Chemotherapy

Four hundred and four. Four hundred and five.

            The beep from down the hall echoed off the white walls. The tubes in my hands stiffened as my fingers contracted around the arms of the chair. The leather steadied me, warm from the sun through the broken blinds.

            ‘Great, she’s alive. But will someone stop that bloody beeping, for Christ’s sake,’ said Bill from the next room. I could almost hear spit flying from his mouth. ‘You’d think they’d close a bloody door.’

I scratched my head. Tiny flakes of skin fluttered down through the sunlight.

            ‘Oh, leave it, Bill.’ Fran’s voice rang through the corridor, forcing sympathy into her frustration. ‘If you stop thinking about it, you won’t even notice it.’

            ‘Bollocks.’

            ‘Bill!’

            Bill shut up at his wife’s command. In the room to my right, Harry snored. Kate, old enough to be my mum and still the youngest apart from me, sobbed quietly.

            The hospital hummed. A building more alive than its residents. I caught my ghostly reflection in the window. Wide eyes; two blue plates on a white tablecloth, not a stain of hair in sight. I breathed in and my stomach retreated, ribs fighting for freedom.

            I tried to sleep.

            Five hundred and ninety eight. Five hundred and ninety nine.