Once, I woke up in my bed and, just for a second, I forgot who I was. I forgot my name, my age, my hair colour, my family. I forgot that, every morning, I make the same journey downstairs from my bedroom and look through the window by the stairs, seeing the same blackbird perched alertly on the wooden fence.
‘Look,’ I said to Mum once, ‘that’s Death outside.’ She drew in a deep breath and told me I shouldn’t say things like that. I found it annoying; patronising, even though I was very young.
Since I saw the blackbird, I knew I would die young. The way it stared at me with its yellow eyes, so intently, could mean nothing else. I’ve been told many times that paranoia is taking over me. How can it not, when every time I grin down at it, mocking it, it’s always lashing back at me, a hundred times stronger?
I sit up in the bed, the white duvet adjusting to my new position. I’m surrounded by white, a small, insignificant dot in a pure, innocent sea. It tells me I’m going to be saved. I am.
I close my eyes and lie back down. I wish I had some water. Water and a Coke.
‘No one’s haunting me,’ I say quietly. It feels good. I repeat it again and again until it turns into a soft, hoarse chant.
The black bird has just grown used to sitting in that spot on the fence, staring at me with yellow eyes, wanting me to think I got the disease because of it. But that would be paranoid. It’s not the bird’s fault. It isn’t. It’s stupid to think so.
Paranoid people are stupid, Mum tells me. She says they think the whole world is against them. She laughs. But it doesn’t come back, hit back, at her. It doesn’t tell her that, if she laughs again, it will hit again, harder. Always harder than before.
That’s why she can laugh so easily.
I’ll never be able to. I can’t tell her that, though. I laugh with her, but I tell the paranoia that I’m laughing at her. ‘How stupid to think my bad luck is a coincidence!’ I tell it.
I’ve grown so used to telling it things, I don’t know what I actually believe anymore.
I sigh.
I think I’m falling.
We’re all in the same boat. We live, we die. If I was a flower, I would have been legendary. People would marvel at how long I had lived without withering.
I’m withering now.
But maybe, if I’m watered, I won’t dry out completely. I might live another month. I might live another year, another ten years.
Behind my eyelids I can see the bird. I smile at it kindly.
‘I won’t mock you,’ I tell it. I mean it. Even if I’ve lied to it before, I’m not lying now.
‘Nurse,’ I call hoarsely. Nobody hears me.
‘I need water.’ My breathing is ragged and it hurts to speak. ‘Or I’ll wither.’
Can they hear me?

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