ANDY COMES BACK His eyes fluttered open, and he was surprised to find himself alive.

If he’d thought about himself at all in the last five years, he’d considered himself dead. Occasionally he’d peek out at the world, and for his peekhole he would use the gibbering, shrieking idiot the nursing staff called Andy.

But today he’d dropped in to the idiot’s head to have a look, and there he was: alive as anything. It was a hell of a shock.

He sat up, immediately aware of the institutional pyjamas he was in.

‘Morning, Andy!’ said the old man in the next bed.

‘Morning,’ he responded vaguely, looking at his bedside cabinet, which had nothing on it but flowers and orange juice.

‘Ha! Good for you, Andy boy!’ said his neighbour, as if impressed.

Andy checked inside the cabinet. It was empty. He twisted around to look at the wall behind his bed. A flimsy plastic bas-relief of Father Christmas had pride of place there, connected by a barbed wire of tinsel to other identical Father Christmases behind other beds. Blu-tacked under Andy’s Santa were photographs of a woman and three children, in various combinations. A child’s painting, rather tattered and signed Robert, was almost hidden behind the bedhead.

A nurse strolled into the ward and said hello to everyone. She was wearing disposable gloves.

‘Andy said good morning just now,’ the old man informed her at once.

‘That’s nice,’ she said, obviously not believing it. She strode over to Andy’s bed and without warning pulled back the covers. Briskly uninhibited, she inspected his crotch, then slipped a hand under his bottom to check the white undersheet.

‘You been a good boy tonight, Andy?’ she cooed approvingly, addressing his lower half.

‘What?’

She carried on instinctively, before she’d had a chance to decode the sound he’d made.

‘Not poo’d the bed?’

‘I should hope not,’ he said. ‘What do you think I am?’

She stared at him openmouthed, stuck for an answer. Then she ran away.

It turned out he’d been a drooling imbecile for five years. He’d contracted a rare disease, survived it, but lost his mind. When first admitted to an acute ward, he’d presented an exciting challenge to medical science. All sorts of experts had tried to pursue his consciousness wherever it had gone, and bring it back. Then the weeks had passed, and life went on, and the hospital needed his bed. He’d been shifted to a nursing home, and that’s where he’d lived ever since.

He gathered he’d been very difficult to care for, twitching convulsively and flinging his limbs about whenever the nurses tried to shave or wash him, sending cereal bowls and cutlery flying across the room with one slam of his fist, waking the other patients up at night with dog-like howls. His howls, in fact, could be heard even beyond the nursing home environs. Despite stiff competition from all the other mournful cries these walls had ever contained, his howls had achieved legendary status.

Calm and soft-spoken now, he asked for a mirror and a razor.

A nurse fetched him the electric shaver that had been shoved across his squirming face every day for five years. He asked for a blade and some soapy water. Their eyes met. Only a couple of days ago, she and a burly porter had had to restrain him when a Christmas singalong provoked him to a frenzy. The memory of his feral strength was fresh in her mind.

‘Thank you,’ he said, when she brought him the razor.

He was disturbed by what had happened to his face. It was very much older in one way, with hard, rubbery folds and wrinkles, and whitish-grey hairs amongst his usual black stubble. But it was obscenely young as well, like the face of a chimpanzee infant. Shaving the stubble off it didn’t seem to make much difference.

The nurse watched him as he struggled to carve out something familiar.

‘Your wife … ’ she began.

‘What?’

‘Your wife is coming today. It’s her visiting day.’

He thought this over for a second; suddenly remembered his wife very well.

‘I suppose you’ve rung and told her the news?’ he said.

‘I’m afraid not,’ replied the nurse. ‘We tried to, but there was no answer. She’s got a surprise coming, hasn’t she?’ She snorted, then blushed and left abruptly.

Andy’s wife arrived after lunch, when the nursing home was at its busiest. She was at his bedside before any of the staff noticed her.

‘Hello Andy-boy,’ she said as she sat down on the end of his bed. Yanking her shoulderbag onto her lap, she rummaged in it. ‘Brought you some donuts. And a can of soft drink.’ She reached past him and put the treats on the bedside cabinet. She ruffled his hair, squinting and pouting.

‘How’ve you been behaving, eh Andy? Not causing the nurses too much bother? Not being a naughty boy at breakfast? Mustn’t be a naughty boy at breakfast, Andy.’

