by Louise Beech
‘It won’t be long,’ he said.
He looked a bit like my grandad, seen in old photos. When I was a child, family members used to talk about him. Said he was brave, that he had been awarded medals, and that there was a museum in London with his things in it. Thinking about him used to keep me awake at night – or did it wake me up? I’d hear the sea then, too, and strange voices and accents. I’d smell salt and think he was there at the end of my bed, telling me stories. I never met him properly, not in the flesh. He died long before I even existed. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. Adult life tends to do that – eat up your thinking time, kill your dreams.
‘You mustn’t be scared,’ the stranger said.
‘I’m not,’ I lied. ‘You know, you look like … well, someone I’ve only seen pictures of. But it’s weird, you’re exactly how I’d imagine him if he were alive.’ I shrugged, realised I was babbling. ‘Your costume’s too nice for Halloween. The kids won’t know what it is. They’re all into wizards.’ I paused. ‘I hate hospitals.’
‘Should be grateful for them.’ His accent was beautifully rich Yorkshire, familiar in its flow, like mine only somehow from a time gone by. ‘I’ve a lot to thank hospitals for.’
‘No, I hate what they mean. You know, if you’re in one it’s not good. My little girl … she … God …’ I couldn’t say anymore.
‘She’s going to be fine.’
‘How can you know that? You can’t possibly. It’s not normal for a nine-year-old to just collapse, is it? And I should’ve seen it coming! What kind of mother am I? I should’ve taken the thirst more seriously. Should’ve had her at the doctor weeks ago. I thought she was just missing her dad.’
My words ran out and I stopped. Tears built behind my eyes like froth on coke poured too fast – but I wouldn’t surrender. If I did I’d be no good to Rose. I tried to apologise for ranting.
‘Do you miss her dad too?’ The sort-of-familiar stranger held my gaze with what I could only call affection. He seemed too interested in my answer for someone I’d never met before. And yet I didn’t mind. In his presence I felt calm and able to be honest. Safe, like in the dark.
‘I do,’ I said softly. ‘He’s been away before but not to a place like that. People say you get used to it – their absence. But this time it feels like he’s missing rather than gone. Does that make sense?’
He nodded. ‘I was missing once – for two months.’
‘You were? Did you get to say goodbye?’
‘I couldn’t.’
He looked down at his palms. I studied them as I had Rose’s earlier; they were crisscrossed like an old map, the hands of a labourer, a man who works for a living. I wanted to put one of mine over his, but that would have been forward, and not me.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘There wasn’t time.’
‘Jake had time,’ I said, almost to myself. ‘The night before he left we sat for hours in front of the TV and he was distant. He’s a quiet man in general – you know, polite, affable, but not outgoing. If you talk to him he’ll talk back but he’ll not seek company particularly. I always thought it odd that he joined the forces – but then he has other qualities perfect for such a life: he’s loyal and patient and hardworking. Anyway, we sat that last evening, quietly, until I swore – I’m so bad for it – and I said it was going to hurt enough, him being in a dangerous place, so at least let me have a nice goodbye to remember. And then … he … well, you know …’ I shook my head. ‘Sorry, you don’t want to listen to all this.’ I paused. ‘Who are you with?’
‘My great granddaughter,’ he said.
I frowned. Even at a push he looked no older than thirty. ‘You must mean your daughter?’
‘Mrs Scott?’ It was Gill. Where had she come from?
‘I’ll go and blow that candle out,’ whispered the man, so close to my ear that bristly hair tickled me and I smelt tobacco and the kind of aftershave that older men favour.
‘Beg your pardon?’ I turned to look at him, but he’d gone. How so fast?
I stood, frowned at Gill, and pushed past her to look up the corridor. Porters and nurses and patients and family members filled every space, some sat, some stood by the vending machine, some hurried, some pushed trolleys or wheelchairs. I searched for that mud-brown jacket, for the slick head of dark hair. Even without seeing him I knew somehow that he’d have walked with a merry, must-get-there swing, hands in pockets, and that he’d be whistling a tune I’d know but not be able to name.
