As she edges through the blindingly white corridors, Mimi’s feet seem to stick to the sterilised floor. Her heart flutters in her rib cage life a moth in a trap. She feels as if she is obliged to be there, though she wishes against all else that she could turn and run. The atmosphere is choking her -- all around is the smell of medical equipment and rubber gloves mixed with second hand clothing, moth-eaten unloved toys and vomit. She picks up her head and walks purposefully through the building, blocking out all but her goal: Fiona.

Faces flash past her, hurt faces, beaten faces, crying faces and always smiling faces.

‘How can anyone live here?’ she thinks. Everything seems detached. This place is not real, it is a simulation created for people that no one wants.

She feels a dull thump into her shin and it takes Mimi a few seconds to realise that she has bumped into something.

‘Oh, sorry.’ she mumbles hurriedly. As she moves to the right, the object moves with her. When she moves left it moves back, soon they are locked in a ridiculous battle. Her eyes eventually lose their glaze as she shakes her weighted head and looks down. There stands a petite, mouse-like little boy, he is so unremarkable he is almost camouflaged. He cranes his frail neck upwards and fixes his eyes on Mimi. His gaze bores straight through her. That stare! Mimi could not escape it. So pleading, so pathos, so totally void of any life. And yet somehow, that weak little ghost of a child might as well lock her down in a chair, jam her in to a lie detector and interrogate her. For he can drill down past her exterior into the recesses of her soul. Mimi gives a nervous smile and repeats once again,

‘S-sorry.’

‘Why won’t he stop looking at me!?’ He is unmovable, like an oyster clinging to a rock, he fixes his gaze on her, after what seems an eternity to Mimi, he whispers,

‘Do you love me?’ Mimi blinks and laughs anxiously, trying to imagine that he is joking. But her smile fades as he remains as stony-faced as ever.

‘W-well, I d-don’t--’ At that moment a nurse comes trotting to the little boy’s side, he flinches as she rests her hands, with their long, messily painted nails on his tiny shoulders.

‘Of course! We all love you, Joseph!’ she sings in a patronising tone. She casts Mimi an apologetic glance and shepards the creature into a nearby room. And his eyes do not leave her until the door clicks behind them.

Mimi is left staring at the plywood door. She manages to let out a sigh of relief, but the boy will not leave her mind. Casting her eyes down the corridor she realises that there are a million faces just like his all around her. Her whole being lurches at the thought of being locked in a million gazes like his and she walks as fast as she can all the way to ward 364.

Unsure of what is customary when entering an anorexia ward, Mimi knocks weakly at the thin door. She stands nervously moving from foot to foot for a few seconds, as she is about to turn the handle to enter, a flustered nurse bursts through the door and crashes into Mimi, knocking her backwards.

‘Oh dear! Sorry, Babe!’ she crows through the lump of chewing gum in her mouth. Mimi quickly picks herself up and on impulse brushes at her long ebony hair with her fingers. She mumbles some incomprehensible reply to the nurse who is already halfway down the corridor.

Stepping into the cream-coloured ward, her eyes are suddenly filled with the sight of twenty or more skeletal figures clothed in green paper and bed sheets. She has to take a step back and close her eyes tight, she breaths in deeply trying to collect herself.

She is startled by a middle-aged and gruff-looking nurse with her hands pressed firmly to the edges of a clipboard.

‘Ah! You must be visiting patient 8g.’ Mimi is too overwhelmed by everything that has happened to reply properly, she gives a feeble nod, not even fully aware of what the nurse has said. She sheepishly follows the woman, who is bounding ahead impatiently past rows upon rows of beds inhabited by stick-like creatures. Eventually she halts and spins round to face Mimi, who wobbles, having been stopped so suddenly. The nurse raises her eyebrows in contempt and states blankly, ‘Fiona McKillan.’ After having horrendously mispronounced her name, the nurse spins on her worn heels and gallops to a chair in the corner of the room where she then buries her head in a copy of Hello! magazine.

