Sixty-Three Stars

“When I count the holes in the ceiling, they turn into stars—and I wonder if the sky is trying to tell me something I’m not ready to hear.”

The hours after Nurse Lola left dissolved like sugar in water.

I couldn't hold onto them. Couldn't grip the edges of time the way I usually could, couldn't feel where one minute ended and the next began. Everything was soft and blurred and wrong, like looking at the world through a window that someone had breathed on, everything fogged, everything smeared.

The paracetamol had barely settled in my stomach when my mother reached into her handbag.

I watched through heavy eyes as she produced a small brown bottle—not a hospital bottle, not something from the nurses' station, but something she'd brought from home, something she'd had ready. The label was turned away from me, but I caught a glimpse of white text on dark glass before she unscrewed the cap and poured a careful measure into a plastic spoon.

"Open up, darling," she said, her voice sweet as honey. "This will help with the pain."

I didn't want to open my mouth. Didn't want to swallow whatever was in that spoon. But her eyes held that warning—steady, unyielding—and the memory of her thumbnail in my ear, her fingers twisting my hair, was still so fresh that my jaw moved before my brain could object.

The liquid was thick and sweet, coating my tongue, sliding down my throat like something alive. It tasted of cherries and something underneath the cherries, something bitter and chemical that the sweetness was trying to hide. The taste lingered, clinging to the roof of my mouth, and within minutes—or was it seconds?—the edges of the world began to soften further.

Not just soften. Melt.

The hospital room, which had been sharp and bright and real, started to lose its definition. The walls seemed to breathe. The ceiling tiles pulsed gently, expanding and contracting like the chest of some enormous sleeping animal. The sunlight streaming through the window became liquid, pouring across the floor in slow golden rivers that I could almost hear, almost taste.

I tried to blink. Tried to hold on. But the medicine—whatever she'd given me, whatever it was doing inside my body—was pulling me down, down, down, into a place where thinking was like swimming through treacle and the difference between awake and asleep was a line drawn in sand that the tide kept washing away.

The dreams came in fragments.

Not proper dreams, not the kind with beginnings and endings and stories you could follow. These were pieces. Shards. Broken bits of memory and imagination shuffled together like a deck of cards thrown into the air.

I was falling again. That familiar nightmare—the endless darkness, the rushing wind, the feeling of my stomach dropping away as gravity forgot which direction was down. I'd had this dream so many times I almost knew it by heart, almost expected the moment when the darkness would split open and the ground would rush up to meet me. But this time, the falling didn't end. This time, I just kept going, deeper and deeper into nothing, and the wind was my mother's voice saying very, very sick and the darkness smelled of jasmine and vanilla.

Then I was in the bathroom. The walls were closing in, covered in brown smears that might have been my shame from yesterday or might have been something else, something darker. The tiles shrank around me, pressing closer and closer, and I was trying to clean them but my hands were too small and the stains kept spreading and Gloria was laughing somewhere I couldn't see—

Gloria.

She appeared like a flame in the darkness. Standing in a doorway, backlit by golden light, her hair loose around her shoulders, her smile the one she saved just for me. I reached for her, my hand stretching out across the impossible distance between us, my fingers grasping for hers.

But the moment I touched her, she dissolved.

Just... came apart. Like mist. Like smoke. Like something that had never been solid at all, that had only been the idea of a person, the memory of warmth, the echo of a laugh that was already fading.

The scent of peach shampoo hung in the empty air where she'd been. Then even that was gone.

Each time I clawed my way back to the surface—back to the hospital room, back to the hard mattress and the scratchy sheets and the relentless beeping of machines somewhere down the corridor—my eyes went to her bed.

Every time. Without fail. An instinct I couldn't override, a hope that refused to die no matter how many times it was crushed.

For a fraction of a second, my drugged mind would conjure her there. I'd see the shape of her under the covers, the spread of her hair across the pillow, the silver glint of the Walkman on the bedside table. I'd see her chest rising and falling with the slow rhythm of sleep, and I'd feel relief so powerful it was almost physical, a warmth that flooded through my body like sunlight.

Then my vision would clear. Just enough. Just enough to see the truth.

The bed was empty.

