How to Switch the Internet Off.

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One January when I was around nine or ten, I went plucking green rushes to make my mother a St Bridget’s cross. It’s said the cross should hang in a house to ward off disease and protect it from burning down. I liked the sound of the stream near the rushes. Spluttering. Father had been threatening to burn the house to the ground due to our ungratefulness as his children, and I wanted to do something practical, for him and for the house, but mostly to cheer up my mother because she was terrified of fire. I hacked clean the first thin wild rushes, but soon began to distinguish hardy ones from lazy ones and with a gentle pinch to the exact middle of each, I heated the sap between my damp fingers, then began bending at the centre point, finally overlapping them. Limp rushes can’t prop up a cross that’s expected to save an entire family, but I was only learning. The base has to be more solid. My first attempt was sloppy, and fell apart a little, but it cheered up my mother and became the Hynes’ Family Cross. It hangs over the front door and upon returning home, I’m reminded of my failures.

I wouldn’t fail now. I wouldn’t tell a soul.

Palliative. Doctor. Time. Tick Tock Hynes. Tick Tock.

Chapter 1

The Ward. Six-Bedded. Much Hospital Paraphernalia.

- Corticosteroids, intravenous. Wired.

- A white plastic pen from the bank that I use for cheques, not my journaling pen. No use.

- Two books. New Selected Poems by Heaney and The Gift of Mindfulness. No use.

- Heavy Astral night cream from a blue tub that I use on bikini line (not for face). No use.

- Vaseline that I use as an eyebrow dye barrier, strictly not for face. No use.

- Roger & Gallet soap. Fleur d’Osmanthus Eau Fraiche. Flowery, floral. (Way over the top, usually kept on show in downstairs loo.) No use.

- MAC Ruby Woo lipstick. Perfect but a little drying.

- Jo Malone Rose Oud perfume. Good.

- Three competing Get Well Mum cards. Too much.

- Blobfish slippers. Aces.

- iPhone 4G. Useful but patchy.

- Baby wipes. Great.

- A picture of us all at Santa’s Grotto. Fuck.

Hospital is entirely recognisable if you are into Victorian dramas or Prison Break. In Hospital you are a) Kept In or b) Let Out. You’re checked fastidiously, usually by the dinner-bringers. You’re tagged. Your clothes are removed, cut off, packed away, lost, stolen, or, perhaps like me, you may arrive entirely naked off an ambulance with only a strapless Wonderbra in the shaking hands of your husband. You no longer have a title, or hardly a name, and all recognisable connection to the past (aka the outside) disappears and is replaced by bright lights, chicken-tikka-with-light-mayo sandwiches in plastic triangular boxes, dark-chocolate-chipped-cereal-bars-with-cranberries, life-saving-Goji-berry sprinkles on salads from the Hospital shop, visitors sipping out of coffee cups, blowing their pursed lips into the tiny hole, the liquid never seeming to cool down, lots of family fighting, lots of TV shows in the Visitors’ Room doing loud Lie Detector tests on people with bad teeth, lots of brown bags full to their necks with pyjamas and impractical fluffy slippers, some ciggie breaks with copious amounts of bitching about doctors who gave the news too harshly, the doctors who gave the news too quickly, gave the news and left for coffee, and then, then worst of all, those doctors who didn’t give news at all.