I placed my hand on the ground and hovered above him, trying to ignore the stickiness that glued my skin to the floor.
The circle around us was growing smaller by the second, a sea of knees that I couldn’t see past. Soon they would be on top of me, on top of Theo. Standing on us both like we were uneven sections of flooring.
And still the music played. I felt my chest go tight, my lungs refusing to expand and take in the sweat-soaked air. I couldn’t breathe.
Why was no one helping? Why did no one care?
It was as if I was trapped behind glass, looking desperately up at the people around me for help but they couldn’t hear a word I said.
Just then two employees appeared, one taking Theo by the shoulders and the other pushing me aside to get to his legs. They picked him up with difficulty, his large, cumbersome frame proving hard to manoeuvre through a crowd of people who were unwilling to move and lose their space. I scrambled up, my palms stinging once I’d ripped them from the floor like waxing strips, and followed them out of the room, the music quietening as the doors shut behind us.
I felt as if I wasn’t really there, but seeing it from afar. Not ten minutes ago I was thinking of how tonight felt like a dream, but that dream now felt nightmarish.
I followed the men to a small room where a woman with pink hair declared herself as the first aider and rolled Theo into the recovery position, ordering one of the men who’d carried him to call an ambulance.
I stood in the doorway cradling my aching wrist against my chest and watching helplessly as the woman tried to rouse him. She asked me questions that I didn’t know the answers to. Does he have any existing medical conditions? Does he take any medication? I told her that I’d found some pills in his room but I didn’t know what they were or if he’d even taken any.
Has he taken any recreational drugs or been drinking? I told the woman that he’d had half a pint of beer and thrown the rest on a man when he’d fallen.
I felt utterly useless.
If only Tessa were here – she’d know what to do.
Panic immediately turned to purpose as I knelt down and pulled Theo’s phone from his pocket. I clicked the power button and the lock screen illuminated, with a keypad ready to receive his password.
SHIT!
I didn’t know it.
How would I let Tessa and Rhys know?
I was alone and dealing with something I was completely incapable of handling.
Just as I gritted my teeth in fury, I heard the pink-haired woman say that he was coming around. My heart jolted as I stepped over his legs and knelt down beside him.
His eyes lolled inside his skull for a moment or two before they remembered where they were supposed to be and opened wide.
He tried to sit up and look around but was abruptly ordered to stay put by the woman who took his wrist in her hand and measured his pulse.
‘What’s your password? I need to call your family,’ I said. My voice was stripped down to the bare bones of efficiency. He didn’t speak, just lifted his thumb to the fingerprint reader and unlocked it. Of course, if I didn’t have a phone from the reign of Richard III, I might have thought of that. I quickly dialled Tessa and on the third ring she picked up.
As she did, two paramedics filtered into the room, replacing the two men who had carried Theo in.
‘Tessa, it’s Effie. Something’s happened.’
‘Effie? What’s wrong?’ she asked, her voice panicked. I didn’t answer her just handed the phone to one of the paramedics – a bald, middle-aged man with lots of studs running up the curve of his ear. He listened to what Tessa had to say, tapping information into his tablet with lightning-fast fingers. All he said was ‘Uh-huh’ and ‘Yep’ and ‘Okay’ giving me absolutely nothing to go on.
The female paramedic said the word tachycardia but I didn’t know what that meant.
I felt Theo take my hand and I looked over. His face looked like it had been sapped of all youth, all wellness, everything that made Theo, Theo.
‘I’m sorry I ruined your night.’ His throat was hoarse, his voice coming out as a high-pitched croak. The female paramedic frowned and looked down his throat before shouting, ‘Potential tracheal angioedema’ at the man with the tablet. I didn’t know what that meant either.
I should have paid more attention when I’d watched House, then I might have some fucking idea of what was happening.
The male paramedic nodded and handed the phone back to me.
‘Tessa?’ I said into the phone.
