Try Not to Breathe: A Novel

by Holly Seddon

  “All right.”

  He’d opened the passenger door for her, and she’d melted into the seat.

  He hadn’t laid a finger on her that day and she’d not stopped wishing he had.

  Alex Dale woke up with dead legs and a clammy forehead. She didn’t remember throwing her duvet off the bed but it was discarded between the mattress and the wall.

  She was lying on the side nearest the door. Matt’s side.

  In the abandoned space next to her was a dark, wet oval, sharp to the nose. She was wearing her pajama top, not her bottoms, which lay farther down the sheet in a wrinkled dank pile. She had absolutely no recollection of putting them on, or taking them off.

  Alex didn’t feel ashamed anymore, it was too commonplace to keep reacting. As long as she was correctly “managing” herself, no one would be in her bed, so there were no reflections of disgrace to worry about.

  The morning routine of stripping the bed, binning the DryNites pad, bundling everything into the washing machine, double-dosing the fabric conditioner, padding naked back up to the bathroom to flannel wash her legs…it was normal now. Autopilot.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she pulled her running things over still-damp skin, grabbed her water bottle, tucked her key into her bra and ran out the door.

  Putting one leg in front of the other, then the other leg in front of that. If she could do it once then she could do it for half an hour.

  As the morning grew in front of her, she jogged slowly and steadily along the narrow pavements of her quiet corner of Tunbridge Wells. Little dogs skittered out of her way and she jumped into the road to avoid pushchairs dangling with changing bags and other weaponry.

  She’d done 5Ks, 10Ks, even half-marathons. Never a full marathon though. Those deserved respect. Sobriety. On jogs and races she ran slowly and steadily, competing against no one but the desire to stop. Her name was listed on hundreds of race results. Alexandra Dale, unaffiliated senior woman.

  —

  Back home and showered, Alex made poached eggs on toast for breakfast. Lunch would be liquid, and dinner would be light. Sometimes, dinner was whatever she could tear with her hands and shove into her mouth, swaying in the kitchen.

  —

  At 10:20 a.m., Alex pulled her Polo into the Tunbridge Wells Royal Infirmary car park and found a space in the farthest corner, under the shadow of an old oak tree. Still seated, she dug around in her bag, enjoying the smell of rich leather that rushed to greet her.

  She controlled her condition fairly successfully now but the divorce two years ago had thrown her from the wagon and straight onto the center of the tracks, where she stayed for three or four weeks.

  Several spending sprees had ripped through the last of her savings before she finally grabbed the reins back, although the Chloe Paddington handbag was one drunken Harrods purchase she didn’t regret so much, it was beautiful.

  Alex blanched as she flicked the driver’s mirror down to reflect her gray face. She rubbed a palm’s worth of moisturizer into her sallow skin and painted on a complexion. She added a rosy blusher glow along her sharp cheekbones and used a pink and brown eye shadow palette to fool the mirror that she had warm, sparkly eyes rather than black holes.

  Lip gloss, powder and paint, she was ready to do her job.

  —

  “Alex, thank you so much for your patience, I’m sorry we’ve had to break arrangements the last couple of times.”

  More like five times, thought Alex, as she smiled warmly and shook Dr. Haynes’s hand.

  His hands were perfect doctor’s hands: cool and soft.

  “No problem, I know you’re very busy.”

  Dr. Haynes, the leading expert on vegetative states, closed the door softly, and gestured to a battered leather chair in front of his paper-strewn desk.

  Alex sat down, jumping as a rush of air trumpeted its way out of a hole in the upholstery.

  Dr. Haynes’s office was the professional equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom. On a sagging office chair in the corner lay a pile of abandoned, crumpled clothes. A CD player perched precariously on a shelf, its drive drawer open like a yapping mouth. Various certificates and awards were dotted around the walls, the crooked frames taking the edge off any gloating.

  On the dark wooden desk sat a dusty laptop with a tangled cable and a photo frame with its back to Alex. Piles upon piles of paper teetered like jerry-built skyscrapers.

