Luke and Jon

by Robert Williams

  He’d fallen silent now and I wasn’t sure what to say. I tried to cheer him up and told him that after living in that house for so long, he would be immune to anything, immune to death even. He didn’t say anything. I looked at the time on my watch and saw that it was still early. I would give it a go. I asked him what ward he was on and told him not to worry, I would try and see him soon. I hung up and shouted for Dad.

  Coloured lines on shiny floors

  Everybody says they hate hospitals. I don’t. At least if you make it to a hospital you stand a chance of coming back out. I know there are people dying and people in pain. People sitting at the edges of beds watching and wishing that they could help. Making deals in their head with a God they haven’t thought about for years, thinking, take me instead, please. But there are also people getting better and people getting good news. There are people who had given up hope being handed a second chance and thinking, this time I won’t squander it. This time I will savour every hour and every day. And maybe, at least for the next few weeks, they will and the world will look precious and new to them again. So, no, I don’t hate hospitals. I would have given anything to have been able to visit my mum in hospital after the crash. To see her lying in bed, a weak smile on her face, a leg in plaster, and covered in bruises, would have made me the happiest person in the world. Of course I hate the smell. Hospital smell is horrible. A warm sickly scent. Everyone hates that. It always feels good to get back outside and take a deep breath of fresh air and shake the hospital odour from your clothes.

  We arrived just as evening visiting time had begun and the corridors were teeming with people carrying flowers, cards and magazines and books. Some looked like regulars; they strode confidently ahead, not checking signs, impatient to reach their destination. Others were more like us: unsure and hesitant, clearly the new boys. We stood staring for ages at the huge board in the hospital foyer, looking for Bowland Ward. We eventually found out that Bowland Ward was a green-zone ward and that to reach it we needed to follow the green-line path. I didn’t understand. And then Dad pointed at the different coloured lines that criss-crossed along the shiny and scuffed floors. As we walked Dad asked why Jon was here and what was going on. I acted dumb and shrugged and muttered nothings. I didn’t know how much Jon wanted anyone to know anything. And it wasn’t up to me to tell anyone anything. The green line led us through a maze of corridors and past departments with names that I could barely pronounce. It took us from one grey building to another and in and out of big silver lifts and further and further into the belly of the hospital. And just when I was worried that we were about to end up at the outskirts of our old town we turned a corner and saw Bowland Ward lurking at the end of the corridor.

  We approached slowly and pushed our faces up against the window, and in the far corner of the furthest flung ward of Duerdale Royal Infirmary we found Jon. Tucked up in bed, looking even younger than normal. We pushed the doors open and Jon glanced up at the noise. When he saw us, a cheek-bursting smile spread across his face. I swear it would have broken the heart of even Kieran Judd.

  We had to pass four other beds to get to him. Four beds containing sickly-looking men, coughing and spluttering, moaning about the heat. One saying he could murder a pint, one gasping for a fag. They chuckled amongst themselves. We reached Jon and followed the usual hospital rituals: finding chairs, working out who sits where, and then, when finally settled, the awkward silence when you realise the whole world is going to hear your conversation. Dad took the lead. He leant forward and gently asked, ‘How are you doing, Jon?’

  Jon smiled again. ‘Good, good, thanks. I’m OK.’

  A couple of seconds of silence followed.

  ‘I just don’t know what’s going to happen next, they won’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Why are you in here?’ I asked, nodding towards the men.

  ‘They’ve run out of beds in the children’s ward and I was the oldest so they put me in here. This lot are nice though.’

  Jon nodded over to his ward mates and me and Dad turned round. All four smiled and waved at us. We waved back.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the man in the nearest bed said. ‘We’ll look after him.’

  Dad smiled and said thanks.

  ‘You the father, are you?’ he asked.

  Dad shook his head and said no, he wasn’t. There was an awkward pause but then the man continued, ‘Well, like I said, nothing to worry about, we’ll see that he’s OK.’

