Mosaic

I am teaching. The students are hard at work.

‘OK. So it’s three coffees and a tea — then I’ll show the slides.’

I go into the kitchen. It is almost lunchtime. I have prepared some salads. The potatoes are ready too, they just need to be dressed. While the kettle boils, I lay the table. I change the tablecloth.  I choose a beautiful one embroidered with intricate patterns of pink and white. It was a gift from the Nobel laureate Neguib Mahfouz. I must tell the students the story, I remind myself. I will throw the old one in the laundry basket.

The storeroom is dusky, lit dimly by the grilled glazed window and door to the garden at the far end. The room is a glorified long, narrow lean-to. Shelves of mosaic line the walls, custom built to fit sheets of vitreous and ceramic material. Opposite the shelves stands an old butlers sink, and a rack of soaking trays. It is a useful system if, like me, you use a lot of sheeted up material. Adjacent to the rack is a heated cupboard, with shelves of metal mesh to dry the tiles.

At the end of the store is a utility room. I keep my tools here, and the washing machine. A fly buzzes against the glass. Spiders have spun webs between the metal bars on the window. There is washing powder spilled on the floor. A broom handle sticks out across the threshold of the door — signs of a lack of attention.

Suddenly I am in mid air. Then I land, wholly horizontal.

I’ll lie here for a minute, I think. My head is resting on a metal toolbox. It is some time before I am able to move. Someone will come, I think, ashamed of my weakness. It is not easy to stand up. I feel strange, and feeble. My arm is a funny shape.

‘Excuse me’ I say, slightly fuzzily, to a nurse ‘Please may I have one of those cardboard bowler hats to be sick into?’

A&E (accident and emergency) is crowded.

‘ Come this way’ says the nurse. ‘Lie down. Look into the light’ she says with apparent concern. I am concerned too. Matt is parking the car. How will he find me in this tiny cubicle? I thought we would queue for hours. But it’s a relief to be able to rest.

I feel a rush of overwhelming love for humankind:  gratitude to my assistant Sandra for taking over the class, to the students who were generous enough to let me go, to the handsome, brainy Asian doctors, who are going to put me together again, to the insightful nurse who plucked me from the crowds, to my husband for his solicitude and for patiently reading to me as we wait for the X Ray. He goes to get me a drink. A young man with a bloodied bandaged hand towers over me. He is wearing work clothes – plastic clogs and checked trousers.  I recognise the uniform.

‘Are you a chef?’ I ask.

‘Yes’ he says.

‘Did you do that at work?’

‘Yes, I sliced through the tendon as I chopped’ he says.

As he paces about, he tells me about his journey to the UK from Hungary, the room he shares in South London, his job in Crouch End. ‘I like my employers’ he says ‘but I don’t think they’ll give me sick pay.’

‘I’ve told you more than once to sit down’ the nurse says, faux-gruff. ‘We can’t have you cluttering up the corridors.’

‘It doesn’t hurt as much if I’m standing’ he says, and he paces off.

Someone is knocking at the door. My glasses have been smashed in the fall, but I can tell it is a man, in a turban.  He is grinning and grimacing, inviting me to come with a beckoning forefinger. He beats ever more angrily. Hospital protocol forbids me to open up.  I start towards the door, but think better of it. I must check with the staff first. He drums more and more loudly, infuriated by the delay.

‘Oh yes, say the nurses – you can let him in, he’s one of the doctors!’

‘I know I look like a dangerous man’ he says with an accusatory air as I open the door ‘but I’m not really.’

Fine judgments are difficult to make when you’ve had a bang on the head.

In addition to a bang on the head, Emma Biggs had a twisted knee, a broken wrist (distal radius), a broken rib and a grazed arm. She would like to thank her students for their understanding and hopes they will forgive her self-destructive act.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs