My Pleasure, Darling

39: Domesticity

The thirty-six hours are very quiet. Felix opens one of his novels – he offers me the other, and I take it. I'm a quarter of the way in before I realise I have no idea what is in it. Who the main characters are. Their motivations. Nothing. I've got nothing. My eyes have been scanning across the words and not a single one has actually dripped into my consciousness.

I stay reading, though. The more I read, the less I have to talk to Felix.

I've had showers since being brought to this hospital, sure I have, but now that I feel a little less weak, and a little more safe, I have the shower of a lifetime. There are cloths, dry, rough, scratchy ones. They feel like total bliss on my skin. The harder I rub, the more I irritate my skin, the more it feels like I am sloughing off layers of grime and hatred and plague. Every inch of me gets the scrubbing treatment and it feels magnificent. Hot water. Sensitive skin. I even do my best to scrape my scalp and I wash it three times with the hospital shampoo.

It's almost like I can wash away my time in nomad country. I can't, of course, but for a few minutes, it feels like I can, and that will have to be enough. When my skin stings it's like I never committed any war crimes at all.

Felix watches me climb back into bed and pick up the book again. He watches me eat when he brings in the meals. He seems eternally on the verge of asking something, but he never does. We barely speak three sentences more to each other. Whatever it is he wants to ask, I don't really want to know.

By the next day, I'm hopping mad. A tracksuit has been donated through our alcohol-dosed cubicle for me, one that's comically large, and I've half a feeling that somebody made it that big on purpose, to make a point. You're too fat, hurr durr, yadda yadda. Maybe I am, but it sustained me through plague, a bullet and a fever, so I think I'll stick with the extra chub.

I can't wait to get out. I think this amuses Felix, but I can't imagine a world in which he isn't also very eager to leave.

It feels like forever before his phone rings. "Yes, Doctor. Yes. Yes, we are. Yes. Thank you." He looks at me with a deep sigh as he puts his bag on his shoulder. "Looks like we can go now."

Felix is not entirely correct in this assumption. We are doused down with an extra-long misting of alcohol – just to be sure – and then, on the other side of the cubicle, is a doctor and a nurse, both in hazmat, waiting to check us both out. Temperature, blood pressure, oxygen, cognition, and then we have to wait for a blood test.

The blood test is mercifully short. Ten, fifteen minutes we have to wait. It feels like eternity.

While we wait, I'm given the details of my operation on a tablet to scroll through. There's a lot of it, and most of it in surgical language I never learned. The highlights are obvious enough though. Flesh was removed. They tried to take out the bullet. They ended up sawing away the bone, putting a piece of metal in, and taking more flesh before stitching me back up.

I'm on painkillers – huge white pills that I take dutifully – and they help, but I can still feel the metal in my body, and it's the strangest sensation. It's a hardness that isn't like my own bones, a coolness almost, though I know that's practically impossible. When I lay my hand on my thigh, I can feel the bar. It's a slightly unsettling sensation. However, I'd rather have the leg with metal than not have the leg.

"How long do you think recovery time will be?" Felix asks. "For her leg, I mean."

"It depends on a lot of things," the doctor answers him. My eyes glaze over at the details of the surgery as I eavesdrop. "With her weight, it will probably take longer than usual."