‘That’s Shadow,’ Stella whispers, stroking his head. ‘He visits us all the time.’
I want to tell her that this is not Shadow, or Ninja, but Jake – strange, mysterious Jake – but it doesn’t matter, not right now. All that matters is that he is here, because this small, odd little black cat gives me something I thought I might not have: he gives me courage. He leaps out of my arms as I begin to walk into the room, and takes up his place on her bed, his head by her dormant hand.
The room is gently lit, and the woman, the old frail woman on the bed, is lying very still, her eyes closed. There’s a rhythmic beat of some sort of monitor and the steady, if laboured, rise and fall of her chest that tells me she is alive.
I come to a halt when I see her, and I hear a sob, deep and threaded tight with longing, tear from my chest, but I catch it and push it away, bracing myself.
Carefully, Stella edges around, and walks to her bedside, picking up my mother’s hand. I take off my coat. It’s so cold outside, it takes a moment for my face to thaw enough to move.
‘What?’ Grace murmurs, so softly, to Stella, and I remember fragments, maybe memories, maybe dreams, of her whispering me goodnight. ‘What’s up, little one?’
Stella nods at me, and I hesitate for one second longer, brim-full of such perfect pain and rejection that I almost want to run – run away from this moment, which will surely hurt us both before any good can be done, and out into a night where there is still the promise of the sun about to rise, flooding every corner with light.
But I steel myself, every sinew in my body tensing as I walk towards her.
‘Mum?’ I say. The word sounds foreign, and tastes unfamiliar. She turns her head at the sound of my voice, her brow furrowed, confused.
‘Am I dead?’ she asks, quite calmly. I pick up her hand; it’s warm and full of blood, pulsing just under the skin.
‘Mum, it’s Hugh. I … I found out you were here. I came to say … hello. Hello, Mum. I hope that’s OK.’
Her eyes focus on me, and I catch my breath as her face fills at once with something akin to joy, something like pain.
‘Son? Is it you, really?’
‘Yes, it’s me. Mum, is it OK, me being here? I know you didn’t want to see me …’
‘Of course I wanted to see you,’ she says, seeming to overcome her drowsiness by sheer force of will. I watch as she tries to drag herself up into a sitting position, and Stella steps forward, raising her bed with a remote-control thing and rearranging her pillows. Mum never takes her eyes off me – she doesn’t even seem to blink. I think she is afraid I might be a figment of her imagination. I take the time to study her face. Her beautiful elegant blonde hair is all but gone now, but I can still see the traces of her that I remember, and more than that: I can see me, my own face, hiding in amongst the shadows of hers. We can’t stop looking at each other, as if two people who have been thirsty all their lives are suddenly offered a glass of cold water.
‘Is it really you?’ Her hand frees itself from my fingers and floats impossibly upward, lighting on my face. I take the greatest of care to control the storm of feelings that wants to shake me to pieces; I must not let that happen. I must keep myself so tightly sewn together that not one molecule of longing escapes. I don’t want her to see what I didn’t know until just this second: that I am still a little boy who needs a hug from his mother.
Stella looks like she is about to leave, so I send her a look, begging her to stay.
‘Do you want me to go?’ I ask my mother. ‘I can, if that is what you want.’
‘I don’t deserve to have you here,’ she says. ‘I left you, and I didn’t even have the courage to die. I ran away.’
There are some silent seconds, with nothing but the beat of the machines, the hum of the heating. It feels like I’ve been let loose somehow, set free of gravity and time; I’m just existing in this strange moment – almost like this is the afterlife and I’ve crossed over with her.
‘That doesn’t matter now,’ I say at last, and she will never know how much it costs me to say those words. ‘All that matters is this.’
She closes her eyes, and a tear tracks down her cheek.
‘I tried,’ she said. ‘Every day I tried to get up and live this life as best I could … Not at first. At first I just drank, and hurt people, hurt myself, but the years went on and I realised. If I didn’t have the guts to die, then I had to have to guts to stay alive.’ She opens her eyes and grips hold of me so tightly. ‘Just before I came here, I phoned you, the house, the old number; I knew it off by heart. It was your dad on the answerphone … I felt like I was calling you then, when you were ten years old. I felt like I was reaching into the past to say goodbye. Only I couldn’t find the words – there were not words.’
