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.