‘Where did he go?’ I asked Gill.
‘Who?’
‘The man in the brown suit. He was just here.’
Gill frowned. ‘I didn’t see anyone like that.’
I looked at the boy with the nose and the woman with stitches across her cheek and my empty chair. If they were still there, with me in the middle, how had he sat next to me?
‘We should sit down,’ said Gill.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I’d rather stand.’
I wasn’t sure why, but a curious line came into my head – We’ll do it together. We’ll be standing when she meets us, by God we will.
Gill interrupted with, ‘I really think we should…’
‘No. Just tell me.’
‘We did the test.’
I nodded.
‘There’s no need to be too alarmed as this condition is manageable,’ she said, as she must have done many times over to various worried parents. ‘We tested Rose’s blood and found an excessively high sugar content, over thirty-eight millimoles. I understand this will mean little to you right now, but, well, you’ll understand it in time. And this reading means your daughter has insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, or as we generally call it, Type 1 diabetes.’
‘Diabetes?’ I frowned. ‘But … she isn’t fat. There’s nothing on her.’
‘Not all diabetes is weight-related and Type 1 is completely unrelated to lifestyle. No one really knows its cause. For whatever reason the body attacks the pancreas and it stops producing insulin. There are theories that it might be inherited, but we think it requires some sort of environmental trigger. Maybe an infection or virus or stress.’
‘Inherited? But I don’t think anyone …’
‘It’s not always inherited.’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘Don’t think too hard about the whys and hows. You’ll drive yourself up the wall. Really this is a good thing to diagnose because it means Rose will be fine.’
‘Diabetes,’ I repeated, as though testing the strength of the word. Maybe if I said it enough it would make sense, sink in.
‘Yes,’ said Gill. ‘It’ll surprise you how fast she’ll be herself again once we set up an insulin drip. By tomorrow she’ll be alert, probably starving hungry. You’ll be able to go home in a few days and give her the insulin yourself.’
‘Insulin? What, all the time?’
‘Yes, she’ll need it for the rest of her life.’
‘And how will she take this insulin at home? Pills? She’s a bugger for not being able to swallow them. I have to buy liquid paracetamol.’
‘No, not pills. Injections.’
‘Injections?’ I tried to imagine it and couldn’t.
Instead I thought of when Rose went away with her grandma for a week and I had missed her smell. I still had Piglet, her favourite toy as an infant, which I’d kept in the vain hope of retaining that baby scent. But the fragrance had gone and it smelt like the inside of a stale box. I searched for remnants of other, still-smelly toys and rags. Eventually I resorted to Rose’s pillowcase and there it was; the subtle essence of my child. Other kids smell alien, but our own babies produce a unique scent that we find irresistible. No sooner have they left the womb than they apologise for all the pain they’ve caused by seducing us with their odour.
I wondered if insulin wouldn’t ruin Rose’s sweet smell. I wanted Jake, realising it suddenly, like when you remember you’ve left a candle burning. It wasn’t fair that I was alone, dealing with this. I fea
red sometimes that the longer he was away, the less I’d love him, that loneliness would replace my heart.
How would I do injections on my own? Jake would have to be told. Could he come home? Would they let him leave a warzone? I shook my head and refused to look at Gill.
‘She can’t have injections,’ I said. ‘She’s stick thin, tiny. I can’t put a needle into that baby skin.’
‘Let’s go into this cubicle, where it’s more private.’ Gill guided me and I let her, mental resistance to the news sapping all my physical strength. ‘It will become part of life, I promise you.’
‘But it won’t be the same will it?’
‘No, but I know many nine-year-olds who cope very well with the finger prick tests, injections and everything.’
‘She shouldn’t have to cope. She’s a baby.’
‘Let me get you a cup of tea. They’ll get Rose settled on the ward and you can stay with her overnight if you want. A specialist diabetes nurse will come and explain it all to you in the morning.’
I surrendered to the news. No more words. No more arguing. A silent world again.