The breaths on the other end of the line, the rush of traffic captured on my answering machine – it was her. It was Mum.
‘I don’t want to die, son. I don’t want to die now you are here. I’m afraid.’
The anger, it’s still there – still stronger than the sadness and the peculiar joy that seeing her brings. There is a large, childlike part of me that wants to tell this thin, fragile woman my own story of loss and sorrow. But I don’t; I simply leave my hand in hers and listen as she talks, telling me about her life, her work, the children she’s brought back from the brink of disaster, the good she has done becoming a surrogate mother for so many. Words pour out of her, defying the medication that she is under, as if her need to explain, to justify, to apologise is greater, has more life force, than even her body. I listen. I am gentle and kind; I speak softly and carefully. Yet in every angle in my body, with each breath, I want to ask, but what about me? Why didn’t you care for me the way that you cared for those other children? And finally she stops talking and reaches for me. Uncertainly, following her lead, I lay my head on her shoulder, and she puts her arms around me.
‘It’s OK to cry, you know,’ she says. ‘Sometimes life just isn’t fair.’
Beloved,
Do not miss me, because I will always be with you. In every drop of rain that touches your tongue, in every breath of air you inhale. In the tips of the leaves that you brush with your fingertips as you pass by. I will be there, in every moment. I am not gone, I am only altered, from this state of matter to another. For a moment, for too brief a moment, I was the man that loved you, but now that I am changed, I am the air, the moon, the stars. For we are all made of stars, my beloved.
You and I, and all of life, we were all born out of the death of a star, millions of billions of years ago. A star that lived long and then, before its death, burned at its brightest, its fiercest – an enflaming supernova. But when it died, it did not cease to exist; instead everything it was made of became part of the universe once again, and everything that is part of the universe will once more become part of us.
So do not miss me, because I do not die; I transform – into the wind in the tops of the trees, the wave on the ocean, the pebbles under your foot, the dust on your bookshelves, the midnight sky.
Wherever you look, I will be there.
Carl x
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
HOPE
‘What are you doing here?’ Stella is surprised and worried to see me and Ben, coming in through the side door. And it’s weird to see her not in her uniform but in just a sweater over some leggings and a battered old pair of surprisingly pink trainers. ‘You only just left. Are you OK?’
‘I’m OK,’ I tell her. ‘It’s him.’ I nod at Ben, who is hunched inside his great big coat. ‘He got in a fight, and he’s a bit bruised. I’m worried about him. I saw something about internal bleeding on TV the other day, and how you can just be fine one minute and then drop dead the next. He’s refusing to go to hospital.’ I give Stella and Mandy my best winning smile. ‘Please would one of you just have the tiniest little look at him? I’ll buy you cake and doughnuts.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Stella says. ‘I’m not officially on duty, thou
gh, so if I’m worried, you’ll have to see the doctor and they may well insist that you go to hospital. There isn’t a free room, so you’ll have to come through here.’ She leads us into the older part of the building, where there is what looks like an old-fashioned school nurse’s office, with a cot bed at the side.
‘Lie down,’ she says to Ben.
He eases off his coat with a great deal of difficulty. Stella frowns as he lowers himself onto the bed, and I, with some newfound sense of intimacy that I choose not to analyse, reach across and sweep up his shirt. Even I draw in a sharp breath as I look again at the bruises that I am already too familiar with.
‘A fight, you say?’ Stella looks at him. ‘Or a beating?’
‘You know, live fast, die … painfully,’ Ben says. ‘Anyway, you should have seen the other guy … barely a scratch on him.’
‘I’m going to have to get the on-call doctor to look at you,’ Stella says. ‘I can’t take the risk of missing something, and if we’ve got her on board, we can maybe do an ultrasound – check for any free fluid. Wait here.’
As soon as she is gone, Ben tries to sit up.
‘Come on, let’s scarper,’ he says. ‘They’ve got people in here a lot worse off than me.’
