Page 10 of The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right.’
I’ve not long finished breakfast when a short, wiry man with a mop of very thick, very dark hair puts his head around the curtain.
‘Hi,’ he says, holding up a hand in a kind of wave. ‘I’m Dr Ali. Or you can call me Hamza. I’m one of the psychiatrists here. Would it be all right to sit and talk to you for a while?’
I don’t know what to say. Part of me is terrified of opening up but the rest of me is bored shitless and desperate for a conversation of some kind.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Why not?’
He drags a plastic chair to the side of my bed. It makes an awful screeching sound and I wince.
‘Too close?’ he asks.
‘No, it’s not that, it’s… It was loud, that’s all.’ I remember that the doctor said I should report any headaches. Is this the start of one? It’s hard to tell.
‘Oh. Sorry.’ He sits down, and I notice that he doesn’t have anything with him. No notebook or pen.
‘This isn’t a proper session,’ he says, as if he can tell what I’m thinking. ‘I just want to get to know you a little bit and assess whether we need to spend more time together. It’s nothing to worry about. I talk to everyone who’s been through this kind of ordeal.’
What does he mean by ‘this kind of ordeal’? Everyone whose partner has tried to kill them? Or everyone who’s been hurt badly enough, by any means, to end up in a coma?
‘Is there anything you want to ask me, before we get started?’ he asks.
My mind is blank. I’ve never had any kind of therapy, never felt I needed it, so I don’t really know what to expect.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Great.’ He clasps his hands together on his lap. ‘Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself. Your name, how old you are, where you live, what sort of job you do, that kind of thing.’
I reach to pull my hair into a ponytail. It feels lank and greasy – when was it washed? I don’t like people seeing me like this. I’ll have to ask Angela if we can wash it somehow.
‘I’m Shelley,’ I say. ‘I’m thirty. I run a pub called the Pheasant and I live in the flat above it with my husband, David.’
Hamza looks quizzical. ‘The Pheasant in Loughborough?’
I nod.
‘I know it,’ he says. ‘You might even have served me an orange juice once or twice. Tell me, do you have a sense of what time of year it is, and what year, in fact?’
Angela asked me this yesterday. It strikes me that it’s possible I’ve been in a coma for longer than I thought. Maybe it’s October already? But no, didn’t Fern tell me I’ve only been in here a few days? There’s no window in the room to look out of at the weather.
‘Well, when this happened to me, it was September 2017. But I don’t know how long ago that was.’
‘I see. And when you say when this happened, could you tell me exactly what you think happened to you? What led to you ending up in hospital with these injuries?’
‘Yes,’ I say. Now we’re getting to it. This must be what he wants to hear about. The attack.
He waits, crosses one leg over the other, clears his throat. I can tell he’s working up to speaking again when I finally find my voice.
‘I’d been working, like every night. I came up to the flat an hour or so before closing. David was in our bedroom, waiting for me.’
I pause and look at him, and he nods politely, urging me to go on. But it’s so hard to know how much is too much, how much is enough.
‘He was all worked up. I know what it’s like when he’s like that. The best thing to do is just lie low and try to let him calm down.’ I’m back there, in sensation and in fear. I don’t have to close my eyes. And I know that I’m here, in this bed, on this safe hospital ward with this gentle psychiatrist, but I’m there too. I think perhaps a part of me always will be.
‘Why haven’t the police come?’ I ask, my voice cracking.
He doesn’t show any confusion about the interruption to my story.
