Valentine

by Jodi McAlister

  I’ve messaged him, of course. But when my first fifteen texts went unanswered, and all ten of my calls got sent to voicemail, I kind of got the point. I’ve had a little experience at stalking Finn Blacklin now. He’ll talk to you when he’s ready, I keep telling myself, just like people keep telling me that Phil will wake up from her catatonia when she’s ready and that Cardy will remember what happened to him when he’s ready and that my stitches can come out when they’re ready and all that other bullcrap you hear.

  No one seems to take into consideration when I’m ready for things. But it turns out the universe does not revolve around me.

  ‘Ready to go?’ Disey says, after the doctor’s finished.

  ‘Not yet,’ I reply. ‘I have to do the rounds.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I think I have to do some paperwork and stuff for the insurance – there’s a stack of forms that are actually as tall as I am. Meet you down in the gift shop in a half hour or so?’

  ‘Sure,’ I reply.

  I watch her walk away down the corridor, hale, whole, upright and proud, and my heart aches. She might not be in one of these beds, but I know I’ve hurt her, hurt her badly, leaving scars that might be invisible but which might not ever heal. That happens when you love someone as totally, as fiercely and as intensely as Disey loves me. There is no one that can wound her as profoundly as I can, simply by putting myself in danger.

  And she’s still standing. Still smiling.

  Paradise Linford. Now that’s real bravery.

  A bevy of nurses come tearing along the corridor pushing a bed and I flatten myself against the wall so they can get past. I don’t know the person in the bed. That’s a change.

  I know it’s not my fault that there have been so many casualties of this . . . this . . . whatever it is. But there is a big difference between knowing something in your head and feeling it, and I cannot help but feel achingly, horribly guilty.

  So I visit them all, every day.

  ‘Hey,’ I say softly, entering the first room. ‘How are you doing?’

  She doesn’t answer. She’s sleeping, her chest rising and falling evenly, the only sound the slight hiss of the oxygen mask.

  ‘She looks better,’ I say as a nurse comes into the room.

  ‘You again?’ she says. ‘Come on, she needs her rest.’

  ‘But she is doing better, isn’t she?’

  ‘Holly-Anne is making good progress,’ she says. ‘The burns on her feet are healing nicely, and we’re fully confident she’ll get better. If she gets enough rest.’

  I allow myself to be shooed out of the room. I could insist on staying, of course, but then Holly might wake up, and she’d probably make a scene when she discovered I was there, like she did the first time.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she snarls at me in the casualty ward, before breaking into a fit of hacking coughs.

  ‘Getting stitched up,’ I say. ‘Are you all right?’

  She wasn’t, of course. Her feet were burned horribly and she had the flu terribly again, much worse than last time, so badly she was on intravenous fluid and a whole bunch of other things. I guess that happens when fairies send you on nocturnal missions and make you dance on hot coals for their own amusement.

  And it looks like her only crime was having red hair.

  I have a vivid flashback to Finn, standing in the disabled toilet at Club H, telling me that Seelie meant knowing that every day for the rest of your life would be the first day of summer. I remember the exquisite, dazzling figures dancing in the bush, so beautiful it was hard to look at them. And then I think of that laugh like silver bells and those pealing voices and I think of Holly-Anne, and I get a sick feeling in my stomach.

  Jenny and Kel were Unseelie. Darkness, despair, death. But not evil. Not any more so than the Seelie. Seelie and Unseelie is not a matter of good and bad. Nothing in real life is ever so simple.

  I lean on the door jamb of the second room and look in at the pale figure in the bed. It’s not only the Unseelie that have left a body count.

  ‘Hey, Pearl,’ Ranga Dave rasps. ‘How are you?’

  It took a while for the penny to drop on this one. I guess it took coming back to the hospital again to remember Dave even existed, let alone figuring out how to fit him into the complicated fairy web. But of course the Seelie had their fingers in him. A red-headed boy sleepwalking . . . of course they had something to do with it. I wonder how many stupid fairy errands they made him do for them before he got so sick he was no use any more.

