Five Minutes of Truth

“Sometimes five minutes feels like nothing—until you realise it’s the only time anyone has asked if you’re safe.”

"Luke! Luke, it's alright, you're safe!"

The voice cut through the nightmare, slicing the darkness open, letting reality flood in. Warm hands found my shoulders—real hands, human hands, hands that gripped firmly but gently, anchoring me to the waking world.

Nurse Lola.

I could see her face above me, blurred by tears and sweat and the remnants of the dream that still clung to my vision like cobwebs. Her dark eyes were wide with concern, her brow creased, her lips moving as she said my name again, said it was alright, said I was safe.

Safe.

The word bounced off me like a ball off cement. It couldn't get in. Couldn't reach the place inside me where the terror lived, where the yellow eyes still burned, where the void still gaped open like a mouth waiting to swallow me whole. My body was shaking—violent tremors that I couldn't control, that made the bed frame rattle, that made my teeth clack together with a sound like stones being knocked against each other.

My throat was raw. Scraped. The scream had torn through it on the way out, leaving behind something that felt like the aftermath of swallowing fire. Every breath hurt, every swallow was a small agony, and I could taste blood—or metal, or fear, or all three mixed together into something that had no name.

"You're in the hospital," Nurse Lola was saying, her voice steady, her hands warm on my shoulders. "You're in your room. You were having a nightmare. It's over now."

But even her familiar presence, even the solid reality of her grip, couldn't quite chase away the feeling that something had followed me back. That somewhere in the shadows of the room—behind the curtain, beneath the bed, in the dark space between the wall and the side table—those eyes were still watching. Still waiting. Still patient.

I clutched the sheets with both hands, pulling them to my chin, making myself small. My eyes darted around the room—checking corners, checking shadows, checking the spaces beneath things where a body could hide.

Gloria's bed was empty. Still empty. The late afternoon light fell across it at a sharp angle, turning the white sheets the colour of old gold.

My mother arrived within minutes.

Too quickly. The thought registered through my fog of terror with a clarity that surprised me. She'd left hours ago—said she had errands, said she'd be back before dinner. But here she was, sweeping through the door as if she'd been waiting just beyond it, as if she'd been standing in the corridor the whole time, listening, ready to appear the moment she was needed.

Or the moment she decided she was needed.

She was still dressed impeccably—the same cream blouse, the same tailored skirt, not a wrinkle, not a hair out of place. Her makeup was still perfect, her perfume still strong. If she'd been running errands, they hadn't left a mark on her. She looked like someone who had been sitting in a comfortable chair, reading a magazine, waiting for her cue.

"My poor baby," she cooed, crossing the room in three quick strides. Her arms were around me before Nurse Lola could react, before anyone could object, pulling me against her chest, pressing my face into the jasmine and vanilla of her blouse. The embrace was suffocating—too tight, too close, her arms wrapped around me like bands of iron dressed in silk.

"These nightmares are getting worse, aren't they?" she said, and her voice was pitched perfectly. Not too loud, not too soft. Exactly the right volume for the nurse to hear every word, exactly the right tone to convey exhausted maternal devotion. She looked up at Nurse Lola over my head, and I could feel the expression she was making without seeing it—the practiced worry, the brave suffering, the silent plea for sympathy.

"This is why I stay close," she said. "He needs me."

He needs me. The words landed on my ears like blows. She wasn't talking to Nurse Lola, not really. She was staking a claim. Drawing a boundary. Telling everyone within earshot that she was the essential element, the irreplaceable presence, the only thing standing between her fragile son and whatever terrors pursued him through the night.

And the worst part—the part that made me want to scream again—was that in this moment, with the dream still bleeding through the edges of my awareness and the yellow eyes still burning in my memory, part of me wanted it to be true. Part of me wanted to believe that her arms were safety, that her voice was comfort, that the mother holding me was the mother I'd always believed her to be.

But my ear still throbbed. My scalp still stung. And the taste of cherry medicine—her medicine, from her brown bottle—still lingered in the back of my throat.

A figure appeared in the doorway.

I felt him before I saw him—a shift in the room's atmosphere, a subtle change in the quality of the silence. Nurse Lola straightened. My mother's arms tightened around me, almost imperceptibly. The air itself seemed to hold its breath.

Dr Schofield.

