Free Fall by William Golding

The parson disappeared and at some remove, over gulfs of fire and oceans of blackness under wild green stars there was a big man in the room who was fighting me, binding me, getting my arms in a hold, fastening me down with terrible strength and saying the same thing over and over again.
    “Just the tiniest little prick.”
    Behind my right ear there is a new moon of scar and a pucker. They are so old that they feel natural and right. I got them that same day, or at least, before the next morning. There was no penicillin, no wonder-drug to control and reduce infection in those days. If the doctor had any doubt at all he operated for mastoid straight away. I came round in a new place, a new world. I was lying over a bowl, too sick and faint to notice anything else but the bowl, whiteness and a brown, polished floor. The pain was reduced to the same dull throbbing that had made me cry at school; but now even crying was too much effort. I lay, drugged and miserable with a turban of gauze and cotton-wool and bandages round my head. Ma appeared at some time or other in that period. I saw her then for the first and last time, not as the broad figure blotting out the darkness but as a person. There is a wan sanity about the drugged eye sometimes that the healthy one does not have. In my misery I saw her as a stranger might see her, a massive, sagging creature, mottled and dirty. Her hair was in wisps over her brown forehead, her face was a square-ish, drawn-down mass with a minute fag sticking in one corner of her mouth. I see now the sausage hands, brown, with discolorations of red and blue, clutching the string-bag into her lap. She sat as she always sat, in majestic indifference; but the gas was escaping from the balloon. She had little enough to bring me, for what has a woman to spare who even borrows an iron? Yet she had taken thought and found what she could. There was a pedestal by the head of the bed and she had placed there a handful of rather dirty fagcards—my cherished kings of Egypt.

3
    And still I ask myself: “Well. There?” and myself answers: “No. Not there.” He is no more a part of me than any other child. I simply have better access to him. I cannot remember what he looked like. I doubt if I ever knew. He is still this bubble floating, filled with happiness or pain which I can no longer feel. In my mind those feelings are represented by colours; they are as exterior to what I feel, as the child itself. His insufficiency and guilt were not mine. I have my own which sprang out of my life somewhere like weeds. I cannot find the root. However I try I can bring up nothing which is part of me.
    The ward was a fine place to be when my head stopped hurting. I got complications, had ups and downs. I was a lifetime in that ward, so that I can switch my mind from the world of Rotten Row to the world of the ward as from planet to planet. I have a sense of timelessness in both places. I cannot remember the doctors or nurses or even the other children at all clearly. Survival in this mode must surely be random or why can I not remember who had the beds to right and left? But there was a little girl who had the bed opposite me. She was tiny and black with tight curls and a round, shining, laughing face. Nobody understood the language she spoke. Now I remember that she had a cot instead of a bed like the older children, because when she stood up at the foot she could hold the top rail and swing up and down. She talked all the time. She laughed and sang, she talked to anyone withinreach in her babbling, meaningless talk, talked to doctors, nurses, visitors, matron, children, happily and irrepressibly. She was entirely without fear or sorrow and everybody who saw her loved her. I deduce from the line of bricks that she came, had her graph of sickness, recovered and went. But to me, if I think of the ward, she is always there, a small figure in a white nightdress with two jet black hands and a black, flashing face, swinging