  I think of Holly dancing on the coals and I wonder what kinds of things they did to him that I’ll never know about. Because the pneumonia has hold of Ranga Dave now, and it’s not going to let go.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, sitting beside his bed. ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ he wheezes. ‘I’m liking the sun. Is it a nice day outside?’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ I say.

  He is silent for a while. This isn’t unusual. Talking is hard for him. But just because no one is talking doesn’t mean he’s not enjoying your company. ‘When do you go back to school?’ he asks after a while.

  ‘Next term,’ I reply. ‘I had to beg Disey and Shad to let me go back with everyone else, but I won in the end.’

  I see him smile underneath his oxygen mask. ‘You must be the only person –’ he pauses, breathing heavily, ‘– the only person ever to want to go back to school.’

  ‘Well, when you’ve been out for as long as I have, you get a bit stir-crazy,’ I answer.

  He looks longingly out the window at the sky and the sunshine, the grey-green leaves of a eucalypt just outside the window waving gently in the breeze. ‘Is it a nice day outside?’ he asks.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ I reply again.

  ‘I wish I could be out there,’ he whispers.

  I reach over and take his hand. ‘Me too,’ I say, wishing with all my heart I could say you will be.

  ‘I dreamed about you last night,’ he rasps.

  ‘I hope I was behaving myself,’ I say, gently squeezing his hand.

  He laughs softly, the sound rattling in his chest. ‘I don’t remember much,’ he says, ‘but I know you were there.’ He stops for a moment, wheezing. ‘I was – I was in a forest with – with these people – and I looked away and I saw you. There was – there was this big dance, and I wanted to go to you, ask you to dance too, but I couldn’t and –’ He breaks into a hacking fit of coughs.

  ‘Don’t go on if you don’t want to,’ I say.

  ‘No, no!’ he insists. ‘I wanted to go to you so badly, Pearl, but they wouldn’t let me – wouldn’t let me, and . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The nurse told me I tried to sleepwalk again last night,’ he says.

  I clench my jaw. If I ever see another one of those damn Seelie fairies again, I don’t care how beautiful or magical or whatever they are. I’m going to make them pay for what they’ve done to Dave.

  ‘I don’t understand how this happened to me,’ he whispers. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’

  Except be red-headed in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I look down at him, a broken, withered wreck of a boy, a boy who once dwarfed everyone around him and who has now become a dwarf himself. ‘You were just unlucky,’ I say.

  ‘I wish we could go swimming together again,’ he says, ‘one last time.’

  ‘Me too,’ I reply softly.

  He goes back to staring out the window, that tiny sliver of a world he will never walk in again. ‘Stay with me a little while?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  It only takes him a few minutes to fall asleep. Our conversation must have been like a marathon for him, poor, broken Dave.

  I get up and smooth the red hair away from his forehead. ‘Sleep well,’ I whisper.

  My only answer is the wheezing of his respirator and the steady beep-beep-beep marking out his heartbeat, counting down to his death.

&nb
sp; Unless they discover a miracle cure for the aggressive form of pneumonia his disease has morphed into, Ranga Dave will not be on my list of people to visit for much longer.

  I wonder how much of Dave’s presence in my life has been the Seelie spying on me. Maybe our whole awkward three-week relationship was them, looking for a way in to my life, checking up on the girl they thought was their precious Valentine.

  And Dave is dying because of it.

  I try to take a few deep breaths in the lift down to the second floor, but it doesn’t help much. Marie. Dave. Two lives, taken. Two lives, stolen. Just because they happened to cross the path of the fairies.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ I whisper to myself.

  ‘It never is, dearie,’ the old woman beside me says, patting my shoulder kindly.

  I’ve heard this a thousand times, of course. Not once has it made me feel any better. ‘Thank you,’ I murmur.

  ‘What are you here for?’ she asks.

  ‘Just visiting,’ I answer.

  ‘Me as well,’ she replies. ‘My husband’s here.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s what happens when you’re old,’ she says. ‘What about you, dearie? Who are you visiting? Grandparent?’

