by Deborah Bee
Hence, my personal guardian angels are warding off the impending dangers. My teeth are cleaned morning and night and I get Vaseline applied to my lips. The bandages on my eyes have been removed – and, according to Lisa, I have two ‘dirty great black eyes’. My mother thinks I have the look of a lout – ‘Which, by the way, is totally normal for where she lives,’ she says. All this I have overheard, in between finding out about Lucinda’s tree-surgeon boyfriend, Lisa’s three-pound weight loss (with her leggings still presumably wedged up her arse) and Beth’s developing varicose veins. Mr Malin apparently has a ‘fuck-ugly’ wife. My mother is a ‘right royal pain in the arse’ and my dad is a ‘cutie’ – good old Dad. I am getting used to the routine, which is a worry in itself. But I’m awake enough, aware enough to think I must be getting better.
They keep talking about the man who’s been here. The man by my bed. My brother. I keep hearing snippets. Whenever the door opens, a tumble of sentences wafts into my room. My mother and father arrive.
‘What do you mean? Sarah hasn’t got a brother!’
I think my mother is talking to Lisa.
‘I know, I know. But the thing is, Mrs Beresford, I thought she did. So if he’s not her brother, who is he?’
‘Who?’
Yes, who is he?!
‘The man who was here! Sarah’s brother.’
‘She’s never had a brother. Has she, Brian?’
I’ve never had a brother. Jesus. Who is it then? What does he want? Is this the man who mugged me?
‘I think my wife is trying to work out who you thought was Sarah’s brother? When did you see him, dear?’
‘He was here before you came. On the first night. He was really concerned. He was pacing up and down and everything.’
‘Where was he pacing?’
‘He was just outside the ward. By the entrance. You have to buzz to get in. But he hadn’t buzzed. I’ve told the police. He was outside, on the first night. He said he was Sarah’s brother. But I didn’t let him in because, well, because on the first night you have to get things straight, you know? Clear up. Get the patient comfortable. If you know what I mean. And Beth said, I mean, Nurse Hodder told me to say he couldn’t come in, and to take his number, and that we would call him. But when I asked him for his number, he just ran off. I’ve told the police.’
Lisa, you are so stupid.
‘Well, that could have been anyone, couldn’t it, Brian?’
‘Yes, you must have been mistaken. Perhaps there’s another Sarah.’
‘Is there another Sarah, dear?’
‘No, he meant this Sarah. He came back, you see.’
He meant me.
‘What do you mean, he came back?’
‘He came back. The next night. When I came in to do the midnight checks, he was sitting next to the bed. Right next to the bed. He was talking to Sarah. I think he was. He was tapping the bedframe with a pen.’
Tap, tap-tap, tap.
‘The same man?’
‘The same, Mrs Beresford. I’m terribly sorry. The man, Sarah’s brother, came back on Saturday night. He got in somehow.’
‘It’s not her brother. She hasn’t got a brother.’ My dad is getting annoyed. ‘Can’t you stop calling him that!’
The door opens.
‘Lisa, you’re needed at Reception. Mr and Mrs Beresford, I’m so sorry. Lisa has told you the situation, obviously. There has been a serious lapse of security, I realise. But please accept our apologies. We have full-time security on the door now. Two policemen twenty-four hours a day. And the good thing about all this is that Sarah is fine.’
After a long pause and a heavy sigh, my father replies.
‘She doesn’t look it, nurse, does she? Does she?’
Someone is trying to kill me.
The lift doors of my mind rattle shut. Bang. Going down.
You know those near-death scenes you get in films? The bits that are supposed to be heaven or something. You know, when someone is unconscious or in a coma and it suddenly cuts to puffy white clouds – or a desert island under a surreal purple sky dotted with diamond stars – or a field of golden barley blowing in a warm afternoon breeze. Harps are usually playing. Or violins. That is not what it’s like. It’s not like that at all.
This is like being in a prison cell that you can’t see or touch or smell. No walls. No floor. Nothing to walk around or sleep on or pee into. Do you think people in a prison cell can even conceive that there is a worse place? This is a worse place. It has to be worse, right?
There are different levels of nothingness. The worst is the black place. I’m gonna call it the Black Place, where there are no dreams and no sounds and no memories. Just blackness. The bottom of the lagoon. One up from that is the Muffled Place where I can hear something but can’t quite make it out. I can dream there. I can think. And when I dream, I forget myself. I almost think the dream is real. Then I can remember what it feels like to feel. I’ve been to the beach running in and out of the cold shallows, feeling the wind in my face and through my hair. I’ve sat behind my desk in the office and looked through my post. I’ve lain on my bed under the bay window and watched the sun’s patterns on the embroidered cover become longer and darker until they disappear. The dreams usually end when the volume goes back up, when I can hear the nurses chatting or my family. My dad. My mother.
Locked-in syndrome. I read a book about it once. About a man who worked on a magazine and had a heart attack and was locked in for months before anyone noticed that he was trying to communicate with his eyes or something. Locked in is right. Locked in. With no door. Jesus, I could be here for years.
