by Sara Barnard
In the confusion, Hugo drops his phone and Sasha drops the package for A. Sharman, watching in horror as it ends up under the grubby rubber wheels of the trolley. She goes to reach for it, but Joe is in the way as he lunges forward to grab the man’s arm. He’s too heavy though, bringing Joe down with him as he folds to the floor with a final, desperate gasp.
Then everything is quiet as they each look down at the man, Joe tangled up on top of him, his legs splayed and his arse in the air. Velvet can see the label on the sole of Joe’s shoes, can see how he tried to peel it off and couldn’t, leaving a scrap of white on the black rubber. Later, she’ll wonder why she noticed that and not the man passed out on the floor of the lift . . . but right now, all she can see is that sticker and the outline of Joe’s phone in the back pocket of his trousers. The others see the man. He’s on his side, his limbs jutting out at odd angles like a marionette that’s had its strings cut. That’s exactly what it was like, Dawson thinks: one moment the man was standing in the middle of them, holding the trolley; then he was crumpling to the floor, like someone had cut his strings. It’s not like it is on television, he thinks: there was no cry; no melodramatic swooning; no out-of-shot mattress to land on. He just fell.
Hugo shouldn’t be this rattled, he knows. After all, he sees girls faint all the time (eating disorders and too much champagne aren’t the best bedfellows, are they?), but he’s never seen a man faint before. Pass out, yes. Plenty of times, in fact – usually in the back of a cab or on one of the sofas at JuJu. But it’s usually funny – an excuse to take photos or draw a dick on their cheek.
This isn’t funny.
There’s a flurry of gasped ‘Is he OK?’s as they each step forward. Except Hugo, who stays where he is, watching as Dawson helps Joe up and picks up the cardboard boxes and puts them back on the trolley to make room. Sasha’s first instinct is to dial 999, but when she checks her phone and remembers that she has no signal, her heart begins beating so hard she has to press her lips together, sure that it’s about to come up through her throat.
Kaitlyn is the first to speak. ‘Everyone get out of the way.’ Her voice sounds far steadier than she feels. ‘Give him some room.’ No one moves though, so she’s forced to push Dawson out of the way. ‘Press the alarm.’ She gestures at Velvet, who just blinks at her.
Sasha reaches forward and presses the button, and as soon as she does, there’s a violent screech and she has to reach for the handrail as the lights stutter on and off and the lift shudders to a halt.
‘What the fuck?’ Hugo grunts, echoing what the rest of them are thinking. ‘Why has it stopped?’
‘Are we on the ninth floor?’ Dawson looks at the doors, waiting for them to open.
When they don’t, Hugo straightens and turns to Sasha. ‘What did you press?’
Sasha looks at the console, then at Hugo, her heart in her throat. ‘The alarm!’
‘Why isn’t it ringing then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Let me see,’ Hugo says, striding over to where she’s standing and shouldering her out of the way. He presses the alarm and, sure enough, they hear it ringing out in the lift shaft.
He presses it again to prove a point.
‘I pressed the alarm,’ Sasha insists, looking between Hugo and the other five faces suddenly staring at her. ‘I did. I pressed the alarm.’
Dawson licks his lips then points at the control panel. ‘You pressed the STOP button.’
‘No.’ Sasha turns to look at it and, yep, there it is: the STOP button right above the alarm.
‘You pressed the fucking STOP button!’ Hugo roars, taking a step towards her.
Sasha takes one back. ‘No.’
‘You fucking idiot!’
‘I didn’t. I pressed the alarm!’ Sasha roars back, the back of her neck burning.
‘Stop it!’ Joe says. ‘Just press it again, and let’s get going.’
Sasha looks confused. ‘The alarm?’
‘No!’ Hugo spits. ‘The STOP button, you idiot!’
‘Stop calling me an idiot!’
‘Well, you are an idiot!’
‘For fuck’s sake, you two!’ Velvet stands up, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. ‘This bloke needs help, and you’re bickering over who pressed what. Just press the STOP button again so we can get moving!’
Sasha obliges, but nothing happens.
‘Do it again,’ Hugo tells her.