  ‘No,’ I reply, as the lift doors open and we walk out. ‘My friend. He was – he was in an accident.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Well, you take care.’

  They’ve moved him again – they keep doing that – and I have to ask the nurse at the desk where he is. ‘Room seventeen,’ she replies, consulting a chart. ‘We had to give him a room to himself – all the old ladies love him a bit too much.’

  Of course they would. ‘I bet he loves that.’

  ‘Mrs Pickering thinks he’s her husband,’ the nurse says, shaking her head. ‘Poor old duck, she can hardly remember her own name, but she lays eyes on him, and . . . I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Room seventeen, did you say?’

  ‘That’s the one. Right at the end of the corridor. Best make sure none of the old ducks follow you in.’

  ‘I will,’ I reply, and leave before she can gush any more.

  I’m almost at his room when an old man grabs my arm, seemingly from out of nowhere. I jump. ‘Excuse me, I –’

  ‘You’re a disgrace!’ he half-shouts, waggling his finger in my face.

  ‘Um, sorry?’

  ‘Your parents must be so disappointed in you!’

  The disappointment speaks.

  I freeze. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Your hair!’ he roars. ‘This short-hair palaver these days – it’s a disgrace! We never would have stood for it in my day!’

  ‘I lost my hair in an accident,’ I say, trying to disentangle myself.

  ‘Disgrace!’

  ‘Oh my – I’m so sorry!’ a nurse says, running up to us. ‘Come on, Mr Jones. Back to bed.’

  ‘You should be ashamed!’ he bellows back at me as he’s led away.

  Disgrace. Disappointment.

  He’s sitting up in bed when I enter, reading a book. ‘Of course, who else could it be but Cyclone Pearl?’ he says brightly. ‘I thought I heard you coming.’

  ‘Hi, Cardy,’ I say, pulling up another one of the interminable hospital chairs and sitting beside his bed. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ he says. He’s as handsome as he ever was, an Adonis in a hospital gown, and it’s easy to remember why I liked him so much. ‘Did they tell you they had to move me because the old ladies keep mobbing me? You have no idea how depressing it is to be seventeen in a ward full of people over the age of four hundred.’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘I don’t know why they had to put me down here anyway. I’ve got amnesia, not dementia.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately,’ I say, ‘the only hospitals with dedicated amnesia wards are ones in soap operas.’

  He laughs. ‘It is pretty soap opera, isn’t it? Maybe I married some foreign princess and then her family erased my memory because I’m not of royal blood. Or maybe I stumbled on some alien spaceship and they messed with my mind.’

  ‘Have you remembered anything?’ I ask him.

  ‘No,’ he replies, slumping back against his pillows. ‘The royal family or the aliens or whoever did a good job on me.’

  I remember the first time I saw him after he woke up, the day after everything happened. He looked almost like Phil, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Hey, Cardy,’ I say.

  ‘Pearl!’ he exclaims. ‘Am I glad to see you!’

  I sit beside his bed, fidgeting nervously. ‘I’m sure you want an explanation,’ I say.

  ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘I’m just glad to see you!’

  I’m taken aback. I had anticipated a thousand different situations, a thousand different explanations, but not this, not joy. ‘I’m glad to see you too,’ I reply.

  ‘Did they tell you I can’t remember anything?’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Not a thing,’ he says. ‘Last night – total blank. And there are all these other black spots . . . they think I might have some weird brain thing. I have to do CAT scans and stuff. You had to do one of those when you had your coma, didn’t you? What was it like?’

  ‘Oh, um, not that exciting,’ I say. ‘So when you say last night – what’s the last thing you remember?’

  ‘I went surfing,’ he says. ‘With Kel – do you know Kel? He’s Jenny’s brother. And then we went back to their place, and we were all watching TV, and I think I dozed off, and –’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say softly.

  ‘You’ll get better,’ I say helplessly, leaning over to pat his arm.

  ‘That’s what they keep telling me,’ he replies. ‘They say it’s all there, locked away in my mind, and it’ll come back . . .  probably. Maybe. Sometime. Or not at all.’

