Alone

by Pip Granger

  I couldn’t hear Father’s conversation with the doctor, because he’d closed the bedroom door so as not to frighten Valerie any more than she already was. I looked at her in the dim light from the lamp and was absurdly pleased to note that the ghastly pallor had been replaced by faintly pink cheeks, but her eyes were still terrifyingly white. Father came back at last and called me out of the room for a moment. We didn’t dare leave Valerie alone for more than a second or two.

  ‘They say it may be an incipient brain haemorrhage and we’ve got to take her back,’ he told me, tears streaming down his haggard face.

  ‘But we promised her!’ I whispered urgently.

  ‘I know. I asked them what, if anything, we can do for her here. They said to keep an eye on her, sedate her if necessary and that if it is a brain haemorrhage, all that they could do at the hospital would be to make her comfortable and wait for the end. They finally agreed that we could do that almost as easily here. So I told them that we wouldn’t be bringing her back.’

  I agreed with him, because I believed then – as I still do now – that promises to children should always be kept, if humanly possible. Kids set great store by promises, and I had experienced enough broken ones to know just how devastating it could feel. The rest of his news frightened me, though. How would we be able to comfort Gaby if her baby died while she was away? There was no good answer to that. I was also afraid of Valerie dying. I had never actually seen anyone die, and the thought filled me with dread.

  ‘I phoned Gaby while I was at it, told her the situation, and she’ll be back tomorrow,’ Father whispered to me across Valerie’s now quiet form.

  My relief was immense. Whatever I thought of her, Gaby was Valerie’s mother, and if ever a child needed her mum, Valerie did at that dreadful moment.

  I looked down at Valerie. She was either asleep or had slipped into a coma. We had no way of knowing which it was without attempting to wake her, and that seemed too cruel. Father and I agreed to let her be, and to hope fervently for the best.

  I even prayed to the God that I had been brought up not to believe in. ‘Please,’ I pleaded, ‘let her live at least until her mother gets home.’

  Father and I spent the rest of the night keeping our vigil, alert to the slightest sign of change. Occasionally, one of us would get up to ease our aching back and legs or to go downstairs to make a cup of black tea. The house had been closed up for the long holiday, so there was no milk or food to be had: not that we were hungry, we were way past that. It was the longest night of my life.

  During that long, long night, Valerie’s eyes righted themselves while she slept, and, to our relief, she awoke refreshed and even a little hungry. It seemed that my prayers had been answered after all. I was feeling faintly astonished as I nipped across the road to beg some milk and biscuits to keep Valerie going and to explain our predicament to the neighbour.

  ‘We’ve had no food, Valerie’s very sick and Father’s the only driver,’ I told the sympathetic neighbour. ‘Could you possibly drive me to the shops so that I can stock up?’

  She agreed immediately, and we set out straight after I’d delivered the milk and biscuits she had so kindly provided. I cooked breakfast when I got back, and we had a remarkably cheerful feast. Father and I could hardly believe the change in Valerie. Relief and the lack of rest had made us mildly hysterical, and the three of us laughed quite a lot at daft jokes and silly stories.

  ‘What’s red and squashy and goes up and down?’

  ‘A tomato in a lift.’

  ‘What’s orange and pointy and goes at a hundred miles an hour?’

  ‘A jet-propelled carrot.’

  Valerie loved silly jokes like that, and we had a whole heap of them. We were still laughing when Gaby walked in.

  Once Gaby was safely back in charge, I made up my mind to go home as soon as possible. I left Father to explain the horrors of the previous day and night, and quietly went across the road to ask the neighbour to take me to the station. I desperately wanted to get home; I was emotionally exhausted, not only by Valerie’s crisis but by the tension between Father and Gaby that never seemed to let up. Even when they weren’t actually fighting I was always tensed up and waiting for the explosion, and I simply didn’t want to have to listen for hours to Gaby telling me what a swine my father was.