‘Effie! What happened?’ Tessa did her best to sound composed, but a telltale skip of panic could be heard in her voice. I told her everything that I could remember and then followed the paramedics as they loaded Theo onto a stretcher and wheeled him to the ambulance that was parked out front. I could hear the band playing another song from inside, the music muffled through the walls.
‘Listen, Effie. Just make sure he gets to the hospital safely. We’ll be there as soon as we can to take over.’
I hung up and climbed into the back of the ambulance, sitting down in the wall-mounted seat beside the stretcher.
I looked over to Theo, the man who had always seemed so strong, and saw his eyes were pulled wide, staring at the ceiling as his skin turned the slightest tinge of yellow under the harsh fluorescent lights.
‘Is he going to be okay?’ I asked the man who was attaching a blood pressure cuff to Theo’s arm. ‘I didn’t understand what she was saying before, when she looked in his throat.’
‘Tracheal angioedema – it means his throat is swelling up. Like an allergic reaction,’ he replied. ‘It’s not a typical anaphylactic shock, but we’re going to treat it as one anyway and hopefully that will sort him out.’
‘He’s allergic to nuts,’ I blurted, in case that would help and then turned back to Theo; his denim shirt was now soaked through and sticking to his skin. I watched his chest as it shuddered up and down, drawing in rapid, ragged breaths.
‘Hon,’ the paramedic said, pulling a seatbelt from the wall, ‘I’m gonna need you to strap in. His blood pressure is very low so we’re going to have to blue light him to the hospital.’
I did as he said and then reached for Theo’s hand. He looked over and I could see by the glazed look in his eyes that he wasn’t behind the wheel right now.
He parted his pale lips and said, ‘Sorry I ruined your night, Jen.’
I held my hand to my head and tried not to cry.
Chapter Nineteen
The tuneless humming of a clerk sat at the A&E desk.
The faint buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead.
The faraway bleeping of a machine that had been sounding for at least thirty minutes.
The torn patch of lino flooring that sat in a ragged triangle as it stuck up and caused a shadow to fall behind it.
The smell of sterile cleaning fluids and stale coffee lingering in the air.
I looked down at the royal blue splint that sat around my hand and lower arm. I’d been taken to get my arm x-rayed and strapped when they found that I had a bad sprain in my wrist after it had broken Theo’s fall. I’d been waiting for so long that I could barely remember a time before I was waiting, as if all I’d ever known was this one depressing room.
Opposite sat a pregnant woman and her partner. The partner, a young woman with a round, friendly face looked stricken with anxiety as the pregnant woman smiled and told her that everything would be fine.
Don’t believe her. She’ll lie to you just like Theo lied to me. He said everything was fine. He said he was well.
A drunk man who could barely form a comprehensible sentence had come in some time ago and sat in one of the highly uncomfortable metal chairs. I was pretty certain that there was nothing wrong with him, other than the one too many Jägerbombs he’d drunk, and he’d just wandered in for somewhere warm to sleep it off before he went home.
I’d been taken to the waiting room after they’d scanned my wrist and I had no idea if a
nyone even knew that I’d come in with Theo. I’d asked the clerk twice for information but all I’d received in response was a sneer and a curt comment about waiting my turn. In the time since I’d been ‘waiting my turn’ I had shifted position about eight times a minute, the stress making my muscles fuse into positions that they’d never been in before. I’d drunk so much water from the cooler that I’d peed six times. The added difficulty of having a useless left hand and giant splint made it impossible to go to the bathroom without fear of getting pee on the asymmetric hem of Tessa’s jumper. I’d raced back so quickly each time, in case I missed anything, that I was fairly sure I had half a roll of toilet paper trapped down the leg of my jeans. But that didn’t matter – nothing mattered except Theo and what was wrong with him.
I hated hospitals. That’s a stupid, cliché thing to say, I know. Who really likes hospitals? No one, that’s who. They are terrible places, where terrible things happen, but then I suppose terrible things happen everywhere. At the supermarket. At home when you’re clearing out your record collection. In the crowd at a gig.