She does, but the same thing happens.
Nothing.
‘It’s not moving,’ Joe says, looking between them. ‘Why isn’t it moving?’ Then he looks down at the man in the heap on the floor and all the colour flees from his face. ‘Does anyone know first aid?’ he asks quietly, but Kaitlyn is already on her knees beside him, carefully rolling the man over so that he’s on his back.
‘I did a course at the summer camp I was at last year,’ she explains, gesturing at Dawson to help her with his legs. He does, straightening them out so the man is laid out in the middle of the lift, his feet pointing towards the doors.
Sasha frowns, her fingers curling tightly around her phone. ‘Is he OK?’
‘Obviously not.’ Hugo sighs wearily, reaching down for his and assessing it for damage.
Sasha crosses her arms and tilts her head at him. ‘How is that helping?’
‘How is asking inane questions helping?’
‘At least I’m trying. What are you doing?’
Hugo holds up his phone. ‘I’m calling for help.’
‘What? On your magic phone that has reception in this lift when no one else’s does?’
Hugo’s smirk slips as he realizes she’s right, but before he can counter, Velvet stands between them.
‘Just shut up, will you?’
Yes, shut up, Kaitlyn almost says. She can’t think with them talking, her thoughts jumping back and forth, like a bird hopping between the branches of a tree. The truth is, she didn’t do a first-aid course at summer camp last year; she wrote a fic about Jem and Ace from Dedman High doing a first-aid course at summer camp last year, but in her panic, she can’t remember a flaming thing.
Think, Kaitlyn.
‘Dr ABC,’ Velvet says, pointing at her. ‘We had some bloke from the St John’s Ambulance come into school a few years back. Dr ABC. I remember it because Mark Barton kept calling me Dr ASS.’
Hugo sniggers, but they ignore him.
Something in Kaitlyn’s brain becomes unstuck. ‘Danger. Response. Airway. Breathing. Circulation,’ she recites, suddenly a little calmer.
Velvet nods, kneeling down opposite her, the man on his back between them. ‘There’s no danger. It’s not like we’re on a main road or something and about to be hit by a bus.’
Kaitlyn nods this time. ‘Response.’ She takes a deep breath and looks down at the man. ‘Hello. My name is Kaitlyn,’ she says as loudly and as clearly as her nerves allow. ‘Are you OK? Can you hear me?’
Nothing.
‘If you can hear me, open your eyes.’
Still nothing.
So she reaches for his hand. It’s as clammy as soap. ‘If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.’
Nothing.
She looks up at Velvet. ‘What’s his name?’
There’s an ID card hanging from a yellow lanyard around his neck. She turns it over. ‘Steven.’
‘Steven.’ Kaitlyn tries again, shaking his shoulders this time. ‘Steven, can you hear me?’
Nothing.
She shakes him a little harder this time. ‘Steven, can you hear me?’
Nothing.
Kaitlyn can feel the panic bubbling up inside her and tries to swallow it back. It feels like that time Danny Taylor shook up a can of Coke in the playground and opened it. She was nowhere near him, but she still jumped back as the plume of foam arced out of the red can, much to Danny’s delight. That’s what the panic feels like right now, like if she opened her mouth it would all rush out of her.
So she closes her eyes and ta
kes another deep breath.
When she opens them again, Velvet is pinching the man’s earlobes.
‘Why are you rubbing his ears?’ Hugo asks before Kaitlyn can.
‘I’m checking if he’s responsive to pain,’ Velvet hisses.
‘Is he?’
Velvet looks up at him, her gaze narrowing. ‘Does it look like it?’
Now who’s asking inane questions? Sasha thinks, arching an eyebrow.
‘Airway . . .’ Velvet prompts.
Kaitlyn nods and reaches over, pressing her palm to the man’s forehead. It’s as clammy as his hand. That can’t be good, she thinks, putting two fingers under his chin and tilting his head back the way the woman did on that YouTube video she watched when she was researching her summer camp fic. She leans down and waits, trying to hear if he’s breathing, but she can’t hear a thing.
‘Everyone be quiet,’ Velvet snaps when she sees that Kaitlyn is struggling.