I let myself be taken to where Rose slept. I nodded as various consultants told me things I knew would matter tomorrow and a nurse asked if anyone could bring me a change of clothes.
And then it was just us again, in a sterile room with tan curtains that reminded me of school halls, and an empty handwash machine and a window that looked onto another identical room, except it was the opposite way around, like a mirror image. In that room an exhausted mother in a ridiculous stained dress and flour-white make-up didn’t lean over the bed of a tiny black cat and smell its cheek. No one in that room felt overwhelming guilt and wanted to take the clock off the wall and wind it back so she could be a better mum.
I pulled up the plastic chair that would be bed for the night, put my head on Rose’s tummy and held her free hand. The other one had a tube in it and a nametag about the wrist, like when she was born. I knew if she were merely sleeping she’d reach under her pillow, check her book was there.
But she didn’t.
‘I’ll go and get one before you wake,’ I promised. ‘Whichever you’ve got under your pillow at home.’ I paused. ‘And you can read any of the books on my shelf. Well, maybe not the ones with the really bad words in. Look, we’ll see. But just please wake up and you can read anything you want to.’
Eventually I fell asleep; but on the threshold of a troubled slumber, the image of the medal-wearing familiar stranger blowing out our pumpkin candle appeared in my head; and within the fug of exhaustion and confusion I realised what Rose had been saying as she collapsed on the kitchen tiles:
He’ll get the candle.
2
THE PUMPKINS ARE SLEEPING
We are about 800 miles from land, so will try to make it. Expect rescue anytime now.
K.C.
All through the night ghosts visited: pastel nurses in creased uniforms crept into our room and pricked Rose’s finger end to harvest her blood, on the hour, every hour, over and over. The digits on their tiny machines meant nothing to me and the jargon on her chart could have been Russian for all I understood it.
I woke repeatedly at each of these disruptions, while my skinny cat remained unconscious. And then, before daylight washed over the rooftops like incoming tide, I woke fully. My neck was stiff and Rose’s hand still curled inside mine.
Our pumpkin candle had haunted my half-dreams. How curious that I had imagined a stranger saying he would blow it out and then heard the same words from my fainting daughter’s mouth. Was it possible that someone imaginary might extinguish a flame? What if it wasn’t and I returned to a blackened building? How would I tell Jake that not only was Rose diabetic but our house was gone?
I had to check.
Besides, I didn’t want Rose waking up without a book. She loved them. It had been one of her first words; ‘Book, book, want book, like book.’ Jake had been delighted that our daughter craved literary sustenance over endless Disney movies. I’d suggested it was because I’d read aloud to her while pregnant because it was meant to encourage early language development. I hadn’t wanted Rose to fail at school like I had. I’d also worried her interest might pass.
But she continued to prefer hearing stories read aloud to watching cartoons, nodding with excitement and trying to turn the pages as we went. The sentences I self-consciously pronounced must have evoked images that were better than an animated screen.
Now I whispered a true story in Rose’s ear; ‘I won’t be long, I’ll just put some more sensible clothes on, ring Dad, and bring your things.’
Then I told one of the nurses I’d be back soon and called a taxi.
Outside, the dark again whispered to me: Halloween’s done, it said, the pumpkins are sleeping now, smell the whiff of dead leaves, of bonfires coming, of loose skin over fleshless bones, of goodbyes, changes. I could smell it all. And again the sea, on the wind, as though I were a ship moving through waves.
I thought I caught a hint of the brown-suited stranger’s musky aftershave; I inhaled deeply and looked around for him. But I was alone; perhaps it was just my memory. The stranger really had reminded me of the grandfather I’d never met: Colin.
In the taxi I tried to remember more about him. I only knew flashes of drama, the medals given, the number of men dead, the bravery – sensational things fit for the blurb on a paperback. My dad used to say Colin never really recovered from his ordeal and all that kept him going afterwards were his three small children. This I now understood; this I now felt.
