The glass on her windows was covered by hundreds of wrought iron bars. All the windows were the same, they had to be. Windows made simply out of glass would undoubtedly keep the cold and animals out but the iron bars helped to keep the patients in. A minority of rooms belonged to staff but bars were installed anyway, as a precaution.
Mary turned back to look at her room. It was large and possessed few items of furniture. An old desk stood shyly in the dark corner begging not to be seen. Her bed was a plain white mattress with only a pillow and thin duvet to keep her warm. It was late and the sun’s light was long gone and she relied on the illumination of the fire to see. Slowly she swayed up to the hearth and picked up the old bellows that hung precariously from a rusty nail in the wall. She held them tightly and knelt down in front of the fire, placing the bellows on the floor beside her.
Mary stared into the flames and delighted in seeing them dance as they did every full moon. The flames flickered and gently licked her fingers as she held her hands above them for warmth. Every movement of her hands caused a new dance with new thrills for the beholder of this spectacle. The popping of unseasoned wood awoke her from her temporary escape from reality. Mary looked at the bellows beside her, gently picked them up and pushed the handles together. A job that required a great deal of effort and left her tiny body gasping for air. The embers and burning coals glowed brightly and lit up like fireflies.
She shivered and replaced the bellows with a heavy heart. Mary walked solemnly to her small desk. She pulled the chair out from beneath it and sat down. The legs of the chair groaned under the weight, though not much. The desk was very small and reminiscent of a child’s school desk, not that of a trained medical nurse. Funds were low and Mary was willing to live poorly to stay in employment, especially in these hard times of war. She leant back in her chair and gazed lazily out of the window and looked at the oak tree in the distance, silhouetted by moonlight.
Mary thought back to what life had been like when she had first come to Greenfield Hall. It had been a much happier place back then before it had happened. She did not like to think of it especially when she was alone. Mary was easily scared and the incident had left her impressionable and vulnerable, like a small child. What she didn’t realise was that it had had a greater effect on her than all of the others.
She no longer lived in the real world but in her own fantasy. In what she thought was the real world she was still treating her patients just as she had done before it happened. In actual fact she was now a patient. Patient 3-3-2-2-2-3-3, inmate Nurse Mary Jordan. Her old friends and colleagues treated her, desperately trying to find a way to cure their old partner.
They watched her every day hoping to see some change in her daily routine, to find a reason for some vague hope that they could cling to when times were hard. Any attempt at friendship they offered her was ignored. The once respected Nurse Jordan now spent her days sitting in a white room with bars on the window and a chair and bed in a corner.
A room she had often visited when doing her rounds barely three months before. Mary sat on the chair with her arms around her knees, hiding most of her face. She would stare out of the window with a blank expression on her face, her eyes seldom flickering.
Mary never took her eyes off the window and lived entirely in her fantasy world. The physicians were convinced that she could no longer hear them as they spoke to her and did not even realise she was living in a dream. They were correct, of course. To Mary’s knowledge she spent every day as she always had in the past, nothing had changed. She would get up and go to see her patients before surveying the distribution of the medication, have meetings with her colleagues and assess the condition of her patients. Her world was completely opposite to her reality.
She always stared at the same thing out of the window, the old oak tree. She appeared to be terrified of it, not letting it leave her sight for a second for fear that something might happen. It hypnotised her to a state of delirium. During thunderstorms she would begin to rock forwards and backwards on her chair. Her eyes would intensify as though she was seeing her past, when the incident had happened. It was as though it was playing in front of her over and over again, like a horror movie showing at a theatre with no exit. As she rocked, gazing forever into the heart of the old oak tree she would begin to murmur to herself in an inaudible whisper:
From this day forth
Beware the old oak tree
That stands lost in the memory
Of an old reverie