by Deborah Bee
My mum is standing up. She’s still lugging that cassette player around.
‘C’mon, Kelly. Time to go home. Thanks for coming down, Mr Malin. Beth. It means a lot to us.’
There’s a pain in my stomach. I’m going to be sick. They’re starting to walk away. My mum is doing up her coat.
They’re giving up on Sarah.
Carol is collecting up the Coke cans and putting them on a tray.
They’re gonna let Sarah die when she’s not dead. Beth is staring at me.
‘She was awake!’ Malin’s heels are making tap-tap-tapping noises on the tiled floor like a girl’s. ‘I saw her!’ My mum has got hold of my arm. The pain in my stomach is getting worse. ‘She looked in my fucking eyes.’
Sarah’s sister is looking in her bag and Beth has said something but I can’t hear it. The fucking bastards don’t know her like I do. Carol’s staring at me too.
‘She was my best friend.’
The pain is getting higher in my stomach.
She wasn’t supposed to fucking die.
It’s crawling up my chest.
I think I’m going to faint.
It’s so hot.
They are liars.
He’s a fucking liar.
He’s a fucking stupid fucking liar stupid bastard stupid . . .
A scream.
A high-pitched fucking scared fucking nightmare scream.
Malin has turned around and is running back towards us with his white coat flying open. The scream is getting louder and louder. My mum is trying to grab hold of my arm. She’s shouting. I can feel her breath on my face. Beth has got hold of my shoulders.
More screaming.
Beth’s saying, ‘Look at me, Kelly. Look at me, Kelly.’
It’s so hot and the scream just keeps screaming and screaming.
‘Look at me, Kelly. Look at me, Kelly.’
There’s a crack as a hand hits my cheek.
Slap.
Stop.
Quiet.
45
Sarah
Day Ten – 1 a.m.
‘The brother’s been arrested again.’
Lucinda is whispering over my bed.
‘What, Adam’s brother?’
She’s on with Lisa.
‘No, David Cameron’s brother!’
‘Who?’
‘Jesus Christ, Lisa. How did you ever pass your medical exams? Yes, Adam’s brother.’
‘Ash?’
‘Yes, your special friend Ash. He’d stolen a load of money. Fifty thousand pounds. Turns out he’d given it to Adam to look after. Adam knew all about it. Sarah didn’t. Well, they think she didn’t. He was coming in here to try to get it back. The police caught him ransacking the house. He didn’t find it. It was at the bottom of a box in the back of a cupboard. Hidden under a pile of porn magazines. He’d taken up half the floorboards.’
‘People are so weird. Why do you always act like I’m thick?’
This means nothing to me. I remember hearing about Ash but I never met him. He was always in trouble. Running up bills in hotels and not paying them. Fifty thousand pounds.
I’m trying to remember if Adam had said anything about Ash recently but to be honest I can’t really remember much of the past month. Not since Liverpool.
My sister has arrived.
‘Listen to this, Mum.’
And my mother. They’ve come back.
‘What is it, Carol?’
Did I tell you I thought I saw Kelly? I did. I saw Kelly. I’m sure of it. I’m getting better. I’m actually gonna get out of here.
‘It’s a leaflet that Gill gave Dad, you know, the support lady. The really, really annoying one.’
‘Gill Brannon has been nothing but kind to us. She even paid for our train fare.’
The light was so bright.
‘It’s a hospice leaflet. “Process-Oriented Hospice Care”. It’s “psychotherapeutic work with patients, families and professionals in the middle of near-death experiences including comatose, vegetative and other highly withdrawn states of consciousness”.’
‘I don’t think that really refers to us, Carol, thank you.’
‘Seriously, Mum. You are going to have to get real at some point.’
What?
‘What your mother means is that there are still many options open to us. We aren’t giving up on Sarah.’
‘I don’t think, Mum, that you –’
‘Please don’t patronise your mother.’
‘I’m not fucking patronising anyone. This is the fucking real world here.’