The sheets were pulled tight, tucked under the mattress with those perfect hospital corners that nobody slept in. The pillow was smooth and centred and undented. There was no shape beneath the covers. No breathing. No warmth. No Gloria.

And the hope would shatter, and the shards would fall through me, and I'd feel the void in my chest grow a little wider, a little deeper, a little more permanent.

Where was she? The Matron had said special care, but what did that mean? Was she sicker? Was the JSLE getting worse? Were they doing something to help her, hooking her up to more machines, giving her more medicines?

The special care unit was where the really sick children went. The ones who needed help breathing. The ones whose bodies were failing. The ones who sometimes—

No. I couldn't think that word. Wouldn't think it. Not about Gloria. She was the strongest person I knew. She had survived five years in this place, five years of her own body attacking itself, five years of treatments that made her sick before they made her better. She was a fighter. A warrior. She would come back. She had to come back.

She had promised me.

My mother sat in the chair beside my bed.

She hadn't moved. Hadn't left. Hadn't done anything but sit there, perfectly upright, perfectly composed, as if she were posing for a photograph. Her legs were crossed at the ankle—never at the knee, that was vulgar, she'd told me once—and her hands rested in her lap with studied casualness. Her cream blouse was still unwrinkled. Her hair was still flawless. Even hours into her vigil, she looked as fresh and put-together as the moment she'd arrived.

It was wrong. All of it was wrong. Real mothers who sat by sick children's beds looked tired. They looked rumpled. They looked like they'd been crying, like they'd been pacing, like they'd forgotten about their appearance because the only thing that mattered was their child.

My mother looked like she was attending a luncheon.

Her hand stroked my hair. The touch was gentle now, soft, rhythmic—a soothing motion that should have been comforting. Would have been comforting, if I didn't know what those same fingers could do. If I didn't know how quickly gentleness could become pain, how the same hand that caressed could twist and pull and dig.

Being touched by her was like being petted by a snake. Smooth and cool and wrong. Every gentle stroke was a reminder of what lived underneath the gentleness, coiled and waiting.

People came and went. Nurses checking on us, other parents passing in the corridor, orderlies pushing carts. Each time someone appeared, the performance intensified. My mother's voice would drop to a softer register. Her hand would become more tender on my head. Her face would arrange itself into an expression of exhausted devotion, a mother who hadn't slept, who hadn't eaten, who had given everything to care for her poor sick child.

"Oh, my poor baby," she'd murmur, loud enough to carry. "Mummy's here. Everything's going to be alright."

The words were a script she'd memorised. Lines delivered with professional precision, the same every time, adjusted only in volume—louder when there was an audience, softer when we were alone. Through my half-closed eyes, through the swimming pharmaceutical fog, I watched her perform. Watched the mask go on and off, on and off, the change so smooth, so practised, that if I hadn't known what to look for, I never would have seen the joins.

Time became something I couldn't trust.

It stretched and contracted without warning, elastic and unpredictable, no longer the reliable, steady march of seconds and minutes I'd always believed in. I would close my eyes for what felt like a moment—just a blink, just a breath—and when I opened them, the light in the room had changed. The sun had moved across the floor, the shadows had shifted, and what had been morning was suddenly afternoon, hours swallowed whole by whatever was coursing through my veins.

Other times, seconds felt like hours. I would stare at the ceiling, watching a single dust mote drift through a beam of sunlight, and it seemed to take forever—an eternity contained in one tiny particle's slow descent through the air—while the clock on the wall barely moved at all.

Through the fog, I became aware of my mother speaking.

Not to me. To someone else—a nurse, maybe, or a doctor. Not Dr Schofield; I would have recognised his voice, would have felt my heart leap at the sound of it. This was someone I didn't know well, someone who had stopped by to check on us, someone who was now standing at the foot of my bed listening to my mother weave her story.

"Yes, he's always been delicate," she was saying.

Her voice was pitched to perfection—the long-suffering but devoted mother, the woman who had sacrificed everything to care for her chronically ill child. There was a weariness in it, a noble exhaustion, as if the burden of my supposed illness was a weight she bore without complaint.

"These episodes come on so suddenly," she continued. "One moment he's fine, the next..."

