‘I’m not sure I will.’
But Mason kept the mobile in his palm, and Daniel took it and put it in his pocket.
‘Anything,’ repeated Mason. ‘Remember, you’re one of us now.’ And Frank and Jiff in the front seats growled as if in agreement. ‘Keep the phone with you,’ said Mason as Daniel opened the door and got out of the car. ‘I’ll be in touch about the flask.’ And then he leant across and slammed the door shut and the BMW drove away into the mist.
As Daniel walked in the direction of his house, he heard the shriek of an animal. A metal bin crashed to the pavement and a lid rolled somewhere like a giant penny and clattered to a stop. In the silence afterwards, Daniel waited in the mist, his breath soundless and white, wondering what was happening until a fox appeared suddenly on the pavement in front of him, its damp fur bejewelled and the white of its throat roughed with the damp.
The creature sniffed the air and blinked and then trotted away, its shoulders like pistons under its pelt. Its brush twitched before it disappeared into the mist as if adding the finishing touches to a brand-new world in which everything had been painted out except for Daniel himself.
47
When Daniel’s aunt woke in the middle of the night, she wondered why until she heard Daniel crying out again, his muffled voice coming through the walls. She got up and padded out of her room and down the landing and opened his bedroom door.
Daniel was asleep, curled up like a dormouse in his duvet. His aunt listened when he started crying out again, burbling words and names she did not know, and then, before she knew what she was doing, she went and crouched beside him and started stroking his hair, shushing him.
When he moved sharply in his sleep, the duvet swilling like sea foam around him, her hand froze. Then, without warning, his eyes fluttered open and he blinked up at her.
‘Mum?’ His voice was full of sleep and his eyes were dreamy.
‘Yes,’ she whispered back immediately before she knew what she was saying, instantly regretting it, and holding her breath to see what he might say when he realized it was not a dream. But all he did was blink and nod and seem to decide through some sleepy mechanics of his brain to close his eyes and settle seamlessly into sleep again. She watched him for some time, as if guarding him from the world, listening to him breathing peacefully, the nightmares inside him gone.
After closing the door, she stood on the landing until her hands had stopped shaking in the dim orangey light coming from the street lights outside. When she felt ready, she went downstairs and picked up the photograph of her twin sister off the dresser in the hallway.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after him, I promise. I’ll do the best I can, just as if he was Michael. I won’t let you down. Either of you. I won’t.’
The Man Who Came Up Out of the Floor
48
Bennett checked his watch to stop his foot tapping. It was 10.05. He was about to ask Daniel if he had remembered to tell the ward staff that Rosie was coming when the door opened and she stood there, blinking at them. She looked so willowy and tall, Bennett expected her to sway back and forth in the draught from the door as it shut behind her.
‘It took me a while to get rid of Mum,’ she said. ‘I sent her off shopping.’ She held up a bleeper. ‘They’re going to let me know when they want me back for my chemo so we’ve got a little bit of time.’
Bennett stood up and introduced himself and offered her his chair and then leant against the wall with his arms folded.
‘I don’t want to get in the way,’ he said. ‘I’m just here in case it doesn’t work, for moral support.’ And he raised a thumb at Daniel who nodded back.
Rosie sat herself down beside Daniel and looked at the man lying in front of her. ‘He looks so calm.’
‘All the sedatives are out of his system,’ said Daniel. ‘That’s what the nursing staff told us. He’s definitely in his own coma now.’
‘We’re going to do everything we can,’ said Rosie. ‘We’re going to help your dad. We’re going to find out what we can really do with these gifts of ours.’
Daniel watched her sit up straight in her chair as if preparing herself for some testing question. ‘What happens to you when we make the fit?’ he asked. ‘What do you see?’
‘A light,’ she said, staring at Daniel’s father. ‘I see a ball of bright white light inside me. And I know it’s there to help with whatever I’m trying to do. It’s there like some battery for me to draw on. It’s strange and yesterday is the first time I’ve felt it. It’s when I’m with you, Daniel. It’s only there when we make the fit.’
She took hold of Daniel’s father’s limp hand and closed her eyes. A moment later, Daniel felt little golden sparks flitting in his chest. ‘Can you see that ball of bright light?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Is it there?’
‘Yes,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s right inside me, just like it was yesterday.’
Daniel felt the golden warmth in his chest increasing as Rosie made the fit between them stronger.
‘I can feel how much your father loves you,’ she whispered. ‘I can sense it through all the things you’ve done together. All his memories are there inside him. His whole life is there for me to see.’ She was smiling. ‘You’ve done so many things together. Oh, Daniel, he loves you so much.’
‘Can he hear us? Does he know we’re here?’ Daniel sat further forward on his chair and touched his father’s arm. ‘Dad, if you can hear us then let Rosie know; please tell her so we know you’re there.’
Daniel’s chest was full of a golden heat now and he was beginning to sweat. Rosie’s white face was twitching and flickering as she made the fit stronger, trying to look deeper into the man in the bed beside her.
‘He’s very hidden,’ she said. ‘I can’t find him, the thinking part of him, the dad that you know.’
