The ward wall

Full text as recovered

The fixture has been on, at a fraction of rating, for nineteen years, and in
nineteen years it has bleached the plaster everywhere its light fell.

Everywhere something was taped up, the plaster underneath stayed the colour it
was in 1986. The wall has kept a contact print of the last things pinned to it.

There are three shapes.

The first is a fourteen-hour observation chart, ruled by hand at the bottom the
same way the sheet in Observation Three was ruled.

The second is a small square, the size of a Polaroid.

The third is a name, written across the top of the chart in marker, large enough
to read from the door.

You have known that handwriting your whole life. It is on eleven birthday cards
in a box in your flat, and on the visitor register in the vestibule dated
the thirteenth of November, and it is here, on this wall, above a chart that
ran fourteen hours and six minutes.

ODILE ALDAINE — 114

Under it, smaller, in the same hand:

        Wren — if you are reading this you came. Thank you.
        Don't switch it on.