by Deborah Bee
Day Three – 10 a.m.
The nice nurse, the one called Beth, she said that Sarah would probably move today. Maybe wake up. Sunday, she said. Sunday would be a good day. She said that once Sarah was on less drug stuff her brain would start to work again. And she said she would call me. She even took my mobile number and said that if Sarah even so much as twitched or anything she would text me. I look at my phone just about every minute. I’m not even lying. I’m looking at it so much I have a pain in my wrist. I have RSJ – repetitive strain . . . injury. Can you get compensation for that?
I haven’t even told you about the arson attack yet, have I? The one that Langlands was on about that took out the entire fucking languages block. But I can’t tell you about that until I’ve told you about Kathryn Cowell and before I tell you about her, I have to tell you about my first day at South Haringey. This is before I even knew Sarah. I started in Year 7, when I was just eleven, at the beginning of September, and Sarah moved in like in the middle of September. It can’t have been long after cos it was still really hot. She saw me on that day when I yanked Billy’s arm. She saw me from her bedroom window upstairs that overlooks the bend in the road. She didn’t see Wino on the other side of the road. She just saw me hurting Billy. But she never told my mum. She never said nothing about it until much later. She was good at saying nothing.
So it all started with this fucking locker key thing. It’s my mum’s fault. You see, everyone had to have their own padlock. It said so in the pack you get before you start at the school. You get given a locker, right, for all your stuff but it’s up to you to lock it up otherwise all your stuff gets nicked. It doesn’t say ‘it may get nicked’, it says ‘it will get nicked’. That’s what it’s like at South Haringey Secondary. It’s not a great area. There’s like the Huntley Estate, that’s one of them high rises, that’s where Wino lives, then the Farringdon Estate, which is exactly the same but further up White Hart Lane. There’s like two thousand kids at the school altogether.
So on my first day at South Haringey Secondary, each form was taken to the locker room and everyone was given a random number and you had to find your locker and put your padlock on it. My mum had got me this padlock from Halfords when she took Billy’s bike in to get the seat fixed – he’d left it out the back again and the saddle had rusted and when his legs grew he couldn’t move it up. Anyway, she got me this pink rubber padlock that is a bit fucking fancy as padlocks go. Most people just got a normal one but my mum thinks – and this is her fucking logic – that everyone is gonna have a plain padlock so better for me to have like a pink one that stands out so I can find my locker easier. There are numbers on the lockers. I told her that. She said how was she supposed to know. So I put all my stuff in my locker, my books for English and my coloured pencils, spare hairbands and stuff, and attached the fat rubber pink padlock and that was fine, right. Then at the end of the day I go back to the locker to pick up my bag. And I see the pink padlock and I put my key in, open it and . . . well, FML, it wasn’t my stuff. There was a half-bottle of vodka, and a brass lighter with a peace sign on and initials KOP in like pretend diamonds on it, and a pair of those boots that have like steel toe caps in (Sarah says they used to be called DMs) which were all dusty with dirty yellow laces, and then there was this metal thing that someone told me after was a knuckleduster. To start off with I thought all my stuff had been nicked. I’d hardly finished totally crapping myself when I felt someone grab my ponytail. I had a ponytail at that point – me and Clare had both started doing this really high ponytail thing. We looked like My Little fucking Pony. Anyway, I was fucking scared because he nearly snapped my goddam head off and I was being dragged backwards across the locker room. And this voice goes, ‘What the fuck you doing in Kathryn’s locker?’ Actually he called her Kaffrin. They spoke like lame twats, all of them. So I was like, ‘It’s my locker. My stuff has gone.’ I could hardly breathe. And he yanked me onto the ground and he said I’d better fucking keep out of his fucking way and out of Kaffrin’s fucking locker and if he ever saw me or my stupid fucking ponytail again anywhere near her fucking locker he was gonna fucking do me, alright? I thought he might do me right there, but then a fight broke out at the other end of the locker room and Wino – that’s who it was – just cleared off to watch, leaving me on the floor by the window.
I got up and stared at the locker again and after about five seconds I realised that the locker three along from the one that I had opened also had a fucking pink fucking rubber padlock. Kathryn Cowell had the exact same padlock as mine. I meant to go back to Halfords to ask them how they can fucking sell two fucking padlocks that take the same fucking key but I didn’t. I mean how can they do that? Isn’t that like illegal? I bought a new padlock on the way home and got in early the next day so I could swap it over. I got the same plain padlock like everyone else had, except Kathryn Cowell. It didn’t matter, though, cos after that they knew who I was. You didn’t want Wino to know who you were.
