I hadn’t noticed for a moment that Martha had returned from treatment and was standing at my side; I was too involved in the book. I glanced up with a start when I seemed to feel a shadow rest on me. She had made no noise in coming to my side.
I jumped, already chary from all that morning’s odd happenings, and Martha smiled to see me start from the world of the book back into the present day, but as I stood, I noted her face had a greenish cast. She looked sicker after her treatment than she had done before.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, closing the book and rising so quickly so that I managed to knock my bag onto the floor and spill its contents across the white-beige linoleum. “I didn’t hear you come out.”
“You were quite lost in your book,” she said, in a voice most unlike hers, weak and fragile she sounded, a ghost of herself.
“Are you okay?” I asked as I picked up all my stuff, and she shook her head a little.
“I’d like to go home now,” she said.
We walked to the car, paying the stupendous fee at the machine. I couldn’t help but frown at the inanimate object as it relayed how much we would have to pay for the privilege of my aunt being ill. There is something deeply wrong, if you ask me, in hospital car parking being so expensive. As if the people visiting the hospital don’t have enough to worry about, when friends and loved ones are ill, broken or dying, to think that they have to take out a mortgage in order to cover the costs of parking at a hospital. A small but sure sign that there are some who care more for the chink of money into their hands, than they do for alleviating human misery.
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