  Aware that she had been staring while Dr. Haynes sat waiting, Alex hurtled into her prepared spiel.

  “Dr. Haynes—”

  “Call me Peter.”

  She smiled. “Peter, the hospital was kind enough to send your biography over and, of course, I’ve read up about your work. But I’d love to know what drives you to explore this area of medicine?”

  Peter Haynes exhaled and leaned back in his own battered leather chair. He looked Alex in the eyes, breathing deeply before raising both his elbows and cupping the back of his own head.

  Alex knew that the doctor was forty-one, but he looked older. He had deep rivulets under his bloodshot eyes and his eyelids were a translucent dove gray. His sort-of-curly, sort-of-straight hair resembled a guinea pig sitting on his head, digging its paws into his face.

  “The thing is, Alex, I don’t really think about my work as an area of medicine to be explored. I think it’s more about exploring people. It’s important because people are important and you don’t become a doctor if you don’t value human life.”

  Alex nodded and gestured for him to carry on.

  “The stuff I’m doing now fascinates me because it challenges our understanding of the line between consciousness and death.”

  When he spoke, the twitching and awkward grimaces that had punctuated his small talk disappeared. Peter Haynes lowered his hands again and flexed his fingers on the scratched desk.

  Alex wondered if this was a rehearsed monologue. She didn’t care if it was, so long as she got the quotes she needed and could push on to asking about Amy Stevenson.

  “When it comes to our understanding of the mind, we’re doing a poor job. I don’t mean psychology, I mean the nuts and bolts biology of the brain and how that governs behavior, thought and communication. There’s so much we don’t know but as soon as someone loses the ability to communicate in the ways that we’re prepared to accept, they’re lost to us.”

  The fire in Peter’s eyes cooled, he slumped back in his chair and seemed to look through Alex to the door.

  “Is it true that about forty percent of diagnoses of vegetative states are incorrect?” Alex asked, hoping to show that she had done her research.

  “Oh numbers, you journalists are obsessed with headline numbers.” He waved his hand dismissively through the air. “We don’t know. But we do know that a large chunk of people who used to be called ‘vegetables’ actually have functioning minds. Maybe a fifth, maybe more, for every scientist you find that thinks it’s a fifth, you’ll find another who dismisses the whole damn idea.”

  “I’d love to understand how you actually recognize communication. You say they can communicate but not in the way we’re accustomed to, so what does their communication look like?”

  “Well, they have the capacity to think and to want to project those thoughts. It’s a little like a computer intranet, do you know what I mean by ‘an intranet’?”

  “Yes,” Alex said, hoping the explanation only involved a very basic understanding.

  “Okay, so within an intranet you have information moving around and you can interact with that data—or memories, thoughts—but you can’t share that data outside of the intranet, it’s a closed loop, if you will.”

  “Got it,” Alex said.

  The doctor paused. “Have you? Yes, well, these patients have data in there, they have memories, and they have a network of thoughts whizzing around, they just can’t share them outside of that closed loop. So it’s down to us, if you’ll pardon the stretched analogy, to hack into that network and see it w
orking for ourselves.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “Brain scans, MRIs mainly. We take a look at the patients’ brains at rest and we capture which parts of the brain are lighting up. Very few of them, generally. So then we start to ask things of the brain. We ask it to imagine and to remember. We ask simple things that will be easy for even a mildly functioning brain with some everyday memories to work from. Sometimes, especially in the younger patients who were active more recently, we’ll ask them to imagine playing a sport, such as tennis.”

  “And can all the patients do this?”

  “No, and it’s really sad when you see that all the lights are out. But on the other hand, you can’t imagine the sheer joy of seeing a supposedly vegetative brain light up and show imagination, memory and willingness to take part. And you see, Alex, that’s what I’m in this for.”

  “So can you tap into any of their original ideas and memories or just watch them reacting to stimuli?”

