It was time.
Chapter Seven
Day Thirty-four:
Anger.
Kara felt it course through her. She imagined herself as a tall glass of coke and the anger a mint, dropped in. It fizzed around her, robbing her of sense, of rationale, of any kind of pause mechanism. Her entire body hummed with it. Anger pressed itself into her, wrapping itself around her, causing her heart to speed up and her muscles to twitch.
She was so mad she wanted to punch the nurse in the face.
‘Now I know you say you’re not hungry, but you really should eat.’ The nurse indicated the tray of food in her hand. ‘The ward sister asked me to pay special attention to you this morning,’ she said, grinning. ‘Your chart shows that you’ve lost quite a lot of weight and with the surgery and your leg healing. I really don’t know how you cope with it all . . .’ The student nurse placed the tray on Kara’s table, prattling on. Her chatter like a cheese grater against Kara’s nerves. Her hands arranged and rearranged the cutlery.
‘I’m. Not. Hungry!’ Kara said each word slowly, her mouth tight as the syllables made their way up her throat, across her tongue and out through her lips.
‘Of course you are. Everybody is hungry in the morning. Take myself for instance; some mornings I have two breakfasts. After a night shift I make toast and then have an extra bowl of cereal. Oh not every morning, you know, I have to watch my figure.’ She smoothed her uniform over her plump waist. ‘So the kitchen sent down porridge this morning. I know it’s your favourite and you must be hungry so . . .’
Was the nurse deaf?
What the hell was wrong with these people?
When Kara was hungry she would eat. When she was tired she would sleep and when she was angry she would . . . What? Assault someone? There was a desperate urge inside her to rip at something, to tear, to strike, to pummel . . . the frustration and unfairness of her situation stung the back of her throat. She remembered after her father and the police report, she’d been so mad. She never meant to set the chemistry lab on fire, it had been an accident. But her anger had made her do stupid things.
‘. . . if I were you I would eat several times a day for strength. Those cells in your body . . .’
Something inside Kara flipped.
‘You stupid, deaf moron! I told you a hundred times, I’m not fucking hungry!’ Kara lifted the tray and, with all her might, hurled it across the room. The bowl of porridge crashed into the wall, smearing a trail of gloop down the plaster. The tray clattered to the floor and Kara closed her eyes, savouring the release.
But it only lasted a moment.
When Kara opened her eyes, the student nurse was staring. Her eyes, big and round flicked from the puddle of breakfast on the floor to her patient in the hospital bed. Her lip began to quiver, her hands folded at her waist. She started to cry before turning and speed walking from the room.
‘Crap.’
Kara pushed up out of bed and hobbled to the wall, bending to retrieve fragments of breakfast bowl from the quagmire of porridge. Rosemary never cried when Kara gave into fits of rage. Rosemary just stood there and let the heat of Kara’s anger wash over her. Kara felt a momentary stab of remorse.
They would send Nurse Trunchenbowl to her room. She heard the matron before she saw her.
‘Miss Bailey.’ Kara turned slowly, the cracked pieces of bowl in her hand. ‘Is there a problem this morning?’
Kara snorted but chose not to answer. She moved toward the small waste paper basket located next to her bed.
The matron, stocky and bull like, glared at her charge. Kara was referred to on the ward as a difficult patient. The weeks in hospital for observation and tests were wearing at her.
‘No matron. Everything is just peachy.’ Kara sat slowly into the reading chair next to the window, wiping her sticky hands down her pajamas. She stared out of the window, ignoring the matron, ignoring the hospital room.
There was a hole in her heart, a deep sense of loss. It showed itself to Kara only when the anger dissipated.
After her father died, there was so much anger. She was lucky that she only had to attend counselling as punishment for what she did. It could have been a lot worse. The solicitor for the school had suggested six months in juvenile detention. Kara suspected that this was just to scare her.
The counselling had been a condition of not prosecuting her. With no other options open, she’d agreed to go. It was all she could cope with at the time. Anything more and she might not have made it, drowning, disappearing under the waves of anger, caught in the rip-tide of grief.
The accident had reopened old wounds, left her too much time to think, to reflect.
She looked out of the window into the distance, trying to remember something, anything concrete that she could focus on. It all seemed such a blur now, session after session of words and talking, of labelling emotions, of trying to understand, of listening to someone else interpret what she was meant to be feeling. When you took all of that away, there wasn’t much left except two base feelings.
She wasn’t sure which one scared her most, the never-ending well of anger or the pit of loss.
***
Strangulation. That was probably the easiest way to do it. The easiest and the cleanest.
Once the person was dead, he knew the blood would die too.
Then there would be no risk.
No chance of further contamination.
***
Day Forty-six:
‘Get the hell away from me. What are you trying to do, kill me? Finish the job?’ Kara paused to catch her breath, black dots swimming in front of her vision. The evening’s physio session was not going well. ‘I bet you’re sorry that car didn’t roll over me a few more times. Then you’d be rid of me for good.’
She was shouting with such force that the vocal cords at the back of her throat quivered under the strain. Hot tears of frustration streamed down her cheeks.
Rosemary stood a few paces away at the end of the recuperation walkway, looking pale and strained. She’d aged ten years in the last few weeks and Kara felt a momentary twinge of guilt, but it was buried in an instant under the force of her anger.
‘Kara, of course I don’t . . .’
‘Shut up! This is hard enough without you talking.’ She tried to take another step; her hands squeezed tight around the practice bars. Every time she put her weight on her right leg a searing pain shot up through her body, lodging in the base of her skull.
‘If I could help you with the pain, you know I would.’ Rosemary folded her arms across her chest, her lips pressed in a tight line.
‘Like you helped when Dad died? Like you helped then?’ Kara had no idea where the words were coming from. It seemed never-ending, the hurt and the loss and the anger. She thought that this was buried deep within. She thought she’d dealt with it. The counsellor said she was better. They’d talked about it, over and over again, until she capitulated. Agreed with what they had written in the police report. She’d conceded, believed what the coroner, the senior detective and the judge had declared.
When she said the words, I believe, it felt like a release. She didn’t have to fight any more. Her truth had been replaced by their truth, a different, more painful one.
But now, with the hours alone in the hospital, her mind free to think as her body regenerated, she realised that she had been lying to herself all along. She didn’t believe. Not for one second. The pressure on her chest increased.