Short Story: As Good As New

Short Story: As Good As New

It’s raining on the gnome. Elsie wipes a small space on the misted window to look out into the gardens. Behind her, the ward is filled with the chatter of visitors but she doesn’t have any. Instead she looks at the gnome.

It sits buried up to its bottom in a muddy flower-bed. Since she came in with her broken hip she’s asked everyone – nurses, doctors, auxiliaries – even the cleaners, how a garden gnome found its way to a hospital. No-one can tell her. Elsie likes to imagine that someone put it there to cheer up a patient. If so, it must have been a long time ago, because the gnome has lost its colour. Stuck there in all weathers for years, until the plastic has become bone-white and almost transparent. She wonders for a frightening moment if the gnome’s a ghost, maybe sent by Walter to haunt her.

The thought makes her shiver and she eases herself on to her bed and pulls the cover over her.

Walter had always hated her garden gnomes, but she’d never given in on that one, continuing to add to her little dwarf family until they were the first thing anyone noticed when they came in the gate. He said they were ridiculous, but Elsie loved them all, with their smiling faces that never changed.

When they got a bit unkempt in the winter – Walter drew the line at sheltering them in the house – she’d sneak them into the kitchen one by one when he was at work and freshen up their paint, until their eyes twinkled at her again. Walter would sniff loudly at the smell of cellulose, and shake his head.

The ward is quiet. The visitors have gone. Elsie struggles out of bed for another look at the gnome. The light shining out of the ward makes a cold veil of the falling rain. It runs over the gnome’s blind eyes and drips from the end of its nose. The sight pains her.

The pain bores deeper when she remembers the skip and her gnomes being tossed into it by the men who cleared her house. Her son had arranged it all from New York. Walter was dead and the house was too big. The good furniture to auction, the rubbish to the dump, and Elsie to sheltered housing.

In the morning the doctor comes to tell her it’s time to leave. Her hip replacement has been a success, and an ambulance will take her home after lunch. She’s as good as new, he says. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It has stopped raining and the gnome is drying out, but there are green streaks on its face, like tears.

When they come for her she whispers to the paramedics as they push her out into the grounds. And the ambulance doors close on Elsie and the gnome, tucked inside the blanket over her knees.

Tomorrow she will give the home-help some money to buy paint.