  “Well, here is the really exciting stuff, especially for the patients’ families. Once we establish a number of different parts of the brain and how to generate a response in those, we can start to ask questions and tell them to imagine playing tennis for ‘yes,’ or lying in warm water for ‘no.’ Essentially, they can have a conversation with us, albeit a simple one.”

  “That’s incredible. So can all the patients that show this cognitive function communicate like this?”

  “Sadly not; in fact, very few can, but the more we understand about the process, the more we can help the others.”

  Alex bit her lip and the tingle of blood helped to focus her mind. “Peter, I’d like to ask about a specific patient of yours. When I was last in the ward, I noticed that you were treating Amy Stevenson.”

  She glanced at his face for signs of a reaction, but he remained impassive.

  “I’m the same age as Amy,” Alex continued, “and I grew up here, so I remember her abduction really vividly. I feel bad admitting it but I had forgotten all about her.”

  “That’s perfectly normal,” the doctor said abruptly, “all life can possibly do is move on around these patients.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose…But when I left here the other day, I couldn’t stop thinking about Amy and her situation. I’d really like to write a follow-up piece on her case and I’d love to ask you or your staff some questions about her story.”

  Alex held her breath.

  “That wouldn’t be a problem in theory.” He paused, looking briefly at the door. “There are lots of limitations on what my staff could tell you about Amy, though; she’s protected by confidentiality like any other patient.”

  “I’m not interested in muckraking or upsetting her family. In fact, if you’ve got contact details for her parents, I’d really like to talk with them too.”

  Dr. Haynes fixed his eyes on Alex. Tilting his head slightly quizzically, he said: “Amy doesn’t have any family.”

  Alex sat back in her chair. She had hoped the hospital staff would act as a go-between and give her a leg up with the relatives.

  “I remember her mother on the news though. What happened to her?”

  Peter stood up suddenly so that the wheels of his chair squawked sharply.

  “Her mother died some years ago, not long after Amy was attacked. Maybe a year…”

  “Oh…Oh I’m sorry,” Alex said, offering condolences to no one. “What about the stepfather?”

  “I have no idea. But if you’d been accused of trying to kill your stepdaughter, would you stick around?”

  The doctor was blunt, but he was absolutely right, precious few families could survive having a child torn from them, much less like that.

  “Would you be able to pass my details to her next of kin?” Alex asked, reaching into her bag for a business card.

  “Amy doesn’t really have a next of kin. She’s the responsibility of the hospital trust and, ultimately, the local authority.”

  The more Alex learned, the more crushed she felt. Amy had been a normal, healthy teenage girl, walking back from school to her family home.

  “God, this is just so sad,” Alex blurted. “I suppose you become desensitized to these sorts of details in your job?”

  Peter Haynes was edging closer to his door, work clearly on his mind, but he seemed affronted. “I don’t think you become desensitized. I haven’t anyway. There are weeks I want to lock myself in my office and not face them.

  “You keep things in boxes though. You have to or you couldn’t do your job properly. I suspect being a reporter is much the same, psychologically speaking…”

  Alex wanted to make it clear that she really wasn’t a reporter, but thought better of it.

  “What I can tell you about Amy,” continued Dr. Haynes, “is that she breathes by herself, she has awake time and she sleeps, she is off the feeding tube and we’ve registered a degree of brain activity that shows she is not ‘brain dead’ as the papers used to love calling her.”

  Alex scribbled on her notepad. “So has she done the yes-and-no tennis experiments?”

  Peter Haynes frowned a little. “We’ve tried. We registered an ability to imagine, but the brain responses were somewhat haywire, and she became extremely distressed. You certainly couldn’t interview her via an MRI scan, if that’s what you were getting at. Not in her current condition.”

  “No, I hadn’t even thought of that at all. I mean, it would be amazing if it could happen but I understand if it can’t.”

  “It can’t,” he said emphatically. “Now, we have visitors who come and sit with the patients and talk to them and that seems to have a slight effect on Amy, but having gone through such a high level of trauma, we haven’t run many more tests on her. We’re still taking things slowly, as she’s prone to shock. No next of kin slows things down too.”

  Something buzzed sharply on the doctor’s belt.

