I'm Still Here (Je Suis Là) by Clelie Avit

Author:Clelie Avit [Clélie Avit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Contemporary Women, FICTION / Romance / Contemporary, Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

ELSA

The scraping of the door handle wakes me. I know at once that it’s the cleaning lady. Her footsteps, her cart, her radio. It’s nighttime, between midnight and one in the morning. It didn’t take me long to work out why the cleaning was done at this time each night. This is the one place in the hospital where there’s no risk of waking most of the patients.

She passes the broom quickly under my bed, spending a bit longer on the edges of the room. I had visitors today, my sister and Thibault, so she will almost certainly have to use the mop.

I like being woken by the cleaning lady, because of her radio, though “woken” is rather a grand way of putting it. Apart from the commentary of the DJ, who seems to be about as asleep as everyone else at this time of night, the music she listens to isn’t bad. It makes me laugh to myself inside my head to think that I am up-to-date with the latest hits. If I get out of here I’ll know the words to all these songs. That would surprise everyone.

The cleaning lady goes into the little bathroom, only used by my visitors—I hear her grumbling that they could use the bathroom on the corridor, but she cleans it all the same. That takes about two songs and an ad break.

When the music comes back on she is on her way back into the bedroom. It’s a song I love. I wish I could hum along. It reminds me of some of my best moments out on the glacier. I lose myself for a few minutes, remembering the return journeys from my climbs, when I allowed myself to sing. I only ever sang on the descent, when the hard part was over, but that always meant that it had gone well.

Yes, for the length of a song I can forget where I am and feel normal…

I know the tune and most of the lyrics by heart, so I sing along in my head. I can hear the mop passing back and forth on the floor. If I were the cleaning lady, I would at least mop in time with the music. She breaks up the rhythm with her random swipes across the floor, and her tired little sighs. But then she stops suddenly, and the broom handle falls sharply to the floor. I’m not too worried, I would have heard if she’d had a fall. But she seems to have frozen to the spot. Suits me, I suppose—it means I can hear the song better.

“Santo Dios!”

Her whisper is so charged with fear that, reluctantly, I leave my mental repetition of the chorus. What could she have seen that has alarmed her so much? I can’t feel the visceral sensation of fear, but I can still imagine what it provokes in me. A tingling feeling in the stomach, a sudden chill on the nape of the neck, my breathing reduced to

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