‘Keep looking,’ said Daniel. ‘Please, Rosie. Please don’t stop. There’s got to be more than just memories inside him. There can’t just be the past. He’s got to be there too.’
Rosie was flinching now and her arms were twitching. Her lips were trembling and peeling back to show her perfect white teeth. Little currents raced up and down the muscles of her throat.
Daniel put his hand to his chest when he felt the heat in it starting to become painful, just like it had done with Lawson. But when he saw his father’s face beginning to flicker he told himself to ignore it.
‘You’re doing something, Rosie,’ he told her. ‘Something’s happening!’ Daniel heard Bennett’s voice muttering in astonishment behind him, but he was too excited to turn round. His father’s whole body was twitching now and his mouth was moving as if the man was trying to speak. One of his eyelids rolled slowly back and Daniel ignored the pain in his chest and leant over.
‘Dad! Dad! Can you see me? It’s Dan! Can you hear me?’
He heard one of the machines chiming a warning sound and he looked up at Rosie, her face shining with sweat. Before he could tell her to keep going, he felt the pain rising rapidly in his chest. It was so harsh it took his breath away and for a moment it was impossible to speak.
‘St-op!’ he shouted as his breath came back to him. ‘St-op!’
But Rosie shook her head. ‘Just a little more,’ she managed to say. When she wiped her nose, a tiny smear of blood striped the back of her hand and Daniel remembered that Lawson had done exactly the same, before everything had gone wrong.
‘Stop, Rosie! Please!’ But she didn’t seem able to hear him now. He put out his arms to try and shake her, but the pain in his chest had taken all his strength away.
A sound started up inside him, a clicking noise. Steady and regular like a metronome beating time. Daniel remembered the sound and what had happened to Lawson’s hand after it had stopped. He shouted to Rosie again, but his words were slurred now. It was like chewing toffee as he tried to speak. The clicking grew faster and faster. Louder and louder. It seemed like a wasp had flown deep into his skull and w
as lost there, becoming angrier and angrier as it tried to get out.
Suddenly, he was dimly aware of Bennett standing beside them, drawing back his hand and striking Rosie hard across her face, the crack of his palm like a whip on her cheek.
It brought her back from whatever place she was in and her eyes snapped open and she sat back in the chair, breathing heavily, a red stripe forming on her face, sweat strung in beads across her brow.
The buzzing in Daniel’s head was already fading and the pain in his chest was softening, melting away.
‘Oh, Daniel,’ whispered Rosie. ‘I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see your dad. There was nothing there.’
When the door opened, the nurse came rushing in, but the machine had stopped chiming and Daniel’s father was lying there peacefully as if nothing had happened at all.
Bennett brought them plastic cups of cold water filled from the reservoir beside the ward door. He said sorry to Rosie again for slapping her and told them that he had been scared and hadn’t known what else to do.
She nodded and said it was OK. But when she rubbed her face again Bennett wasn’t sure if he believed her.
‘I thought if I just pushed a bit harder I could find him,’ said Rosie. She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Daniel.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘It is. It’s me. I need to learn more about what I’m doing. We need to practise and then we can try again.’
Before Rosie could say anything else, the bleeper went off and she knew her chemotherapy infusion was ready.
‘We’ll try again. We will,’ said Rosie as she clicked the bleeper off and then she hugged Daniel and left to go back to the unit where her mother was fretting, waiting for her, asking where in the hell she had been.
After she had gone, Bennett sat down beside Daniel. ‘Do you think you can really do it? That you can really help your dad?’
‘I do in my heart, Bennett.’
‘But in your head?’
Daniel tapped his foot.
‘Daniel, do you believe it in your head?’
He looked up at Bennett. ‘Of course I do. How can I think anything else?’
49
When Rosie looked again, the cannula was already pricked into the vein on the back of her hand, secure with a dressing, and the nurse was walking away.
She watched the drip drip drip of the vincristine drug in its solution inside the transparent bag, hanging from its stand, and tried not to think about how bad the side effects of the chemotherapy might be. Whatever worries she had didn’t come close to matching the fears that constantly bubbled up inside her about her tumour and what the cancer might do to her.
She had googled survival rates for low-grade gliomas like hers constantly, after her diagnosis, trying to decipher her future from the numbers and graphs. When she had started reading about the experiences of other patients like her, everybody had seemed to have their own story to tell. It had all seemed so random to Rosie that she eventually gave up using them to search for clues to the truth about how her own story was going to turn out. Despite being told by doctors that having chemotherapy before surgery might be very effective in her particular circumstances it was hard not to daydream about the worst of it now that she was here finally embarking on her treatment.
Seeing Daniel’s father made all her fears seem more real too. The man had seemed so empty inside, like something hollowed out. It reminded her of the eggs she and her mum used to paint at Easter when she was younger, the shells pricked through with pins so the yolks and the whites could be blown out into a Pyrex bowl and kept for cooking. Rosie wished she had been able to do more to help him, and to help Daniel too. But she hadn’t seemed close to being able to make anything happen, not even right up to the moment she had felt the sting of Bennett’s slap and her eyes had snapped open.