She trailed off. Let the silence do the work. Let the listener's imagination fill in the blanks with all the terrible possibilities a mother might be too brave to voice.

"But the tests," the other voice said. A nurse—not one I knew well, her accent different from Nurse Lola's. "They don't always show—"

"The tests don't show everything."

My mother interrupted smoothly, stepping on the nurse's words before they could finish forming. Her voice was still calm, still gentle, but there was a firmness underneath that brooked no disagreement.

"A mother knows," she said. "I've been dealing with this for years."

She paused, and when she spoke again, there was something in her tone—a subtle emphasis, a careful stressing of certain words—that made the hairs on my arms stand up even through the fog of medication.

"The seizures that leave no trace. The fevers that spike and disappear. The episodes that no one else ever seems to witness."

No one else ever seems to witness.

The words echoed in my drugged mind, bouncing off the walls of my skull, repeating and distorting. She'd said it like an accusation—as if the fact that nobody else had seen my episodes was evidence of their reality, proof that they were so unpredictable, so sudden, that only she was ever there to catch them. As if being the sole witness made her more credible, not less.

But my brain, even dulled and slowed by whatever she'd poured down my throat, caught the other meaning. The meaning she hadn't intended. The meaning that turned her words inside out.

Episodes no one else witnessed. Because nobody else was there when they happened. Because they only happened when she was there. Because maybe—maybe—they only happened because she was there.

The nurse murmured something sympathetic and moved away, her footsteps fading into the corridor's constant hum.

And the question that had been growing in the back of my mind—the one I'd been avoiding, the one I was afraid to look at directly—pushed its way forward, up through the pharmaceutical fog like a plant breaking through concrete.

Was I really sick?

The question was enormous. Terrifying. It seemed to fill the entire room, seemed to press against the walls and the ceiling and the floor, seemed to take up all the space that was left in my small, confused, exhausted mind.

I tried to focus. Tried to do what the doctors always asked me to do—catalogue my symptoms, pay attention to my body, describe how I felt.

Did my stomach hurt?

I turned my attention inward, past the fog, past the fear, trying to feel what was actually there. My stomach... no. It didn't hurt. Not really. There was a knot in it, a tight ball of anxiety that had taken up permanent residence somewhere beneath my ribs, but that wasn't illness. That was fear. That was the feeling of being six years old and understanding that something was very wrong and not being able to do anything about it.

Did my head ache?

Only where she'd pulled my hair. I could feel the tender spots, hidden beneath the surface, invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for them. Small points of pain where strands had been twisted, where roots had been strained. Not fever. Not illness. Just the lingering evidence of my mother's fingers.

Was I dizzy?

The medicine made everything spin, made the room tilt and sway like a boat on rough water. But underneath that chemical dizziness, underneath the fog and the blur and the strange elastic quality of time—underneath all of it—I felt something I hadn't expected.

Normal.

I felt normal.

As normal as I ever felt. As normal as any six-year-old boy lying in a hospital bed with an empty space where his best friend should be and a mother who—

The thought skittered away from me, too big, too terrible, too heavy for my drugged mind to hold.

But it came back.

Thoughts like that always come back, no matter how hard you try to push them away. They're like water—they find the cracks, seep through the barriers, fill up the spaces you thought were sealed.

What if this was all part of some grand deception?

The idea crystallised in my mind like ice forming on a window, one crystal at a time, spreading outward in patterns that were beautiful and terrible and impossible to stop.

A performance. That's what it was. A carefully orchestrated performance where I was both actor and audience, puppet and witness. Where the stage was a hospital bed and the costumes were hospital gowns and the script was written by my mother and I was expected to play my part without ever understanding what the play was about.

What if the illness wasn't in my body but in the story being told about my body?

The thought sent a shiver through me that had nothing to do with temperature, nothing to do with fever, everything to do with the slow, horrifying recognition that something I'd believed my entire life—I am sick, I am ill, there is something wrong with me—might not be true. Might never have been true. Might have been a lie told so many times, so convincingly, by the person I trusted most in the world, that it had become indistinguishable from reality.

If I wasn't really sick, then why was I here?

Why did I keep coming back?

