WARMER

Don't come in here. This is a bad place where the air is meant to be sterile but instead it's just stale, and where the dust on your feet are the bones of people dead, from yesterday and long ago, taken from happy lives just like mine. I've left Lizzy at the door, she's gone outside to play on the swings. She's never coming in here. Ever. Over my dead body she's coming in here.

Yesterday at the breakfast table right?, as Auntie Ruby drank her Nescafe, black-no sugar, and Uncle Frank ate his prunes, black-no sugar, I was sick, black-no sugar. Right there at the table. I didn't even have time to turn my head, it just gushed from my mouth in a hot smelly jet and then ran down over the side and onto my legs. Lizzy just sort of looks up at me half puzzled and half amused and then laughs out loud. I couldn't move because I'd shit my pants too and Auntie Ruby says not to worry and,
"Come on sunshine" as she lifts me out of the mess. I start to cry like some kind of emotional cripple, which I guess is what I am, and then somehow, and I don't know how, I can see me crying from above myself, like I'm looking down on the whole crappy, piece of shit event. I want to stop so bad, I want to stop and open my eyes but it doesn't happen. My eyes are closed but I can see her leading me up the stairs to the bathroom. I'm still crying as she runs me a bath and I'm saying that I wish the water could get inside and wash away all the shit in there.                                 "Hush now Marcus, she'll be fine, you'll see. She'll be home soon, I know it." I had ‘A‘ level tests due at school but I didn‘t go. They had to wait.

It's nurse Dana that leads me to the new ward. She's so hot and sexy, I think I love her but this isn't the time or the place for love. Last week I tried to wank myself over her but it didn't happen. Nothing worked . All the lights were on but no one was home down there. God, d'you know what it‘s like to be fucked up and fifteen? I'm so scared sometimes.

Inside it's warm as usual and everything is new, brand new and my mam is sitting up. Her tired eyes are too big for her now as she holds out her arms and I run to her. She kisses my neck and my hands, my hair, my lips, my cheeks and everything she can kiss she kisses. I know what she's doing though. She's hiding her tears because I feel them on my face. She always does this but I don't mind it one bit.
After she asks where Lizzy is.
"She's outside on the swings"
"Come on then" she says and I wheel her over to the window. Tired eyes aren't tired anymore, frail hands find the strength to wave, brittle hair blows in the breeze, thin skin and nose pipes stretching together with laughter. Happiness has come in through the window.

Yesterday, what I did, right, was I got all my mammys things together in the garden, her handbags and her shoes, her Tampax and her nail varnishes, and doused them in petrol from the mower and flamed them. Whoof. My eyelashes went but it was worth it. Well I can't let Lizzy go through this can I. Everytime we see these things we want the old times back. But what if they're not coming back? So why keep reminding ourselves of them. No, better gone they are. Better by far than making us ill.

My mam turns from the window. She asks me what I think and nods at the room around us. I tell her it's cool.
"So you won't mind Lizzy coming in here then?"
"Yeah she can come in here mam. As long as it stays like this, not like that other room. Lizzy didn‘t like that place, with all those machines tickin‘and bleepin'"        "No. Neither did I Marcus. Neither did I. Now, listen," she says as she leans forwards and takes my hands. And suddenly and only now, for the first time in so long her face lights up like from some long sleep, and her eyes and her cheeks have come back some kind of freaky furlough, and they are saying
"I'm coming home next week. Home for good."
My mams skin, right, it was like the colour of all those chickens you see in the supermarkets, but suddenly it's redder and warmer. And then it happens again, I close my eyes and fuck knows where I am. The kid below me is me, with his warmer mother, an the kid starts to cry as he tells her about the little bonfire he has had but she pats two chicken fingers onto his lips to stop him and she's saying it's okay, it's okay, that she knows all about it, that Aunty Ruby told her and that it doesn't matter. The kid can hardly speak because all the tears have taken his breath away and his words can only fall from his mouth like he's laying fuckin' eggs or something.
"Really...mam...are you...coming home..."
And she grabs me and I know that she can't speak either because again I can feel her tears down my neck and it's a real long time before she sort of spits this word into my hair
"Yessss..."
And her smile bursts through the thinness of her face, hiding but no longer hidden, my ever beautiful mammy.