Her hands balled into white-hot fists the more she thought about it, refusing to believe that she and Daniel had made the best fit they could. It felt like everything was up to her to try harder because Daniel was only the battery who increased her power.
She began to watch the two other teenagers in the room who were also receiving their chemotherapy, both of them lying on beds and wearing headphones, plugged into screens. Rosie knew a little bit about the girl because they had met on the ward before. Her name was Sophie. She was a year older and had been diagnosed with a medulloblastoma. Rosie focused on her first, trying to use her talents to find out something personal about the girl, about what her life was like outside the ward.
But the drip drip drip of the vincristine in the bag hanging above her seemed to get in the way of Rosie’s thinking. She found it impossible to get a hold on Sophie and find out anything. She kept trying, but her brain felt useless and heavy. She could have been holding hot coals in her hands as she clenched her fists to try harder. The coil of tubing on the pillow beside her moved when she did and kept breaking her concentration.
Frustrated, she turned her attention to the patient sitting on the other side of her, a boy called Mike who was the same age as her. He had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia and his bare scalp shone in the daylight like a wet rock. But when she tried to look inside him nothing happened, as if a valve had been switched off inside her to stop her using her gift. The harder she tried, the more the drip drip drip of the drug in the bag above her seemed to grow louder until it was all she could hear, like something was dripping inside her.
When Rosie gave up trying, she decided the efforts with Daniel’s father must have tired her out. Maybe she needed to recharge somehow. So she sat back and wished the drugs into her system and deep into the tumour that had grown mysteriously and silently in her brain.
The infusion only took ten minutes after which the cannula was removed. Rosie was given two different coloured tablets – one blue and one ivory. She was asked to repeat the strict instructions about when to take the tablets in the upcoming days because the nurse wanted to make sure she understood.
‘How will I feel?’ asked Rosie. ‘How long will any side effects last?’
‘Do you feel ill now?’ asked the nurse, concerned.
‘No . . . but . . .’ She paused and wondered what to say. ‘No, I’m OK,’ she said and bit the inside of her cheek as her mother pushed open the doors and came back through into the unit, ready to whisk her home.
50
Daniel and Bennett decided to wait and see if Rosie came back. But the longer they sat there talking, trying to involve Daniel’s father in their conversation, the more certain they became that she wouldn’t.
Bennett suggested they watch YouTube clips from Daniel’s father’s favourite films on his phone, saying he had been reading up on coma patients and what might help. So they played scenes from classic movies like Jaws and Star Wars that Daniel’s dad was always quoting lines from and they joined in loudly when the most famous lines came up. They went through clips from Alien and Blade Runner and comedies like Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop and The Breakfast Club.
They tried playing songs that Daniel knew his father liked, singing along to rock tunes and dancing to house music and banging their heads to grunge.
Eventually, the battery on the phone was too low to play any more and Bennett said he had to go and he told Daniel that he should go home too.
‘I can’t,’ Daniel replied. ‘My feet feel like they’re stuck to the floor.’
‘Why don’t you think of one memory then?’ suggested Bennett. ‘A really special one your dad might like to hear. Then you’ll know that you’ve tried your best for today.’
Daniel rubbed his head as if trying to summon a personal genie to tell him the very best memory he had. ‘We went fishing once,’ he said eventually. ‘Fly-fishing. It feels stupid now, talking about it.’ He shrugged like it was a bad idea. ‘Maybe—’
‘Go on,’ said Bennett.
‘But nothing really happened.’
‘Tell me what it was like. I want to hear.’
&
nbsp; So Daniel told him everything he could remember about it. How it had been an early August morning last summer when they had been staying in a holiday cottage in Devon. His father had found two fly rods in the attic and had knocked on Daniel’s bedroom door as the world was breaking open for the day.
‘They were two-piece canes as light as bones,’ said Daniel. ‘Each one had a cork handle, and they were so dainty you could balance them on a finger. There was a river a mile from where we were staying. After we walked there, we found a spot clear of trees and started to cast. I’d never tried fishing before.’
He described to Bennett how the cane rods whipped and the wet lines hissed as they peeled up off the water, unfurling behind them, then hurtling forward with a flick of the wrist to land soft on the face of the river.
‘We aimed the flies for spots that looked likely. Dark holes in the water or pools or beneath an overhanging branch. The first tug of a trout I felt, I struck too hard and yanked the fly out of the water in a coil of line. Three times I missed a fish. And after the third time, as I was pulling back to cast again, I saw a tiny fish hooked to the end, a parr Dad called it. It was so small I hadn’t felt it. I was so shocked I lost control and shanked the line and it caught in a branch, leaving the tiny fish hanging like a Christmas decoration, flipping and sparkling, gasping in the air. We cut it down and I slid it off my hand back into the water, watching it swim safely back into the deep.’
He told Bennett how they spent three hours fishing in the sharp morning light with the blue sky hardening above them and the air starting to bake as the sun burned off the mist. And they barely spoke. Somehow, the silence made them one with each other and at one with everything around them. It was a memory to cherish.
‘I remember it all, Dad,’ said Daniel. ‘It’ll stay with me forever.’
All Sorts of Possible Page 13