by Deborah Bee
‘We’d just put on what clothes we had out, you see. I don’t think you’ll mind me saying that I’m actually wearing what I had on yesterday. Well, you see, it’s an emergency, isn’t it? And I just picked up my handbag. My glasses were in there from last night, when we were at Jean’s for the rummy night. We go every week for the rummy. Since her John died. But anyway I haven’t got Brian’s glasses. He’d taken his out the night before, you see, to look at the paper. He likes to read a bit before he goes off, you know. So his glasses will still be on the bedside table.
‘Do you know, Lucinda, you could say anything about him right now and he wouldn’t hear a word. Not a word.’
‘Morning there, Dad.’
The Irish girl is still shouting.
‘Have you been trying to talk to Sarah, Dad? We know how helpful it is, don’t we?’
‘We have. Haven’t we, June? Oh yes.’
‘Would you like some tissues, Mr Beresford? Mr Beresford? I have some super-mansized tissues here.’
Dad.
Is that my dad?
He is crying.
These people here in this room, they can see me. They can’t hear me. Hello?
I’m here. HELLO!
I can’t open my eyes. I can’t move my hands. I can’t feel my body. It’s like I’m here but I’m not here. I’ve lost myself.
Coma. That’s what this is. This is a coma from the inside. Coma. I’m opening the eyes inside my head. As wide as I can. Everything is black. It’s blacker than black. Like inside a coal mine. I’ve been inside a coal mine. I remember a thick yellow gate smeared with black dust, banging shut. The clanking of a lift as it’s swinging downwards. They told us that in a coal mine it is blacker than black. And it was. Not even a glimmer of light from anywhere.
There is no light here. Just sound. It’s like I’ve been buried in a hole and covered over.
I’m dying then.
Dying.
I thought they said when you die, you see a tunnel of light. I’m supposed to see a light and I walk towards it and then I find God, surrounded by distant family members who I don’t recognise. But they recognise me. They hug me. It’s like being at a wedding. Or a funeral.
There’s no light.
There’s nothing.
I’m not surprised.
I’d be more surprised if there was.
I don’t think I’m a God fan.
Am I?
This can’t be happening.
4
Kelly
Day One – 8 a.m.
Still here. Still waiting. The pigs in hi-vis jackets come and go. Visitors sign in with the old guy. The drug smuggler is out cold. The scrunched-up tissue is drying out, in the palm of her open hand. But still no one has said anything more about Sarah. Maybe they’ve forgotten about me.
If they could’ve seen me back when I was twelve – or like nearly twelve – they would’ve thought something else, something quite different. They’d have noticed me then. You would have too. If you’d seen me walking home from school, socks rolled down, scuffed up platforms, dyed blond hair, Rimmel Scandaleyes blue waterproof eyeliner. My blazer collar would be up at the back like the girls in Year 13. I had quite a cool bag back then. Got it in Wood Green market – looked exactly like Prada, though. Same gold lettering and everything. Wonder where that’s got to now. When Billy started at the junior school, Mum said I had to collect him and get him home safely. Hold his hand all the way. He was five. He’s seven now, and a right royal pain – that’s what my mum always says. But he’s alright, if you tell him he is. Once he knows not to do something, he don’t do it. He knows now not to touch my stuff. Not never. Don’t go in my room. Not never. Don’t tell Mum nothing. He’s alright. So there was this one day, when he was doing what he was told, holding my hand like I’d said, like Mum had said, and it was a sunny afternoon. Actually, really sunny. The pavement was fucking boiling. The tarmac on the road had gone shiny at the edges, like where it was melting. We were loping along even slower than usual. I mean you never walk fast coming back from school, do you, but sometimes it would take us three times as long as it takes to get there in the mornings. Even longer on hot days like that one. We’d stopped off at Tesco Express to get sweets. We always did. Mum doesn’t know that. We used our dinner money. Sometimes we’d have to wait to get in because only four kids are allowed in at any one time. It says so on the door. It says ‘South Haringey Primary and Secondary Schools – 4 children only at ANY ONE TIME’ – that last bit’s written in thick black magic marker. Obviously it didn’t actually say that they suspected the kids of stealing, shoplifting, but everyone who saw the notice knew what it meant. We were really pissed off when it first went up. My mum told the Tesco people off and wrote in to the school. Mrs Backhouse wrote an official letter and complained that our schools were being singled out unfairly. The Tesco people wrote an official letter back saying that all the children were in a grey and navy uniform with a South Haringey tie. Plus there aren’t any other schools nearby so it had to be us. In fairness it was us, but it might not have been, right? Despite keeping the numbers to a manageable four, and putting up cameras and mirrors in all four corners of the store, Tesco Express in White Hart Lane didn’t get any less shoplifting. We just got better at it. It was a game. We’d just wait until one of the staff went out the back. Or a few customers were at the counter. Then strike. Sometimes one of us would distract one of them – by asking if they had any salad cream or something difficult to find, and then when they went to look for it we would fill up our pockets with Haribo sours. Billy didn’t do it. He was too young back then. He’d probably do it now if I let him. But I don’t even do that stuff now. I’m good. Like I said earlier . . . now, I talk nice and dress like a goon.