‘If you are going to use that language –’
‘Dad, listen. It’s not what you think. It says –’
‘I don’t care what it says. You’re just upsetting everyone, as usual. You’re so bloody-minded. You always have been. You are talking about my daughter here. Your sister. This is not the way that life is supposed to go. You don’t bury your own child. You don’t bring life into the –’
He’s crying. I’m crying.
‘Dad, stop. I know. Please stop. Let me read this. According to this bloke, Posner or something, “A patient who appears non-communicative may still experience the world around them and is capable of communicating using subtle, often barely detectable nonverbal signals.” You see?’
‘What is she saying, Brian?’
‘“Patients in comatose states have traditionally been considered by mainstream medicine to be victims of pathological processes that curtail normal cognitive and communicative functioning. Modern research suggests that patients may display ‘islands’ of consciousness in even persistent vegetative states.”’
‘What is she talking about, Brian?’
‘I’m saying that Sarah may be awake some of the time, just not all of the time. She may have islands of being able to hear us, understand us.’
Islands? Yes, islands. That’s what it is.
‘It says, “The range of comatose and vegetative states described by medicine are thought to be without intrinsic meaning, and the experiences of their victims without significance. Since, by definition, the patient is incapable of understanding, thinking about or communicating about his or her own condition, this view precludes the participation of patients in their own care.” It says, “Coma work allows patients to become active participants in their own care.”’
Their own care? What does that mean?
‘“Coma work begins with the attitude that the comatose patient is capable of perceiving and relating to outer and inner experience, no matter how minimally. The coma worker therefore tries to discover what communication channels are open to the patient, and then to use these channels to relate to the patient’s experience. Channels of communication may be identified by noticing small, sometimes minute signals in the form of movement, eye movement, facial expressions and vocalisation by the patient. The coma worker then attempts to interact with the patient by interacting with and amplifying these signals.” Fuck, why have the doctors not been doing any of this? Where the fuck is Malin? He needs to do all this coma work stuff!’
The door opens.
‘This all looks very serious. What’s going on? Hello, Mum and Dad. Glad to see you’re here. How are we all today?’
Beth is back.
‘Look, I know you all want to be here, but right now I’ve got jobs that need to be done. Why don’t you all go and get a coffee or something? The cafeteria is open.’
‘We were actually hoping to talk to Mr Malin. We’ve been reading up on this coma work thing. Do you know anything about it?’
‘The place in St John’s Wood? I know a few patients who’ve moved there.’
‘And did they . . . you know – did they get better?’
‘You should make an appointment to see them. They are really nice people.’
‘But did they get better?’
‘Mrs Beresford, I’ll be honest. It’s not what Process-Oriented Hospice Care is about. You don’t go there to get be
tter. You go there when there are few opportunities left to you. The idea is that if the patient has some way of communicating then they can make some decisions about their future.’
‘I think we’d all prefer her to just get better, actually, Beth. But thank you.’
You know in a film or a book or something someone says they are frozen with fear, well, I am frozen with fear. It’s not that I’m cold. I can’t feel anything. It’s not even that I can’t move, though obviously I can’t. It’s like my thoughts have seized up. Malin was just in. He was here with Beth. He told all the people that I care about, my family, he told them all basically to switch off the life support. He’s not actually going to do it himself. He says it’s time for them to consider it. Them! I don’t have a choice in the matter. He wants to take me off life support and let nature take its course. He actually said that. LET NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE.
My Dad is here with Carol and my mother. They came back because he told them they had to make a decision. The decision is whether or not to switch off my life support. Whether or not to kill me.
And all the time he was talking, all I could think about was: why isn’t he actually doing some work rather than standing around pontificating about my fucking quality of fucking life? Shouldn’t he be doing tests or something? Should he be organising MRI scans? Is that all he’s got to do?
My mother is crying. My dad is fussing over her, making sure she’s taken her tablets and insisting that they go back to the Travelodge. Brenda is here too, talking to the nurses about Kelly. Kelly isn’t here, I don’t think.