  Despite Mother’s best efforts, I had found myself between flats, and had gone home while I sorted myself out. She had taken it with relatively good grace, especially when she realized that I was off almost immediately to France with Father, Gaby and the kids. She was even fairly gracious when I came back so suddenly.

  ‘I suppose you can’t help Valerie being ill,’ she observed. ‘It must have been grim for you, darling. After all, you’re only a kid yourself.’

  I was grateful for the welcome and, having had a cuppa with her, I went straight to bed, and didn’t wake up again until late the next morning.

  Things remained quiet for a while. I can’t remember quite how long; a week or maybe two. Possibly it was as much as three. I really can’t remember. All I know is, life had a chance to get back to what passed for normal – and then there was a phone call that shattered all that. Mother answered the phone.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Doug. It’s one thing after another for the poor little mite, isn’t it?’ There was a pause. ‘I don’t think that’s wise. She hasn’t had mumps. It must be the only childhood thing she’s managed to dodge, but she definitely has not had mumps.’ There was another, longer pause. ‘Yes, I do understand, but catching mumps now could sterilize her. I never got pregnant again after I caught the damned things from a kid at school, and let’s face it, I’d never had any trouble getting pregnant, it was hanging on to them long enough for them to be born that was my problem.’ There was another pause. By this time, Don and I were listening intently from the wrong side of the door. We glanced at each other, eyebrows raised in enquiry. What on earth was going on? ‘Well, I’ll ask her, but I’ll advise her strongly against it. You could afford to hire a private nurse, you know. You have the money and you don’t need to put the poor girl in this position. It’s really unfair of you.’

  Mother sighed loudly. ‘Hang on. I’ll ask, but I’m warning you, I don’t think she should come.’

  The receiver was put down with a clatter on the telephone table and Mother’s footsteps sounded loud as she approached the living room. Don and I just had time to arrange our features into some semblance of innocence as if to say, ‘Who? Us? Listening? Never!’

  ‘It’s your father. He wants you to go back to Surrey to help to nurse Valerie. Looks like she’s caught mumps now. I told him that you haven’t had mumps, but he’s being nagged in the background by Gaby. I could hear her.’ Mother lit a cigarette.

  ‘What should I do?’ I wailed. ‘I don’t want to go back. It’s awful to watch her, and those two will be fighting, and I hate that too. They’re always bloody fighting.’ I felt utterly wretched.

  ‘You don’t have to go, pet,’ Don told me quietly. ‘I’ve seen those two going at it hammer and tongs, and I don’t blame you for not wanting to be in the middle of it.’

  Mother nodded. ‘Tell them you’re not going. That’s my advice, for what it’s worth. You’re too young for all this, and worse, you may want children of your own one day and mumps is a glands thing. I’m sure they put a stop to my breeding days.’

  By the time I got to the phone, Father had had time to pile on the guilt. ‘If you want it on your conscience for the rest of your life that you didn’t help your sister when she was dying, don’t come,’ Father roared down the phone as soon as I’d said hello.

  In one sentence Father had relayed to me just how little I actually meant to him. I was dreadfully hurt. I’d always thought he loved me, despite everything, but not caring at all what catching mumps could mean to me told me that he didn’t, not really. My only value to him at that moment was what I could do for him, his wife and his other daughters, and I counted for nothing
at all. That’s how it felt at the time, and I was devastated.

  It was only much later that I realized just how frightened he was, and I finally understood that frightened people are capable of anything. Father and Gaby couldn’t seem to depend on each other, but somehow they both thought that they could depend on me, which, given the appalling circumstances, was flattering in a backhanded kind of a way. When I thought about it later, I also realized that both Valerie and Nicci probably needed me to be there as well. Despite the miserable feeling that I had been blatantly emotionally blackmailed, I didn’t feel that I could possibly let everyone down, mumps or no mumps. And so I went.