  The men started chatting amongst themselves again and Dad turned back to Jon. He clapped his hands together and said, ‘So …’, and he looked like he was about to ask a question, but he came to a halt, with his hands clasped together in mid-air and his mouth closed around the word ‘so’. He looked like a devout man offering up prayer but nothing else came out, nothing else happened. It was just Dad and a brick wall. And I think that was quite a moment for him. A camera-flash moment when he realised that he’d no idea how he’d ended up here. At the hospital bedside of a thirteen-year-old boy he hardly knew, in a town he didn’t know existed a few months earlier. I think it might have been then, in the white light of a hospital ward on a winter night, when he finally understood how fully the fog had descended over the last few months. He looked startled. His mouth opened and closed gormlessly a few times. He looked from Jon to me and back to me again and said, ‘Who’s going to fill me in then?’

  Latvia

  We were both silent. And then Jon said, ‘Tell him.’ I asked if he was sure, and he nodded that he was. He looked exhausted. He looked too tired to handle the coughs that kept hacking at his chest. He seemed happy to let me paint the whole gruesome picture and just occasionally nod that I was speaking the truth when Dad looked to him for confirmation, thinking that I must be exaggerating a little least. I didn’t exaggerate because I didn’t need to. I just described the house as I remembered it with the rubbish, and the smell and the black scurrying creatures that I didn’t fully see and didn’t dare ask if they were mice or rats. I described the cats, the newspaper mountains and Jon’s grandparents, rocking themselves, insane in their old and stained bedclothes. I hoped I wasn’t embarrassing Jon but I saw this as his apples-and-oranges incident and our chance to get everything out in the open. And anyway, he looked too tired to be embarrassed.

  When I finished Dad was quiet for a few seconds and then he shook his head and said that he was sorry. He should have seen that something wasn’t right. But Jon and me said, no, he couldn’t have known, it was a secret that we wanted to keep. And we all knew that whilst this was true it was also true that at times during the last few months a hurricane could have lifted our house up off the ground, spun it around in space and landed it in Latvia, and Dad probably wouldn’t have noticed, would have just opened another bottle and poured another glass when the dust settled and the windows stopped shaking.

  Dad asked questions: How long had it been like this? What did they do for money? Did they get any help or benefits? And again: Why hadn’t we told him? Eventually he ran himself quiet and he saw that Jon was finding it hard to keep up with all the questions anyway. A nurse appeared on the ward and seemed surprised to see us. She told us that visiting hours had finished half an hour ago and we would have to leave. As I put the chairs back and grabbed our coats Dad asked who he could contact, who was the doctor. The nurse gave him the name and told him to ring the hospital in the morning. Before we left I asked her what was going to happen to Jon and she said she didn’t know but that she was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be going anywhere for a few days at least. Jon seemed to relax a little at this news and he started to give in to the tiredness. He just managed to stay awake as we said our goodbyes although his eyes were fluttering with sleep before we got our coats on.

  Black roads

  We left the hospital and headed for the car. It was easy to spot, the car park had emptied quickly and ours was almost the only vehicle left. Dad, as usual, had parked in the most remote corner he could find and we walked across t
he brightly lit tarmac with the hum of the hospital fading behind us. Within a few minutes we were a world away from the shiny white wards and metal machines and nurses dressed in blue and were rolling along on black country lanes, trees on either side and darkness all around. I had only recently understood that night does not always mean blackness, that on some nights the moon will illuminate the fields and trees and roads like a floodlight. Even on the fell, without any streetlights for miles around, on certain nights you could walk along tracks with no torch needed, the light from the moon bright enough to guide you. Other nights, nights when the moon hid or was covered by cloud, it felt like a medieval darkness descended on the valley. It was a blackness that swallowed torchlight whole three steps out from the front door. Tonight was a black night and the only light for miles around came from our weak headlights which only just cut through the thick dark. We were halfway home when Dad cleared his throat and it might as well have been a drum roll. He was about to break his car silence and I braced myself. He spoke faster than usual, his voice hard with determination, three short sentences, pushed out into the car like gunfire.

  ‘It’s the inquest. Soon. They’ve set a date.’

  I didn’t respond; I could tell more would be coming. He leant forward in his seat. He told me that they’d spoken to everyone else involved, they just needed to speak to him now and had gone ahead and set a date for the official inquest.

