Yes, actually. While we’re at it, here are my top ten “Taster in a Chocolate Factory” jokes that I get at Faces, our local nightclub. It’s not a very nice nightclub, but the rest are really much, much worse:
1. Yes, I will give you some free samples.
2. No, I’m not as fat as you clearly expected me to be.
3. Yes, it is exactly like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
4. No, no one has ever done a poo in the chocolate vat. (Though I wouldn’t necessarily have put it past Flynn.)
5. No, it actually doesn’t make me more popular than a normal person, as I am thirty, not seven.
6. No, I don’t feel sick when confronted with chocolate; I absolutely adore it. But if it makes you feel better about your job to think that I am, feel free.
7. Oh, that is so interesting that you have something even tastier than chocolate in your underpants, yawn. (N.B.: I would like to be brave enough to say that, but I’m not that brave really. I normally just grimace and look at something else for a while. My best mate Cath soon takes care of them anyway. Or, occasionally, dates them.)
8. Yes, I will suggest your peanut/beer/vodka/jam-flavored chocolate idea, but I doubt we’ll be as rich as you think.
9. Yes, I can make actual real chocolate, although at Braders Family Chocolates, they’re all processed automatically in a huge vat and I’m more of a supervisor really. I wish I did more complex work, but according to the bosses, nobody wants their chocolates messed about with; they want them tasting exactly the same and lasting a long time. So it’s quite a synthetic process.
10. No, it’s not the best job in the world. But it’s mine and I like it. Or at least I did, until I ended up in here.
Then I normally say, “Rum and coke, thanks for asking.”
“Anna.”
A man was sitting on the end of my bed. I couldn’t focus on him. He knew my name but I didn’t know his. That seemed unfair.
I tried to open my mouth. It was full of sand. Someone had put sand in my mouth. Why would anyone do that?
“Anna.”
The voice came again. It was definitely real, and it was definitely connected to the shadow at the end of my bed.
“Can you hear me?”
Well, of course I can hear you. You’re sitting on the end of my bed shouting at me was what I wanted to say, but all that came out was a kind of dry croak.
“That’s great, that’s great, very good. Would you like a drink of water?”
I nodded. It seemed easiest.
“Good, good. Don’t nod too much; you’ll dislodge the wires. NURSE!”
I don’t know whether the nurse came or not, because I was suddenly gone again. My last conscious thought was that I hoped she or he didn’t mind being yelled at by people who sat on other people’s beds. And I couldn’t remember: had my parents said something was wrong with my nose?
- - -
“Here she is.”
It was the same voice, but how much later I couldn’t tell. The light seemed different. A sudden shock of pain traveled through me like a lightning bolt and I gasped.
“There you go; she’s going to be great.”
Dad.
“Oh, I don’t like the look of this.”
Mum.
“Uhm…can I have that water?” I asked, but it came out like “Ca ha wa?”
Thankfully someone spoke desert sand, because instantly a plastic cup was put to my lips. That small cup of tepid chalky tap water was the single best thing I had ever put in my mouth in my entire life, and that includes the first time I tasted a crème egg.
I slurped it down and asked for another, but someone said no, and that was that. Maybe I was in prison.
“Can you open your eyes for us?” came the commanding voice.
“Course she can.”
“Oh, Pete, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Oddly, it was slightly to spite my mother’s lack of ambition for me in the eye-opening department that really made me try. I flickered and suddenly hazing into view was the shape sitting on the end of my bed I’d been aware of before—I wished he’d stop that—and two shapes as familiar as my own hands.
I could make out my mother’s reddish hair that she colored at home, even though my best mate Cath had offered to do it down at the salon for a price that she thought was next to nothing, but my mother thought that was extravagant and that Cath was loose (that last bit was true, though that had nothing to do with how good she was at hair, which admittedly also wasn’t very), so about one week a month my mum had this kind of odd, henna-like fringe around the top of her forehead where she hadn’t wiped it off properly. And my dad was in his best shirt, which really made me worry. He didn’t dress like that for anything but weddings and funerals, and I was pretty much 100 percent sure I wasn’t getting married, unless Darr had suddenly regenerated into a completely different physical and personality type, and I figured that unlikely.
“Hello?” I said, feeling a rush that somewhere, the desert sands were retreating, that the division between what was real and what was a writhing sandy ball of confusion and pain was retreating, that Anna was back, that the skin I was wearing was mine after all.
“Darling!”
My mum burst into tears. My dad, not prone to huge outbursts of affection, gently squeezed my hand—the hand, I noticed, that didn’t have a big tube going into it, right under the skin. My other hand did. It was the grossest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
“Ugh, gah,” I said. “What’s this? It’s disgusting.”
The figure at the end of my bed smiled in a rather patronizing way.
“I think you’d find things a lot more disgusting if it wasn’t there,” he said. “It’s giving you painkillers and medication.”
“Well, can I have some more?” I said. The lightning-sharp pain flashed through me again, from the toes of my left foot upward right through my body.
I suddenly became aware of other tubes on me, some going in and out of places I didn’t really want to discuss in front of my dad. I went quiet. I felt really, really weird.
“Is your head spinning?” said the bed-sitter. “That’s quite normal.”
My mum was still sniffing.
“It’s all right, mum.”
What she said next chilled me to the bone.