When I can hear, I allow myself to be optimistic, that I can – no, that I will – make a finger twitch or open my eyes or scrunch my nose. But when I’m in the Black Place I almost wish that I could end all this. It’s so unfair. How did it happen? Who could have done this? Some dirty kid, probably off his head on weed or crack, has stolen my life. I want to howl from the pit of my stomach. I can’t even do that.
I’ve remembered more about my mother. I remember she always felt closed off to me. Maybe she just preferred my sister. I was my dad’s favourite. I remember coming home from school with a painting and holding it up for her to see and she said how nice it was, but she hadn’t actually looked. She hadn’t actually lifted her eyes from the meal she was cooking. I remember telling her my exam results and her saying that I was getting far too big-headed and I should watch it or I wouldn’t be able to get through the doors. When I came top in English she said, ‘Oh no, here comes The Big I Am.’ I don’t think she liked me. Not at all. I can’t remember her ever hugging me. Or kissing me goodnight. Not like my dad. I can just remember her telling my dad that I was spoilt. By him. While he was standing behind her shrugging and winking.
We moved when I was seven. From the house with the yellow door. To a bigger house with no garden. My mother didn’t want a garden, she said. Too much trouble with gardeners, she said. And my father said he totally agreed. And that shut her up. I said that I was glad because I didn’t like gardeners anyway. And she hissed that dirty little liars grow into dirty big liars so why didn’t I just stop whining on? Just because I was pretty, she said, didn’t give me the right to tell lies. And I remember my dad saying that he was glad to see the back of Mr Eades, and my mother saying that ‘he was a good man, there was no doubting that, everybody said so’, as she stared hard at me.
When I was much older I went to visit my parents. There was a man with me. Adam? My mother said she would make fish pie for dinner. I like fish pie, only she uses really horrible fish. Cheap fish. Tasteless mush. Carol was there. Carol. My sister. I have a sister.
I remember her pouring us a glass of wine each, for courage, she’d said. She knew. So we sat on the sofa in the sitting room – it was a lavender-pink velour sofa with stubby pine legs that sunk so low into the pink nylon carpet that the whole thing seemed to be floating. The wine was kept in the cabinet at the far end of
the room, the mobile drinks bar – that’s what my mother called it. The cabinet had a mirrored pull-down door that turned into a shelf for preparing the drinks. The gin bottle that had stood in there for years must by then have been made up of 99 per cent water, diluted after so many times of us sneaking a glass and refilling it from the tap. My parents didn’t drink gin. Port and lemon and sherry were my mother’s favourites.
The wine was white and warm. From the edge of my seat, and with my wine glass (free from the Esso garage) in hand, I delivered the news that we were getting married. My mother was reading People’s Friend magazine. I remember thinking it was a rather odd title for someone of my mother’s disposition. She was wearing a navy and white ensemble – a white tie-neck blouse from her Margaret Thatcher days and a woollen pleated skirt. Her hair was newly permed and sprayed into a neat globe of black curls. She must have picked the magazine up at the hairdresser’s. With her head to one side, she kept licking her third finger then flicking the page. Lick finger, flick page. Lick finger, flick page, as though I had said nothing at all worth considering. As though someone she didn’t even know had mentioned something terribly dull about the weather. Afterwards Carol told me that my mother had said, ‘I don’t know what she wants to marry him for.’ We went back to London. Then all I remember is a hole in my kitchen door. A hole the size of a fist. With splinters of wood on the brown carpet. And blood in the sink. Not my blood. Adam’s blood.
There’s no one in my room now. Just me and my machines. The relative peace is shattered by Mr Malin and his students. Malin is one of the few people who generally practises what he preaches when it comes to speaking in front of me. His voice tends to be so low that I can’t quite make out what he says. This time he is less discreet. He has the results of my latest brain scan. He says he’s got to talk my parents through it later. Yesterday he’d said, ‘Let’s look forward to some progress, shall we?’ and my parents had perked up.
He is asking one of the students to assess the scan.
‘Although I would say, sir, that there is too much swelling to get a definitive answer, but I believe that the scan suggests that she is in a persistent vegetative state, unaware of either herself or her environment. She may have sleep cycles and awake cycles. But since she has no voluntary responses to sound, light, motion, and no understanding of language as well as no control of her bowel or bladder functions, I would put her chances of recovery at very slim.’
Malin responds but I can’t hear.
‘Sir, I would simply explain to them that recovery is rare.’
That was the student again.
‘Ten out of ten, Miss James.’
Ten out of ten – that’s what Malin said.
This is me thinking.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit, shit.
I just have no strength for this.
Oh, listen to yourself. You are not getting better. You are not going to get better. You are better off dead anyway.
I was in the Black Place earlier. Maybe yesterday. Before Malin gave me the prognosis. It was cold, so cold. The bottom of the lagoon. Down that deep, you would be cold, wouldn’t you? I was plucked out of the darkness, catapulted back to the present by this voice whispering right in my ear. I don’t know how I could have forgotten – it sounded so urgent, so desperate.