He stood in the doorway, backlit by the corridor's harsh fluorescent light, his silhouette tall and still. His face was in shadow at first, unreadable, but as he stepped into the room, the features resolved—the serious blue eyes, the lines around his mouth that deepened when he was thinking, the careful way he held his body, as if every movement was considered and deliberate.

He took in the scene. I watched his eyes move across us—my tear-stained face, half-buried in my mother's chest; her arms locked around me in their protective cage; Nurse Lola standing to one side, her expression a complicated mixture of concern and frustration; Gloria's empty bed, casting its long shadow across the floor.

Something shifted in his gaze. Something hardened. Something that looked like a decision being made.

"Mrs Smith," he said quietly. "I'd like to speak with Luke alone for a moment."

The words were simple. Polite. Spoken in the tone of a reasonable request, the kind of thing a doctor might say a dozen times a day.

My mother's arms didn't move. If anything, they tightened further, pulling me closer, pressing me harder against her chest. I could feel her heartbeat through the fabric of her blouse—faster than it should have been, faster than her calm exterior suggested.

"That won't be necessary," she said. Her voice was smooth, controlled, carrying just the right note of polite dismissal. A mother who appreciated the doctor's concern but knew what was best for her own child. "He needs—"

"What he needs," Dr Schofield interrupted.

His voice didn't rise. He didn't raise his hand or step forward or do anything that could be called aggressive. But the words cut through my mother's sentence like a scalpel, clean and precise, severing her speech mid-thought.

"What he needs is a medical assessment."

He moved further into the room, his steps measured, his presence filling the space in a way that my mother's performance couldn't. He wasn't performing. He wasn't acting. He was simply standing there, being himself, being a doctor who had seen something that concerned him and intended to do something about it.

"The night terrors are increasing in frequency and intensity," he continued. "I need to determine if we should consider a different approach to his welfare."

Welfare. Not treatment. Not medication. Welfare. The word hung in the air, loaded with implications that I didn't fully understand but that my mother clearly did. I felt her body stiffen against mine. Felt her breathing change—a slight hitch, a momentary interruption in the smooth rise and fall of her chest.

They stared at each other across my bed.

And I was in the middle. Caught between them. A rope in a tug-of-war between two forces I didn't fully understand—one pulling me toward something that felt like suffocation dressed as love, the other pulling me toward something that felt like exposure dressed as help.

The silence stretched.

Seconds passed. Each one felt enormous, weighted with everything that was being said without words. Dr Schofield's gaze was steady, unblinking, patient. My mother's grip on me was rigid, unyielding. Nurse Lola stood to the side, barely breathing, watching the standoff with an expression that hovered between hope and fear.

I could hear the hospital sounds through the open door—the distant beeping of machines, the murmur of conversations, the rattle of a cart being wheeled down the corridor. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. Sounds that existed in a world where mothers loved their children and doctors treated illnesses and nightmares were just dreams that went away in the morning.

"Five minutes," my mother said finally.

The concession came through gritted teeth, each word squeezed out reluctantly, as if surrendering even this much ground cost her something she couldn't afford to lose. She released me—her arms unwinding from around my body with a slowness that felt deliberate, that felt like a message directed at Dr Schofield: I am choosing to let go. Remember that. This is my choice.

She stood. Smoothed her skirt. Adjusted her blouse. Every movement controlled, precise, the actions of someone who needed to be seen as composed even when she wasn't.

"I'll be right outside," she said.

The words were directed at me, but they were meant for Dr Schofield. A statement of proximity. A reminder that whatever happened in this room during those five minutes, she would be close. Listening. Waiting.

She walked to the door. Her heels clicked against the linoleum—sharp, measured beats, like the ticking of a clock counting down. At the threshold, she paused. Turned. Gave me a look that was warm and loving on its surface and something else entirely underneath. A look that said: Remember what I told you. Remember what happens if you mess this up.

Then she was gone.

Nurse Lola followed, giving me a small, encouraging nod as she passed through the doorway. The door closed behind them, not quite latching, leaving a gap through which corridor light leaked in—and through which, I knew, my mother would be straining to hear every word.

Dr Schofield sat on the edge of my bed.