  ‘If your mind has shut it away,’ I suggest, ‘maybe it’s for the best that you don’t remember.’ Because if you do remember, and you tell anyone, you’re going to get shut in a psych ward for life.

  ‘If I could just get out of here, I know I’d get better,’ he says. ‘No one could ever remember anything here, staring at the walls, smelling that detergent smell . . . I read somewhere that smell is the best trigger to the memory there is. And I’m pretty sure that whatever happened to me, it didn’t involve hospital-grade detergent.’

  I laugh the obligatory laugh.

  ‘Jenny hasn’t come to see me yet,’ he says softly.

  ‘No,’ I say, trying not to hesitate.

  Because they haven’t told him, of course. I asked one of the nurses why last time I was here and she said it might produce some kind of catastrophic mental shutdown and he might end up catatonic like Phil.

  ‘I know you know what happened that night, Pearl,’ he says. ‘You have to tell me.’

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  ‘I’m not stupid!’ he blurts out. ‘It’s not rocket science to work out that if your own girlfriend hasn’t bothered to come to see you when you’re in hospital with bloody amnesia, and she’s the last thing you can remember, then something’s gone down with her. Something bad.’

  I spread my hands helplessly. ‘Cardy, I can’t.’

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ he demands.

  I blink, taken aback.

  ‘The killer got her,’ he says. ‘The killer got her, and I tried to stop him, and he – he – he hit me on the head, and I lost my memory.’

  I don’t say anything. Better he think this for a while than the truth . . . even if the truth they’re going to eventually tell him is a lie.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘You know I can’t say,’ I reply.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pearl, this is not a game! We’re not two little kids going “I know something you don’t know, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!” This is my life! And you have to tell me!’

  ‘Please,’ I say, ‘don’t put me in
this position.’

  ‘You know something,’ he says stubbornly, ‘and I want you to tell me.’

  I look at his face, that pleading, chiselled face that I used to trace the lines of in my mind over and over, the sweep of perfect cheekbones framing the curve of his brown eyes.

  And I shake my head.

  ‘Pearl, please, you have to!’

  ‘No,’ I say, getting up. ‘I hope the rest of your day is nice. I’ll come and visit you tomorrow, or maybe the next day.’

  ‘Don’t go! Stay! Please! You have to tell me!’

  His pleas follow me out the door and down the corridor. With every step, I harden my heart a little more.

  ‘More of the same?’ the nurse on the desk asks sympathetically.

  ‘When are you going to tell him?’ I demand. ‘He has a right to know. And you’re putting me and everyone that comes to visit him in a very difficult position.’

  ‘We’ll tell him when he’s ready,’ she says soothingly.

  When he’s ready. Spew.

  ‘Well, make him ready,’ I snap, ‘because I can’t take much more of this. I don’t like lying.’

  I check my watch when I get into the lift. Five minutes before I have to meet Disey. Time for one last stop.

  She’s awake when I walk into her room, staring at the ceiling. Julian’s sitting by her, holding her hand.

  ‘Hi Julian,’ I say.

  He barely looks at me. He grunts.

  Yeah, he is so not happy with me right now. Not only does he think I’m crazy – ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he demanded, when I cornered him about the Seelie business – he blames me for this. For Phil being here. For her being like this.

  I can’t say I disagree with him.

  ‘Hey, you,’ I say to Phil, trying to keep my tone light. ‘Me again.’

  She doesn’t answer, of course. But I like to think she can hear me when she’s this way. It’s the only way I can cope with seeing her staring, unblinking, the light behind her eyes dimmed, everything that makes her Phil somehow flown away.

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ I say, ‘but I’ll be back again tomorrow.’

  I wonder if she can see me.

  ‘I get to go back to school soon,’ I continue, ‘I’ll pick up all your assignments for you, don’t worry! And we’ll work through everything you miss – we’ll have a big study party. We’ll stuff our faces with junk food and our brains with knowledge. It’ll be awesome.’