And more terrifyingly—the question that lurked at the bottom of all the other questions, the one I was most afraid to ask—

What was my mother getting out of it?

Through my half-closed eyes, I watched her.

The medication made it easy to pretend I was sleeping. My eyelids were heavy, barely open, just thin slits that let in light and shape and movement without giving away the fact that I was watching. Observing. Doing what Gloria had told me to do—paying attention.

My mother had taken out a magazine. She held it open in her lap, one leg crossed over the other at the ankle, her posture relaxed, her face serene. She looked like a woman enjoying a quiet moment of leisure, catching up on her reading while her child napped peacefully beside her.

She turned a page, and I caught a glimpse of the headline.

When Your Child Has a Chronic Illness: A Mother's Journey.

The words floated in front of my eyes, sharp despite the fog, as if my brain had decided that this, this particular thing, was important enough to see clearly.

She wasn't reading casually. She was studying. Her eyes moved across the text with an intensity that didn't match the casual pose, the relaxed posture. Her lips moved slightly as she read, forming silent words, committing phrases to memory. Occasionally she would pause, her gaze going distant, as if she were rehearsing something—practising lines, preparing for a role.

A mother's journey.

She was learning how to be the mother of a sick child. Learning the language, the expressions, the emotions. Studying the part the way an actress might study a character, absorbing the details, perfecting the performance.

The realisation settled over me like a cold blanket, and even through the medicine's warm fog, I felt it—the chill of understanding, the frost of truth.

She turned another page. Her finger traced a paragraph. She nodded to herself, satisfied, the way someone might nod when they'd found the answer to a difficult question on an exam.

I closed my eyes the rest of the way. I couldn't watch anymore. Couldn't process what I was seeing, what it meant, what it said about every day I'd spent in this hospital, every symptom I'd been told I had, every episode I couldn't remember.

The fog rose up and took me, and I let it.

Time slipped sideways.

I surfaced again—minutes later? Hours?—to the sound of voices in the corridor. Different voices this time. Voices that made something in my chest tighten with recognition, with hope, with fear.

Dr Schofield.

His tone was low and urgent, not raised but carrying, the way voices do when the speaker is trying to be discreet but is too agitated for proper discretion. And another voice alongside his—calm, measured, authoritative. The Matron, perhaps. Or someone else. Someone serious.

"—concerning patterns in the documentation," Dr Schofield was saying.

I held my breath. Tried to slow my heartbeat, to make myself as still and silent as possible, to become invisible so they wouldn't know I was listening, so my mother—was she listening too?—wouldn't realise what I was hearing.

"Episodes that only occur in the mother's presence," he continued, and his voice was tight with something that might have been anger or might have been fear or might have been both. "Symptoms that don't match any known—"

"We have to be very careful with such suspicions," the other voice replied. It was the Matron. I was sure of it now—that crisp, authoritative tone, those carefully measured words. "The implications are serious."

"The implications for the child are more serious," Dr Schofield said. And there was something in his voice when he said the child—something fierce and protective, something that made my eyes sting with tears I didn't fully understand. "Have you seen the blood test results?"

Their voices faded as they moved away, the words dissolving into the corridor's ambient noise—the hum of machines, the squeak of shoes on linoleum, the distant sound of a television in the common room where Gloria and I used to—

Gloria.

The thought of her hit me like a wave, sudden and overwhelming, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out. Not from physical pain. From something deeper. Something that lived in the hollow space beside me where her warmth should have been.

But the words I'd overheard wouldn't let me grieve in peace. They circled in my mind, sharks in dark water, their shapes becoming clearer each time they passed.

Patterns. Suspicions. Blood test results.

My mother had been so confident. The blood tests will show you're sick. They always do when you need them to. She'd said it like it was a certainty, like she knew something about those tests that nobody else did. Like she could control what they found, what they showed, what story they told.

How? How could she know what my blood would say?

Unless she'd done something to make it say what she wanted.

The thought was too big, too terrible. I pushed it away, pushed it down, let the fog take it. But it didn't go far. It stayed just beneath the surface, waiting, growing, becoming something I would eventually have to face.