I’d watched my grandad die in a place like this. I’d been there when it happened and it was nothing like I had expected. His breath had stopped; his eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, the life instantly drained from them. There is no confusing live eyes with dead ones.
In the films, people die gracefully with a quiet puff of air trailing from their lips, their eyes gently falling closed as they utter a meaningful goodbye and fall into the abyss. You think this will prepare you for the situation, should you ever find yourself in it. I’m telling you now, it doesn’t.
There was no gentle puff of air, no grace or sentimentality. He was simply there one minute and gone the next. I barely even noticed him leave. His eyes didn’t fall closed. They stayed fixed on the same bit of ceiling tile that he’d been watching for hours and they stayed that way until someone closed his eyelids for him. I don’t remember who had done that. It hadn’t been me.
One thing they don’t show you in the films is the post-death spasms that cause dead hands to flinch and lifeless legs to twitch. That’s a sure-fire way to give yourself nightmares.
I looked over at the desk to where the clerk was typing notes into a computer. I couldn’t see her hands but I knew that she had acrylic nails from the sound as they hit the keys. I looked down at my own nails. Bitten, jagged, long on one finger, short on the next. The three coats of ‘Barbados Blue’ nail lacquer that I’d painted on two days ago had already chipped. I picked at the paint on the thumb of my left hand and peeled it off in three pieces. I collected them and put them into the empty polystyrene cup from the water cooler that sat between my knees.
How long had it been since we’d arrived? Two hours? Two days? Two decades?
‘Effie?’ a nurse in a pale blue uniform called and I shot up so quickly that my knees clicked audibly. ‘You can come through now. He’s asking for you.’
She was smiling; surely that meant he was all right.
I followed her to cubicle nine and found Theo lying on a trolley with a thin pale blue waffle blanket covering his legs, his head tilted to the side, his eyes closed. His shirt hung open at the chest and I could see the stickers that they’d used to hook him up and read his heart rhythm.
‘The doctor should be back to see him again shortly,’ the nurse said with a smile, before pulling the curtain shut behind me.
His sleeve had been rolled up and a taped cotton wool ball showed where they’d taken his blood.
I picked up the plastic chair from by the wall and placed it beside the bed, the noise rousing him.
‘Effie?’ He lifted his head, realised that it was too much effort and lowered it down to the pillow again. He reached up with one hand and I placed my good hand inside it. His fingers were cold against my skin.
I looked up into his red-ringed eyes; how hollow they looked now, how vacant of expression.
I felt the tears gathering behind my eyes before they began to fall and I did nothing to stop them. They scattered down my cheeks like raindrops, tinged grey by my mascara.
‘What happened to your arm?’ he asked, his eyebrows knitting in the centre.
I looked down at the blue splint. ‘I tried to catch you when you fell. You landed on my wrist.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice still scratchy but at least it sounded like him this time.
I shook my head, causing more tears to fall. ‘Stop apologising.’ I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his knuckles.
He sighed heavily, as if he barely had enough energy to exist.
‘Tessa and Rhys are on their way,’ I said.
He nodded and closed his eyes. His fingers remained entwined with mine and he swallowed hard, as if it was a struggle to do so. I noticed an empty paper pill pot lying on the blanket and wished that I knew what they’d given him.
I watched as his chin began to judder, his face creasing until veins bulged in his temples and deep lines lay etched into his brow. He opened his eyes and they shone with tears that sparkled with the glow of the sodium lights overhead. A tear or two rolled free and pooled in the hollows of his eyes.
I reached over and wiped them away, wishing that I could do something to help, anything.
I reached down and pulled his shirt closed. I remembered the feeling as I’d laid my head on that chest; now all it did was shudder as he struggled to take a breath.
It was typical really.
I’d found myself the perfect man, or rather, he’d found me. He was practically flawless in every way, then he’d spent a little under two weeks with Effie ‘Meh’ Heaton and I’d drained him of everything until all that was left was what I saw lying in the bed in front of me.