They’ve all gone now. All I can hear is the buzz, click, hum of my life being supported. For how much longer?
What’s weird is that I was feeling so much better today. So far out of the deep hole of nothingness. I actually dreamt I saw Kelly at one point. It felt so real. For like five seconds I saw her face, crystal clear. Her green eyes gazing into mine. Her hand moving close to my face. I could have sworn it was real. It can’t have been.
46
Kelly
Day Eleven – 10 a.m.
I’ve already been into school. It’s Monday morning. Mum was still asleep when I crept out of the front door. She was up most of the night with me. I lost the day yesterday. I just slept. Half of me thought if I left Sarah alone she might prove everyone wrong and wake up. But she didn’t. My mum spent the day paranoid. I kept waking up to find her right in front of me, just staring at my face. She made me a fish-finger sandwich. She must’ve thought I’d lost my mind. When I asked her, she dyed my hair for me, back to White Platinum, and ironed it straight, like Clare used to. She would’ve done anything to calm me down.
Billy was up early, but he didn’t see me leave. He was too busy watching CBeebies – some naff cartoon. The road was silent and the High Street weirdly empty. The usual tide of commuters going to the tube hadn’t started. No one else was around, really, apart from the night workers coming back the other way. The school run hadn’t begun. There was fog in the air and my breath was coming out in little clouds. My lungs hurt. I tried not to run even though I wanted to. I tried to walk slow, like I had not much to do, no fucking place to go. I had a hoody, a beanie, my satchel, my old school shoes and an empty sports bag. The rest of me was as plain as you fucking like. Dull Kelly. Dumb little schoolgirl Kelly. Stupid skirt, nasty shoes. Colourless latex gloves. The last pair in the pack. I detoured past the bus shelter, no one around. No CCTV in operation. Gum still in place. On to the bench. Grab the bat. Shove it in the sports bag. Through the car park by the Rec. The trees lost and silent in the grey fog.
I took the art-block entrance in Grove Road as usual. I walked up the alleyway by the bike sheds where clumps of Clare’s hair were once stuck along the gutter of the redbrick wall. I turned into the dining-hall block. There was a guy polishing the parquet floor with one of them floor-polishing machines. He had headphones on. He didn’t look up. The locker room is at the end of the dining hall. It has a swing door. The lights weren’t on. I didn’t need lights. I knew where I had to go, what I had to do. I emptied most of the contents of my satchel and the sports bag into the locker and closed it using the pink padlock key.
I left the locker room and headed for the girls’ toilets, the ones next to the bike sheds. The guy had got about three metres further up the parquet floor. Headphones still on. It looked fucking fun, that floor polishing. I want a go.
The windows in the girls’ loos are at the top of the walls and flip open outwards, and if you stand on the back of the toilet you can just see out. I took off the hoody and beanie. I had a hairbrush and a hairband in the side pocket of my satchel. I bent forwards and brushed my hair upside down so I could get the highest ponytail possible, a My Little fucking Pony ponytail, then I dropped the brush on the tiled floor and twisted the hair into the band. I checked in the mirror. I pulled up my collar, brushed on my glittery lip gloss in Pepto-Bismol pink, turned over the waistband of my skirt twice and rolled my socks over my knees, like stockings. My wedges were in my satchel. Shabby little tart. I could hear the sound of bicycles and voices so I climbed onto the toilet seat to look out. Alex Hall, Wino, Tom Bush and Rob Long were sitting with their backs against the wall of the bike sheds – their usual spot to meet Kathryn. The early shift. They were making rollies, eyeing up victims. A small kid arrived on a too-big bike. It must’ve been new. His blazer sleeves were over his hands. He must have used an entire pot of hair gel to get his quiff. It was solid. He wiped his nose on the length of his sleeve, like little kids do, and examined it. Alex nodded towards him and Rob sneered that fucking weird sneer he does. Like a fucking animal. The kid was like totally not knowing what he had walked into. He got his fucking phone out of his fucking blazer pocket and polished the screen on his lapel. He unstrapped his laptop case from the back of his bike (for fuck’s sake – he may as well have a sign) and searched in his blazer pockets. He yanked out a pair of canary-yellow headphones and while he balanced his bike against his leg he pushed the headphones into his ears. One popped out. He stared at it like he was not quite sure what it was, then he pushed it back in his ear. He was humming. Behind him Wino, Rob and Alex were dragging on their roll-ups and starting to stand up. They started taunting him. ‘Oy, kid. Got a hard hairstyle there, have you? Bit of a quiff like the big lads? Got a new phone there have you. Kid?’