‘Ben, don’t be an idiot,’ I tell him. ‘Imagine how annoyed I’d be if you died before me – now, and of stupidity, too. I’d be so pissed off. We haven’t even …’
‘What haven’t we even?’ he says.
‘Just lie still,’ I say. ‘And that includes your mouth.’
‘Fine.’ He lays back down, picks up my hand and starts to idly play with my fingers. His touch makes my stomach flutter.
It’s been a curious few hours since I rescued him, which is how I am choosing to describe it – because it is driving him mad. They have been curious and dream-like, spent in my bedroom with the curtains drawn and my mother pacing anxiously outside the door.
‘Do you want tea?’ she called through the door more than once. And when I refused: ‘Squash?’
‘We are not having sex, Mum,’ I called out to her. ‘And even if we were, it would be legal.’ And then I remembered how much I loved her, and how lucky I was that I had her. ‘I love you, though!’
Ben slept for a while when we got back, just falling easily into a deep sleep; one minute he was there, the next he was gone. I wasn’t surprised that he was tired. He curled up in my bed, his arms wrapped around one of my many teddies, and he was fast asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.
I read for a while. I thought of Issy and, logging on to Facebook, I found her mum’s profile and sent her a friend request and then a private message, saying hi. I said it was probably too soon, but as soon as I was able, I wanted to do something to raise money for the hospice, and I suggested that maybe we could join forces. I’d already given her my phone number so I told her to call me. I put three kisses on the end of the message. After that, I watched TV and had a look on Twitter. I read the blogs of people I wished I was more like and watched a lot of videos of cats in dog beds until eventually the adrenaline, or whatever it was, wore off, exhaustion overtook me, and I slept too.
When I woke up, not too much later, Ben’s arms were wrapped around my waist – his great big body curled around mine like a comma. For a few sleepy moments, I was aware of the rise and fall of his chest, and I think I was smiling to myself when I went back to sleep. I felt like I was smiling, anyway. And then hours after that I was very sure what woke me, because it was impossibly awkward and embarrassing. It was Ben’s erection pressing against the small of my back.
I tried to wriggle away from it, but he caught me and pulled me closer, still sound asleep.
‘Ben.’ I prodded him till he opened one sleepy eye. ‘Inappropriate hard on.’
He groaned as he rolled away from me, grabbing one of my poor teddies and holding it over the offending area.
‘Is it that inappropriate? I mean, we did nearly have sex; we could do that now, if you like.’
‘No!’ I was appalled. ‘We can’t have sex now just because of your mechanical erection. That’s not …’
‘What?’ He looked at me, interested.
‘Polite.’ I was defensive. ‘And, anyway, that ship has sailed, don’t you think?’
‘I guess so,’ he said, and I let the little smooth pebble of disappointment sink to the bottom of my chest. ‘And, anyway, I thank God that my penis is working. I don’t think any other part of my body is up to much.’
And all these strange and curious, and frankly quite… erotic thoughts rushed through my head, so I grabbed his hand and pulled him out of bed. ‘That’s it, I’m taking you to Marie Francis to get checked out.’
‘It’s not that serious,’ he’d protested.
‘Not yet,’ I’d told him. ‘But if we stay here, I might kill you.’
‘You are so brave,’ I say now, quite suddenly, to Ben, who looks perturbed.
‘I don’t think so. I picked a fight with a psycho. I’m fairly sure that makes me stupid.’
‘Yes, that was stupid, but that’s not what I’m talking about,’ I say. ‘Before, in the hotel, when you said … you know.’
‘No idea,’ Ben says, and my eyes widen before I see that he is teasing me. ‘When I said that at some point in the last couple of years, probably when I was drunk or on drugs, I fell in love with you. Yes, I remember.’
‘You kept all this stuff inside for such a long time. You didn’t tell me. Why? Am I a shit friend?’
‘Yes.’ Ben looks serious for just a moment, and then he smiles. ‘No, of course you aren’t a shit friend. I didn’t tell you because … well, no one likes rejection.’
