Page 39 - WTP Vol. X #7

In the accident and emergency department she stitches up cuts from knives, cuts from glass caused by traffic accidents, she even stitches on an index finger around Christmas time. In the severe burns ward, she runs cold water over the bodies of burned children for hours, sometimes she has to send for more doctors and nurses to hold the children under the water. Afterwards she dresses the burn wounds on their bodies and gives them an injection to make them fall asleep.
The weekends she is not on shifts, she goes home. She thinks her father has a lady friend, he goes
out sometimes now, even when she’s home for the weekend. Her grandmother is almost always there. She prepares grand dinners for Elinor’s return. “Elinor, Elinor,” she says and touches Elinor’s arm.
Elinor goes to see her mother in her bedroom. The room looks different now, it’s darker, new curtains have been put up, made of heavy fabric, dark purple. She goes to draw the curtains, just a chink to let some sun in, but her mother whispers, “No, Elinor,” from the bed, “not today,” but she makes an effort
to sit up. Eggs roll down the hill with a hollow
sound when she moves. The room smells dusty and sour, she recognises the smell of old milk from the maternity ward, when the babies won’t suck or they are sick and have to be kept somewhere else, and the milk just runs from the mother’s breasts and dries on their t-shirts and on the bedlinen.
Elinor tells her mother about her studies, cells, viruses and bacteria.
She wants so badly to touch her mother and when she leaves the room there is a hurt running from her throat down to the middle of her chest.
~
After her exams, Elinor spends her summer at home. She has three and a half months of spare time. She sits on the swing bench in the garden, it swings back and forth with a creaking sound when she pushes with her foot on the ground. She has textbooks, papers and a notebook lying next to her. She opens the books but doesn’t read, she looks straight ahead, she looks up in the trees, she follows a butterfly with her eyes, and she looks up at her mother’s window.
When a breeze blows through the garden, the chick- ens gather under the bench. “There you are,” Elinor says, “there you are.” She picks up their eggs in the
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“Falling on asphalt or gravel was the
best then the doctor would have to sit and pick out the little stones from her body or face with tweezers, and Elinor could ask her questions.”
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