Mimi turns and has to contain an audible gasp at the sight of her best friend. Propped up on a pillow in a metal-framed bed is Fiona, or rather the shell of Fiona. Her unwashed hair hangs limply over he face, hollow and void of emotion, her boney hands grasp at the bed sheets angrily, in her arm is a needle connected to a sachet of some liquefied substance meant to be food and Mimi can barely hear the random incomprehensible snarls and groans escaping Fiona’s lips.

‘Fiona?’ she says, almost questioningly, as if she needs assurance that the half-child before her is really the girl she knew. The girl who used to dance when she was sad, the girl who used to write poetry, the girl who used to lie in the Summer sun and talk for hours on end.

There is no response, she does not even flinch, she simply sits there, unmoved, drawling incoherently to herself. With nothing else to say, Mimi feebly asks, ‘How are you feeling?’ Still no response, it is almost as if Fiona has seen this all before, and cannot be bothered to replay it. ‘I brought you a present!’ chirps Mimi cheerfully, thankful of something to talk about. She delves into her pocket for he small, hurriedly wrapped parcel. She scoops it out, yellow and pink paper with the words ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ trailing into the sellotape. She offers the little gift to Fiona, who does not move. Mimi seems almost hurt, in any circumstance, to see her friend effectively reject a gift. ‘I’ll open it for you.’ she says, prying at the tape. She unwraps a bent piece of cardboard reading ‘Claire’s Accessories’ with two, sparkling hairclips on it. ‘I know it’s only small but. . .’ unable to complete her sentence, she pushes the square of cardboard into Fiona’s hands.

Finally, Fiona’s eyes shift from a blank nothingness to the two clips. Her lips move but no words come out. She snatches the gift up and rips the two hairclips from the backing, she scratches at them furiously.

Mimi reaches a shaking hand out to calm Fiona. She is surprised as Fiona opens her fists, offering the clips to Mimi. ‘I’ll show you.’ she smiles, carefully bending one of the clips back so it clicks open for Fiona to see, ‘Remember?’ Fiona’s eyes widen and she immediately snatches the clip from Mimi, she twirls it in the air, watching as the light dances off its smooth surface. Mimi gives a nervous chuckle, unsure of Fiona’s intentions. Suddenly Fiona plunges the metal towards her wrist with an inhuman scream. Her needle rips from her arm, there is a muffled confusion as the stern-looking nurse cries out,

‘Oh Christ! Not again!’ once the nurse has reached Fiona, and succeeded in pinning her to the bed, a herd of medical staff bursts through the door. The nurse must have pressed the alarm. Mimi is left at he edge of a scrum, with Fiona in the centre.

‘Fiona!’ she calls out, frantic, unsure whether her best friend is even still alive. She sees the flash of a needle and catches the edge of a high-pitch screech. ‘FIONA!’ she cries, in a frenzy she tries desperately to claw her way through the mass of starched medical uniforms.

She blocks out the angry voices as she shoves past the last doctor in time to see Fiona, thrashing against the wall of people, as a nurse tries desperately to ram the needle into her. Her arm is streaked scarlet as deep red blood flows openly from her wrist and spreads like ripples through the pristine bed sheets.

‘FIONA!!!’ she screeches again at the top of her lungs over the sea of raised voices. Suddenly, Fiona’s eyes flash upwards to stare dead forward at Mimi, they are the same eyes as those of the child she saw earlier, hollow and pleading. And her lips, coated with saliva like a rabid dog, slowly form a single, unspoken word.

Mimi.

Her head then reels and slams back against the pillow as the nurse succeeds in stabbing the needle into her skeletal arm.

Mimi is thrust out of the congregation as Fiona’s limp body is hauled from the blood sodden bed and on to a stretcher.

Mimi is left, speckled with her friends blood. Her head snaps towards the bed leg as she hears the tinkle of metal on the floor. She picks up the hairclip, sparkling, laughing, coated in scarlet life, coated in Fiona’s blood.