The taxi drove parallel to the River Humber, by the crumbling Lord Line Building, past rusted trawler boats, muddy waters, and the disused Sea Fish Industry Authority building at St Andrew’s Dock. Long grass grew up around brick, like hands from the ocean reclaiming what was once theirs. These fish docks, years ago, were the busiest in Hull. Now they were abandoned, like those further east along the river, where merchant seamen once set sail in gleaming ships, where Colin would have departed long ago.
As the taxi left the river and we passed dying orange lanterns and discarded witch hats in front gardens, I tried to remember the stories about Colin, but they had died with my childhood. I could ask my dad or uncle or aunt for his full history but I worried it might make them sad.
I closed my eyes and tried to recall seeing Grandad Colin at the end of my bed years ago. Hadn’t I smelt the sea then, too? Were those the high-temperature-fuelled hallucinations of a child who’d frequently had tonsillitis, or had I seen a ghost? Had I imagined the recurring sea breeze while worrying about Rose? Had I yesterday fantasised the somehow familiar brown-suited stranger?
Did trauma induce such imaginings?
But no, the man at the hospital had been too real. He’d been there. I could still feel his chin whiskers scraping my cheek. He’d probably reminded me of Colin because I’d craved the comfort my visions had given me when I was tiny. Now, with my own child ill, I’d needed someone bigger, someone braver than myself.
The thought of her, alone at the hospital, turned my stomach over.
‘Is this the street?’ asked the taxi driver.
‘Yes.’ I was relieved. I could do what I needed and hurry back to Rose’s bedside. ‘My house is just past the lamppost.’
I leaned forward in my seat to check it was still there. April’s overgrown hedge meant you had to be parked right in front of the door to see us. And there we were. Our home, not burned down, the house we’d bought ten years earlier because it was close enough to a main road and the local shops and schools, but safely tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac.
I liked safe, hidden, private. Not having to make small talk with residents too often, being able to go to them if needed. Close but far. My love of privacy came from my father, a man who liked his own space; my mother’s traits were weaker in me; but my occasional need for company and converse came from her, a social butterfly who flitted happily here and there.
‘There
you go.’
I gave the driver a generous tip because he’d not bothered me with unnecessary chat, and went inside.
I’d actually thought to lock the door after me earlier. Our pumpkin wasn’t lit, the face we’d carved not visible in the darkened kitchen. I switched on the light and lifted its lid. The candle inside hadn’t burned down all the way. It was hard to work out how long it must have burned after we left the house in a rush of muddy footprints and strange costumes. But this certainly didn’t look like a candle that had had been alight for hours and hours, only dying when it ran out of wick – it had been extinguished. Had someone blown it out or had it flickered and faded in some errant breeze?
There was no way of knowing.
I went into the dining room. One of Rose’s books stood on the table on its edge; triangular, like a tent. I missed our shared stories. She read privately now, to herself. I missed the perfume of her hair and the book pages, the discarded peel of her after-school orange.
Behind the table was the book nook, a place Rose had created and christened when she was five.
‘How do you know the word nook?’ I’d asked her, thinking it was an odd choice for a five-year-old.
‘Mrs Atkinson at school told me,’ she’d said. ‘It was in this story about fairies and they had one. She said it was a cosy and nice place. You can make magic and stuff there. Plus book rhymes with nook.’
So we filled our book nook with two cinnamon-coloured cushions and a bookshelf donated by Rose’s aunt Lily. Over the years our collection of books grew and grew. We picked them up in charity shops, at jumble sales, at book fairs and at Christmas. Most evenings Jake used to come home to us reclined in our squishy cushions, me reading, Rose in rapture.
‘You’re like two mice,’ he’d say. ‘Peace for me anyway.’
I sank into one of the cushions now. Though Rose rarely came here anymore, having naturally begun to enjoy TV shows more, I’d never had the heart to change it. Instead she kept books beneath her pillow, secret, selfish reads, each with a colourful marker like a flower growing from the words.
The night after Jake left I’d come here in the dark and cried a little. Now I did the same; I knew if I did I’d be able to call Jake without a fuss, be able go back to the hospital and greet Rose without burdening her, be able to do whatever diabetes dictated.