It was not long after this—or perhaps it was hours later, time had stopped making sense—that my mother announced she was leaving.

She closed her magazine with a decisive snap, the sound sharp and final in the quiet room. She stood, smoothing her skirt with firm movements, checking the fall of her blouse, adjusting the way her cardigan sat on her shoulders. Every movement was precise, deliberate. Preparing for her exit. Making sure the costume was perfect for the corridor, for the nurses' station, for whoever might see her on her way out.

She leaned over me.

Her lips pressed against my forehead, and the kiss felt like something being stamped there—an imprint, a brand, a mark of ownership. Mine, the kiss said. You are mine, and nothing anyone does will change that.

The smell of her perfume was overwhelming at this distance, filling my nose and throat and lungs until I couldn't breathe anything else. Jasmine and vanilla, thick and sweet and suffocating, wrapping around me like chains made of flowers.

"I'll be back soon, darling," she murmured, her breath hot against my skin. "You rest now and get better."

The words were right. The tone was perfect. But something in her eyes—visible even through my half-closed lids, even through the fog—told a different story. There was satisfaction there. Calculation. The look of someone who had set a plan in motion and was confident it would play out the way she intended.

"Mummy has some errands to run," she continued, louder now, projecting for anyone who might be listening in the corridor. "But I'll be back before dinner. Be a good boy for the nurses."

Errands. The word seemed wrong somehow. Too ordinary. Too innocent. What errands did a mother run when her child was supposedly very sick in hospital? What could be more important than staying by his side?

Unless staying wasn't the point. Unless the point was being seen to stay, being seen to leave reluctantly, being seen to sacrifice and worry and care. Unless the performance required an intermission.

I watched through heavy lids as she gathered her things. Her handbag—cream leather, matching her blouse. Her magazine—A Mother's Journey—slipped inside. Her cardigan, draped over her arm. She moved to the small mirror above the basin—the same basin where she'd run the hot water over the thermometer—and checked her appearance.

Her lipstick was touched up, a quick practised motion. A strand of hair was adjusted, tucked behind her ear. She turned her head left, right, assessing. Everything had to be perfect. The performance never stopped. Even in exit, even in departure, there was an audience to consider, an impression to maintain.

When she reached the door, she turned back.

Her gaze swept over me one last time—over my small body in the hospital bed, over my swollen ear, over my tear-stained face, over the evidence of everything she'd done to me that morning. For a moment, something flickered across her features. Something that might have been regret. Something that might have been uncertainty.

Or something that might have been nothing more than a final quality check. Making sure her work was complete. Making sure I was sufficiently subdued, sufficiently sick-looking, sufficiently broken for whatever came next.

"If you need anything, just press the call button," she said. "Tell them to phone Mummy if you feel worse."

The door closed behind her.

And then she was gone.

The silence that followed was enormous. It filled the room like water filling a tank, rising from the floor, covering the bed, pressing against my ears. After hours of her constant presence—her voice, her perfume, her hand on my head, her breathing, her lies—the absence was almost as overwhelming as the presence had been.

Even the usual hospital sounds seemed muted, as if the world was holding its breath. As if everything was waiting for something—for the next act to begin, for the next performance to start, for the curtain to rise on whatever scene came next in the play my mother was directing.

I lay still.

The medication was stronger now than it had been. Whatever she'd given me from that brown bottle—on top of the paracetamol, on top of whatever else was already in my system—had built up layer upon layer, wave upon wave, until consciousness felt like something happening far away, something I was observing from a great distance rather than experiencing directly.

I stared at the ceiling.

The tiles stared back at me. White. Square. Pocked with tiny holes arranged in regular patterns, hundreds of them per tile, thousands across the ceiling. I knew this ceiling intimately. Had spent more hours staring at it than I could count, during all the hospital stays that had defined my short life.

The tile directly above my bed had sixty-three holes.

I knew this because I'd counted them. Not once, not twice, but dozens of times. Counting them was something I did when I couldn't sleep, when the pain was bad—or when I was told the pain was bad—when the night was long and the darkness pressed close and the only thing I could control was the movement of my eyes from one tiny hole to the next.

