Pictures of You

Last night’s party is still throbbing in my head as I scramble awake, a tsunami of remorse crashing over me. Whatever I did that made me feel this horrendous, I will never do again.

The worst part is, I don’t even recall having fun. But then, I’m a person who normally spends Saturday nights drinking raspberry tea and debating costuming inaccuracies in period dramas on Facebook. Not loving a wild party isn’t far off script.

I make the mistake of inching my head to the right. Pain shoots into my eye sockets and I want to die. My poor brain. Is it true that alcohol kills the cells, or is that an urban myth? I don’t actually remember drinking last night. Certainly not enough to make the world feel this heinous.

Please don’t let me have been drugged.

I wish whoever owns that alarm would switch it off. Scratchy, starched sheets bunch into a ridge under my back. As I wriggle, the plastic mattress beneath me squelches, the tube that’s sticking out of my hand pulling at my skin where the tape is stuck.

My eyes shoot open. Harsh fluorescent lights bounce off stark white walls around me. A tangle of cords and wires and an oxygen mask dangle where my thrifted scarf collection is meant to be draped romantically over the bedhead with fairy lights. Where is the framed Pride and Prejudice poster of Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth? Breanna says it is one of the many reasons I will never get a boyfriend. Admittedly, getting a boyfriend seems like the least of my problems right now . . .

I try to sit up. Pain sears across my chest, forcing me back against the bed. My mouth is so dry, I can’t even clear my throat as my heart pounds and the beeping from the machine beside me gallops. A blonde nurse in blue scrubs and Crocs rushes over, presses buttons to silence it and looks at me kindly.

‘Hello, Evelyn,’ she says, glancing at her watch. ‘I’m Liz.’

‘Where am I?’ My voice is groggy, like I’ve emerged from some sort of swamp. ‘I want my mum,’ I squeak out. I sound like a five-year-old, gripped by separation anxiety at kindergarten. Liz places a gentle hand on my shoulder as I try to straighten my spine and act my age, but the pain makes me wince.

‘You’re in St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. I’m afraid you’ve been in a car accident.’

Oh, God. Breanna . . .

Liz checks the tube sticking out of my hand, which trails past purple bruises on my wrist up to a bag of fluid hanging from a metal pole. My gaze travels from the drip and snags on an unfamiliar scar on my hand, just as my hair tumbles across my face. Dark. Is it coloured?

Who dyed my hair? I must have done it. Drunk. I take back that thing about wanting Mum. She’s going to kill me . . .

‘Who was I with?’ I ask. ‘In the car?’ I can barely get the question out. What if Bree is dead? What if I killed her?

Liz signals to a doctor in the corridor, who looks like she belongs on the set of Days of Our Lives instead of in a frenzied emergency room. She sweeps into my cubicle, shunts blue papery curtains closed for privacy, then stands at the end of my bed like the grim reaper.

‘Evelyn, I’m afraid we have some very difficult news.’

I glance at Liz, whose upbeat expression has evaporated in favour of the Bad News Face: kind eyes, serious frown, tilted head.

I feel like I am going to be sick. And I have a phobia of that, which makes my stomach churn and my anxiety skyrocket. Where is Mum? I need her, whether she’s going to kill me or not.

‘Your injuries are fairly minor,’ the doctor explains, even though every part of my body is blaring otherwise. ‘Sadly, Oliver took the brunt of the impact.’

Who? Don’t tell me I finally got a life and snuck out of the party with some boy?

‘The airbags deployed, but they’re not always enough. Your husband sustained a very serious head injury.’

My what?

Everything swims. The room. Her voice. My tenuous grip on reality.

‘We did everything we could . . .’

Cartwheels tumble through my mind, gathering speed with every passing phrase. She must have mixed up the hospital records. Walked into the wrong room?

‘Evelyn, we’re deeply sorry for your loss.’

Really, it’s perfectly okay, because I have obviously not had a loss.

‘First, it’s Evie,’ I explain. ‘And second, I don’t have a husband!’ There’s an awkward pause. I’d fill it with my views on marriage – that it’s an archaic, patriarchal trap that only made sense in Jane Austen’s day – but it doesn’t seem like the right time. Especially since they are both wearing wedding bands. I sneak a glance at my left hand to double-check for a ring, but it’s just the tubing, tape, and that weird scar. How could these people think I’d be crazy enough to get married at my age? It’s probably not even legal.

The two of them exchange a pointed glance before Liz scurries off. The doctor settles in on the plastic chair by my bed and smiles at me. It’s a smile that says we’re sending for reinforcements.

She makes polite conversation, avoiding the topic of my deceased imaginary husband, asking things like where I live. Newcastle.

And what year it is. 2011, obviously. Did we not watch Will and Kate’s wedding just the other week?

