LITMIR.BIZ

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love. We’ll sort it for you.’ She sticks a needle in my good thigh and helps me take a tablet. Soon I descend into a tunnel of blackness and glorious silence …

      The last few days have been awful. I do not quite understand how I have got where I am. It is now almost a week since my amputation. The days have settled into a routine. It is still horrible, but at least I know what to expect. There are not so many nasty surprises.

      Each day Mr Peach asks the nurses to sit me up a little more. Now I am upright and can move around the bed on my own. One by one the various tubes have been taken out of my body: first the drip, then the catheter, then the tubes draining my wounds. It hurt a lot when Mr Peach took those out. In fact I screamed and swore. Now they are all gone and I am left with a bandaged stump. The pains are still there, shooting like lightning, but my phantom has changed. Instead of a strong and healthy ghost leg, it is now swollen and mis-shapen. It feels as if I have a gigantic foot and a short leg. But at least I know it isn’t real. I am learning to push it out of my mind. Every day the physiotherapist comes to see me. Over the week she has made me sit up and close my eyes and try and stay upright. At first I was swaying all over the place but now I am quite steady. She helps me do special exercises. She pummels and pushes me and I feel really tired. She tells me I need to strengthen my muscles so I can learn to walk again. She bandages my stump and tells me I will learn to do this so I can use an artificial limb. But I turn my head away and refuse to look at my mutilated body. What none of them realize is that I will not need to do all this. I am just going along with it until my leg grows back.

      Every day I check under the bedclothes to see if it is there yet. It seems to be taking some time. I want Mr Peach to be the first person to know about the miracle so I always check first thing when I wake up. So far it has not happened but I am not giving up faith. I must continue to trust and I know God will use all things for good. I just wish He would hurry up and get me out of this hospital so I can spread the word.

      My mum and dad visit every day. Mum is very strong and brings me lovely surprises. She has stopped crying and instead tells me all the news and chats. She and Hellie have been shopping to buy me new clothes. Things I can wear without my leg. She brought some of them in to show me and, of course, they are so fashionable because Hellie chose them. I told her not to throw my tight jeans away, though. Mum seemed a little puzzled when I said that. But then miracles don’t happen in our church. This will be the first. She is going to be amazed when it happens to me! Dad usually comes to see me on his way home from work. He is silent and worried. I don’t think he believes I am going to be healed. Hellie comes to see me at lunchtime and fills me in on the school gossip. She seems to have grown older in the last few days. My little brother Adrian is so upset he will not speak to anybody.

      When my friends visit me from school, I tell them it’s okay. I tell them God is using me for His glory. I smile this big smile. I call it my plaster saint smile. But all they do is cry or sit there and ask dumb questions. It feels as if they are children and I am no longer part of their world. And yet I would far rather be part of their world. I don’t want to be here. I wish I could run away. But, of course, I can’t run anywhere now. I read my Bible and my prayer book and I talk about miracles and things like that. I pretend I am amazingly happy because of being close to God. Everybody tells me I am so brave. My faith is very strong, they say, and I’m an inspiration. How can I tell them that sometimes I don’t even believe in God now, let alone heaven, and I am just so scared of it hurting? It already hurts. My leg and my hip and all the injections. I guess dying from cancer must take ages and it must really, really hurt. Where is God? Where is He? Heaven? What is it like? I don’t want to be stuck on a cloud with a pair of wings and loads of old people. It sounds pretty boring. I read this bit about heaven in the Bible – the book of Revelation. It was like reading Shakespeare on a bad day. It was going on about golden lampstands and walls made of jasper, white horses and red dragons and seas made of glass. And do you know what I thought? I thought it sounded horrible. Scary and weird. I don’t want to go somewhere like that. I’d rather stay here with my sisters and my school lessons and my pretty clothes.

      But today I feel quite excited because I get to sit up in the armchair and, if I do that, then I can use a wheelchair. It has taken a whole week even to achieve this tiny step. I feel nervous about getting out of bed. I have been here now for three long weeks since I was admitted on Boxing Day. It also means I will have to look at my body – and my stump. I still haven’t done that. I am filled with a sense of expectancy as my favourite nurse arrives with the physiotherapist.

      ‘Ready for the big moment?’ she jokes.

      I nod and sit up. ‘You bet!’ I say enthusiastically. ‘I can’t wait to get out of here.’

      ‘No guesses for where you’ll be going first!’ she teases. Barry from Ward Six has been to visit me a couple of times.

      The first time I saw the Ward Six boys after my operation was really difficult. The door crashed open and Peter yelled, ‘Surprise again!’ and in they all came in their wheelchair convoy. Of course, the thing they all noticed was that my splint had gone.

      ‘What happened, then?’ asked Peter, who is a bit vague after his head injury.

      I realized with horror that they didn’t know about my amputation. I felt sick with fear at the thought of telling them. I stammered and tripped over my words. It was the first time I had needed to tell anyone myself. ‘Well, I had to … I had to …’ and stopped.

      I looked in shock towards Barry, beseeching him to understand.

      ‘Are you okay, Mary?’ he asked, and I shook my head and felt the hot tears well up again. ‘Right you two – out!’ he ordered.

      ‘Tell me what they did, Mary,’ he said gently.

      ‘I can’t,’ I whispered. ‘It’s too awful.’

      ‘They took your leg, didn’t they? You have cancer, yes?’

      I nodded slowly and he wheeled over and held my hand.

      ‘Oh kid, I’m so sorry,’ he said, and I wished everyone could be as understanding as him.

      So since then he has been to visit me and I love his easy smile and his stories of falling off bikes. I guess he is just being kind.

      ‘Hey, Mary, come on,’ urges the nurse. ‘Stop daydreaming and start practising and then you can go and visit lover-boy!’ We laugh. I was miles away.

      ‘Swing your leg round in the bed so you are sitting on the edge.’ She lowers the bed for me.

      ‘Okay, now put your foot on the floor nice and firmly.’ She pauses and lets me get used to the feeling of planting my one and only foot on the floor for the first time. It feels weird. I keep wanting to put the other one next to it. I stretch out my leg and look at my toes and count them out loud.

      ‘One, two, three, four, five!’ I look at the nurse. ‘There should be ten, you know. One day there will be.’

      I spend a moment looking critically at the little bulge under the hem of my night dress. ‘And there will be two feet and two knees.’

      ‘No, Mary, that won’t happen. Your leg has gone – you know that. You will always have five toes, one foot, one knee.’

      ‘No, they will grow back. Just wait and see.’

      ‘Mary,’ she says firmly. ‘Look at me.’

      I glance at her from beneath my fringe, sulkily.

      ‘No, properly.’

      I sigh and look at her.

      ‘Mary, your leg is not coming back. Not one day. Not ever.’

      As I stare into her eyes my veil of deception drops and suddenly, with the force of a ten-ton truck, I am hit with the dreadful realization. I cry out in pain and I throw the pillow across the room.

      ‘No! no! It’s not going to happen! My leg is gone!’ I collapse in a pile on the bed and my body is racked by huge heaving sobs as my mind takes in, for the first time, the

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