Lights out at 10 by Neil James
The hospital never sleeps. Even in darkness, light from the corridor slips under my door like floodwater. Footsteps squeak along vinyl floors.
Still wearing my joggers, I swing my legs off the bed and find the light switch. The strip light flickers then flares, five dead flies baked into the plastic casing.
I walk to the sink and wash my hands again. I wash them until they’re sore. Can’t avoid the face in the mirror. Shit, Johnny, you look so damn old – not Mum’s handsome boy anymore. Eyes are bloodshot. Skin’s more grey than brown. Hospitals are supposed to make you better, not feel like shit.
This is my life now. Lights out at ten; pills in plastic pots; group therapy with men who shout at ghosts. If I’d known, I’d have done a better job on my wrists.
I leave my room and head down the long white corridor. Sadness is soaked into the paintwork, settling into every spiderweb crack. At night it seeps out, slow and greasy–like water stains bleeding through a ceiling. Our water tank burst at home once. The brown rings spread outwards across Dad’s fresh paint job. That’s what sadness is like. You see it everywhere if you know where to look.
Ravel pokes his head through the nurses’ station door, his uniform West Indies maroon. His sad old face is just like my old man’s–all tired eyes and greying dreads.
He asks me what I’m doing up, with it being half ten and everything. I tell him I can’t sleep and ask if I can watch some TV with him and Antonio.
He looks confused.
I’m being unorthodox.
Ravel doesn’t like unorthodox.
I talk about staying up late at home to watch football with the old man. When I was young, he’d give me a blanket and a hot chocolate. When I was older, a can of Red Stripe. Maybe I can do the same here, I say. Chat shit and watch TV. Not like therapy, just three guys talking.
Ravel asks me if I’m feeling alright. Whether I’ve taken my meds tonight.
Antonio calls out from inside the room. Says to let me in for a bit. Ravel shrugs like a husband going whatever and steps back. Only, I don’t enter. I’m rooted to the corridor, staring through the doorway at the worn brown carpet.
“What you waiting for? You heard the man. Come in if you want,” says Ravel.
Trouble is, deep down, I know. I’m making a normal thing seem crazy, just ‘cos of who I am.
I tell them I don’t want to cause a problem. That this was just a silly idea. I’ll go to bed now, and I’m sorry for bothering them.
I turn back. Head to my room with the strip light that hums like radio waves. I imagine Ravel giving Antonio his usual why do we bother look.
It’s after ten. Lights out.
Neil James is a writer from Stoke-on-Trent, England, and the author of ‘Stoke and I:The Nineties’ (Pitch Publishing). His fiction has been published by Literally Stories, Cranked Anvil Press and Wensum Literary Magazine amongst others. He lives at www.neiljameswriter.co.uk and can be found on Twitter/X @NeilJamesWriter