We’d already got our sweets that day. Billy’s got a drumstick lolly with the pink and yellow wrapper – he still loves them. And I’d got my prawn cocktail crisps. I prefer smoky bacon flavour now. I go through phases with crisps. But I remember wishing I’d chosen something else cos eating prawn cocktail crisps and holding Billy’s hand was totally rank. I had to keep dropping his hand so I can get the crisps out of the pack and then lick the pink stuff off my fingers and quickly pick up his hand again, in case Mum caught me, or one of her neighbours saw. She knows just about everyone in the street. And his hand was hot and sweaty and tacky from holding the lolly stick, and sometimes when I licked off the prawn cocktail pink stuff from my own hand I got a bit of the taste of his drumstick. We’d got nearly to the last corner before our street, and Billy was chattering away like always. And smiling. And I was laughing at something he said about Miss Treneer, who he always used to get wrong and called Miss Trinnier. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I yanked his arm. Like really hard. Like nearly out of his socket, hard. Poor Billy. He was so shocked. He had no idea what was going on. One minute laughing, next minute he was crying hard. Screaming. So what am I? A psycho in the making, you think? If you could pull back from the scene a bit then you’d have seen what was going on. On the other side of the road, that bloke who had just come around the bend, in the hoody, with the funny rolling way of walking, that was Wino, aka Joe Herne. They say he walks like that cos he’s pissed all the time but I don’t really think so. Mum said he was born that way – with a funny hip. She used to know his mum. She had another kid who had something wrong with it too. Autistic or something. But really bad. But that’s not the sort of thing you want to get caught talking about. Wino would kill you for talking about that. He lives on the Huntley Estate, still with his mum. If he lives there, you wouldn’t think he’d be able to afford to be pissed on wine all the time. Most of his mates drink lager. To start with everyone thought he was a complete girl for not drinking lager and drinking wine instead but nobody would say that now. Nobody would say anything, to Wino or about Wino. He’s Year 10. Kathryn Cowell’s year. Kathryn Cowell’s best mate. Kathryn Cowell’s henchman.
Pulling Billy’s arm out of his socket, almost, may see
m like a random thing to do just because Wino is on the other side of the road, right? But I had to do something fast. Having a laughing little kid brother was like a chink in your armour – something else to screw you over with. Acting like you didn’t care about nothing was how you got through South Haringey Secondary. It was bully or get bullied, right? You had to act hard or you’d get picked on – but not too hard, or you’d be competition. If you acted tough you would look like you belonged, that you approved, that you were one of them. So that’s what we all did. Not just me. All my friends did the same. We dressed hard, we acted hard. If their crew was around, you just jutted out your chin a bit and set your mouth in a thin-lipped grimace, never met their eyes, and then you were in the crowd. That was the idea. Anyone looking vaguely vulnerable or scared would get robbed. Anyone showing off their new phone, robbed. Anyone daft enough to carry a laptop, robbed. People who stood out, they’d lose their dinner money, mobile, earrings, packed lunch – whatever it was you were carrying that Kathryn decided she wanted. She took someone’s puppy once. But they did get it back – their dad went round her mum’s. Maybe dinner money was how Wino funded his alco habit. Dinner money goes a long way when you’ve robbed twenty kids in one day. After I got onto Wino’s radar, there was no going back. Every time he saw me he’d wrap his hand around my ponytail and yank my head back. ‘’Ello, Blondie. What you got?’ That’s when my mum was starting to get suspicious, given the black eye and the bruises. But nothing was gonna get that out of me. Some things have to be kept secret. Best not to fucking say anything.
