Careless by Capes Kirsty

Author:Capes, Kirsty
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781398700116
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2021-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

I dream that I’ve gone to heaven and everything is light.

Heaven has many rooms, each of them coming off a long corridor that’s neither indoors nor outdoors, but is definitely in the sky. All of the doors are locked. But the heaven corridor is also the Maths corridor on the C Floor at Our Lady of the Assumption. And it’s also a hospital corridor and the light is not a good light. It’s artificial strip lighting, passing above my head like white lines on a road. Like on the M3. And there are tiny carpet beetles crawling all over my skin and the hairs on my arms, eating all my clothes, burrowing into me until the only thing left is my brain locked in my skeleton. And there she is. My mother. She’s standing in my bedroom door in the middle of the night, her silhouette illuminated by the yellow light in the hallway. And she is saying, Are you hurting yourself? Are you hurting yourself again? Have you been hurting yourself again?

When I wake up, the first thing I see is the ceiling tiles, all pure dimpled white, hexagons fitting together. It’s calming. My digital alarm clock is going off too. So, I’m at home, but this isn’t my ceiling. These aren’t my walls. It’s not my alarm clock either, it’s a machine with blue and red lights on it, and coming off the machine is a thin clear tube, and the tube connects to me, and there is a clear liquid in it being slowly syringed into my body through a needle sticking out of a bit of yellow plastic attached to my wrist.

So I guess I had my abortion after all. I went to the doctor’s like I was supposed to and had a real abortion.

I look over to my left and see Mrs Bhandari (of all people) sitting in a visitor’s chair, her knuckles kneading her face. I feel my own body, my dry, scratchy throat, my pounding head, my aching bones. My abdomen is sore from retching. I remember the bathtub and being dragged out of it by Eshal. Bits of paramedic green. Bits of an ambulance ride, not much else.

Where’s Eshal? I ask, and my voice is sandpaper in my throat. I try to cough, and it burns, but doesn’t hurt. I must be smacked out on medication. I feel like I’m floating two feet above the hospital bed.

Mrs Bhandari looks up, suddenly alert, when she hears my voice. For a second, she looks relieved to see me. But the moment passes quickly and her face contorts into something like contempt. She is wearing a dark blue sari with a grey diamond pattern on it. Her eyebrows are furrowed like how Eshal looks when she’s annoyed or confused. I’ve never noticed how much Mrs Bhandari looks like Eshal before. Well, I suppose it’s the other way around. Eshal looks like Mrs Bhandari. Except Mrs Bhandari’s skin is like paper that has been

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