  Mercifully, I don’t remember just how long the final stage of Valerie’s illness went on, but I do remember that it was harrowing. Slowly, as the condition of her blood worsened, the systems in her poor little body broke down. Her blood was no longer able to clot properly, so her lips became covered in blackened scabs and her gums bled. Oxygen wasn’t getting to her brain because she didn’t have enough red blood cells to carry it there. She became delirious and spent hours and hours chanting our names, ‘Mummy, Daddy, Nicci and Pippa, Mummy, Daddy, Nicci and Pippa,’ over and over again. Or she’d shout, ‘Push my arm to school, push arm to school.’ Her impatience mounted as we failed to do as she demanded, or when we simply could not understand exactly what it was that she wanted from us.

  As the days went by, she chanted less and less, then all that could be heard was her laboured breathing as her lungs tried to take in the oxygen that her blood could not carry.

  One afternoon, when I’d been left alone in the house to care for her, I stood for ages with a pillow in my hands, listening to her rasping breath, willing myself to put an end to her suffering. I had reasoned that the Valerie that we knew was already gone and that she was never coming back, so the sooner she finally left us, in body as well as spirit, the sooner we could all get on with the dreadful business of mourning.

  Valerie had been in the long, slow process of dying for four and a half years. Everyone was exhausted and wrung out by watching it happen and being powerless to change it. It seemed as if real life, the life outside of leukaemia, had been put on hold, and that we were all trying to hang on to a spark of hope that was fading and dying as surely as Valerie was slipping inexorably away from us.

  Eventually, I put the pillow down again, unable to do the deed, because even the tiny, flickering flame of life and hope that was left was precious. I sat down beside her bed and simply listened to that awful, jagged rasping and the clock, ticking, ticking, ticking her life away.

  ‘Wake up, wake up!’

  I unglued my sleep-heavy lids and saw the dark shape of my father in the gloom as he shook me awake. ‘Come quickly. Valerie’s asking for you.’

  Even in the grogginess that accompanies being wrenched out of a deep, exhausted sleep, I wondered that my little sister had been able to form the sentence, when she had been incapable of expressing a coherent thought for days. I glanced at Nicci, who was sleeping soundly beside me, and satisfied myself that she was OK for the time being.

  ‘I’ll be in in a minute,’ I whispered.

  When he knew for sure that I was awake and taking notice, Father left the room. I staggered out of bed, fumbled around for my summer dressing gown and checked on Nicci once more. I had been sleeping with her ever since she had vacated the bedroom she had shared with Valerie. Her bed was needed for whoever was on night duty, and anyway, it was too awful to leave her to witness her sister’s last illness at such close quarters. However, Nicci had been having nightmares ever since she had changed rooms, and she found it comforting to have me there, ready to cuddle and soothe the night terrors away. Anxious not to wake her, and even more anxious about what I would find when I arrived at Valerie’s bedside, I crept out of our room.

  I pushed the sick-room door open and witnessed a heartbreaking scene. Father and Gaby were standing each side of Valerie’s bed. They must have been upset beyond all measure, and were arguing about what to do for the best.

  I edged round Father and looked down at Valerie’s pale, pinched face. Her eyes were dark with pain.

  ‘You wanted me?’ I whispered, my mouth close to her ear so that she could hear me over her parents’ voices.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ she whispered back. ‘I just can’t bear it.’

  I nodded and turned on her parents and told them quietly, but with an absolute authority to give me a quiet moment with Valerie alone.

  My voice brooked no further argument and, as one, they turned on their heel and left the room. Once safely downstairs they resumed their argument, but mercifully it was muffled by distance.

  ‘Hold me,’ Valerie whispered, for the first and last time in her life. I gathered her gently in my arms and, at last, after a few minutes, that dreadful rasping breathing finally ceased. I held on to her for some time, as tears slipped down my face, then gently laid her back on her pillows and took her small hand in mine.

  How could I tell them? How could I tell them? I sat for maybe ten minutes beside the body of my dead sister and listened to the latest battle in the long war between her parents being slugged out below. I tried desperately to think of a merciful way of breaking the news to them. I could not simply say, ‘She’s dead.’ It seemed too cruel. I decided that they would need a blessed moment or two between the words being spoken and the news sinking in. I looked at the clock, which was still ticking. It was almost four o’clock in the morning, on the day before my nineteenth birthday.