So, anyway, when we’d got to that corner and Wino was out of sight, my mum, in her slippers and her apron, came racing out of the house, where she’d been twitching her nets at the front window waiting for us. And she picked Billy up and cuddled him and he was still crying and chewing his drumstick lolly at the same time, and there was a line of sticky pink and yellow dribble coming out of the corner of his mouth and draining onto Mum’s white crochet cardigan and I said, ‘Mum, he just tripped. He’s fine’, and he nodded silently, his face half hidden by her steel-grey perm. And she carried him into the kitchen and put him on his naff little stool where his squash was waiting, in his favourite naff Spiderman cup, and his small plate of biscuits was right next to it. And I looked in the hall mirror and applied another layer of glittery lip gloss in Pepto-Bismol pink, looking like the sort of girl who has a lot to say.
Fuck. I wonder where my mum has got to. How long can it take to get Billy to school? He’s such a dick.
This all happened before my re-education. This is before I was taken in hand and restyled and reformed, and turned into the sort of girl who doesn’t get noticed. Because Sarah said it’s better not to get noticed at all than get noticed for the wrong things. She said if you’re going to pretend to be something you’re not, better to pretend to be nothing. Then you won’t get seen. Then you disappear. That’s what she said. And she said looking like a bit of a loser would make me disappear off Kathryn Cowell’s radar, and anyone else’s for that matter. She said I could become invisible.
You’re probably thinking that this is really random because it’s all happening in the wrong order. Twelve-year-old girls are supposed to be girly and do-gooding, then, bang, hit thirteen and become monsters. This is mainly right. All the girls at school did that, even Samantha Elliott who was seriously a total twat until she came back after the summer holidays with blond highlights. If you flicked back to when I was, say, ten you’d have seen the makings of the prissy self you see here today. At ten I wasn’t allowed to dye my hair yet. Mum had let me get my ears pierced when I was eight and I got my belly button done when I was eleven but Auntie Liz took me and Mum still doesn’t know. If I’m honest it was a bit rank. It’s healed up now. It went septic after a week and I seriously thought I was going to die because I was never going to tell Mum what I’d done because she’d have literally killed me, and all this yellow stuff started coming out. I’m not even lying. Auntie Liz took me down the doctors and they gave me some special talcum, and some tablets that I had to hide in my Rice Krispies.
Also when I was eleven I got my highlights done for the first time. It was my last year at junior school. Auntie Liz took me down the salon in Haringey High Road for a half-head and I got to sit on like three cushions so I could see myself in the mirror. My mum said it looked quite nice, but it wasn’t really blond enough so I spent my Christmas money on getting a full set and went for White Platinum rather than Golden Glow and it looked wicked. Clare Millard in my class had had hers done there too and had the White Platinum as well so we looked the same. Like twins. Everyone said we actually were twins. We got the same wedge shoes too. And the same glittery lip gloss in Pepto-Bismol pink. And when we went out together people used to look at us and point. My mum said it didn’t look nice. Not at all. She got really angry. I got the ‘shabby little tart’ line. But it was too late. By the time I turned twelve, I had the complete shabby-little-tart look down to an art.
