One of the things, I think now, that first felt so fractured about my time within the hospital was that the landscape around me was so different, decidedly suburban, broader and flatter and more quiet than the space in which I now live. My window, once I was moved into a room that had one, overlooked something that may have been a canal, a creek, or a storm-water drain – a thin trickle of water through a steep concrete ditch – and a dry-grassed park backed onto by red-bricked and boxy apartment buildings.
One of the things that first felt so fractured about my time within the hospital was that the landscape around me was so different.
Eventually, once I’d been deemed no risk to myself or others, I was allowed to leave the grounds to walk here for fifteen minutes in the afternoon, the dried leaves of casuarinas and bottlebrush seeds catching in my sandals. The place was beautiful, in its own way, tranquil and languorous and filled with birdsong, but I missed the press of buildings near my home, the way they cram up close together, overspilling with wetter, fatter foliage – ivy, frangipani, tibouchina, silky oak. I missed the press of people, of cyclists, of dogs tangled up outside supermarkets, clothes shops and cafés. I felt alien here, and so alone.
*
The hospital was its own bubble – and set up deliberately to be so – but what this meant was that there were patterns of conversation, routine jokes and repetitions that became the fabric of the days there. I started drinking instant coffee, perhaps because everyone around me was constantly sucking it back, and then I started liking it (I drink it still). I learnt how to wrap the cuff of the blood-pressure monitor, twice daily, around my own bicep, and which buttons to press to make it inflate – although not how to read the numbers it displayed. My heart stopped hammering in my chest at snack times when I put the same things on my plate: a kiwifruit in the morning, a box of sultanas in the afternoon, three Jatz and a pre-packaged square of cheddar cheese at 8pm.
I joined in on the in-jokes, most of which involved comparing the levels of bloating that our changed hospital diets had induced in all of our bodies (I’ve never heard so many and such consistent jokes about constipation and farting in my life, despite growing up with a brother and a toilet-humoured father). One evening, when my friend Laura visited, I lifted up my shirt to show her my distended stomach and she just looked at me, puzzled and silent, and it was only then that I realised how odd a thing this was to do. We adopted each other’s patterns of speech: you’re a good egg, and, oh, what fresh hell is this, the refrain whenever we were served something that was difficult or just plain disgusting. These things were what we needed to feel slightly less uncomfortable, to feel a little bit connected, to survive.
These things were what we needed to feel slightly less uncomfortable, to feel a little bit connected, to survive.
There was a dark side to this too because we couldn’t help, at times, but copy the habitual ways that the others ate – separating trail mix into its component pieces on our plates, or slicing apples into impossible piles of translucent wafers, eating ridiculously slowly every time. In all the other hospitals I’ve been to, these kinds of rituals, called ‘safety behaviours’, were not permitted at the table, but this hospital was more lenient, more pragmatic, in its approach. We don’t mind how you get the food in, the dietitian, a wonderfully kind woman, said, as long as you get it in.
But I started feeling guilty and somehow greedy because my breakfast, one piece of toast (either undercooked or burnt, and more often than not stone-cold) and one glass of full-cream milk, didn’t take me anywhere near thirty minutes to complete, and I’d sit at the table with my empty plate and glass in front of me, awkward and ashamed.
*
On the day that I left the hospital I left early, so that I could arrive in Petersham, just up the road from where Alex lives, in time for breakfast, one of our shared rituals. I ordered coffee, real coffee, sweet-bitter and smooth, the cup a deep, mineral grey. Toasted sourdough, bread that was chewy and seedy, not wet and white; I held my handbag on my lap, because it still felt so novel, so pleasurable to be carrying it around. (Coffee I had known I’d miss; carrying a handbag, far less so.) Later, I unpacked my clothes, vacuumed my bedroom, watered the pots of cherry tomatoes growing in my small backyard. I’d missed my home, the habits I have that shape it and are shaped by it, the small delights it gives me across the day. I felt collected, grounded. And I thought, I must remember this, in the coming months, as my habits and routines become once more invisible because of their ordinariness, their everyday repetition. I must remember how they help me, hold me. I walked along King Street, just to feel it on my skin.
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An extended version of this piece appears in The World Was Whole (Giramondo Publishing), available now at Readings.