But no one is making a sound, the four of them huddled around her and Kaitlyn in stunned silence, the man in the middle of them.
‘Anything?’ Velvet asks.
Kaitlyn shakes her head.
This prompts a flurry of mutters and gasps that make Kaitlyn feel light-headed.
‘It’s too late,’ she says, taking her fingers away from the man’s throat.
Velvet stares at her. ‘What?’
‘He doesn’t have a pulse. He’s dead.’
‘He can’t be.’ Velvet kneels down next to him again. ‘Let me try.’
She presses two fingers to his throat and waits, but there’s nothing.
‘Try his wrist,’Joe says, then resumes chewing his bottom lip.
She does, but she can’t feel anything.
‘Maybe we need to do mouth-to-mouth?’ Dawson suggests, but Velvet hushes him, her palm splayed on the man’s chest and her ear near to his mouth as she checks again to see if she can hear anything.
She obviously can’t, and Dawson fidgets with panic. It reminds him of a scene he did for Dedman High when the girl he was in love with was in a car crash and he had to bite her, thus saving her life and ending it all at once. At least that’s how he saw it, committing her to an eternity of drinking blood and avoiding sunlight. But the viewers loved it, and the scene won him a Teen Choice Award.
‘Do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth?’ he asks Velvet when she sits up again. She shakes her head, and he turns to Kaitlyn. ‘Do you?’
Kaitlyn shakes her head as well. ‘He’s gone.’
‘We have to try.’ He looks around the lift. ‘Does anyone know how to do mouth-to-mouth?’
‘He’s gone.’ Kaitlyn says it more firmly this time.
‘Gone where?’
‘To Magaluf,’ Hugo spits. ‘Where the fuck do you think he’s gone? He’s dead!’
‘But he was just here.’ Dawson looks down at the man’s body. ‘He was just here.’
They look at one another, all except Hugo, who is staring at Velvet’s hand on the man’s chest, waiting for it to move. But it doesn’t.
And then there were six.
TWO WEEKS LATER
DAWSON
I’m really getting into the swing of my latest, and most challenging, role: Alicia Sharman’s Disappointing Son. So far, the cast is just me and Mum – although our first guest star is about to make his debut as the doorman bringing my dinner up to the flat, because I’m not going into the kitchen to make anything while she’s in there. Not that there’s anything to make; I’ve eaten everything that we had in while she was at work, and she hasn’t bought anything new. I wish I’d ordered before she got home.
I’m watching the pizza tracker on my laptop like a hawk, planning to be in and out of my room before she’s even realized what’s happened, when she knocks on my bedroom door.
‘Dawson? I’m not going to invade your private space, but enough is enough. We are going to have this conversation.’
The tracker stays resolutely on Quality Control.
‘Dawson, you don’t get to be the angry one here. You walked out of school without telling anyone. Again.’
I open a new tab and check my emails. I’m waiting to hear back on two parts I asked Kimba, my agent, to put me forward for. There are twelve new messages, but none I want to read.
‘Dawson.’
The doorbell rings, and I check the tracking window. Out For Delivery . . . Shit. Seriously?
It is. Of course it is. I hear the front door open, rumbling voices, then the click of it closing.
‘Dawson,’ Mum calls. ‘I’ve got your food. Nice try. It’ll be in the kitchen. With me. And the conversation we’re having, whether you like it or not.’
We’ll see. I open a new tab. But before I start to type, the screen whites out with a message saying there’s no connection. She didn’t . . .
‘Did you turn the Wi-Fi off?’ I shout.
When she doesn’t reply, I charge out of my room, down the hall and into the kitchen. She’s sitting at the breakfast bar, and my pizza box is open. I watch as she lifts a slice and starts picking the pineapple off. ‘Hey!’
She drops a final chunk on to the neat pineapple mountain she’s made. Then she looks at me, green eyes meeting mine. It’s where I get them from. Green eyes from her, brown skin from my dad. She says I get my love of pineapple on pizza from him too.
‘I’m not going back to that school.’
Mum says nothing, pushing the box towards me.
I’m too hungry to refuse.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks when she’s finished her slice.
