On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory by Stephen Benatar Read Free Book Online Page B

Or would I then be made to return a second time? Yet it seemed plain I couldn’t just stick to the truth, the lovely unvarnished truth. The lovely unvarnished truth could cause nothing but confusion.
    I don’t know why but I’d thought that perhaps for old times’ sake I should go back to the third floor. I took the lift. As I returned down the long corridor I began to sing softly—at first not even realizing I was doing it—telling myself again that he’d be leaving, leaving on that midnight train to Georgia. I was in fact cheerfully acknowledging once more that I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine when an old woman in a pink nightdress came wandering out of a side ward, grew aware of my presence and appeared to do a double take. She eyed me up and down severely.
    â€œJames! So you’ve decided to come back? And from whose bed this time I should like to know!” Her thin grey hair receded at the front but fell almost to her shoulders. Her long and bony nose had a drop quivering at its end. The plunging neckline of her nightie might have seemed better suited to some well-stacked young actress in a sex farce. I said, “I’m sorry but I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”
    â€œOh you think that do you?” One hand shot out and clutched me round the wrist, the fingers gripping with surprising strength. “What have you got in there? All those nastily stained bedsheets you expect me to bung into the wash as usual? Oh Jamie, Jamie! Why must you keep on breaking my heart this way? Why must you? What have I done?”
    I looked desperately towards the ward she’d wandered out of, trying to convince myself that at any instant some bustlingly efficient nurse would come rushing forth with cries of humorous reproach: “So there you are me old darlin’. Merciful heavens where are we off to now?” And to me: “Always got an eye out for the boys. She’ll have you standing beside her at the altar before you can even say whoops-a-daisy!” I considered calling urgently for aid, not “Help!” exactly but “Excuse me there’s a lady come out here …” Yet, all the time, she was implacably pushing me back along the corridor and somehow I couldn’t find it in me to cry out for assistance. And utterly amazing though it might seem it wasn’t actually my own dignity or lack of it that I was thinking about.
    â€œI could better understand it,” she said, “if I was being unfaithful too.” Her tone had lost its note of accusation; was fast developing into a whine. This was no big improvement. The drop that had been teetering at the tip of her nose now broke away from its anxiously awaiting replacement and, narrowly missing her nightgown, fell neatly between her plimsolls. “Come back to me,” she pleaded. “Let’s try again to make it work.”
    What was I to do? Where were all the members of staff? Sod the staff, where were all the patients?
    Uncertainty was snatched away from me.
    Again I wouldn’t quite have used the word ‘improvement’.
    â€œOh,” she cried, “oh Christ! Oh James! I’m dying for a shit.”
    I wildly looked about me. Sweet providence—there was a lavatory nearby; on board that midnight train to Georgia I simply hadn’t noticed. “Back there!” I urged. “Look! See the sign?”
    She nodded eagerly yet when I tried to pull away continued to hang on. “No, no. Come with me. I can’t manage.”
    â€œThen it’s better if you go on,” I said. “I’ll send a nurse.”
    But she was already dragging me forward. “Don’t want a nurse! Want you! Oh hurry James I can’t hold on!” With her free hand she prodded at the parcel. “Oh drop that stupid thing! Yes I’ll wash them for you! Just get me to the lav!”
    I dropped the parcel, kicked it to one