Pediatric Ward.
Psychiatric ward—definitely not there—I read the signs as I rushed down the long passage. At the end of the corridor, I saw an emergency exit. The red “Exit” sign on the door felt like a beacon of hope right now. I ran for the door and pushed it open. The sound echoed along the stairwell. I hurried down the stairs, feet clanking on the steps, and when I reached the bottom, I burst through the door, into the main hospital reception. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw those two massive glass doors that led to the parking lot outside.
I tried not to run manically towards the doors. I didn’t want to arouse suspicion, but I almost couldn’t help it, my feet moved so quickly and desperately towards them, as if they had a mind of their own. And as soon as I’d pushed the doors open, I was finally free. I didn’t bother looking back at the hospital as I raced through the parking lot, weaving through the cars until I reached the other side. I ducked under a boom and only stopped running when I was two blocks away. I stood there for a while, trying to catch my breath, and when I had, I looked around and a thought hit me.
Now what?
CHAPTER 8
I stood on the sidewalk, watching the passing cars. They were hypnotizing as they passed me by, one by one, none of them stopping. I was all alone on this street, apart from these ghosts of the road, going past me in a blur. I heard a noise and looked down as a giant rat scuttled by, dragging half a pizza slice with it. Suddenly, it stopped dead in its tracks, let out a strange, high-pitched squeak and dropped the pizza. It stared up at me, squeaked again, showing its big yellow teeth, and then turned and ran back across the road. I watched as it disappeared into a drainpipe, as if it couldn’t get away quick enough. I looked down at the pizza slice and wondered what would have made the rat drop it like that. Maybe rats didn’t like me either? And then I heard another noise that made me look up at the street again. A car had stopped, a person climbed out of the back seat and I knew exactly what this was. A bolt of excitement lit me up from the inside. This was my escape. I rushed over and knocked on the driver’s window frantically. The man sitting inside wound it down.
“Are you a taxi?” I gushed.
“Uber. Yes. Do you need a lift somewhere?” the man asked, and I nodded vigorously, even though I didn’t know where on earth he would take me.
The man glanced at his phone and then back up to me. “I don’t need to pick anyone up, so I can take you. Where to?”
“I . . . I . . . don’t know.”
“If you tell me where you want to go, I can take you there,” he said, clearly not understanding what I meant. That I had zero idea where to go.
“So?” The man leaned across the seat now and looked at me. I shrugged at him, sighed then hung my head.
“Ma’am, are you okay?”
I shook my head. It rattled, like a single coin at the bottom of a tin might do. And then, there was a small scratching sound inside my head as something seemed to wiggle its way in. I reached out and tried to grab the thought, and this time I did! I flicked my head up and looked at him.
“Noah. Noah Robinson. 19C Edward Drive, Parkmeadows. Does that exist?” I asked, wondering if I had imagined Noah standing there talking on the phone too. The man typed something into his phone and then tilted his head up at me, his glasses slipping down his nose as he did.
“Sure, I can take you there. It’s only fifteen minutes away.” I jumped, literally—my feet lifted off the ground for a second out of sheer excitement. I couldn’t believe my luck. First bit in days.
But as soon as the car started moving, all the excitement I’d felt was gone. I gripped the door handle. I didn’t like the feeling of the moving car as much as I didn’t like the feeling of being inside the hospital.
“Can I open the window?” I asked, panicked.
“Sure.” He eyed me in the rear-view mirror and I could see he was weighing me up, trying to form an opinion of me. He had that same look in his eyes that all the doctors had had when they looked at me and wrote in their charts.
I wound the window down, and as soon as it was open I stuck my face out and the fresh air delivered what I’d been so desperate for. I felt a little better now. But not so much that I was able to loosen the tight hold I had on the door handle. I looked out the window as he drove, studying the buildings around me. Trying to see if there was anything familiar about this place. There wasn’t. The buildings and streets were as generic to me as everything had been so far. We turned off the main road into what looked like the suburbs. I knew this because the sidewalks suddenly filled with grass and hedges and trees. Gone was the concrete coldness of before. This place seemed to be filled with a different feeling now, and this was confirmed when we drove past a small park with a red-and-blue merry-go-round in the middle of it. I stared at the merry-go-round and, like with the black-and-white panda, something lit up inside me.
Not so much a memory, but a feeling, in the pit of my stomach as I went around and around and around.
Did you know merry-go-rounds in America tend to turn counterclockwise?
We drove a little more until we finally came to a halt. I was so grateful when the car stopped, I’d been on the edge of my seat since it had started moving. The driver pointed at a house and I looked. It was small, and cute. Tucked behind a pale yellow wall covered in ivy. Big trees rose up from inside the property, and a red tin roof peered at me.
“Here we are,” the taxi driver said, turning the engine off. I gazed at the house . . . now what?
“That will be one hundred and fifty Rand,” the driver said loudly.
“One hundred and fiftywhat?” His statement hadn’t quite landed with me yet. I was finding this with a lot of things. Someone would say something to me and, on some level, I think I understood what they were saying, but it took me a while to register. As if my brain was making sense of the world much more slowly than it should.
At last I clicked. “Oh! Yes. Money!” I looked down at my hand and it was empty. No bag. No money. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I would need to pay this man.
“You do have money, don’t you?” he asked, although I got the impression he already knew the answer to this question. I pursed my lips together tightly and shook my head. My head gave a thump, and I winced, reached up and touched the bandage on my forehead. The man’s face seemed to soften slightly.
“I’m going home this way anyway, so it’s fine.”
“It is?” I was overjoyed. “Thank you. Thank you!” I gushed over my shoulder as I raced towards Noah’s door.
