Miss Silver – #19, 1953

The young man in the hospital bed threw out an arm and turned over. His first conscious thought was that he must have called out, because the sound of his own voice was ringing in his ears, but he didn’t know why he had called out or what he had said. He blinked at the light and got up on his elbow. There was a screen round his bed. The light came in over the screen. He blinked at it, and a nurse came round the edge of the screen and looked at him. She had a good plain face and nice eyes. She said ‘Oh!’ and then, ‘So you’ve waked up.’

He said, ‘Where have I got to?’

She came right up to him and took hold of his wrist.

‘Now don’t you worry. The doctor will be along to see you in a minute.’

‘What do I want a doctor for? I’m all right.’

She said, ‘That’s fine. You were in a train smash. You just had a bump on the head.’

He said, ‘Oh-’ and then, ‘It feels all right.’

She went away after that, and presently she came back again with some sort of milky cereal that tasted like baby food.

By the time this happened he had made sure that he was all there and in one piece. Actually when she came round the screen he was out of bed seeing if he could stand on one leg. The leg felt shaky, so he wasn’t too sorry to get back and take his scolding. It was part of a nurse’s job to scold when you broke the rules.

She went away when he had finished the cereal, and he lay there wondering how long he had been in hospital. He had lost muscle, and his hands were a horrid sickly white. You don’t lose a good strong tan in a day or two. He wondered just how much time he had lost, and how he had come to be in a train smash, and where he was now. The last thing he remembered was going to see Jackson in San Francisco. After that, ‘nix’, as they said over here.