He moved carefully, the way you might approach a wild animal or a bird with a broken wing. No sudden movements. No looming. He lowered himself slowly, keeping his body at my level, making himself small—or as small as a grown man could make himself. His hands rested on his knees, open, palms up, as if showing me he held nothing, concealed nothing, intended nothing but what he was about to say.

"Bad dream?" he asked gently.

His voice was different with my mother out of the room. Softer. Warmer. The professional authority was still there, but it was wrapped in something else now—a gentleness that seemed genuine rather than performed, a concern that came from somewhere real rather than somewhere rehearsed.

I nodded. My voice hadn't come back yet—or rather, it had, but it felt fragile, a thing made of glass that might shatter if I used it too hard.

"The same one?" he asked. "The falling one?"

I shook my head. "The house one."

He knew about the dreams. I'd told him fragments during his check-ups—small pieces offered reluctantly, the way you might hand someone a shard of something broken and hope they could tell what it used to be. I'd mentioned the falling. I'd mentioned the darkness. I'd never told him the whole truth. Never about the hallway that stretched impossibly long, or the man that emerged from beneath Paul's bed, or how real it all felt—not like a dream at all but like a memory wearing a dream's clothes, like something that had actually happened being replayed through the distorting lens of sleep.

Never about the eyes. The yellow, knowing, terrible eyes.

"The house one," he repeated, and I could see him filing this away, adding it to whatever picture he was building. "Can you tell me about it?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The words were there—I could feel them, crowding behind my teeth, pushing against the backs of my lips, desperate to get out. But my mother was just beyond that door. Five minutes. That's what she'd given us. Five minutes, and she was right there, and she would ask me afterward what we'd talked about, and if my answers didn't match what she expected—

"It's okay," Dr Schofield said, as if reading my thoughts. "You don't have to tell me anything you're not ready to talk about."

He paused. His eyes found mine, held them. And in that gaze, I saw something I'd been starving for without knowing it—patience. Real patience. Not the calculated waiting of someone biding their time, but the genuine, open patience of someone who would sit here all day, all week, all year, if that's what it took.

"Luke," he said carefully. "Your mother mentioned she's concerned that you might be going home tomorrow."

The words hit me with unexpected force. Going home. Tomorrow. My mother had told him she was concerned about it—which meant she was already working on it, already laying the groundwork, already building the case that I was too sick to leave.

"She did?" The surprise in my voice was unfiltered, slipping out before I could shape it into something safer. The sound of it—genuine, startled, confused—made Dr Schofield look at me more closely.

"You didn't know?"

I shook my head. "You said that I was ready to go home. That my vitals were—"

"Yes," he interrupted gently. "I did say that. And I haven't changed my mind."

He paused. The pause felt deliberate, weighted, like the space between two notes in a piece of music where the silence is as important as the sound. He seemed to be weighing his words, testing them in his mind before releasing them into the air between us, making sure they were exactly right, that they said precisely what he intended and nothing more.

"Luke, I need to ask you something."

His voice had changed again. Quieter now. More serious. The professional warmth was still there, but beneath it was something else—an urgency that he was trying very hard to keep hidden, a sense that whatever he was about to say mattered more than anything else he'd said all day.

"And I need you to think very carefully before you answer."

The room was very quiet. The late afternoon sun had moved lower, casting long shadows across the floor. Gloria's empty bed was a white shape in my peripheral vision, watching, waiting, as if it too wanted to hear what came next.

"Do you feel safe?"

Four words. Four small, ordinary words that anyone might say, that meant almost nothing in most contexts, that were as common and unremarkable as how are you or what's for dinner.

But in this room, in this moment, sitting on this bed with my nightmare still fresh and my ear still throbbing and my scalp still stinging and the taste of my mother's medicine still in my throat—in this moment, those four words were the biggest thing anyone had ever said to me.

Do you feel safe?

Safe from what?

The question split open like a seed, branching in every direction at once. Safe from the nightmares that came every time I closed my eyes? Safe from the illness that nobody could quite diagnose, that produced symptoms no test could confirm? Safe from the mother who loved me too much, whose love felt like drowning, whose arms were a prison and whose kisses were brands?

Safe from the man beneath the bed? From the yellow eyes? From the void beyond the front door?

Safe from the truth that was forming in the back of my mind, the terrible understanding that was taking shape out of fragments and whispers and things that didn't add up?