I didn’t tell my mum. She wouldn’t have been able to do anything or if she did she would have made it like totally worse. I didn’t say anything to anyone. Until later, when I told Sarah. That’s when we decided to dye my hair back to what it looks like now. I didn’t really get what she was saying from the start. I get it now, though. It’s easier to look plain. Can you see why it’s like totally the right thing to do? If Sarah was here now she would say ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself, Kelly. Stay quiet.’ And by quiet she meant, like, not loud like I used to be. People don’t notice visually quiet people – that’s how she used to put it. Visually, she said. She always used big words.
But now she’s not here. And the phone just rang in the hall and it was Sarah’s mum to say not to come today but to come tomorrow or the next day cos Sarah’s sister was gonna be arriving soon from Canada like either today or maybe tomorrow. And that Sarah hasn’t woken up yet. She hasn’t moved at all. This is so shit. Even my mum said it was so shit.
19
Sarah
Day Three – 1 p.m.
The next time the sound came back it is a different day.
I think my brother was in my room again last night.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what’s real.
The victim liaison officer has obviously wound up my mother about the credit cards. They are all in my room and to the accompaniment of my own personal life-support symphony, my mother has now decided that somehow her savings – not even mine, hers – are going to be hacked into. Mrs Brannon is talking in that reassuring voice in the way that she does, and my mother is badgering my dad in the way that she does, and he’s not really listening, or he can’t hear her because he’s turned his hearing aid down. And the conversation is one big circle that keeps going round and round . . . ‘No, they won’t have access to your bank account. Why would they? Yes, Sarah’s bank account has been frozen. Yes, we can find out if they’ve used the cards. Yes, the bank will be insured for that. No they don’t have access to your bank account . . .’
I’m sure I should remember more about my mother but there was no one standing next to my dad as he watched me jump in and out of the paddling pool. ‘Daddy, watch me. Daddy.’ In the garden behind the house with the yellow door there was a neat little lawn. He stands there patiently, in his beige slacks and his tweed jacket and his polished lace-up shoes, beside our white-painted garden gate. The lawn was bordered by flowerbeds, a metre wide down each side and along a wooden fence at the back. They were stuffed with heavy-headed chrysanthemums, too many of them, yellow and red and orange all mixed up together. They were tied with green twine, just below their heads, and the stems strain against spindly canes. In the smallest gust of wind the canes come loose, and the flowers fall flat on the grass, exhausted.
Along the garage wall there was a trellis with an apple tree trained along it. There were tiny apples hanging from its narrow branches, cute cartoon apples that were pink and shiny. But we weren’t allowed t
o eat them. Not ever. Bees would busy themselves in the leaves, adding a droning backdrop to the heat of the afternoon. Occasionally they would disappear into a deep black hole in the side of an apple and everything would go quiet. Their tails would poke out, vibrating silently.
In the centre of the lawn is my yellow and blue paddling pool. The tiny waves in the water are creating a glittering light show, like in a fairy story. The water is perfectly cool. I have a neon orange swimsuit that has a flowery skirt and a yellow plastic belt.
The swimsuit has got wet. It is itchy and loose and long.
The water from the pool has spilt onto the grass and made it flat and slippery. And the water has got dirty with blades of brown grass floating in the top, circling slowly, and mud and stones washing around the bottom. The gate to the garden is empty. My dad has gone. A different man is standing in the garden. An old man with torn clothes and bent hands. Dirty fingernails.
The sun goes in.
My memories come like stuttering films among a background of voices, half dream half thought. Nurses. Doctors. Cleaners. Dappled sunlight. A warm breeze. Somewhere there’s music playing.
Then the lights go out.
My daydreams disappear and the voices switch off – like a radio – and I feel like I’m sinking and sinking and sinking. Swallowed up by nothingness. Sinking is beginning to feel comfortable. A safer place. I’m tired.
Tired.
This is me thinking.
I’m dying. Would that be such a bad thing?
From far away I hear the sound of a buzzer. And footsteps. There’s an argument. Someone is saying, ‘You can’t come in. I don’t care who you are.’
A door slams.
