The corridors were deserted.
No doctors, no nurses, no porters . . .
No sign of anyone at all.
No windows either.
And the only thing I could hear was a faint humming sound that seemed to be coming from behind the walls.
The recovery room was nice enough. It had a small settee and a matching armchair, a table and chairs, a few cupboards, a flat screen TV, and a proper little bed (not a hospital bed). The floor was carpeted, and there was a separate bathroom (with a bath and a shower). And on the far side of the room there was a window. It was fitted with a blackout blind to keep out the daylight, and when Dr Kamara had first shown me inside, the blind was down and the room was so dark that she’d had to turn on the lights to show me around. The lights were controlled by a dimmer switch.
‘Your dad will be here at twelve,’ Dr Kamara reminded me. ‘We’ll bring him straight here when he arrives, okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is there anything you need before I go?’
Yeah, I thought, I need to not be here, I need to not be a monster, I need my ordinary life back . . . my shitty old ordinary life . . .
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I told her.
I don’t get people sometimes. I don’t understand how their minds work. Take Dr Kamara, for instance. I’d thought at first that she was the most compassionate of the three doctors, the most perceptive, the one with the most understanding. But when I’d asked her about niqabs and burqas that time – whether or not non-Muslims could wear them – I got the impression that I’d offended her in some way, and the only explanation I could think of was that she’d thought I was only asking her because I’d assumed she was a Muslim, and that I’d based that assumption purely on her appearance and the fact that she had an ‘Asian-sounding’ name. Either that or she was a Muslim, and the idea of me wearing a niqab or a burqa was somehow offensive to her faith.
Whatever the reason, I just didn’t get it.
I didn’t say anything though. And I didn’t mention niqabs or burqas again either.
But that didn’t mean I’d changed my mind.
I still wasn’t going to let my dad see my skull.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to put Dad through the ordeal of trying to pretend that his daughter wasn’t repulsive, or that I didn’t want him to be so traumatised that he wouldn’t be able to cope with things anymore – although, for Finch’s sake, that was something I was desperate to avoid – I also had my own selfish reasons for not wanting Dad to see my faceless face. It felt bad enough knowing how I looked to the doctors, but they were doctors, and although they still couldn’t help staring at me now and then – their professional integrity overcome by the sheer freakishness of my condition – they were, for the most part, as restrained and objective as they could be. They were doctors, and for some reason we’ll reveal things to doctors that we wouldn’t dream of sharing with anyone else.
But my dad wasn’t a doctor.
He was my dad.
And I knew he wouldn’t be able to hide his repulsion if he saw the horror of my see-through head . . . and I didn’t think I could live with that. I mean, imagine how you’d feel if your dad (or your mum) were so revolted by your appearance that they couldn’t look at you without grimacing in disgust . . .
It would tear you apart, wouldn’t it?
It would turn your world upside down.
‘You can get changed now if you want,’ Dr Kamara told me, putting the carrier bag full of clothes on the settee. ‘You don’t have to,’ she added. ‘You can wait until your dad’s brought some fresh clothes if you want, or if you feel more comfortable keeping the gown on . . . it’s entirely up to you.’
It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. I knew that nothing could make me look normal, but there were still certain things that could make me look a tiny bit less abnormal.
There was nothing normal about the gown.
There was something normal about my clothes.
I turned the lights down low, then went over and sat down on the settee next to the carrier bag. I wasn’t looking forward to getting changed – it meant exposing my body again, and even in the lowest light I was still going to see stuff I didn’t want to see – and for a moment or two I wondered if I could do it with the sleep mask on. It would obviously be quite awkward, but it certainly wasn’t impossible. The only thing was . . .
It didn’t feel right.
I shouldn’t have to be scared of myself.
And even if I was, I didn’t have to be so pathetic about it.
I picked up the carrier bag, placed it on my knees, and reached inside.
The first thing I pulled out was something that shouldn’t have been there. When I’d taken my phone out of my hoodie pocket the other day, the hoodie had been at the top of the bag, and I’d put it back in the same place. But now there was something else on top of it, and I knew it wasn’t mine. It was a smallish polythene bag, and inside it was a pair of sunglasses and a folded-up headscarf. The sunglasses were fashionably large, the kind that celebrities wear, and the lenses were really dark. The headscarf was made from some kind of silky black material.
Dr Kamara . . .
The sunglasses and scarf had to be from Dr Kamara.
Maybe I hadn’t offended after all . . . or maybe I had, but she’d forgiven me. Or maybe it was just me . . .
I don’t get people.
I really don’t.
I opened up the headscarf and held it out in front of me. I didn’t know if it was a hijab or just an ordinary headscarf – I didn’t know the difference, to be honest – but it didn’t matter. It was easily big enough to cover my whole head. And the sunglasses would cover my eyeless eyes.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, looking myself over for about the hundredth time. From the neck down, I looked just about normal – pumps, leggings, skirt, T-shirt, hoodie. The only slight oddity was the white gloves on my hands and the white socks on my feet. From the neck up though, I didn’t look normal at all. I’d never even tried on a headscarf before, let alone had to cover my entire head with one, and it wasn’t just a matter of making sure that everything was covered up either. I had to make sure that it stayed covered up, which meant working out how to wrap the scarf round my head in such a way that it wouldn’t come undone.
It took quite a while, but I got there in the end.
And when I put the sunglasses on and pulled up my hood, tightening the drawstring to fix it firmly around my wrapped-up face, every inch of my see-through head was safely hidden from sight.
I looked ridiculous.
But that was okay.
It was the price I had to pay for not looking hideous.
I