Room for Recovery
by Martin Westlake
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
I’d been waiting in the hospital corridor, chewing the skin around my nails for hours, while staff somewhere in the guts of the building operated on my wife. It was the sudden brilliance of light filling the narrow space that pulled me away from my anxious thoughts. I looked up, expecting to see a door opening, a doctor striding through. Surely this would be someone arriving with news of Raffaella? But no. The light was odd; red, yellows and greens, as well as blues. And then the lights stopped. I put it down to an ambulance arriving outside and settled back to wait, but it wasn’t for long. A few seconds later, a nurse arrived with an invitation to come to the recovery room.
Raffaella had made it through.
I thanked the nurse profusely and followed him down another anonymous corridor, which was also bathed in the twinkling light from the exterior, through hermetic doors to a changing room where I was instructed to dress up in protective clothing. The nurse finally gave me a thumbs up and led me into the recovery room itself.
He had no need to point Raffaella out to me. I knew which was her bed among all the beds and medical equipment parked around the walls in that great chilly barn of a room. She was plugged into several machines, her long black hair splayed about her head on the pillow. She was breathing into a mask and various tubes emerged from the blanket that had been pulled up to her chin, but she was breathing.
She had made it through.
The nurse pulled the curtains around us. “You can’t stay too long,” he said, “but I thought you’d like to see her. You’ve had a long wait.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Was the operation difficult?”
“Long, and difficult,” he replied. “But there were no complications.”
I turned to Raffaella and murmured her name.
“She’s completely unconscious,” the nurse said unnecessarily. “She won’t be able to talk to you.”
“I imagine,” I said.
The nurse smiled reassuringly. “I’ll come back in about ten minutes,” he said.
I stood — there was no chair — and looked down at the love of my life. We’d been married for forty-three years and had known each other for closer to fifty. All sorts of ideas raced through my mind. One moment we had been climbing mountains and crossing the Swiss Alps on foot; the next, she was in an ambulance surrounded by people with grim faces and doctors telling me it was touch-and-go. I wondered at the mystery of our genes. She led such a healthy life, certainly compared to me.
I had almost lost her.
I shivered at the enormity of the possibility. I had dutifully drawn up a will when I reached fifty and made sure that Raffaella would be well-provided for when I passed away, but I had never, ever thought about life without her. It was simply unthinkable. How would I have managed? It wasn’t the practical side of things — I’m a fairly domesticated man, capable of cooking a decent meal and ironing my shirts, even if Raffaella always laughed at how long it took me to do them.
It wasn’t the practical. It was all the rest. The way she would rest a soothing hand on the back of my neck at traffic lights, when she could sense I was stressed about something. The way she would sing with sheer delight when some good news had come through. That smile of hers when she looked up and found me watching her. The strange Yorkshire dialect she had, long before she met me, picked up on a study trip from Italy to the UK. The pirouette shape of the wet footprints she left in the bathmat after she had taken a shower. The lovely tinkling sound of her laughter as she chatted with the neighbour over our garden wall. Above all, she had always been there for me. I realised that I could not conceive of life without her.
It was gone five in the morning when I finally drove out of the underground car park and set off for home. As I emerged into the dark of early dawn I was immediately struck by that same scintillating, multicoloured light. It had started again! It was not an ambulance as I had thought, but seemed to be coming from the sky.
Intrigued, I stopped the car, got out, and had a look. It wasn’t difficult to spot the source. A long, balloon-shaped object hung low over the city to the west, and it seemed to be covered in flashing lights. I thought it was a publicity stunt of some sort, probably an airship. I watched it for a few minutes. It seemed motionless but then, if it were a balloon, it would probably be tethered in some way. And then the lights went off. I thought I could still make out the silhouette of the object in the night sky. It seemed to be quite big. Strange!
When I got home, I went straight to bed. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep at first. The thought kept racing through my mind; I had almost lost Raffaella. How was that possible? I finally fell asleep, thinking I should take flowers to her room. Tomorrow, I vowed, I would take her a bunch of sweet peas, her favourite.
* * *
The roar of a low-flying jet woke me. The planes taking off from the city airport sometimes flew quite low over our house, but this didn’t sound like a civilian airliner. I looked at my phone. It was just seven o’clock. I cursed the plane and went to the bathroom. Just as I was drying my hands, another jet roared overhead. And then I heard a hovering helicopter’s rotors chop-chopping the air. What was going on? I looked at the online news. That’s when I learned that the object I had admired a few hours before was not an airship and nor was it a publicity stunt. In fact, nobody knew what it was. It had just appeared in the sky, lights intermittently twinkling — probably at precisely the moment I had seen their reflected glow as I sat in that hospital corridor.
The lights had apparently stopped flashing several hours before, and the thing had become a pale grey-green shape against the morning sky. Its surface seemed to be smooth, like polished granite. The thing was big, although nobody had been able to measure it accurately yet. More planes flew low overhead as I stood at the window, gazing skyward, sleep forgotten. I turned on the breakfast news and ate hurriedly.
Raffaella! I had to get back to her!
When we were students and the world seemed to be going to hell in a handcart, Raffaella and I used to half-joke about keeping an apocalypse box in the cupboard. A grab bag of supplies, cash, identity cards, canned food, dried food, and batteries for when the day came when we would need to flee. It was only half a joke. The box was still there, in the cupboard under the stairs. I opened the door and looked at it. Now perhaps the day was here, I thought, except that Raffaella was stuck in a hospital bed, wired up to life-saving machines. A can of tinned peaches wasn’t going to help her much.