‘OMG, Sarah. Sarah! Fuck’s sake. You have to wake up. This wasn’t sposed to happen.’
My heart starts pumping really fast. I can hear the blood rushing around my body. And then I remember Kelly.
22
Kelly
Day Four – 3 p.m.
We’re in the hospital cafeteria. We had lunch here. Cheese and bacon grilled baguettes. Quite nice. Must come here more often. Joke. Sarah hasn’t woken up but apparently after we left they removed some of the bandages and Lucinda says she looks a lot less like a cartoon mummy. But still not like her. Not yet, she said. She ain’t pretty.
The cafeteria has got like a glass ceiling. It’s at the front of the hospital. My mum says it’s called an atrium. If you sit in a sunny bit it’s really hot and if you sit in a shady bit it’s really cold. There are automatic doors out the front that swish open every time someone gets within like a fucking mile of them even if they aren’t coming in, so there’s wind blowing in all the time too, big bursts of cold wind mixed up with the smell of cigarettes and clouds of dust off the pavement. Outside there’re people smoking their heads off. In wheelchairs, some of them. With drips. Seriously. Why would you smoke if you’ve got a drip? It’s like they’re not dying enough already.
There’s this old man standing right by the door, crying. He keeps dabbing his face with a big crumpled-up hanky that is filthy. He’s got a thick woolly old coat on, even though it’s not exactly winter outside, and then his pyjamas and his slippers. And he keeps just looking at the ceiling. Like there’s something really interesting up there. Maybe he’s just been told he’s like gonna die of something, really soon. And he’s looking for heaven. Like maybe he’s got lung cancer, right? Or maybe he just got here and they’ve told him that his wife went and died in the night or something. He wouldn’t be in his pyjamas and his slippers if he just got here. Unless he came on the bus in his pyjamas and his slippers cos his wife’s not at home any more to remind him to put his clothes on. Maybe he just went out the front for a fag. What I wouldn’t do for a fag right now. But I don’t smoke any more. Sarah said not to smoke. She said it’s not nice to smoke. Well, she said people think it’s not nice to smoke. She said the baddies in movies always have a fag in their hand. She said you can always tell whodunnit by who smokes.
I was only like halfway down my chocolate milkshake and smoky bacon Walkers, when I saw Sarah’s parents come in through the automatic doors. It didn’t seem right to be stuffing my face. They joined the end of the self-service queue and you could see by the way that they kept looking over at us that they couldn’t decide whether to come and sit down or like go and sit on their own. And then my mum did one of them gross embarrassing waves, that way that old people wave, so they came over. The groany noise the chair legs made on the tiled floor as they dragged them out from under the table made me jump. I thought it was them making the noise. Seriously. I’m not even lying. The noise matched the looks on their faces. I feel sorry for them. Sorry that their daughter is sick. Sorry that they didn’t even seem to know her.
‘What was Sarah like when she was little?’ I say to Mr Beresford, when my mum and Sarah’s mum get talking about medical stuff.
‘She was the most beautiful girl,’ he says, and his eyes are like wet and twinkly. And I think ‘holy fuck, I really hope he isn’t gonna cry’ cos I was only asking to be polite.
‘She was such an ugly baby, though, wasn’t she, Brian?’ joins in Mrs Beresford, who, like my mum, can follow two conversations at the same time.
And I can see my mum’s lips get tight and she shifts her butt in her chair, and I can tell she’s thinking that you don’t speak ill of the . . . ill?
‘We used to hide her face inside a bonnet so that no one would see her.’ She is grinning like a false grin even though her eyes are red from crying. She has mascara smudged down her cheek and a smear of orange lipstick on her front teeth.
‘She was the light of my life,’ says Mr Beresford, quietly, like he’s just talking to me. ‘She used to laugh all the time. She was such a happy child.’
‘She was full of herself when she was little,’ says Mrs Beresford. My mum flashes me a look that says ‘here we fucking go’.
‘She won a competition, didn’t she, Brian? A beauty competition when she was three.’
‘Little Miss Pears,’ says Mr Beresford, stirring his coffee absent-mindedly. ‘She looked like an angel.’ He’s also now gazing at the ceiling. I just double-check to make sure there isn’t actually something quite interesting up there.
‘I always found her quiet,’ says my mum. ‘I think they call it unassuming.’
‘Yes, she turned into a b
it of a bookworm. I don’t know where she got that from,’ says Mrs Beresford. ‘I don’t ever read myself. Haven’t the time. But she always had her head in a book. If we lost her we’d find her in the airing cupboard, lying on one of the bottom shelves reading Enid Blyton or something with fairies and princesses.’
‘It was school that quietened her down,’ says Mr Beresford, still looking at the ceiling and seeming sad again.
‘What’re you all talking about?’ says a woman who suddenly drags a chair up to the table. You couldn’t mistake Sarah’s sister. She looks so similar. Not as pretty. Not as thin as Sarah had got. But same genes. She’s wearing a leather jacket. Fucking nice leather jacket. And one of those scarves that models wear. Those fucking expensive ones. Cashminas or something. It’s lilac blue.