Dr Schofield was watching me. Not pressing. Not demanding. Just watching, with those serious blue eyes, waiting for whatever I could give him, prepared to accept whatever I offered—whether it was the truth or a lie or the confused silence of a six-year-old boy who didn't know the difference anymore.

I opened my mouth.

My mother's voice drifted through the gap in the door.

She was speaking to someone in the corridor—another nurse, maybe, or a passing doctor. Her voice carried the way it always did, pitched to project, shaped to perform.

"He's always been delicate. These episodes, they come on so suddenly..."

The words reached me like fingers sliding through the gap in the door, reaching across the room, finding my throat, closing around the answer I'd been about to give. I felt them wrap around my voice, felt them squeeze, felt the words I'd been forming—whatever they were, whatever truth or half-truth or desperate plea they might have been—retreat back down my throat and disappear.

Dr Schofield heard it too.

I saw his jaw tighten. Just for a moment. Just a fractional clenching of muscle beneath skin, a reaction so small most people would have missed it entirely. But I was learning to read faces now—learning the way Gloria had told me to learn, watching for the things people tried to hide—and I saw it. The frustration. The anger. The carefully controlled rage of a man who understood exactly what was happening and was bound by rules and procedures and the terrible slowness of systems that were supposed to protect children but that moved like glaciers while the children they were meant to protect burned.

He knew. I was certain of it now. He knew what my mother was doing. Maybe not all of it, maybe not the specific details—the heated thermometer, the ear pinching, the hair pulling, the medicine from the brown bottle—but he knew the shape of it. Knew the pattern. Knew that something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with the story being told about me and my illness.

And he was trying to help. Had been trying. Was still trying, right now, sitting on my bed with his open hands and his careful questions, giving me space to tell him the truth, hoping I would trust him enough to reach across the chasm of fear that separated us.

But my mother was right there. Right outside the door. Listening. Waiting. And the five minutes she'd given us were ticking away, and every second that passed was a second closer to her return, to her questions, to her assessment of how much damage I'd done.

"I'm going to recommend you stay at least another day," Dr Schofield said.

He said it louder than necessary. Louder than the conversation warranted, louder than the quiet, intimate space between us required. He was projecting—for the first time since my mother had left the room, he was performing, aiming his voice at the door, at the corridor, at the woman listening beyond.

"For... observation."

The pause before observation was barely perceptible. But I heard it. A hesitation where he'd chosen a word that was medically neutral, professionally defensible, impossible for my mother to argue against without revealing more than she wanted to reveal.

He was keeping me here. Not because I was sick—we both knew I wasn't sick, not in the way the charts said—but because being here, in this hospital, under his watch, was safer than going home. Because home was the house with the long hallway and the room at the far end where no one could hear you scream.

I understood this. Not with my thinking mind, not with the part of my brain that could put things into words and explanations. But with something deeper—some instinct, some survival sense, some animal awareness that recognised a protector the same way it recognised a threat.

He was trying to keep me safe.

The door opened.

My mother's face appeared, her expression arranged into a smile that sat on her features like something placed there by careful hands. It didn't reach her eyes. Her eyes were doing something else entirely—scanning, assessing, reading the room for evidence of what had been said in her absence.

"Everything alright?" she asked.

The question was light. Casual. The question of a mother returning from a brief absence, checking on her child, making sure the doctor's visit had gone smoothly. But underneath the lightness was something else—a probing, a testing, a need to know exactly what had passed between us.

"Just explaining to Luke that he'll need to stay a bit longer," Dr Schofield said, standing. His voice was calm, professional, giving nothing away. "I want to run some additional tests."

"Tests," my mother repeated. "Haven't you run enough tests?"

"Not the right ones, perhaps," Dr Schofield replied carefully.

They faced each other across my bed again. Another silent battle, another invisible war fought with glances and pauses and the careful placement of words. My mother's smile was fixed in place, but her eyes were calculating, measuring, weighing her options. Dr Schofield's expression was neutral, professional, unreadable—but I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands were held slightly too still at his sides.

I lay between them, thinking of Gloria.

Her empty bed. Her promise. You're going to figure it out. But what was there to figure out? The pieces were all there—the heated thermometer, the fabricated fevers, the episodes no one else witnessed, the medicine from the brown bottle, the blood tests that always showed what they needed to show. The pieces were all there, and they made a picture, and the picture was horrible.