I retook his hand and laid my mouth against his knuckles; the smell of stale beer clung to his fingers. I would always think of tonight whenever I smelled beer in future. More tears quietly fell as I watched him, hunched over in the thin hospital sheets with tears pooling around his eyes. He looked frail, not in stature but in the way he held himself.
Thirteen days ago, I hadn’t known that Theo even existed, but now I knew that I didn’t want to let another thirteen go by without him being part of my life.
‘Theo?’ I spoke softly. His eyes flickered over to mine and struggled to stay there. He grunted and I looked into his pupils; they were the size of pennies. ‘I love you.’
He didn’t smile. He didn’t say it back, just looked at me as if he couldn’t comprehend what I’d said.
His eyes left mine and retreated to look down at his hands, which were fidgeting on his lap. He sucked his lips into his mouth and lines deepened in his brow as he squinted.
The floor fell out of my stomach. I shouldn’t have said it. I’d been a fool, a love-struck fool. He didn’t love me yet, maybe he never would. I looked down at the bed, mortified, my eyes falling onto the open screen of his phone.
A text chat sat open and ready for my snooping eyes to devour. Four or five messages sat in coloured bubbles. I looked up at the top of the screen and saw who they were from. My mouth turned dry.
You don’t need to come. I’ll be fine. Theo’s last message read.
Of course I’m coming. I’ll be there as soon as I can. X Jenny had replied.
I looked back up at his face as he fumbled for words.
I was here with him, me, and still he wanted Jenny, after all she’d done to him.
I wasn’t good enough.
I wasn’t her.
I simply wouldn’t do.
‘Effie, I … erm, I don’t …’
At that moment the curtain flew back and Tessa stepped in, followed quickly by Rhys. She threw herself onto Theo and instantly bombarded him with questions. Rhys saw my moistening eyes and placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder. He seemed overly worried about my wrist, but I kept telling him that I was fine. I lied through my teeth; I was far from fine.
The curtain moved again and in stepped a doctor, a smiling man with glasses and an
armful of notes.
‘Theodore Morgan is it?’ He nodded us all a greeting and then splayed the notes out on the end of the bed. Theo seemed uncomfortably squashed into the bed, the length of his legs and his slouched position making him look far too big for it. ‘Does the family want to stay while we talk or would you rather they wait outside?’
Theo looked around at the others, but didn’t meet my eye.
‘Effie,’ Theo said quietly, ‘would you mind giving us a minute?’
I blushed, embarrassed, and reluctantly went back to the waiting room. There I was again, being pushed out. And he’d had the cheek to tell me that I kept pushing him away.
The waiting room was less packed when I returned, wiping the grey tears from my cheeks and slumping down into the cold metal chair. The drunken man was gone, so were the pregnant couple. New ones had arrived to take their place but I wasn’t looking at them, I was trying to hide the fact that I was crying. How could he have dismissed me like that? What could the doctor possibly be telling him that I didn’t have a right to know? I was the one who damn near broke my arm trying to save him from falling. I was the one who had helped bundle him into an ambulance and yet I was the one who was asked to leave. My whole body seemed to be splitting down the middle, the one half of me terrified and concerned for Theo and the other half wanting to storm back in there and scream the place down.
I leaned forward and cupped my face in my hands and tried with all my mental power to erase the memory of me saying ‘I love you’.
I’d been certain he would say it back. Hadn’t that been love in his eyes this morning when he woke up to find me next to him? Hadn’t it been there in his eyes from the very start, growing stronger every day, like it had for me? Theo was my first love, the one everyone always talks about, the one who either makes or ruins your life. But I hadn’t been Theo’s first love, no, Jenny held that title and it looked like she was coming back to defend it. How could I ever compete?
I leaned back, my head resting against the mauve wall, and looked up at the ceiling. It was one of those panelled ones with the metal grid between the squares. Each panel was white flecked with dark grey and before long I’d counted every fleck in the square directly above me. I multiplied it with the number of tiles, came to a total and looked for a new way to kill time.
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