She seemed quite content, steaming ahead without really noticing him, like a primary school inspector breezing through a class of cheerfully preoccupied children. It seemed a shame to tell her the truth, but as a nurse was running towards them he thought he’d better get in first.

‘I’m all right now, Brom,’ he said quietly.

‘Uh … yes,’ panted the nurse, squeaking to a stop on the polished linoleum.

Andy’s wife didn’t speak, only looked from the nurse to Andy and back to the nurse.

‘I mean,’ said the nurse, ‘we’ve called in the specialist, and the test results aren’t in yet, but …’ She flashed a goofy grin and gestured towards Andy, as if to say see for yourself.

Andy’s wife smiled too, a grin of infinite foolishness and shock, as if she were the victim of a surprise birthday party on the wrong day.

‘Really?’ she said.

It was her husband, rather than the nurse, who answered now.

‘Really,’ he said.

‘How wonderful, darling,’ said Andy’s wife. She reached across the bed and embraced him awkwardly, like a member of the Royal Family embracing a deformed child.

There followed an excruciating silence.

‘Well,’ said the nurse, feeling herself being sucked into its vortex, ‘I expect this will take a bit of getting used to. On both sides.’ Counselling over, she walked off to do a bit of nursing, which was what she was paid for, after all.

The embrace broke. Andy and his wife settled back into their previous positions like pool players after a shot. Bromwyn stared straight ahead of her, at the narrow corridor at the far end of the ward.

‘I’m sorry if I don’t seem delighted, Andy,’ she began.

‘Have you been calling me Andy these past few years, Brom?’ asked Andrew, who didn’t like to be called Andy.

‘Sorry. Yes. Sorry,’ said Bromwyn, who didn’t mind being called Brom.

He stayed in the nursing home for another two days, reading Reader’s Digests, chatting to astounded medical experts. Every capability he’d ever had seemed to have come back to him. When the time came for him to go home, however, he was advised, for no explicit reason, not to do the driving.

After some embarrassing farewells and best wishes for the new year from the nursing staff, Bromwyn took Andy home. A staunch non-driver all the years that he’d encouraged her to learn, she’d bitten the bullet and got her licence barely six months after his mind had gone. He would never know if mastering the controls had come easily to her. She drove mechanically and without undue concern for the other traffic, like all experienced drivers. He found this oddly unbecoming.

The old neighbourhood had scarcely changed. This seemed to him an indictment of the sort of neighbourhood it was. He had moved here, reluctantly, for the sake of his job, which of course no longer existed.

His wife had found work, though. It was all she talked about on the way home, understandably.

At the front door of their house she could not, for a moment, find her key. This flustered her immoderately. Key found, she insisted on going in ahead of him when she’d opened the door. The house, from what he could glimpse as he followed her through, was cluttered and untidy: young boys’ mess.

‘I’m sorry the place is in such a state,’ said Bromwyn, although she sounded irritated, not sorry. He knew damn well he was unwelcome, that he had come back to life at much too short a notice for her. He didn’t care.

The house was a single mother’s place now. Everything of his had been removed. He found this interesting, but didn’t mind much. Nothing he had ever possessed had been quite what he wanted anyway. He guessed correctly that his den had been given to the eldest of his sons, and he approved of that: Robert would be nine now, an age at which a boy deserved a room of his own.

Andy wasn’t looking forward to meeting his children, though.

His wife seemed hell-bent on taking him through a guided confessional tour of what had changed, and why. Extra space had been required for X, which meant that Y had to be shifted to Z, where it got in the way of … He told her he could wait until later for all that, and suggested she make them both a cup of tea.

The kitchen bench was littered with the mess made by children who’d been too young to serve themselves last time he’d seen them. He cleared a spot to lean his elbow on as his wife stiltedly made the tea.

‘Now,’ she said, her back to him, ‘Is it two sugars or one?’

‘Two,’ he said absently. They seemed mutually agreed to let this exchange pass as if unnoticed. Instead, they sat at the breakfast bench and drank their tea in silence. This, as far as he could remember, was not unusual for them, although of course it felt that way in the circumstances.

‘I have to clean up,’ said Bromwyn at last.

‘I’m not stopping you,’ he said.

She stared pointedly at his elbow leaning in the midst of the plates. He understood he was in the way, got up and walked into the living room.

He sat down in the old armchair and picked up a newspaper to see what sorts of things the world was up to these days.

-Micael Faber, he said I could post this