  I walked slowly down the stairs, took a deep breath and opened the living-room door. Both heads turned towards me. ‘She’s stopped breathing,’ I told them, and watched as the meaning of the words finally registered on their faces.

  And then, while I stood in the doorway, feeling utterly powerless, I saw their poor battered hearts shatter, never to be entirely whole again.

  21

  Bye-bye, Val-Val

  The doctor put it as kindly as he could.

  ‘You will need to call a second doctor if you wish your daughter to be cremated,’ he explained. ‘It’s the law. I know a man who will come,’ he added, as he placed a copy of Valerie’s death certificate on the mantelpiece. ‘If that is of any help?’

  Neither Father nor Gaby was able to speak, so I nodded. ‘Call him,’ I said.

  The doctor picked up the telephone receiver. ‘May I?’ he asked, and I agreed that he could. He dialled, stared into space as he waited for an answer, then held a muttered and brief conversation with his colleague.

  ‘He’ll be along directly,’ he told me. ‘Is there anything that I can do for any of you? Sleeping tablets, perhaps some tranquillizers?’

  I knew my father’s view on mood-altering substances of any kind. He was very definitely against them, and had been ever since he had given up drinking. He thought tranquillizers were downright dangerous; they were addictive, he said, and as time went on, he was proved right.

  I looked at Gaby. ‘The doctor says can he give you anything, sleeping tablets or anything … ?’ My voice faded to nothing as Gaby turned her haunted eyes on me and shook her head, still mute with shock and misery.

  ‘My father won’t want anything, either,’ I told the doctor firmly. ‘He has views.’

  ‘And yourself? It’s been a difficult time for you, too.’ I remember thinking that that was the understatement of the decade, but I decided against chemical assistance none the less. The problems and heartache would still be there when the pills wore off, and I believed what my father had told me. I didn’t want to be swallowing the damned things for the rest of my life.

  The second doctor arrived and agreed that Valerie could be cremated, as there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding her death.

  ‘And the sooner the better,’ the second doctor added. ‘The poor child has had so many drugs to treat her illness, and it’s summer …’ He allowed his sentence to drift into nothing, but we got the picture. He went on to recommend the local underta
ker – ‘He’s a good man, considerate, efficient, he’ll take all those worries off your shoulders’ – and then he took his leave.

  The sound of Father’s voice came from a long way away; I was lost once again in the numbness that follows a terrible shock.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said, could you tell Nicci that her sister has … ?’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. His voice cracked as he continued. ‘She’ll be waking up soon, and we’ve got to tell her something. Gaby and I think it’ll be best coming from you.’

  It never occurred to me to ask them why they thought this. Even now, it seems to me that the terrible news might have been better coming from her parents; that it might have helped them to grieve together, instead of being left to do it all alone. As it was, nobody seemed to be able to help anyone else. Everyone was locked away, imprisoned by their own misery and grief.

  I simply nodded and trudged up the stairs. It felt as if I was weighed down by lead boots. The short flight of steps seem to go on and on for ever.

  It was still relatively early in the morning, which came as a shock. It seemed like days since I had heard Valerie breathe her last, difficult breath, but in fact it was only a little over four hours. I looked at Nicci’s sleeping face for a long time, then stroked her long, blond hair from her forehead and planted a kiss on it to bring her awake as gently as I could. I can remember the smell of shampoo and warm child even now. Her eyelids fluttered open and she smiled. I sat quietly beside her to allow her to come fully awake before I spoke.

  ‘I have something very sad to tell you.’ Nicci blinked and looked puzzled. I ploughed on quickly, before I lost my nerve. ‘You know that Valerie has been very ill?’ Nicci nodded again. ‘Well, I am sorry to tell you that she died last night.’ Now Nicci looked blank, not really understanding what I was telling her. ‘It means that she won’t suffer any more, but it also means that you will never see her again. I am sorry, sweetheart, I’m so very sorry,’ and I held my arms out to her.