But looking at the picture meant accepting something I wasn't ready to accept. It meant believing that my mother—the person who was supposed to love me more than anyone in the world—was the one making me sick. The one keeping me in hospital. The one who needed me to be ill the way other people needed air or water or food.

And it meant something else too. Something that sat alongside that realisation like a shadow beside a flame.

The thought of going home filled me with as much dread as staying here.

Home was the house with the long hallway. Home was the room at the far end, with the lower bunk and the dinosaur sheets and the door that never stayed closed. Home was my mother without witnesses. Home was the place where the nightmares felt most real.

"Well," my mother said finally.

Her voice was bright. Brittle. The brightness of something that had been polished until it was too thin, until light could pass through it if you held it at the right angle.

"If the doctor insists." She smiled, and the smile was a performance in miniature—perfect lips, perfect teeth, perfect curve, and nothing behind it but cold calculation. "Though I do think Luke would recover better if he wasn't subjected to so much unnecessary poking and prodding."

Poking and prodding. She made the tests sound invasive, excessive. She made Dr Schofield sound like the one causing harm, the one hurting her child. She was rewriting the story even as it happened, reshaping reality to fit the narrative she needed.

Dr Schofield made a noncommittal sound—a hum that acknowledged her words without agreeing, that let her comment pass without challenge but also without acceptance. He moved toward the door, his steps measured, unhurried.

But as he passed my bed, his hand briefly touched my shoulder.

The touch lasted less than a second. It looked casual—the kind of absent, professional contact that a doctor might make a hundred times a day. A pat. A reassurance. Nothing that could be called significant, nothing that could be questioned or criticised.

But it wasn't casual. I felt the intention in it, the deliberateness, the message that was being transmitted through that brief press of palm against hospital gown. It said what he couldn't say out loud, what the five minutes hadn't been enough time to say, what my mother's proximity made impossible to say.

I see you. I believe you. I'm not going to stop.

His hand lifted. He walked to the door. He nodded to my mother as he passed, a gesture of professional courtesy that gave nothing away. And then he was gone, his footsteps receding down the corridor—not the hurried retreat of someone who had lost a battle, but the measured pace of someone who was playing a longer game.

The evening routine resumed.

My mother settled back into the chair beside my bed with the air of someone reclaiming territory. She crossed her ankles, arranged her hands in her lap, and began to talk.

She talked about the weather—a cold front coming in from the south, rain expected tomorrow, better to be inside than out. She talked about dinner—what she'd made for Dad and Paul, a roast with vegetables, Paul had wanted extra gravy and she'd given him too much and he'd made a mess.

She talked about the garden—the roses needed pruning, the lawn needed mowing, the gutters needed cleaning before the rain came. She talked about Mrs Henderson from next door, who had a new dog that barked at everything. She talked about the price of petrol and the programme she'd watched on television last night and the sale at the department store where she'd found a lovely new cardigan, the very one draped over the back of the chair.

She talked and talked and talked, a stream of inconsequential words that filled the room like water filling a tank—rising slowly, steadily, covering everything, leaving no space for silence, no gap for thought, no opening for the questions that burned in my throat.

The chatter was its own kind of performance. Not the dramatic performance of the concerned mother for the nurses, but something more insidious—the performance of normality. The creation of a surface so smooth and ordinary that anything beneath it became invisible. If anyone walked past the door, they would hear a mother chatting pleasantly with her son about everyday things. Nothing concerning. Nothing suspicious. Just a family making the best of a hospital stay.

But beneath her cheerful monologue, I sensed something else.

A watchfulness.

Her eyes never left me. Even as she talked about the weather and the roast and Mrs Henderson's dog, her gaze was fixed on my face, reading it, analysing it, looking for any sign of what had passed between Dr Schofield and me during those five minutes. She was searching for evidence. For damage. For any crack in my compliance that might tell her the doctor had gotten through.

I kept my face still. Blank. Gave her nothing.

I was learning to wear a mask of my own.

I let my mother's words wash over me. Let them fill the room, fill the silence, fill the space where the truth should have been. And underneath the torrent of words, underneath the performance of normality, I held onto the two things that mattered.

Dr Schofield's hand on my shoulder.

And the question he'd asked that I hadn't been able to answer.

Do you feel safe?

I didn't. I didn't feel safe.