The transformation from shabby little tart back to loser was not my idea. I’m not that smart. Well, I wasn’t back then. It didn’t happen overnight either, but it was a conscious gradual toning down of everything, from my hair – back to mousy – to my make-up – none – to my uniform looking boring. Probably at first I didn’t even know she was doing it. As I say, it wasn’t even my idea. It was Sarah’s. And now she’s going to die. Fucking brilliant.
5
Sarah
Day One – 9 a.m.
‘Mr and Mrs Beresford? Yes? Uh huh? Good. Mr and Mrs Beresford.’
He sounds very official.
‘Thank you for coming so quickly. I understand you all had quite a drive this morning.’
‘It wasn’t really morning, was it, Brian? It was the middle of the night.’
‘Winchester, is it? Lovely part of the world. So, Mr and Mrs Beresford, I am sorry for these difficult circumstances. We are all so sorry. I think the best thing that I can do is explain exactly what has happened to Sarah here so that you can understand what we are doing. Has anyone explained to you exactly what has happened here? Right, right, I thought not. Alright, good, uh huh, well, Sarah has suffered what we call a cerebral haemorrhage . . .’
Cerebral haemorrhage? Someone has started crying.
‘. . . caused by trauma to the brain. The bruising to the face and the swelling around the eyes indicates that the force of the blow was sufficient to rupture blood vessels. You understand that the impact of hitting the pavement . . .’
What pavement?
‘. . . the probable impact – this is still with the police, you understand – during the assault caused a fracture to the skull. In this situation we might have expected there to be an extra-axial haemorrhage – that’s a haemorrhage on the outside of the brain. In fact, what we believe we have here is an intra-axial haemorrhage . . .’
Intra-axial? Is that good? It sounds bad. Is it better than an extra-axial whatever?
‘I don’t think we really understand what you’re saying, um, doctor.’
That’s the one they keep calling ‘Mum’. She doesn’t sound familiar.
‘. . . in other words it is within the brain tissue. We often see these in stroke victims, where the pressure has built up and built up. For Sarah it was caused by a sudden blow to the skull. The skull is fractured, but the intracranial pressure has not decreased. The brain is swelling, dangerously. When she came in last night we put her into what is called an induced coma – to give her brain a rest.’
Swelling dangerously!
There is more crying and the sound of a nose being blown.
‘Sarah isn’t the sort of girl who ever got mixed up in this kind of thing, doctor.’
The doctor’s voice becomes too low to hear.
Mr and Mrs Beresford. So they are my parents. I have parents. And my name is Sarah Beresford. It doesn’t sound familiar at all, Sarah Beresford. What would sound like me?
‘. . . I’m
afraid so. The mortality rate for intraparenchymal bleeds is over 40 per cent.’
Does anyone actually know what he is talking about? I don’t.
‘The treatment that we advise for this type of trauma is sedation. For the first few hours we keep the sedation high to give the brain time to recover, then we start to gradually reduce it so that we can see what damage has been done. We’ve already started to bring that down. We want to see if it’s possible for Sarah to reach a conscious state. Do you see? Sarah will continue to be assisted with her breathing through this tube here. She will be fed through this tube. Her sedation is administered up here. So for the next few days we will continue to monitor her progress and look for signs.’
‘How long will she be like this, doctor?’
‘Mrs Beresford, I can’t really answer that. The brain is very complicated. Generally we say that we’ll have a very good idea of the future for brain trauma in ten days. But in truth we don’t know much. We have to look for signs of any brain activity. What sometimes happens in this kind of situation, and I’ll put this in simple terms, is that the brain forgets how to do things. You know, like breathe, or swallow.’
‘What? The brain forgets to breathe. How long for?’
That was my dad, I think.
‘For some patients it’s short term. Others aren’t so lucky. They have a long-term disability, I’m afraid. But it’s too early for us to say that in this case.’
‘What, so, when she wakes up, she might end up in a wheelchair, is that what you mean?’
Yes, is that what you mean?
‘I’m not going to lie to you, Mr Beresford. There’s quite a catalogue of possible damage: there’s personality changes, impaired sensation, paralysis, incontinence, visual or language problems, deafness, blindness, seizures, even swallowing difficulties and neurological deficits.’