I shrug, chewing slowly. No, I’m not all right. I haven’t been online in four days because I’m sick of photos being sent to me, of me looking gormlessly at a body just out of shot. I’m sick of the ‘If only you were a real vampire’ jokes that everyone seems to think are so original. I’m sick of my phone ringing with numbers I don’t recognize, but I know belong to journalists wanting quotes.
‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ Mum says, taking another slice. ‘He had a chronic condition.’
‘Did you know him?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it was in the papers. I don’t think I ever met him face to face. He usually left any post for me with Hanifah.’
That reminds me, I’ve still got the package for her that I took from that girl . . . but right now I’m more interested in what the reports say.
‘Do we have any papers?’
Stupid question. She reads them all. She gestures to a pile, and I bring them back to sit opposite her, leafing through each one until I find the story. I lay them across the table. They’re a study in contrasts: all the broadsheets feature Hugo Delaney, and all the tabloids have me. I ditch the tabloids and pull one of the others closer, folding it so I don’t have to look at Hugo while I read: Steven Jeffords, 53 – shit, that’s pretty young for your heart to give out. Ten years older than mum – Chronic undiagnosed condition.
‘Will you go to the funeral?’ I ask.
‘No. But we’re sending flowers from the whole floor.’ She wipes her fingers delicately on a tea towel, and I take another slice. ‘I have bigger fish to fry. Like what we’re going to do with you.’
The pizza turns to sludge in my mouth.
KAITLYN
Are any of the others still thinking about it? They probably aren’t. But how could they not?
Two weeks on, and it’s still all I can think about. It’s not fair. I didn’t even want to be there. Not in that building, not on that stupid work experience, and definitely not in that horrible stuffy lift with all those other useless-in-the-face-of-death strangers who just let me try the whole CPR thing, even though I clearly didn’t know what I was doing. ‘I took a course at summer camp.’ Why did I say that?! And now he’s dead, and his face keeps swimming around in my mind, both alive and dead, like some gruesome Before-and-After montage. One day, when my sight has got so bad I can’t see faces in front of me any more, I’ll probably still see his. All dea
d and clammy. And dead.
The thing is, no one else seems to think it’s a big deal. My mother said, ‘Not the kind of thing you’d expect from the UKB,’ like they’d bloody done it on purpose or something. Like prestige is some kind of force field keeping out ugly things like death. And Hannah, my sister, just wanted to know what Dawson Sharman is like in real life.
‘Ugly,’ I said, which was mean, and I felt bad straight away, but still I didn’t take it back.
‘No offence, but I don’t trust your opinion on what people look like,’ Hannah said, and then cackled like she’d said something funny, so I threw the nearest thing to hand at her face: my phone. But I missed, and so now my phone screen is cracked, and if that doesn’t sum up the current state of my stupid little life, I don’t know what does.
But at least I still have my stupid little life.
Look, I know it’s the biggest, most patronizing cliché in the world to be all ‘At least you’re alive!’ when you’ve got a disability (or, in my case, one on the way), and I really don’t want to be the person who goes, ‘I’m seeing things differently now I’ve seen death!’ but . . . well, I think I kind of am. Steven Jeffords is dead. I’m not. That’s a thing, and I can’t just ignore it.
All of this is why, right now, I’m on a train heading towards a little cemetery near Salford: to say goodbye to a man I never even said hello to. I think it might help. I don’t know how, exactly, but everyone says you need closure to move on, right? And what’s more ‘closure’ than a funeral? (Death. No, shut up, Kaitlyn.)
I wanted to buy some white lilies to bring, but they were too expensive, so I got the biggest bunch of flowers I could afford instead. I don’t even know what they are, but the colours are nice, all pinks and yellows, and I’ve decided that that’s what matters.
The train slows, and I stand, clutching the stems in my hand as I make my awkward way towards the doors. I know it’s a bit weird, going to a stranger’s funeral with the wrong flowers and wearing a black dress that’s a bit too small because it’s actually your sister’s, but I tell myself it’ll be fine. I’ll sit at the back, pay my respects, get my closure, and leave. Tonight, this will all be behind me.