Sixty-three. Every time. The number never changed, never varied, never surprised me. It was the most reliable thing in my world—more reliable than my own body, which was apparently sick in ways I couldn't feel; more reliable than my mother, whose love came with conditions and pain; more reliable than anything except maybe the fact that the sun would rise and the hospital would still be here and I would still be in this bed.

Sixty-three holes in a ceiling tile. Sixty-three tiny absences in the surface of things, sixty-three places where material should have been but wasn't. Like the answers I didn't have. Like the memories I couldn't find. Like the spaces in my life where truth should have been but had been replaced by something else.

The fog thickened.

I tried to fight it. Tried to hold on to consciousness, to awareness, to the sharp edge of understanding that had been forming all morning. There were things I needed to think about. Things I needed to remember. Dr Schofield's voice in the corridor—concerning patterns, blood test results. Nurse Lola's whispered promise—Dr Schofield will come soon. The Matron's careful questions. The magazine in my mother's lap.

But the medicine was winning. It always won. It was bigger than me, stronger than me, more patient than me. It didn't care about my questions or my fears or my desperate need to stay awake and alert. It just kept pulling, kept dragging, kept wrapping me in layers of warm, soft, suffocating nothing.

Gloria's empty bed watched me through increasingly heavy eyelids. A silent witness. A white shape that blurred at the edges, that seemed to float, that became less real with every slow blink.

Her last words echoed in my mind—but they were stretching now, distorting, the way sounds do when you hear them underwater. When you're sinking. When the surface is getting further and further away and you can't remember which way is up.

You're going to figure it out.

Her voice. Gloria's voice. But warped, slowed, as if someone had put the Walkman on the wrong speed. Each word drawn out into something long and strange and unrecognisable.

Yoooou're gooooing tooooo...

I was starting to figure it out. Somewhere in the small, shrinking part of my brain that the medicine hadn't reached yet, the pieces were coming together. The heated thermometer. The ear pinch. The hair pulling. The medicine from the brown bottle. The episodes no one else witnessed. The seizures that left no trace. The blood tests that always showed what they needed to show.

The truth was forming, assembling itself from fragments, and it was the most terrifying thing I had ever almost understood.

But the terror was fading too. Not because it was less terrible, but because everything was fading. The medicine was dissolving me, breaking me down into pieces that couldn't hold onto fear or hope or understanding. A deep, chemical sleep was creeping up from my toes, through my legs, weighing down my chest like a hand pressing me into the mattress. Warm. Heavy. Inescapable.

My breathing slowed. Each breath came deeper, longer, with more space between them, as if my lungs were forgetting how to work, as if my body was shutting down one system at a time.

The sixty-three holes in the ceiling tile began to blur. They multiplied. Divided. Split apart and came together, forming new patterns, new shapes. They became stars—tiny pinpricks of light in a darkening sky, a sky that was spreading across the ceiling, replacing the white tiles with something vast and deep and infinite.

Sixty-three stars in a sky that hadn't been there a moment ago.

I tried to hold on.

Some instinct—deep and wordless and more animal than human—was warning me that sleep wasn't safe. That I needed to stay alert. That there were people coming who might help me, who might see what was happening, who might pull me out of the water before I drowned. Dr Schofield, with his serious eyes and his careful questions. Nurse Lola, with her secret touch and her whispered promise.

But they seemed like figures from a dream now. Or maybe this was the dream and they were real. Or maybe none of it was real—not the hospital, not the bed, not the empty space where Gloria should have been, not the mother who hurt me and called it love.

The fog rose up. The stars multiplied. The sixty-three became a hundred, became a thousand, became a sky full of lights that pulsed and breathed and whispered things I couldn't quite hear.

The last thing I was aware of was the sound of my own breathing—slow, deep, the breathing of someone falling asleep or someone falling away from the world—and somewhere beyond that, footsteps in the corridor.

Real footsteps or dream footsteps, I couldn't tell anymore.

The medicine had won.

I was sinking. Drowning in pharmaceutical sleep, pulled under by something my own mother had poured down my throat. And below the surface, in the dark water beneath the stars, I knew what waited for me.

The dream. Always another dream.

And those eyes—terrible, knowing, patient—watching from the darkness. Waiting for me to arrive.