The White Room

The woman shifts on the bed and its white-painted metal frame creaks against itself. The room is lit by blue-white neon and the grey-white of a winter sky flooding in through the metal-framed window.


Outside, a van beeps as it reverses.


She looks up at the thin white cord hanging from the ceiling and remembers the last time she pulled it. She shudders away from the memory, from the panic, the fear, the powerlessness. And the pain that she nursed for weeks afterwards.


She gazes across at the man sitting on the fold-out chair by her bed. His hair is crisp and precisely combed, and his rectangular glasses seem severe to her. His white coat is neat in its ironed perfection. He flicks through his notes, all on headed notepaper and countersigned.


“What do you think,” she asks.


He shifts in his chair. “Well, in some ways, it’s obvious.” She waits, expectantly. “But of course there are so many ways of interpreting these things,” he says finally.


He turns over a page and then quickly flicks through several sheets before putting down his clipboard and smiling at her.


“But it doesn’t really matter what I think. What do you think it means?”


She sighs and turns away, staring at the endless grey-white clouds billowing across the sky.