  ‘Are you going to be OK? With what people might say? The implications?’

  I thought about his questions but I didn’t need to think too long. I’d been thinking about the inquest since the day the letter arrived and I knew exactly how I felt. So I told him that I wasn’t really interested in what they had to say. He shot me a surprised look and I explained. I told him, I knew it was an accident, that Mum wasn’t depressed that day and it didn’t matter to me what anyone else said, particularly a group of people who had never even met her. He looked across at me again to see that I was being honest, to check that I wasn’t trying to fob him off, but he could see I was telling the truth. He nodded, he seemed pleased, and said that was good, that he had come to the same conclusion himself. He was sorry that it was all being dragged up again, he said, and he was sorry that Brian Stuart’s family might be thinking Mum was to blame, but there was nothing we could do to change anything. He said that as long as we knew what we thought, that was what was important.

  We drove on in silence for a couple of minutes before he spoke again. He said that as long as I was doing all right, getting by, that was the main thing. He looked to me for a response so I shrugged and said I supposed I was OK, that compared to Jon right now I was pretty much King of the Castle. Then he asked if I knew that I could always talk to him about anything, no matter what, including Mum. A river burst its banks in my chest. I squinted and stared ahead. I dug my nails into the palm of my hand until it stung. I wasn’t going to cry. I gathered myself. I nodded and said, yes and thanks, I did know that but thanks.

  I didn’t know that at all. I tried not to think about all the times I wanted to ask him questions, to talk about her, to remember her out loud. I remember wanting to ask where all her clothes were and where all her little bottles of nail varnish had got to. Had he boxed all her belongings and brought them with us? Where was the book she had started and never finished? Was all that stuff left unpacked in one of the dirty spare bedrooms with all the other boxes we hadn’t opened? I wanted to know if he ever blamed Brian Stuart for driving such a stupidly big lorry that left her without a chance. I wanted to know if he was ever angry with her for crashing, for maybe losing concentration, just for a second. And I wanted to ask if he ever blamed me. If he blamed me for having a stupid after-school art club that meant I couldn’t get the school bus home and had to be picked up. But I didn’t ask anything. It was enough that he’d mentioned her; that her name was back in circulation.

  Dad relaxed, he sank into his seat and his shoulders dropped. He talked about the inquest. He told me that they would look at all the evidence again and take Mum’s mental state and medication into consideration and then come to a final conclusion about whether her death was an accident, suicide or would be left as an open verdict. I nodded and said I understood. I didn’t say so but the whole thing seemed as useless as a machine designed to test the wetness of water. We turned off the fell road and onto our track and were bumping along as usual when Dad braked suddenly. We stopped in almost exactly the same spot we’d nearly killed Jon on our first day in Duerdale and I peered out into the dark to see why. The biggest owl I’d ever seen was sat on a gatepost by the side of the road. He was tall and white with big black eyes. He seemed oblivious to us but when Dad turned the car engine off he turned his head our way and looked right at us, his eyes taking in everything. He watched us for a while and then, bored, turned his gaze past the car and back down the road. Dad turned the key in the ignition and we slowly moved off.

  I kicked a boy

  It was the day after the hospital visit and I was feeling frazzled. I was sat in an empty classroom working on my Maths homework. I hate Maths. My old Maths teacher, Mr Knowles, told me that Maths is the most logical subject of them all. That all you have to do is follow rules and formulas and you can’t go wrong. He said that if you had enough time you could teach a monkey Maths. That made me hate it even more. We had to answer from 17a to 29b before the next lesson. The next lesson was in ten minutes and I was stuck on 17b. I couldn’t concentrate and I let my ears settle on the shouts and calls from the playing field. My mind drifted and I remembered something that struck me in the first few days after Mum died. You still get homework. Of course nobody would question it not being done, or it not being done on time for a while at least. But it still gets dished out to everyone, no exceptions. But that was then, at my old school, in the days and weeks after the crash, when the town was still shocked and rallying around and I was still, really, the exception. It was still part of the time when Dad and I would open the front door to find casserole dishes left on the doorstep covered in foil and resting on notes saying things like ‘40 minutes, gas mark 5. Can be frozen. Sue and Brian xx’.

