Helen Lyttle

Listen to Helen’s story – read by Jo Clark

You are dressed in a white shirt, dark blue jeans and a pink polyester cardigan. You hate pink. The cardigan is not yours. The girls in the laundry do their best but that’s how it is sometimes. Last night you wanted your own cardigan, the navy cashmere one, and you sobbed when you couldn’t find it. You went along the corridor making enquiries. Urgent, desperate enquiries. But nobody understood. When you bury your face in its softness, inhale its musk and that perfume you used to love, you are whooshed to a different world.  

And you stand outside a functional redbrick building looking into a small room. It has white walls, a grey acrylic carpet, a surgical bed, a sharps bin, and a one-person desk with a computer. There are people sitting around that desk. You think you might know them but they have their backs to you and the window is blurry with condensation. The room is full of words. You hear them but they bob like starlings on an updraft.

      scans are conclusive                                                          risk to patients

vascular dementia

                           my dear                                                so sorry

so sorry ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffso sorry

so sorryffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffmy dear

The certificates on the wall have your name on them. Dr Catherine Swan. There is a woman sitting at the desk, crying. And she has your name too.

You think that one of those people came to see you today. You talked about the cardigan while they nodded and drank their tea. After dinner you want your mother. You open the window and shout into the darkness. Help me help me help me help me. Nurse Laura comes with the medicine trolley. 

The worst is not that you soil yourself and nurse Kitty has to change your pants. The worst is not that I romanticise your tragedy, festoon it with garish cliches. The worst is not that you understand less and less these faces these mouths these hands these pushes these shoves these needles this drowning on dry land. The worst is that sometimes you do.

Helen Lyttle’s flash fiction has appeared in Paragraph Planet, Rejection Letters and other places.
Always trying, usually failing, to write a novel.