PART 2
I spent the rest of that night working out how to talk to him.
It took about forty minutes to build a system and we did it entirely with one eye.
I did not invent it. There is a version of it in the training, for stroke patients, and I had never used it once.
What I had to invent was the speed. He could hold that eye open for about four seconds at a time and then it closed whether he wanted it to or not.
So everything had to be a question with a yes or a no in it, which sounds simple and which took me two hours to get good at.
You cannot ask a man in that state what is happening to him. You can only ask him things you have already half worked out.
Which means the ceiling on that entire night was my own guessing, and there were things he was trying to tell me in the first hour that I did not get to for four days.
One blink is yes. Two is no. Looking at the door means somebody is coming.
That third one was his. He built it himself, on the first night, before I understood what he was doing — and it tells you what he had spent two months thinking about.
I said: can you hear everything they say around you?
One blink.
Something went through me that I have not been able to describe since, and it was not pity.
It was the understanding that a man had been lying in that room for two months listening to his own nephew choose hymns.
By lunchtime his lips could move a little. I put my ear against his mouth and I could feel the words more than hear them.
He said: Christo isn't waiting for my money.
Then, after about a minute, because it cost him that much: he's speeding it up.
Eight words and one more, and it took him nearly two minutes of a four-hour window.
I have thought about what I would have spent that window on. There are about four hundred things I would have said first — help me, get a doctor, ring the police, where is my sister.
He spent it on a diagnosis of his own family.
That is either the clearest thinking I have ever encountered or it is a man who had had fifty-six nights to draft one sentence, and I have decided it is the second one and that the second one is more frightening.
Before I could ask anything we heard footsteps.
Christo came in without knocking, which he has never done once in six weeks.
Grey suit. A watch worth more than my car. Irritated before he had looked at anybody.
He said: how's our patient?
I said: no change.
He did not look at his uncle. Not once, in the entire ninety seconds he was in that room, and I watched for it deliberately.
He said: good. The doctor's here at four.
There is one detail about that sentence that took me eleven days to notice.
He said it to me. Not to his uncle, and not about his uncle.
In six weeks I never once heard that man say a sentence in that room with the word he in it where he meant the person in the bed.
It was always our patient, or the doctor's here, or how's it looking.
You can go two months without using a pronoun about a living relative, if you are careful, and Christo was careful, and I think it was the only careful thing he did.
Then he said: and one more thing, Calla. If that child cries all night again, you and he can find somewhere else to stay.
I said: it won't happen again.
He left. I waited until the footsteps had gone all the way down the stairs.
Then Rendel opened his eyes and said: don't tell him anything.
I nodded.
And then he did something with his face that took me a while to read and that I got wrong at the time.
I thought he was frightened.
He was not. He has told me since, and I believe him, that in that moment he was working out whether I would last the week — because he had already watched two carers come and go since the September, and because a man in that bed has nothing to do all day except assess the only people who come into the room.
He had been assessing me for six weeks before I ever knew he was there.
He knows what I sing to my son. He knows I cry in that room on a Thursday, which is when the agency money lands and does not cover things.
That is the part nobody thinks about when they hear the word paralysed.
And it works the other way too, which is the part I have to sit with.
He heard everything I said in that room for six weeks.
