Vertigo Read Online Free PDF Page A

though these children do and say nothing childlike. The seat I am sitting on is a long narrow couch. It is decorated with pictures of dinosaurs also at right angles. This seat makes me small again. My feet don’t reach the ground. I cannot sit back against its back: my thighs are not long enough, because the couch is also a bed. Its smell is the same smell as new clothes shops: synthetic, sweet as a nut. There’s something of the body about it, but only just: the body removed, perhaps.
    The ward is hot, and there is always sound. Somebody’s baby is wired up to beep. There is always light. The people who wait are all women. The nurses are women. So is the receptionist, the cleaners, and some of the doctors. I saw a man once but he left. You left me at the door on the ground floor, holding me by the elbow, that most reluctant handle. Did I not expect you to stay, or did I not want you to? Or was it that I wanted but knew it would not work. You left gladly enough, or, not gladly, but perhaps without feeling anything at all. You did not see the ward. You could not imagine all this. Text, you said. Text.
    The women with babies have one-way conversations. They do not speak to each other, but then neither do I. One of them makes a screaming noise but softly, then laughs, then repeats a scream caught in the back of her throat, dragged across her tonsils. It is directed at her baby and the noise is a noise of love. She presses a button on a remote and, behind her, someone on the TV appears and says something that crackles. Is she listening with pleasure? It sounds like a crossed wire. It doesn’t sound like fun.
    What will compensate me for this wait, which is so much longer than the wait expected?
    Will it be clotheschocolatebooks?
    I could buy, say, a silk dress jacket blouse for the summer. I could look online to see if any garment meets my thought: that would occupy my mind, would it?
    A nurse comes.
    She tells me Charlotte will update me.
    I do not know who Charlotte is. I do not ask. I could stop watching the bed in which there is nothing, and go, once again, to the information desk across the hall, where the woman wearing an apron with puppies has no information.
    If Charlotte comes she will tell me.
    If she tells me there will be no more words.
    There will be no more words soon.
    Get ready for it.
    No more words ever now.
    No more ever.
    I don’t dare to ask anymore.
    I wait. I watch the bed.
    The baby wakes. It cries. It beeps.
    I hope she’s OK.
    I hope we’re OK. I hope we’re all OK.
    OK?
    But Charlotte being not here to give the reply it goes unvoiced perhaps will always which is sentimental so I guard myself against it by labeling it as such when the toddler in the bed beside sits up and vomits blood into a cardboard bowl he has been holding on his knee for this purpose which makes me start to sweat. It makes my body start to part. In a moment I know it will no longer be with me. Sensible of it to want to get away. Good luck to you mate, I can hardly blame you. If Charlotte comes with her words comes to tell me it all went wrong how would my body know it? How long before the parts of my body realized, independently, that something was wrong and arrived, severally, at panic? Panic is a still thing. I have felt it before: each limb nerve organ coming into extreme alert unrelated to any other, ready for action, but who knows what action, as there is no action that could help here. Each part of my body knows, individually, what action it will take, but none of them are telling. I sit in the middle of them. I have no control. They seem to be ready to run in all directions. But without their cooperation I cannot run, cannot scream, so I sit still and I look quite meek. I know what this feels like. I have felt it before. I am waiting to feel it again.
    To occupy my mind I could think wouldn’t you through time backwards to milk cereal first school-wear awww plasticine cookies wooden blocks whatever slippery tales