Far From The Madding Crowd

The key is unlabelled.

Fiona found it in a rusted tin beneath the old staff lounge radiator. She said nothing. Just pressed it into Helen’s hand and walked away.

Helen looked down. The key was heavy and expectant. It doesn’t match anything modern. But it fits the storage annex beside the sluice corridor – a room once used for linens, now half rotted with time.

The door opens with a reluctant sigh. The light inside is soft and yellow, powered by something ancient. A single bulb swayed slightly from the ceiling.

The room smelt like cloth, ink and something colder.

On the far shelf: a wooden box.

She opened it.

Inside was a coat. Folded carefully. Heavy wool. Black with grey threading.

And on top of the coat: a book.

Unremarkable at first glance. Hand stitched binding. No title. The pages thick, yellowing. She opened it.

There was no table of contents, only entries. Entries with margins of what could not be officially recorded, or deemed relevant.

“P7: said her name was sewn in the wind. Sang until the sedation took her: I wrote it phonetically: “Mair-ili-un.” Over and over, until she wept with her eyes open but vacant.”

“P13: Screamed when the music was turned off. Not the song – the silence after. Said it was shaped like her father’s hands.”

P24: Protocol deviation noted. Ice wrap extended beyond safe window. Reversal order delayed – medical staff. Patient repeated: “I remember my mother’s voice, but not her name.”

P14: Said he was my brother. I don’t have a brother. Said he lives in the spaces I forgot to clean.”

P10: Protocol held. P10 entered insulin coma at 14:17. No verbal response. Recovered by 16:05.

And then, written sideways, cramped tightly into the margin:

But he wept sugar from his eyes. I saw it. I didn’t say it to anyone.

P3: repeated phrase ‘the floor listens’ post treatment. Refused food. Said her hands no longer belong to her.

And in the margin: She touched my face before the ECT. That was the last honest thing either of us did today.

Beneath this was a crossed out entry – a single line of ink – still legible: “P14 restrained with assistance. Screamed incoherently.” In its place: he screamed his mothers name. I didn’t write it down. I had no right to keep it.

In the margins, below the binding seam they had written: I think the building remembers them better than I do.

Helen noted at the foot of the page, written upside down was this: “They said hold the line. But no one said what to do after the line broke.”

“Hold the line. Hold it until your fingers bleed. Nobody says what to do after the line breaks. Nobody ever says.”

Helen turned the pages randomly now.

Silence is like rot. You catch it off a man, the way you catch a cough. Soon the whole ward stinks of it.”

The bricks remember every man that’s passed through. They don’t forget like we do. It’s the walls that carry them, not us.

There’s more in the floor than in the patients. Every footstep’s a pressed flower of what’s been done here. Even the floor has secrets.

Some things don’t want to be remembered. Some things dig their heels in and fight you. But you carry them anyway.

A knot in the reedbed marks the place. Tied by my hand so it doesn’t slip away again. All the knots come undone in the end.

I carried them longer that I should. Thought I could make them mean less. But I was wrong.