She isn't cognizant now, unobservant, introspective. Conscious of little besides the young mothers under this bewildering sun. She hates them now, their haw-cheeked ebullience, and their close antiseptic cousins, breast-plated nurses, those floods of strained efficiency.
Julie is in a new room now, an old room, paint chipping and moisture dripping, slipping, ever present on the walls. Their colour must be the identical febrile, madhouse green of her bile. Conjecture is unnecessary, superfluous, to know that she spits the same when she does not spit red. The knowledge is superfluous. Her flesh is superfluous.
Barry is hers now, that other her that is nothing to do with Julie, Julie's narrow realm of damp infectious sheets and basins and a faint decayed smell exuding, seeping, bleeding from her skin. Embalmed, entombed, but releasing the undertaker's beneficent preservative compounds. Rotten, dying, melting, expiring, My fluids are killing me, it's not the disease, my own wrong, gone, dead, infected, infested self is doing the damage.
Her faint decayed smell is a deranged smell; they have taken away the curtains, sick vomitus orange curtains, pale and brittle as she is pale and brittle. The curtains are dying too, the year is dying, the world is dying.
"Open your mouth, Miss McCarthy, aaaaaaaaaah now. There's a love." The nurses are legion, perennial and pervasive as geraniums. Any of fifty or five hundred could be persuaded her to hold narrowly sheathed poisons on her tongue, one millimetre from Miyamoto and deformity. Is it that her own perverted systems are not poisoning her fast enough?
They must want her to die; every plump smiling girl is an aider and abetter to that massive common countrified her. He wants to come to me, has to come: he loves me. Not her, never her.
Arrange lips, tongue, teeth around lethal stick. Nurse is ennervated, grotesque, criminal. "Under your tongue, love, that's the way." Mild eyes are lies, masks, cold metal bits shrouding benevolently a demonic brain-case. Julie scowls, contorts, grimaces at the white stiff cap, the topgallant apron. Perhaps he never came for her, came only for this heiferish, sanitary piece of furniture, reeking of good health and permanganate. "Give him back, you fat absurd sheep."
No change in expression; accustomed to insults from fractious patients, poor sick sad babies! Dutiful, compassionate; play the Angel of Mercy. Above all, be kind, competent, refreshing block of stability. "Shall I open your window, Miss McCarthy? No? No matter then, but let's have back the thermometre, if you please." Easy, always easy; a calm nurse means a calm patient.
Evil now approaching, twelve o'clock level. I will not go along with this thievery: privacy, health, possessions, Barry. Rebel, you daftie. You're not dead yet, not entirely powerless. She has seconds, threads, to locate some weapon, some miniscule missile in symbolic resistance - she grinds her teeth fretfully, and has the solution. The nurse cried out, dodges quicksilver furious projectile. Time to impact three, two, one -
Julie giggles quietly, tacictly; she is vindicated in the fountain of glass and mercury.