  “Sorry, Alex, but I’m wanted in another part of the hospital.”

  “I really appreciate you giving me your time. I’ll let you know when the article is published.”

  As Alex shook Peter’s perfectly dry, smooth hand again, she wondered if he ever read his own press, if he would read her piece on Amy Stevenson. If she managed to get it published. If she managed to get it written.

  The doctor had bolted in the opposite direction and Alex headed to Amy’s ward before she could talk herself out of it.

  The doctor’s office lay at the heart of a coil of corridors, which eventually opened out into a main walkway. The shiny floors squeaked under every footstep, and the smell of chemical hand cleanser prickled Alex’s nose. She couldn’t begin to calculate how many ill people there were right now, all coughing and complaining into this same block of warm air.

  As she came to the thick double doors of Bramble Ward, Alex dropped a big glop of disinfectant hand gel so it sat like ketchup in her palm. She rubbed it slowly and carefully into her skin.

  She pushed the doors open, passed the empty reception desk and tiptoed quietly up to the open office door. Giving a gentle knock, she waited for the nurses to finish their conversation. Inside, the radio was burbling with mid-morning local news updates. A breezy voice announced the arrest of a wanted rapist, the results of a successful school fundraising event and the timescale for extended roadworks on the A21.

  After a minute or so, she knocked again. Eventually one of the nurses came out as Alex had made a fist to knock one last time.

  “Oh sorry, you should have knocked,” said the nurse, despite looking straight at Alex’s unfurling fist.

  Alex tried to peer into the office to see if the ward manager she’d met last time was in there, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Alex Dale, I’m a journalist. I visited before because I’m writing about Dr. Haynes’s work.”

  “I’m Gillian Radson, and I wasn’t aware there’d be journalists on my ward today,” replied the nurse, pursing her lips.

  “I’ve just been in
terviewing Dr. Haynes and he’s agreed that I can write a piece on one of your patients, Amy Stevenson.”

  “I’ll have to check that with him,” replied the nurse.

  “Sure,” said Alex, “but while I’m here I wondered if I could sit with Amy?”

  “She has someone with her at the moment.”

  Alex tried to see into the corner cubicle, but there were pillars in all the wrong places. “I didn’t think she had any relatives?”

  Nurse Radson crossed her cardigan over her chest, folding her thick, flat arms. “He’s not a relative. He’s one of our sitters.”

  She sighed at Alex’s blank expression. “Volunteers. They come and spend time with the patients.”

  “Oh, okay. Maybe I could speak with him?” Alex suggested, opening her bloodshot eyes as widely and innocently as she could manage.

  Alex sensed the answer was no, and that if the nurse could speak freely, the answer would be more like “fuck off.”

  “Wait there,” she sighed. “I’ll go and ask.”

  Nurse Radson, with her apple tummy upholstering the tight, sexless striped blue uniform, marched off toward Amy’s cubicle. Inches at a time, Alex shuffled along so that she could see Amy’s curtains clearly, noticing the man’s foot tapping under the gap.

  The nurse pulled the curtain back sharply and Alex could see that a tall, sandy-haired guy was sitting on the bed, holding Amy’s hand. He was wearing a blue hoodie with a hospital-issued visitor’s badge dangling from his neck. As the sitter dropped Amy’s hand, Alex could see the nurse stooping to talk in his ear. The man and the nurse both shot Alex a look at the same time. After a minute, the nurse came back over to where Alex was trying to look nonchalant.

  Perhaps weighing up whether to complain about Alex moving from her original spot, the nurse shook her head and said, “I’m sorry but he says the volunteering he does here is personal and he’d rather not talk to you.”

  “Can I have a quick word and explain that I can interview him anonymously?” Alex tried.

  “No, look…” The nurse took a deep breath, her irritation barely concealed. “I’m sorry, but that won’t be possible. He gives his time out of the goodness of his heart and he’s a nice man.” She rolled the words around her mouth slowly. “I’m not going to risk his goodwill by letting people bother him when he’s already said no.”