He couldn’t hear them.
I left the toilets in a hurry but I didn’t forget anything. I checked. The empty sports bag I left under one of the sinks along with a load of other empty sports bags that had long been forgotten. I didn’t need that again. And my own bag was in one of the cubicles. I doubled back to the other side of the bike sheds so that I could get into them from the art-block entrance – out of shadows. It was still totally dark from that direction. Wino, Rob and Tom had made a circle around the little kid and were pushing him, nicking stuff from his pockets as he went round and round. As I drew level with them they turned. I must have looked like a vague shadow in the darkness of the bike sheds. They stopped what they were doing. I drifted past, eyes forward, with just a few metres between us, separated by the bike-shed wall. The only thing they could’ve seen absolutely for sure was the platinum-white hair. In the high ponytail. No mistaking that hair. And no mistaking that swagger. And the fog was still hanging in the air. Thank God for fucking fog. I heard the sound of a bike fall and the little kid running. And a breathless ‘What the fuck!’
In the girls’ toilets I changed back. Back into the hoody and the beanie. Back to the shite shoes and the long skirt. I changed slowly, deliberately. I made no mistakes. I was the invisible me again. And the whole time in the toilets I could hear them shouting, arguing, fighting.
‘It fucking was her!’
‘You twat, it couldn’t have been.’
‘She’s dead, fucker. Dead.’
‘Even if she’s not dead, you cut her hair off, you twat. It must be someone else.’
‘It wasn’t someone fucking else. It was her.’
>
‘And that’s a ghost come back to haunt you then, is it? WHOOOOOOAA.’
‘Fuck off, Hall. Fuck off.’
‘Twat.’
‘Who are you calling a twat, fuckhead? Get over here and say that.’
There was the slap of skin meeting skin, bone meeting bone. Someone yelled.
‘You fucking stabbed him, you cunt! You fucking stabbed him!’
There was groaning. Some girls started screaming.
As I walked out of the girls’ toilets I saw over the bike-shed wall that Kathryn Cowell had already got involved in the fighting. She was shouting. People were running. Wino was dragging her by her coat. Wino dragging Kathryn Cowell. Someone shouted, ‘KNIFE!’ and Mrs Backhouse started running towards them while Miss Meering started dialling frantically on her phone.
And as I slowly made my way out of the art-block door on the back road to town, the police sirens were whining up the road leading to the front entrance. More vans flew past as I got to White Hart Lane.
I’m back at home now. Billy must’ve just gone to school. The remaining Honey Loops in his bowl have gone soggy in the milk. My mum has left a plate with a marmaladey knife on it, and a note on the side. It says, ‘Hope you like your hair.’
She thinks I’m still in bed.
I’m going in to talk to Sarah.
47
Kelly and Sarah
Day Eleven – 11 a.m.
‘They don’t believe me. They said you didn’t wake up. But you did, didn’t you, Sarah?’
Kelly is here. Kelly. I can hear her. I saw her. I know I saw her.
‘Still chatting away, Kelly? Well done. Oooh, nice hair.’
‘Fuck off, Beth.’
‘Pardon? Come on, Kelly. That’s not like you.’
‘What the fuck would you know, Nurse La-di-fucking-da? You dare to come in here now? Why don’t you just go and fill out a fucking form or something? Leave me alone with her. I need to talk to her. I need to tell her something. Why are you fucking touching me? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!’