I take the tissue, dab my eyes, blow my nose, then give it back to Sister Ruth. You mustn’t keep anything that doesn’t belong to you. That’s stealing. Sister Ruth laughs and puts the tissue back in her apron. Of course I ask her about Mama, but all Sister Ruth says is: ‘She’s in the best hands.’ I know that’s not a proper answer, I’m not stupid.
‘When can I see her?’ I ask, but don’t get an answer to that either.
Instead Sister Ruth says that she’s going to take me to the staffroom to see whether there’s a pair of slippers I could wear. Jonathan and I have to wear slippers at home too because the floor is very cold, but mostly we forget and our tights get dirty. Then Mama gets cross because it’s not washing day, and Papa gets cross because Mama hasn’t cleaned the floor properly. Cleanliness is important.
The staffroom is big, at least fifty paces from the door to the wall opposite. In the middle are three tables, each of which has four chairs arranged around it. Three fours are twelve. One of the chairs isn’t straight. Someone must have been sitting there and not tidied up when they left. I hope they got into trouble. Because tidiness is important too. The left-hand wall of the room is filled with a metal cupboard with lots of individual lockable compartments, but there are keys sticking out of almost all of them. There’s also a loft bed, which is metal too. Straight ahead are two windows. I can see the night through them. The night is black and there aren’t any stars. To the right is a kitchen unit. There’s even a kettle out on the work surface. Hot water can be very dangerous. Skin burns at forty-five degrees. At sixty degrees the protein in the skin cells congeals and the cells die off. The water inside a kettle is heated to one hundred degrees. We’ve got a kettle at home too, but we keep it locked away.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Sister Ruth says.
Three fours are twelve. Twelve chairs. I have to think, but I’m distracted by the black night without any stars beyond the windows.
Concentrate, Hannah.
Sister Ruth goes to the cupboard, opens one compartment after another, then closes it again. She says ‘hmm’ a few times, drawing it out, and the metal doors clatter. Looking over her shoulder, she says again, ‘Come on, child, sit down.’
First I think I ought to go for the chair that’s not straight. But that wouldn’t be right. Everyone needs to tidy up after themselves. Take responsibility. You’re a big girl, Hannah. I nod at nothing in particular and count to myself, eenie, meenie, miney, mo. There’s one chair left over, which would give me a good view of the door and which I’ll put back neatly later when Sister Ruth tells me the time to sit down is over.
‘How about these?’ she says with a smile, turning to me with a pair of pink rubber shoes. ‘They’re a bit big, but better than nothing.’ She puts them by my feet and waits for me to slip them on.
‘Listen, Hannah,’ she says as she takes off her cardigan. ‘Your mum didn’t have a handbag when the accident happened. That means we couldn’t find an identity card or any papers belonging to her.’
Grabbing my arm, she holds it out straight and fiddles the sleeve of her cardigan over my hand.
‘So now we don’t have a name or an address. And no emergency contact number either, unfortunately.’
‘Her name is Lena,’ I say to be helpful, like I was in the ambulance. You always have to be helpful. My brother and I always help Mama when her fingers tremble. Or when she forgets things, like our names or when it’s time to go to the toilet. We go with her to the bathroom so she doesn’t slide off the toilet seat or do anything else silly.
Sister Ruth is now on to the other arm. The warmth that’s still in the cardigan spreads cosily across my back.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Lena, great. Lena without a surname. The paramedic already made a note of this.’ When she sighs I can smell her breath. It smells of toothpaste. She tugs on my chair, which scrapes across the floor, until she can squat in front of me without knocking her head on the edge of the table. Table edges can be very dangerous. Mama often hits her head against the table when she has one of her fits.
Sister Ruth starts fastening the buttons of the cardigan. On my thigh my finger draws the zigzag pattern of her parting. Right, straight, left, straight, left, straight, left again, like a jagged lightning bolt. Sister Ruth suddenly looks up as if she’d sensed me staring at her head.
‘Is there anyone we can call, Hannah? Your papa, perhaps? Do you know your telephone number by heart?’
I shake my head.
‘But you do have a papa?’
I nod.
‘Does he live with you? With you and your mama?’
I nod again.
‘Shall we call him? Surely he should know your mama had an accident and that the two of you are in hospital. He’ll be worried if you don’t come home.’
Right, straight. Left, straight, left again, like a jagged lightning bolt.
‘Tell me, Hannah, have you ever been to a hospital before? Or your mama? Maybe even this one? Then, you see, we could look in our really smart computer for your telephone number.’
I shake my head.
‘In an emergency, open wounds can be sterilised with urine. It disinfects, coagulates the proteins and relieves the pain, full stop.’
Sister Ruth takes my hands. ‘You know what, Hannah? I’ll make us some tea and then we’ll have a bit of a chat, you and I. How about that?’
‘Chat about what?’
*
I see, she wants me to talk about Mama, but I can’t think of anything to say to begin with. I just keep thinking of the big bang when the car hit Mama and the very next moment she was lying on the cold, hard ground in the beam of the car headlights, her arms and legs all twisted. Her skin was far too white and the blood flowing from all the little cuts in her face far too red. Crimson. The glass of the headlights shattered on impact and flew straight into Mama’s face. I sat on the side of the road, closed my eyes, occasionally blinking in secret until the flashing blue lights appeared in the darkness: the ambulance.
But I don’t have to tell Sister Ruth all of this. She already knows that Mama had an accident. Mama wouldn’t be here otherwise. Sister Ruth stares at me. I shrug and blow ripples on my tea. Rosehip, Sister Ruth said, and she told me it was her daughter’s favourite when she was small. ‘Always with a big spoonful of honey in it. She had a real sweet tooth.’ Sweet tooth. I don’t believe there is such a thing, but I like the sound of it.
‘I think we urgently need to speak to your papa,’ Sister Ruth says. ‘Have another think; maybe your home telephone number will come to you.’
‘We don’t have a telephone.’
‘What about your address, then? The name of the street you live in? Then we could send someone by to pick up your papa.’