  That was another thing I learnt. When someone dies, people like to cook. Honestly. We couldn’t move for food. The freezer was full within two days and in the end Dad had to throw stuff out. Now I’m no longer the exception in the ‘no exceptions’, I’m just the kid in the empty classroom who hasn’t finished his homework and will get into trouble like anyone else.

  I lifted my head up towards the ceiling and blinked hard and tried to concentrate on the task in hand. I was about to attempt to refocus on 17b when I saw Kieran Judd and Darren Laycock peering through the classroom window. I looked back down at the page hoping deeply that they would pass along and leave me alone. The door opened a couple of seconds later and they spilt into the room as quickly as water. Kieran Judd pulled out the chair next to me, sat down and folded his arms across his chest. Laycock hung back, sitting on a desktop, waiting for whatever was about to happen to happen. I stared so hard at the question on the page that it started to wobble.

  After a few seconds of consideration Judd rocked back on his chair. He finally spoke. ‘So are you and Slack Jaw best mates?’ I ignored him and continued staring at question 17b, which might as well have been in Welsh for all the sense I was making of it. Judd continued, ‘The thing is, you seem all right to me but if you continue hanging around with King … Spaz … Boy …’ – he said these words slowly, a gap between each one, cherishing the sound they made – ‘then you aren’t going to have many other friends are you …’ It wasn’t a question and I remained silent, still staring at the page on my desk, but aware of a strange feeling that had started in my gut. I couldn’t place it. It was unfamiliar, but not unpleasant. I tried to ignore Judd, but he didn’t want to be ignored and he ploughed on. ‘So, are you not bothered about it being just you and Slack Jaw?’

  On the word ‘jaw’ the feeling in my belly exploded. It ran as fast as field mice
into my arms and legs and shocked me out of my chair. It robbed me of control and handed it to a mad man and it was terrifying and brilliant. I was stood over Judd before he had chance to move. I grabbed a chunk of his slick straw hair and used it to bang his face down hard on the desk. Before he managed to react I shoved him off his chair and onto the ground. He scrambled to get up and I kicked him hard in the stomach. I made satisfying contact. If he were a football he would’ve flown.

  Laycock didn’t know what to do; he was shocked into stillness. Eventually he stirred and made a move forward and I ROARED at him. It came out of my mouth like a train out of a tunnel and I didn’t know whose voice it was but I was glad it was there. He looked terrified, like a little boy facing an army. He froze. I told him to fuck off and stand still. He did. I walked over to Judd who was starting to stand up, trying to gather himself to start kicking the hell out of me. I knew he was thinking that he couldn’t get beaten up by the artist boy, the boy with the bright green eyes and the spastic friend. But before he could get fully to his feet I charged at him and shoved him against the nearest wall. His head cracked hard against the white tiles, making the sound an egg might. My stomach spun and slipped, a queasiness edging up my throat. I pushed it back down. Our arms were flung around each other and for a few seconds we were hugging more than fighting. I almost had my head in his armpit and I could smell him. New sweat mixing with old sweat. I shoved my body into his and against the wall three times and then held him there. He twisted and tensed and his face turned a royal gala red. A drop of sweat squeezed out and trickled from his temple to the top of his cheek and I wondered if I could make the spots on his forehead pop by pushing harder. I gave it a go and shoved again. I told him that if he ever touched Jon again I would kill him. I asked if he understood. He didn’t respond so I pushed harder. I knew that if he didn’t answer soon I would cause him harm. His eyes started to water and he squirmed and slithered against the wall, popping like a fish on a boat deck. But I held firm. Eventually he fell slack and nodded. He was scared. I shoved again, one more surge, and then let go. He fell to his hands and knees, gasping for breath. I looked down at him and felt nothing. I glared at Laycock, still daring him to make a move, but he had retreated to a corner. The bell was ringing. I picked up my homework and bag and walked out of the room and straight to my Maths class. At the end of the lesson I handed in my homework. I never did get past 17b though. I got an F.