The buzzer sounds again.
‘If you don’t go away, I will call the police. Security are already on their way up. And I mean it.’
More footsteps. Men talking. A woman. Beth maybe.
‘Alright, Sarah? It’s all OK. Come on now. You’re causing us all sorts of fun and games here. So you may as well come back and help us sort them out. Good night, love.’
20
Kelly
Day Four – 11 a.m.
My phone went off last night. Like in the middle of the night or something.
Message.
Unknown number.
HEY KELLY. HOPE THIS IS YOU. NO NEWS FROM HERE. SORRY. WE ARE LOOKING AFTER SARAH WELL. BTW WHAT DOES SARAH’S BROTHER LOOK LIKE?
And then, just as I was about to reply, another message.
IT’S BETH FROM THE HOSPITAL BY THE WAY. NURSE HODDER.
Beth, the nice nurse.
So I thought, well, what a strange fucking message. I replied back straight away because it was the middle of the night, right, so it must be something important.
HI BETH. IT’S KELLY. I’M FINE. SAY HI TO SARAH FOR ME. SHE DOESN’T HAVE A BROTHER. SISTER. NOT A BROTHER.
And then I lay awake for the rest of the night because I can never get back to sleep once I’ve woken up. I was gonna tidy my room but then I did my nails instead.
My mum woke up at like fucking dawn or something when the hospital called saying it was alright to visit Sarah. It was the tea-and-tampons lady. Said that Sarah’s family are in seeing the medical team and that my mum should come in and talk to Sarah to help with the memories and shite, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t fucking work but what the fuck.
So we are waiting in the fucking tragic Family Room again, with the OAP plastic chairs. And my mum is making us tea in the disgusting mugs.
It’s a bit like going to a wedding or a funeral or something, visiting people in hospital. Everyone is like really, really happy or really fucking sad or just really, really nervous. No one seems to know how to behave or what to wear. My mum has got her church coat on again and her matching handbag. People like totally avoid each other’s eyes.
The nurse comes in – the other one, Lucinda she’s called. Beth wasn’t there. She gives me a wink and says we should go on in now after all our waiting. So we walk down the faded grey plastic lino (at least it’s an honest colour), which seems to go on for ever and now I’m thinking I don’t really want to go in and see my friend, probably my best friend, looking like she’s nearly dead. And then we are standing outside the door. My mum opens it.
‘OMG, Mum, that’s never her,’ I say, staring at the bed with my hand over my mouth.
‘Is there ever a situation, Kelly Louise Jane McCarthy, when you don’t feel the need to say OMG?’
She’s looking at me, not through the door.
‘Oh my good lord,’ she says, staring at the bed as we back out of the room again.
We’re still in the corridor with the faded grey plastic lino and I’m shaking. And my mum is blowing her nose and her tissue is smearing her lipstick down her chin.
‘Mum, she looks like a mummy. She looks like an Egyptian mummy.’
‘I wouldn’t have known her. Would you have known her?’ My mum’s accent is always more Irish when she’s nervous. She had to give a speech once in assembly about the Christmas Table Top Fair and no one could understand a fucking word of what she said. I just said same name, no relation.
‘Her eyes are all like puffed up,’ I say. ‘She looks like she’s done ten rounds in a boxing ring.’
‘They said we can’t talk about anything negative in front of her, Kelly,’ she hisses at me as we edge into the room. ‘She might be able to hear us.’
I don’t know what I was expecting a life-support machine to look like. I guess on those police programmes and hospital soaps they always look kind of clean and sterile. This doesn’t look clean or sterile. There are plastic tubes snaking around everywhere. They are ridged like the bendy bit on straws. There are like TV screens either side of the bed with graphs on and numbers flashing. And there’s a big machine thing that makes this clicking noise all the time. Probably it is all like totally the way it’s supposed to be, but the puffy purple body lying in the bed with the bloody bandages is making it look raw and it smells too hot even though it’s cold. The bed is propped up and Sarah’s head is resting on a pillow. On a good day it would be a perfect angle for like reading a book. Or having a cup of tea. There are bandages all around her shaved head and a bit over her eyes. There’s a piece of like blue tape holding a pipe in her open mouth. She’s wearing a pale-blue hospital overall that’s not her style at all. It’s got like little bunches of flowers on it. She’d be well pissed off by that. Then there’s a clip kind of attached to her head with a wire coming out and another smaller yellow tube going up her nose. Her eyes are so swollen and purple she wouldn’t be able to open them even if she was awake.
