The Fiance is leaving the hospital. The corridors seem labyrinthine. He does not know which way to go. He has already been down the corridor with the hectic art on the walls twice. He moves into the centre of some conjoining corridors and 360’s. He is late for work. He is late for work and clumsily pirouetting in a NHS hospital. There is a desire to stamp one’s feet. He looks down each of the adjoining passageways. The Fiance does not believe the art on the walls in a hospital should consist primarily of red smears. He is sure of this one thing. He turns left. The hospital is confusing, last night was confusing. The hospital’s smell is an obvious euphemism. If every sense possesses a euphemism for death what would that make the totality of her body? He has not slept. He has sat with Evelyn and Helene the whole night. He has sat with them because he must love them. There was no other reason he could think of for having sat there, next to them, utterly awake for the past six hours.
The Fiance is chewing gum with vigour, forehead arrowed towards nose in a half willed half natural meta-optical illusion; one in which the flexed, triangulated mat of skin, stanza-ed in seemingly different thicknesses and lengths all represent the same sizeless abstraction. The frown is providing a psychic tread to their impenetrable surface. The frown is reassuringly physical. Thoughts are physical too. Try to forget that.
It is seven A.M now. Evelyn has been deposited in the Hospital crèche. She was all gurgles and burbled loops even as he began to leave. Ten steps down the corridor and she begins to cry for her Mother.
The Fiance walks down the sterile corridors of the hospital. His jaw is aching and clicking. Every thirty minutes or so since he drove to the hospital last night he has added a stick of gum to the wad in his mouth.
The Fiance is an estate agent. His name is Lawrence Muir. A new family is moving into a house at the bottom of the hill on Sunny Side Lane. Lawrence Muir must be there. He must be there showered and sprayed and crisp enough to be sugar snapped out of the scenery, to be cut and pasted into whatever impression said clients might wish him to impose on their terraced lebensraum.
The Fiance reminds himself of this. He tries to relax. He forces his expression into neutrality. There’s confusion in his muscles. His face tries to depressurize whatever is in its features.
The Fiance unwraps a stick of gum and pushes it through his gurgled lips. He carelessly discards the multi-pack wrapping onto the floor. The gum in his mouth is now a tiny rubbery appendage. Lawrence Muir leans against a wall in the maternity ward. He looks into the glass, sees the silenced mewing of the incubators. A grey arm withers in his mouth. Sound is battery ramming the glass wall. Sound is ripping the faces from infancy.
The Fiancé begins to sweat a rind.
A man with forks under each of his fingernails waves to him from the end of a corridor. The man with the forks in his fingers is asking the way to the A and E.
Lawrence Muir points in the easiest direction.
-That way, I think
-Thank you
The man with the forks in his fingers waves goodbye. His hand looks like an exceptionally useless pen knife. Some blood helter skelters down the man with the forks in his fingers cufflink. It slides off his elbow. On the floor: a bulb of blood.
A skin begins to slow over the bloods surface.
Lawrence Muir is hypnotized by it.
-Hey you, hey you!
The man with the forks in his fingers has spotted a nurse rounding a corner at the end of the corridor and has begun to move in her direction. He has several questions for this nurse, for every nurse here in fact.
Lawrence Muir shouts to the man with the forks in his fingers. He shouts:
-Which way out?
The man with the fork in his fingers turns around and tells him.
The man with the forks in his fingers turns back. The nurse is out of sight. He curses loudly and repetitively. Lawrence Muir scampers.
The sliding doors of the exit sound like a broken down future, like the white noise sea. The morning is bright and glassy with a light that lays like a pane of thin ice over the concrete and bushes. There is barely any wind. Time feels suspended.