has hair that looks patchy but just needs her white roots done.

I have no phone signal.  I slide down in the seat, the metal too shiny and slippery tho no one else is struggling to stay upright.  I feel distant like I’m up in the crows nest.  Insomnia.  A cloud.  And now a head injury.  The perfect storm.

It fills up.  Fills up with plump mothers with full hands and quiet injured children.  Fills up with slender teenage girls sniffing tears and uncomfortable fathers who’d rather be at work but do their best.  Fills up with blond women who come and go behind the desk.  Pleased with their importance and jealous of desk space smiles either warm or cold but all their heads held high. 

I pace the tile.  I walk outside but the smoking man is there muttering.  Still no phone signal.  I ask at the desk if there is an internal phone I can use to call my boss.  The woman with the warm smile dials for me and hand the phone thru the vertical gap in the glass.  I have a brief conversation.  I am called a doughnut and worse.

Insomnia.  My legs ache like I done the iron man.  No sleep till after midnight when I never breathed properly anyway, my apnoea yet to be treated.  I was awake by three and only dozed before the 5.30 alarm.  And when I dozed I dreamt of bags of important ID lost on rafts and of nurses who demand red carrots, not white parsnips in angry/kind voices.

Insomnia.  I’d be anxious if the cloud wasn’t so thick and the world an old picture fading in pastel on a far away wall.

I am called in by a dr who says 'isn’t it' at the end of all his sentences.  He compliments my dressing and the cleanliness of the wound.  He fingers my wound and makes it bleed and checks I haven’t thrown up or fainted or am seeing double. 

He fastens a simple dressing on my forehead and says a nurse will come and decide how best to dress it, isn’t it.

I sit on the bed in the room alone and feel I could be anywhere waiting for anything and I hear a clock ticking loudly behind me but I don’t turn to look.

A cleaner I recognise from smoking out the back by the country lane comes in with a checklist and a silver pen.  I recognise her too because she looks like Frankensteins monsters daughter.  All her features seem mismatched and her brow is low and huge.  Her shoulders are wide and she moves like a wrestler on those trainers with curved souls that are meant to be good for you.

A nurse comes in and says she is called Dee.  I believe you I say and she takes her time deciding how to dress the wound.  I see she has numbers written on the palm of her hand and wears expensive shiny glasses. 

She decides on some glue but doesn’t have any and when she does come back she can’t get the dressing to stick so leaves to find a larger one.  Eventually it’s done.  Or rather very much over done as the dressing feels huge.  The dr comes in and gives me print-out on head injuries.  He advises me to go home and rest, isn’t it.

I leave and smoke walking back to the office checking for texts and taking calls in the sun on the fire path behind the MHU.

In the office it’s busy and relived to be going home I joke with delivery drivers about domestic violence.  I haven't hit a woman for ages I say.  

I leave some homemade brownies in the office fridge and go home. 

I sit in the garden on the old bench in the shade and look out at the garden.  It’s full with greens.  Yellow greens and red green and brown greens.  I feel like Tom Thumb or like I am in a small church garden in a model village or inside a snow globe but one that’s all about summer and instead of snow there is blossom floating and strange white fluff.  Insomnia – trippy.  Too trippy out here for me.  

I slowly smoke then I head in to stretch out on the bed with the windows open and a cool breeze to fall asleep straight away exactly like the print-out says I shouldn’t.