With My Little Eye Read Online Free Page B

his family. They didn’t want to move. But the board decided to build a director’s house in the hospital compound.’ She smiled. ‘It’s a smaller house than this, much smaller.’
    ‘Oh, blow the expense!’ Laura laughed. ‘We so much want it.’
    ‘You’ve decided already?’ Mrs Kawasaki was astonished.
    Laura laughed again, this time throwing back her head. ‘When can we move in?’

(3)
    It is curious that, washed up in this wasteland by my stroke, I should spend so much of my time thinking of that long-ago seven months in Japan. On the map of my life whole areas of the past are blurred and faded. But that brief period is clear and bright in every detail. It is as though the tunnel vision of my memory is now focused constantly on it. I even have chaotic and frequently disturbing dreams of lurid fragments of it jostling and jangling against each other.
    Although it is midday I have just had such a dream. Now it has been abruptly ended by Laura’s arrival. She has brought some Scotch eggs and two meringues, prepared by her with all the professionalism that she brings to every task. There has been a problem with the boiler. What is the use of a service contract if no engineer is available for five days? It keeps cutting out and she has to keep restarting it. She is indignant. People highly efficient themselves are always infuriated by inefficiency in others.
    No, I can’t possibly eat another Scotch egg, I tell her, delicious though they are. Lying like this, immobile except when I totter to the lavatory – mercifully I do not have to rely on bottle and bedpan, like so many of the other patients in this ward – I eat not from hunger but out of boredom. She swings round to face the bed from which the emaciated old man vanished yesterday , in a wheelchair propelled vigorously forward by the cheerful black porter who has repeatedly taken me in the same wheelchair to this or that scan or test. As the chair accelerated down the ward, the old man was still calling out in terror and despair ‘Mum, Mum, Mum !’
    A young Italian – a student at a language school, he has told me – now occupies his bed. He never reads or watches the television suspended above him, but spends most of the time either sleeping or staring up at the ceiling. So far he has had not a single visitor. Laura holds out the box of Scotch eggs to him. ‘Would you like one?’ He gives a weak, apologetic smile andshakes his head. His chin is dark with stubble and his hair is overlong and unbrushed. ‘They’re good. I promise you. I made them myself.’
    Reluctantly and awkwardly he puts out his left arm. It is shaking violently, whether because of his stroke or because of stress I can only guess. The other arm is limp. He opens his clenched fist, takes one of the Scotch eggs and raises it to his mouth. He takes a small bite, masticates for a long, long time and swallows. He puts his head back on the pillow and again stares for a few seconds up at the ceiling. Then he turns his head and slowly smiles. ‘Good‚’ he says, more in relief than in pleasure. He is still holding the rest of the Scotch egg.
    She begins to talk to him, eager, sympathetic and encouraging . Slowly he responds. His eyes brighten and he even laughs from time to time with what strikes me as genuine amusement. Once again I admire her for this ability, totally lacking in myself, to achieve an immediate intimacy with strangers, often of a different nationality or, as now, far younger than she is.
    Then he tires. He has spoken to her of his bewilderment when he woke up one morning to find that he was incapable of moving his right arm or his right leg; of the arrival today or tomorrow of his older brother, who will take him back to Italy, to the family home in Modena; of his English girlfriend, who has not been able to visit him because she has a heavy cold and does not want to infect him or the other patients. Now he closes his eyes. ‘Poor chap‚’ Laura says, as though