As I brushed my teeth, an air force spokesperson was interviewed by a journalist. She insisted there was no cause for alarm. Everything was under control. I spat into the basin. Really? Meanwhile, she said, the object was being carefully monitored. For the time being there was no reason to suppose it represented any sort of threat. Houses and shops directly under the object had been evacuated as a precautionary measure. Temporary housing had already been found and allocated. The object did not appear to be “animate” in any way. All the same, attempts were being made to establish contact with it. In the meantime, there was no reason to panic.
How absurd, I thought. No reason to panic. How the hell does she know?
Over breakfast, I watched a news channel. Whatever it was, the object had caused instant chaos. All flights in and out of the city airport were cancelled. It had been decided to establish a five-kilometre radius exclusion zone below the object, and this decision was already causing chaos. Sometimes, I thought, people could be so ridiculous. Why five kilometres rather than ten — or one, for that matter? And then the thought struck me — how would I get to the hospital, to Raffaella, with a five-kilometre exclusion zone established below the object? What if the damn thing could cut off our power or cause an outage, or worse? What if those life-saving machines were turned off?
A nurse on the ward called. My stomach gave a lurch as I waited to hear that the hospital systems were down, that they were evacuating, that they were doing their best. But no, Raffaella had had a good night in the intensive care unit, she said. Normally they would keep patients in the ICU for a day or two but, in her case, the doctors thought she could be transferred to a ward. She was much stronger and was asking after me. I could come and visit her if I wished. After I had rung off, I felt something welling up inside me, and then the dam broke. I fell back onto a chair and sobbed uncontrollably. The impossible disaster had been avoided.
Raffaella had made it through.
I showered and dressed and set off for the hospital. I should have known better than to have taken the car. There was a traffic jam already at the end of our road. I did a U-turn, parked the car in our driveway and set off on foot.
Once I’d got beyond the tree line on the other side of the road, I could see the object again. It had a mesmerising effect, and I had to remind myself to keep walking. It was so enigmatic. Its shape, for a start. It was like a column lying on its side. Sometimes, it seemed round, and sometimes it seemed hexagonal. I couldn’t tell, though, whether that was because it was changing shape or because of some sort of optical illusion. As I’d left the house some talking head had said it was about the size of “a small battleship,” though he didn’t say which one. I turned my head resolutely to the road ahead; florist first, and then the hospital!
* * *
I found Raffaella sitting up in bed, leaning against a mountain of pillows. Various tubes and wires ran out of the covers and into a large machine on one side of her bed. She was very pale, but otherwise did not look at all as though she had just been through a major operation. I leaned over, gave her a gentle kiss and placed the bunch of sweet peas in her hands.
“My love,” I said. “how are you?”
She gave a typical Italian shrug, the sort that means, “What do you expect?”
“Thank you for the lovely flowers,” she said. And then she added, “So, what do you think it is?”
“Welcome back, Raffaella!” I said, smiling.
“Well, I’ve got a grandstand view,” she said, waving her hand at the large picture window by way of explanation. It was true. The window looked out towards the city and there, centre stage, was the mysterious column, hanging horizontally in the air, pale green. “We’ve been following the news,” she said, nodding her head towards the other two patients in the room, and then the large television screen against the wall.
She introduced me to the two ladies, who seemed to be in their middle sixties. Mollie Stern wore a permanent frown and was unmistakably wearing a wig of short, black hair. Cato (“but everybody calls me Catty”) Quinn had a full head of wispy, curly grey hair and a round, friendly face with an enigmatic smile. We were immediately on first-name terms. Both ladies were as pale as ghosts, but no matter how ill they might have been they were clearly animated by the column’s appearance.
“Nobody’s got the faintest idea,” said Mollie. “All those soldiers and things.”
“I think it’s rather lovely,” said Catty.
It was hard to make Raffaella focus on herself when the nurse came in to speak to us. She would experience discomfort for a few days, he explained. There were special pillows behind her to help when she needed to cough or sneeze. The incision would need to be dressed regularly. The tubes and wires would mostly be gone in a day or two, and then it would be good for her to get out of bed and take the odd stroll up and down the corridor.
“Do you hear that, love?” I said, “A few more days of rest, and then you’ve got to start working.”
“Va bene, va bene,” she replied.
The nurse smiled. “If you have no questions,” he said, “then I’ll leave you two to it. You can ring that bell if you need me.”
“We won’t need you, amore,” said Raffaella. “We know you’ve got more important things to do.” And then she turned to me and said, with that faint Yorkshire accent, “He’s a lovely lad.”
The nurse blushed and smiled and bowed his way out of the room.
“So,” said Raffaella, as if getting back to business, “what do you think it is?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “And I don’t really care, you know. All I care about is you.”
“Oh, Ciccio,” she said. She reached out for my hand and gave it a squeeze.
Mollie and Catty had turned their attention back to the television screen. “Do you mind if we turn the sound back up again a little?” said Catty.
“But of course not,” said Raffaella. “We’ll be listening ourselves, won’t we, Ciccio?”
* * *
The next few days went by very quickly. I went to see Raffaella every morning and afternoon. Once she was authorised to do so, I made sure she got up and walked about. The people at my office were being very kind, but I had to let them know what was going on and make sure my clients were being taken care of properly.
The doctors at the hospital told me Raffaella was making excellent progress and that, unless there were any complications, she could probably come back home in a week’s time. But though there would be morning visits, she would need in-house care, which I wouldn’t be able to provide if I went back to work. And that led Raffaella to call for her sister to come from Rome.
This was an excellent idea. Lara was a widow and adored her younger sister. She would be happy to jump on a flight and stay for as long as was required. Except that there weren’t any flights to the city anymore because of the strange object in the sky.
Copyright © 2024 by Martin Westlake