‘Well, Mum,’ I say, ‘she certainly don’t look like she can hear us.’
‘Shhh,’ she whispers. ‘Exactly how many people have you ever seen in a coma, then, Kelly?’
‘She just looks like, like she’s asleep,’ I whisper back. Or dead, I think, but I don’t say that.
‘She is asleep. But her brain might be awake or something, so we need to talk nice to her.’
This is so mental. There is nothing to say.
‘Well, go on then.’ My mum is silently crying.
‘What shall I say?’ I don’t know why we are whispering.
‘I don’t know. Say, “Hi Sarah. It’s Kelly here.” ’
‘That sounds like I’m on a fucking walkie-talkie. Ten-four, Sarah. Come in, Sarah. Over and out.’
‘Do you think that’s helping, Kelly? Go on then. What are you waiting for?’
‘Hi, Sarah. It’s Kelly here.’ I say this loudly in case she can hear.
‘There you are! That wasn’t so bad.’ My mum is back to whispering.
‘Now what?’
‘Well, just say what you’ve been up to. What you’ve been doing at school.’
‘OMG, Mum, what the fuck would she want to know that for? She’s in a coma. And anyway, I haven’t even been to school.’
‘Kelly, I don’t think I need to remind you about your language
please!’
‘Hi, Sarah. It’s Brenda here.’ She pauses and then says, ‘Also.’
‘OM fucking G, Mum. What’s with the “also”? Who says stuff like that – except a complete moron?’
‘Well, in case she wondered who I was, you know. Since she obviously can’t see us.’
And back at full volume she says, ‘Billy is doing lovely in the school play, Sarah.’
‘Mum, why are you shouting?’
‘He’s got a lovely voice. Voice of an angel, Mr Sertin says. Doesn’t he, Kelly?’
‘Yeah, right, Mum. Sure he says that. Exactly that.’
‘Hmmph,’ says my mum, more to herself. ‘I’m going to find some tea.’
When my mum has gone I lean closer to Sarah, even if all that fucking disgusting yellow watery stuff that’s coming through the bandages above her eyes is making me feel like I’m gonna puke.
‘OMG, Sarah. Sarah! Fuck’s sake. You have to wake up. This wasn’t sposed to happen.’
21
Sarah
Day Four – 2 p.m.
‘Afternoon, Sarah. It’s Monday. I’m on a late today. But I’m full of the joys of spring. I hear Brenda and Kelly came for a visit this morning? That’s nice of them. And how are you feeling? The weather is shite by the way. Wet and cold. No good for my knees.’
I’m very well, thanks, Beth. I’m beginning to like Beth. I’m beginning to get used to the routine. I like the way we have become more informal with each other even though we haven’t officially met.
‘It’s important for you to get moving, Sarah. Sarah. You’re in hospital. You’ve been here since Friday morning – well, Thursday night. We need to see some action now.’
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If only it were that easy.
‘Plus it’s that special time of day when you get down with Mr Motivator.’
I didn’t know what she was talking about when she said this yesterday. Now I remember some breakfast TV show where a man in a peaked cap used to yell at the viewers to get off their fat arses. Apparently this is my morning routine. Either Beth or Lucinda or Lisa oversee my morning routine. Not that I do anything. I wish. By the strain in their voices they are rolling me around. How hideous is that? This is what they do for coma patients. Rolling over happens three times from midnight to dawn, to stop bedsores. Sponge baths and motion exercises are every morning. Proper baths I think they said are twice a week – I’m actually quite glad I won’t see myself going through that. I’d actually die of embarrassment. A man came in to talk to my parents about splints to stop the legs going into a foetal position – THE legs, they don’t feel like MY legs any more – but I’m not quite sure how that happens. A physiotherapist introduced himself too, to do yet another assessment and he told my parents that the comatose are likely to get pneumonia, bowel obstruction from lack of dietary fibre, urinary tract infections, blood clots in the legs, seizures, a ruptured stomach, skin breakdowns, skin infections due to lack of circulation and all the rest. They take no prisoners, these medical types. The comatose, he said. Not your daughter who is here in a coma. They try to remove the physical from the emotional. I can’t tell you how removed I feel from the physical.