Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

the wall and heading straight towards me, a wide, white smile stretched across her face.

“Hello. Aisha?”

I stood up and nodded.

She stopped before the table and offered a manicured hand, the nails coated in deep red polish. She was tall for a woman, though a couple of inches shorter than my five, eleven. Her mascara’d chestnut eyes were sparkling as she looked at me. She looked late twenties or early thirties.

I put down the magazine and shook her hand. Her grip was soft and hardly there.

“My name is Hazel Sanders.” she said, in a warm, breathy, sexual voice. There was a little rasp in her throat as she talked, a bit like how an adolescent boy first losing his voice might sound, but it sounded soothing and warm in her thick English accent.

“I’m the senior nurse in charge, and you’re going to be based in my ward-ward four. Does that sound okay?” She beamed again, showing her bright, Colgate-ad teeth.

“Okay.” I said.

“Great!” She pulled her hand away and rested it on her side while she stood upright. Her skin was flawless and foundationed, her cheeks aglow with blusher. She looked radiant as she stood there grinning with little dimples creasing the sides of her mouth.

“How was your drive?” she asked, glancing from me to Mrs Mack.

Mack brought her fist to her mouth and coughed. “Yeah, it was good thanks. Very foggy.”

“Yeah, it’s often like that here. It’s the sea.” Sanders replied.

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t good with small talk. Mack was quiet too and nobody knew what to say.

A few seconds of silence reigned between us all.

“Well, Aisha?” Sanders chirped. “Will we get going up?”

I turned to face Mack, but catching me by surprise, she threw her arms around me. She held me there for several moments, and I felt the warmth flowing through her frail, little body.

She pulled back and looked nervously up at me through her glasses.

“I’ve got to get going now, Aisha.” She said. “If you need anything, just let me know okay?”

Her face was placid, but she couldn’t hide the worry in her voice and her eyes. I wondered if she cared about everybody she worked with as much as she obviously did for me?

“Yeah, I will. Thank you.” I said.

She gave a last lingering look, then rounded the table, keeping her face turned away from me as she patted a right hand on Sanders’s shoulder, “Take good care of her, okay.” she said, her voice cracking.

“We will.” Sanders smiled.

I watched her back as she headed down the corridor, until she disappeared through the door.

Chapter 7

When the door shut Sanders said, “C’mon then, I’ll show you around.”

I picked up my bag from the seat and followed after her long, leggy strides down to the other end of the corridor. At the bottom it branched off left and right down long identical stretches, lined with doors on either side. We stood before a large staircase. I looked up to the sign dangling from two metal chains, my mind whirling with all the influx of information -Ward 4,8,12 upstairs. Kitchen, canteen, ward 2, 3 and 7 right. Ward 1 and 5 left. It was like a maze.

Sanders bounced quickly up the first step and I followed, but my legs were like lead. Each step made me feel like throwing up and the spinning, floral patterns of the Victorian wallpaper didn’t help. I tried to keep up as her long legs flighted up the stairs. Even in her heels she climbed them sprightly. She stepped off on the next floor and went right, motioning me to follow, she hadn’t said a word the whole way. We stood outside a wooden door with thick glass panels, labeled ward 4, and she pulled a set of keys from her pocket and unlocked it.

She held it open and I stepped in front, only to be stopped at another identical locked door. She unlocked this too and we entered onto a long, empty narrow hall, lined with closed doors on the right and large barred windows to the left. She again took the lead and darted ahead- clack-clack-clack- and while I tried in vain to keep up, at the same time I was searching out of the windows to make out my position. It was pitch black, but I could make out the vague forms of the same trees I had seen before, running down the hill either side of the path that cut through the grounds. And down to my left, directly below the main stairway I had come, was the car park, lit up under the orange streetlights.

“This is Ward four.” Sanders said. “These are all the patients’ rooms on your right. On your left, as you can see we have the grounds- if you behave you get an allowance of leisure hours and can go for walks out there. There is a library upstairs if you like to read and we have TV and DVDs in the common room which I am just about to show you.”

She spoke quickly over that continued clack-clack-clack of her heels. The friendly manner that she’d shown before had all but disappeared in a rush as she tried to get to wherever it was we were going. Her bleached blonde hair was bunched in a smooth ponytail that cascaded down her back, and it kept bouncing about as she strode forward.  Her chestnut eyes made up with mascara, her lips rouged soft pink, her cheeks glowing with rosy blusher- she was a bonnie girl, and from her long neck and long legs and slender hips I could tell she was one the guys would like. But in the seconds we walked together something struck me as odd. I tried to figure out what it was. I kept looking and trying to work it out, and