By Harrison Abbott

The man that was on the bed next to me died last week, so it’s just me in the ward now.

I miss him. He was called Miles and was about 40 years older than me. I suppose I didn’t know him that well but we became friends over the couple of months that we knew each other. His wife came to visit him quite often. This tiny old woman. She and him would speak in these soft spidery voices and I would head elsewhere in the ward to give them privacy.

Where is Miles now, I wonder? Has his funeral been yet? I’ve never personally liked the idea of being cremated. Would rather be a skeleton in a cemetery.

I went to London once when I was young and visited this graveyard. A really old graveyard, filled with thousands of tombstones and almost all of them were submerged with ivy. The ivy had grown over the masonry and covered the names and the years of birth and death and it was obvious that nobody came to visit the graves. All of these skeletons were forgotten by the current living. The irony being that the cemetery was so pretty.

Saying ‘when I was young’ is a bit ironic, because I still am young. That London trip was when I was in my 20s. And I’m in my 30s now.

As a boy, I didn’t think that people died in their 30s. Unless it was violently. If they got hit by a car, or something similar. I certainly would never thought I’d be terminally ill in a hospital ward at this age.

The nights can be pretty bad. I wish I could switch my head off. But this isn’t possible, and I just lie and uselessly regurgitate stories from my past.

It was like this earlier on, a few hours ago. But it’s young morning now. And the colours of the summery sky are blooming through the windows. I can see the windows at the far end of the ward, and that’s something cheerful.  

There’s a whoosh down the corridor. The front doors open. A flock of young women come through. The nurses. They giggle and yack together. I wave at them. They smile and wave back and they head past my bed to go and get changed.

One of the nurses is called Michelle and I’m friendly with her. She comes up to my bed later that morning.

“How are you doing, pal?” she says. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah,” I lie, “thank you.”

“Any new drawings in your notebook today?”

“Not yet. I’ll do some later, though.”

Michelle’s a nice woman. She has a husband and two little kids. I know because I often ask her about her family life, just for something to do. Her daughter has just started primary school and so I ask how she’s finding it. Stuff like that. Michelle has a quirky voice; she’s funny: the kind of person I wish I’d been like in the past. I often think that if I’d had her kind of personality and outlook then I wouldn’t be here now. But I suppose I may as well make use of her benevolence whilst I still can.

She can’t really ask me conversational queries in return – as to my family life, or whatnot – and so she asks me about my artwork instead.

Yes, I draw pictures. Or at least, I try to. I keep a sketchpad on me and when I’m feeling energetic enough, I do little drawings. Mostly from my imagination; because there isn’t much visual material in the ward. Although there was one time I asked Michelle if I could draw her? She said, yeah, sure. So I did a quick portrait of her. And showed it to her.

“Wow,” she went, “that’s amazing. Can I keep it?”

I tore out the sheet from the pad and gave it to her. She asked me to sign it. And said that she would put it on her wall at home. I wasn’t sure if she was just being kind but I like to think she was being genuine.

I’ve had my artwork published, over the years. In journals and magazines; and I’ve had a few commissions; and one time I did some illustrations for a writer friend I knew. He wrote the book and I did the pictures. And the book sold an okay amount of copies. He gave me a wee fee for my efforts and I was quite chuffed.

And there are times, now that I’m in this situation, where I go, ‘Maybe I will live on, in a small way, through my pictures. Even if only a few people will ever see them.’

Then there are other moments where I think of myself as a diddy, small-time artist who wasted the free time he had when he was still healthy. And I won’t be remembered. People won’t be gazing at my work in national galleries, years after I’m gone. They will not be looking my name up online to see my material, and certainly won’t be reading my biography.

And so there is a mix of wispy hope, and lost despair.

But when I’m drawing I don’t tend to think so much. I just do it. And so this is a kind of medicine to me.

The morning passes. I doze a little. And when I wake up it’s afternoon and I’m feeling revitalised. So I figure that I’ll get up and wander around the ward.

I go over to the windows on the far side. There is a decent view from here. Beyond the hospital car park there are fields and trees and in the long distance the outlines of hills. The hospital is right on the edge of the city so you can basically see out into the countryside and sometimes, like today, it can be pleasing.

I’ve drawn this little landscape many times in my sketchpad. The annoying thing is that I can’t open the windows. And the glass naturally acts as a barrier. I wish I could go outside, and draw in the open air.

What makes this dilemma worse is that I could go out and draw this landscape from this height. Because there is a little balcony where the nurses go on their lunch breaks. I can see it from here: the balcony. And now and then I spot Michelle and her chums, laughing and playing on their phones and eating their sandwiches.

A while back I said to Michelle:

“Hey, Michelle?”

“What’s up, pal?”

“I was wondering – would it be okay if I could go onto the balcony some time? I’d like to draw the fields. You know, in my pad. It would be easier if I did it outside. Would that be all right?”

“I’m sorry, pal. That balcony is for staff only.”

“It’s only for me to draw the landscape. Just one time?”

“Sadly, I can’t let you. Patients aren’t meant to be there. Sorry.”

Every time I’m at the window I always yearn to be on the balcony.  

Then I look down at the car park. My ward is six storeys up. And if I jumped from this storey, I would no doubt be dead, splat, when I hit the bottom.