‘It’s expected you’ll be a little confused,’ the doctor says.

I’m not at all confused. They just have their information wrong. Hospital debacles happen all the time on Grey’s Anatomy.

When nurse Liz returns after about ten years of uncomfortable small talk between the doctor and me, I notice the bags under her eyes, blonde tendrils tumbling from messy hair that screams ‘double shift’ and ‘prone to clinical errors’. She’s brought with her a man in beige corduroy slacks and a wrinkled off-white shirt, also with a rehearsed smile. These people look like they are on their last legs. No wonder they’re making mistakes.

‘Hello, Evelyn,’ the man says. ‘I’m Dr Gordon. The psychiatric registrar.’

Psychiatric?

‘How are you feeling?’

‘A bit sore, but otherwise normal,’ I report. Emphasis on ‘normal’.

‘Looking at your notes, we’re a little concerned about your memory.’

And I’m a little concerned about him! How can a specialist believe a schoolgirl is married? ‘There’s nothing wrong with my memory.’  I struggle to sit up straighter, as if they’ll take me seriously with better posture. ‘I can literally remember what I ate for lunch yesterday in the cafeteria. Sausage roll with sauce and a chocolate bar. I eat so much junk, I’m just lucky I have an amazing metabolism. I eat like a horse and I’m a size eight!’ I pat my stomach through the thin sheet as if to demonstrate said overachieving metabolism, and that’s when I realise something is wrong. There is . . . more of me than there was yester-day. I lift up the sheet to investigate. Yes. Pleasantly curvier hips.  A slight rounding to my stomach. I drop the sheet. What has happened to me in this car accident? It’s like I’ve been redistributed!

The psychiatrist is studying me closely.

‘I’m not a size eight,’ I admit. ‘How did that happen?’

Liz chuckles and pats my arm.

I envision having been in a coma. Maybe they fed me through a tube and gave me too much sustenance for my activity level. Perhaps the car accident triggered my metabolism to go into shock, and of course lying around on this bed for weeks or months, I’d be out  of shape.

‘When exactly was my accident?’ I ask. The timing suddenly seems critical, because the only other explanation here is that I’ve had body dysmorphia all this time and I’ve finally snapped out  of it.

‘Yesterday,’ Liz replies. ‘You’re doing really well.’

Yesterday? I lift the sheet to inspect myself again, only to be newly baffled by the boobs. ‘That simply cannot be right!’ I mutter. I mean, I had boobs yesterday, obviously, but not like this. I must be a C cup! ‘Where have the extra two cups come from overnight?’

All three glance at the plastic tumblers on the bedside table, striving to keep up.

‘Evie, how old are you?’ the psychiatrist asks.

‘Sixteen. But something is very wrong.’

He puts his clipboard on the bed, leans back in the chair and places his hands in the position of prayer, tapping his fingertips against his nose in thought, as if this is the first time in his career that he’s encountered someone who has changed shape overnight. ‘I know this might come as a shock,’ he divulges after a long pause, ‘but according to your driver’s licence and medical records, you’re twenty-nine.’

Twenty-nine? ‘See, there you go! You’ve clearly mixed me up with someone else. I don’t even have a licence. I’m still on my Ls.’

He nods. But not to agree, to placate me – I can tell. ‘This sort of confusion can be common after a car accident.’

He goes on, but I’ve stopped listening. There is just no way that I am twenty-nine and married. Or whatever it’s called when your husband is dead. Widowed.

‘I’m opposed to marriage!’ I argue. ‘I am one hundred per cent a career girl. I haven’t even finished high school. I can’t be twice my age.’

As I shake my head, another wave of hair falls across my face and I sweep it away, then grab it and look at the colour more closely. It’s definitely not my natural shade. But I’ve never dyed it, because Mum won’t let me. Not even pink for crazy hair day.

Is there a mirror?’

Liz leaves the room and returns with a compact.

I flick it open and confront the frantic woman – yes, woman – staring back at me with shocked blue eyes.

‘Fuck!’ I say. ‘Sorry.’ It’s an immediate detention if the teachers catch you swearing . . .

It’s not just the red mark on my neck from the seat belt. Or the dark hair. It’s that my freckles have faded, the way Mum always promised they would. And there are tiny creases around my eyes and mouth. They’re not full-on wrinkles or anything, in fact they’re sort of hard to see, because everything is slightly blurry. I squint at my reflection and Liz asks if I want my glasses.

‘Oh, I don’t wear glasses,’ I brag, just as she passes me a pair of sleek, tortoiseshell Prada frames I couldn’t possibly afford, which bring everything into perfect focus.

And by ‘everything’, I mean the unbelievable set of facts that I appear to be an adult woman with prescription lenses, fine lines on my face, additional kilos on my frame, and a dead husband I never wanted.