‘But … you didn’t give me a chance to respond,’ I say.
‘You didn’t have to; you should have seen the look on your face! It was pure horror!’
‘It wasn’t! It wasn’t horror,’ I say. ‘It was shock. And it was amazement. Because it just didn’t seem real to me that you – the coolest, smartest, funniest person I know – could really like me.’
‘I don’t really like you,’ Ben says. ‘I fucking love you. I am in love with you, Hope. Big shit-scary, proper all-the-way-to-my-toes love. With you.’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘Thing is, yeah, I think I fucking love you too.’
Ben suddenly drops my hand and covers his face.
‘What? I say. ‘What? Have you changed your mind?’
‘I’m freaking crying,’ he says.
‘Dork,’ I tell him, taking his hand away from his face and kissing it.
‘So, we’re doing emergency admissions now?’ The tall and very beautiful Dr Kahn appears in the doorway, eyeing Ben, with Stella close behind. ‘Well, come along, young man. Let’s make sure you are not completely broken.’
‘Oh, I’m not completely broken,’ Ben says, a smile breaking out on his battered face. ‘There’s one bit of me that’s working just fine.’
Dear Julie,
Well, now, the time has come … and all that jazz. You know what a Sinatra nut I am, so please would you indulge me this one last wish and have ‘My Way’ played at the funeral? I know you never had much time for Ol’ Blue Eyes but, for me, there was never anyone better.
We’ve always been different, you and I. Not a match made in heaven, but you have been a good wife, and I am sorry to leave you. I think sometimes you’ll be quite glad to have me out from under your feet, but I think you’ll miss me too – I like to think you will.
We didn’t marry for love, did we? We married because of one silly Saturday night, and our Roy, who was the result of it. I thought my mum would die of shame, and I thought your dad would kill me. There was nothing else for it but to get married back then. And so we did. We stared at each other on the wedding day like we were terrified of each other. I was sorry that you didn’t love me and I didn’t love you. But I wasn’t sorry we were married, or sorry about Roy when he arrived; he was the apple of both of our eyes.
But do you remember the day th
at it happened? Roy was about four and we’d taken him to Brighton for the bank holiday. Hot as Hades it was; him in his hat, moaning about the pebbles under his toes. We were walking along the shore behind him, not saying much. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, you just grabbed my hand and held it. We’d never held hands, but then we did, walking along like a couple in the first bloom.
Roy was wading in up to his knees, screaming and splashing. You shaded your eyes to look at me, and you said, ‘I like being married to you, Brian Fletcher.’
And I said, because it hit me just then, ‘I love being married you, Julie Fletcher. I love you, you know.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
STELLA
Home. After leaving Hugh with his mother, and sending Hope back out into the night with her boy, I discovered I wanted more than anything to be at home – because that empty, unloved house suddenly felt exactly like that to me; it felt like home.
I walk around the house I have hardly lived in for the past two years and see it with fresh eyes. The wallpaper in the hallway left over from the last occupants: huge blousy red roses we swore would be gone as soon as we’d closed the door. The corner that Vincent ripped off with his thumb, revealing magnolia paint underneath. The box of nonspecific kitchen items, still labelled and sealed in the space where a dishwasher should be. Clearly it’s filled with objects that I never use, or need – objects that I can’t remember – and so quite why I bothered to wrap them in newspaper and seal them in a box is anyone’s guess. They must have seemed important once. A lot of things seemed important once that hardly matter at all now.
On the stairs there’s some neatly folded laundry that I left there to take up a few weeks ago, now dusty and creased, and a mug of cold tea. In the bathroom is a desiccated sprig of lavender in a frosted glass vase, its shattered flower heads littering the windowsill like dead flies. In the bedroom, the cold green paint, the temporary wardrobe. And at the bottom of this is Vincent’s bag from the hospital – all of his belongings still zipped up in an overnight bag that has never been unzipped since the day he got home. I don’t know why neither of us touched it. Maybe we thought that unzipping it might somehow release all of the terror and pain of the first few days of surviving the accident out into this world, our world. Perhaps we didn’t realise that had already happened.
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