It would be scary to jump but it would also be quick and I would not have to wait to die in this ward. I know that, given time, I won’t have enough strength to even walk around anymore. Let alone draw. I will be too weak to do my drawings and this is what terrifies me most. And so I’d rather die whilst I can still be of artistic use.

Hmm. If I could just get to that balcony somehow. Then I’d have these options. 1/ To draw the countryside in the open air. 2/ To jump. I could do both.

And there is an idea I’ve been working on the last few days.  

The staff door that the nurses use. The door that leads out to their balcony – it has a code lock on it. I.e., not a lock that you need a card to buzz open. You just need to punch in the code and then turn the switch. And all of the nurses know the code.

So … what I’ve been trying recently is to hover near the balcony door. And then when the nurses go for their break – I try to spot what code they punch in. I have my sketchpad with me. And I pretend to draw, whilst noting down the numbers/letters that they press.

Obviously I feel like a bit of a creep, spying on them, but I’ve made some progress. I’ve learned that they punch four times on the lock. And I definitely know that the first three punches are: 1 3 X. Those are for sure. Only I haven’t figured out the last punch yet.

I decide that I will do more espionage today. It’s nearly lunch time. So I lurk by the balcony door, with my sketchbook open. Hoping that the nurses will appear. I wait half an hour. Then forty minutes. After an hour I start to tire. The ward is very quiet. Perhaps I could try going up to the lock, and punching in the 1 3 X – and then trying the last digit, just pressing at random until I find the right one? But I might get caught. And that would just be embarrassing. I can’t try that in the daylight.

Dejectedly, I head back to my bed. And sleep for a while.

When I awake, it’s night time. And Michelle has gone home. The overhead lights in the ward are all off. Leaving only the little red and green dots of the machinery by my bed.

I feel awful. Physically. You know when you wake up sometimes, and your body is so spent of energy that you feel glued down? Totally stuck to the mattress. Well, the last few weeks I’ve had that on turbo levels.

And with the drained physicality there comes a great sadness in knowing that I’m dying. I believe that sadness is the most powerful of emotions. Back in the past I used to get angry a lot. Things that happened to me in adolescence. That made me furious – and the anger would revolve, manically, over and over. The rage never went anywhere, never did anything purposeful. And I used to reckon that wrath was the strongest emotion.

But sadness is what makes you a person. It is far more potent than wrath. You may have all of these fiery thoughts inside of you: but, flames depend on other elements in order to keep burning. Sadness resides by itself. You can stomp out a fire, or scoosh it with water … but sad thoughts fly in their own wind, and they will not be shot down, nor their wings falter. There is a purity to sadness that no other emotion has.

And I often find this unbearable.

I lie for a long while. Hoping that I might go back to sleep. But, I can’t. So I get out of the bed. And head down the empty ward. I go to the windows.

The sky is an oceanic ultramarine. There are dainty stars here and there. Remember that this is summer, and the nights short, and so dawn will not be far off.

Downwards, I look, at the car park, six storeys below. And I think to myself, ‘Let’s just jump. I don’t want to wait around anymore.’

I go along the corridor to the balcony door.

Nobody else is in the ward tonight. I may as well give it a go. And so I start punching in the buttons that I know. 1 3 X. And follow them up with a guessed button. 1 3 X GUESS. One of them must work. I go down all the buttons on the left hand side. None are correct. Then move on to the right. Come on. Come on, please. I finally go 1 3 X 0. And there is a satisfying click. I try the switch – and it turns!

A burst of cool oxygen flumes over me. This is real oxygen. Of the world. I’m on the balcony, finally, after months of wanting to be here. There is the sky and the stars and I can see them without any thick glass in the way. And beyond the hospital grounds are the hazy fields and the lofty hills. It’s still dark, but I can see their sleepy contours.

For a long while I simply stand there on the balcony with the cool breeze on my skin.

The railings come up to my ribcage. It would be very easy to climb up onto them, and jump off into the car park. Directly below the balcony, way down, there aren’t any cars – it’s just a stretch of cement. So I won’t need to worry about damaging somebody’s car if I jump. I won’t land on anybody’s vehicle.

But I don’t want to anymore. Jump. Not this morning, at least. Maybe another night but not now. I know the code to the door – so I can do suicide another time.

What I really want to do instead is draw. Now that I have a better vantage point of the countryside; there is a wider scope from here. Yeah, let’s do that instead.

I go back into the ward. To my bed, and I get my sketchpad from my table and load up with pencils. I return to the balcony door. 1 3 X O. Ha. Outside, the sky is slowly lightening in the east. This will be one of the final ever dawns that I’ll witness. It might be the last one that I’ll see in the fresh air. Because the night-shift nurse might wander into the ward, and come looking for me. I could still be caught. But for now, it doesn’t matter.

Opening a fresh page on the sketchpad, I begin with an outline of the hills in the upper horizon. Via my pencil streaks, I can forget everything. Forget that the doctors can’t save me. That’s not important.

The sky is clear of clouds and gradually the stars begin to shy away from visibility as if they have never been here at all. And there emerges a stunning redness at the bottom of the sky. That brings with it an intense vermillion and then lemon yellow. The colours spread over the countryside and allow me further clarity.  

I’m definitely not leaping off the balcony this morning. I am part of this euphoric dawn. And I can make a drawing of it.