‘Sorry.’
‘I should think so, you’re making a scene.’
We looked around. People were turning away now, tittering into their noodles. I felt my blood hammering through every vessel in my body. I hadn’t heard that voice for many years but it couldn’t have come at a better time.
‘It’s a present for someone at work, a joke for a hen night,’ I squeaked.
‘We’re not discussing it, Sam.’ And Mum opened the heavy brown vinyl-bound menu decisively. ‘Now what are we going to eat?’
I stared at the menu unseeing, still reeling from the embarrassment of having the only dildo I’d ever purchased waved around in a restaurant in front of my mother. But also, as I turned the plastic pages, I was still hurting from the freezing stare Rebecca gave me when she heard I was going with Charlie to this stupid gig. That was completely unnecessary. Completely.
55
MARA
From: Mara Minkley
Date: Thursday, 12 March
To: Ed Minkley
Subject: re: Scotland
Ed,
So I’ve chatted with Sam and things feel better on that front. She’s being paid cash tomorrow so she promised me she’d hand over some wedge then. It’s not the money so much as the lack of awareness that hurts but catching up on her debts is a positive gesture. So, my twin, you can see I am trying to see this glass as half full!
I was so jealous, hearing you having such a good time up there. I would love to escape these grey, London streets for some bracing Scottish air. When I imagine inhaling some of it I can feel my head opening and relaxing all at once – and the roar of London being left completely behind. I hope that’s what it’s like for you. Think of me breathing in lovely fumes as I bike home as usual! By the way, I’ve booked my bike in to get my brakes sorted out tomorrow after work, so you can stop nagging me.
Speaking of work, I’d better get on with some. I’ve got lazy Lisa in here today and she’s barely removed her emery board from her fingers all day, the little sod.
Lots of love,
M x x
56
SAM
Vic and I were knocking back a coffee while the set was being re-dressed. So far that morning the shoot seemed to be ticking over well. Worryingly well. We stood side by side, having reviewed proceedings on the call sheet, and scanned the set for problems but there just weren’t any. Everything had been set up quickly; they were ticking off the shot list ahead of schedule. All going well they would be wrapping shortly after lunch.
‘So . . . how’s that hot photographer?’ Vic said.
‘Ed?’
‘Duh! Of course I mean him.’
‘Apparently he’s having a great time – he’s on that job in Scotland that Katherine’s doing, remember?’
‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that. Apparently? What does that mean? You don’t think he actually is?’
‘I’m sure he is. I just haven’t heard it from him directly, that’s all.’
Vic nudged me with her elbow.
‘Do I detect a note of jealousy in your voice? Huh? Huh?’
I frowned at her, annoyed that she was making me blush. She was grinning away like a schoolgirl at me.
‘Of course not!’
‘Sure, Sam!’
She started giggling in a very aggravating way. I was about to set her straight – not least of all fill her in with all the excitement of Charlie – when I felt my phone buzzing from inside my Puffa. I took it out. Vic had time to wind me up so I had time to check my phone. It was Claudia. Claudia? I was confused, couldn’t even think what time of the day it was for a moment, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a time Claudia normally phoned. What did she want?
‘Mind if I take this?’ I waved it at Vic.
Vic was rosy with laughing and waved her consent to me.
‘Claudia?’
‘Sam? It’s Mara. She’s had an accident.’
*
Claudia was waiting for me at the main reception, her face ashen, and I upped my walk to a fast trot to hug her.
‘She’s this way.’ Claudia took my arm and led me to the lifts.
‘Is she in A&E?’
‘No, ICU.’
‘ICU? That means it’s serious, right?’
‘Yes, it does, Sam. A lorry cut in front of her, and she couldn’t stop in time and went into the side of it.’
‘But she couldn’t have been going very fast – Mara never goes fast!’
‘Well, she was going fast enough to put herself into intensive care.’
The lift pinged at us, strangely cheery, when we reached our floor. Claudia led the way down a wide corridor, dodging dazed patients, visitors and brisk-stepping medics. Every step I took down that corridor became more surreal and the chill that had started in my heart when I got the phone call spread down every limb as I walked, until my whole body was fizzing with cold. I realised, as I walked through the decisive doors of ICU, that this must be what proper fear feels like.
Kate was sitting miserably on a plastic chair in the waiting room and I embraced her clumsily.
‘Don’t you bloody start!’ Kate reached out and wiped her hand down my cheek.
‘Sorry.’ I dragged my hand across my snotty nose and Claudia silently handed me a tissue.
‘Have you seen her yet?’
‘No. They’re doing stuff to her.’
I pushed aside the images my mind conjured of a bloodied Mara being subjected to urgent medical pokings and proddings.
‘How did you hear?’ I asked.
‘Dad called me – the police had called him.’
I looked around the waiting room, wondering if I’d missed him.
‘He’s at home, the miserable sod. Hates hospitals.’ Kate sighed. ‘But he’d just need looking after if he was here. I’d much rather have you guys.’
‘What about Ed, does he know yet?’
‘Yes, I managed to speak to him. He’s coming as soon as he can. Maybe even getting here tomorrow morning.’ She took her phone out of her pocket and looked at it absently. ‘There’s no signal in here so I’m not sure what he’s managed to do.’
We sat and flicked through magazines without really seeing them and took turns visiting the yellow café on the ground floor to drink tea and choke down dry sandwiches. Hours passed but we lost track of time, suspended in that ziplocked, humming, fluorescent building. All that mattered was seeing Mara. Nothing else, nothing else. By the time the beautiful, quietly competent Asian doctor came out to speak with us we were grey in the face from the suspense.
‘Which one of you is Kate?’
‘I am.’ Kate was suddenly alert, her brown eyes not leaving the doctor for a moment.
I shuffled down a couple of seats to give him the seat next to Kate.
‘Thank you for waiting,’ he began. ‘We believe she is stable now but we’re going to keep her sedated for the moment. The good news is her vital signs are all doing OK. They’re showing signs of being stressed but are within good levels. She has a broken collarbone but nothing else that we can see at the moment.’
‘At the moment?’ Kate’s forehead wrinkled with confusion.
‘Well, she may have other broken bones but we have been concentrating on more important issues – whether there is any internal bleeding and how severe her head injury is.’
Kate took a sharp intake of breath and her hand whipped up to her mouth.
The doctor’s eyes flickered slightly but he pressed on. ‘The good news is that she was wearing a helmet that was securely fitted so that would have taken a lot of the impact. We’ve done an MRI scan and that doesn’t show any bleeding, just swelling, and we would expect her to have some swelling, after all she’s had a bang on her head. Just like when you bang your finger, it’ll swell.’ The doctor mimed banging his finger with a hammer, with all of us following the arc of his hand mutely.
‘The important thing is that it doesn’t swell
any further. At the moment we have her sedated to rest her brain. The swelling appears to have reached its peak but we don’t want it to go any further. We may have to put her into an induced coma if it progresses but we are hopeful we won’t need to go down that route.’
Blah, blah, blah, coma was all I heard. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. It couldn’t be possible. Mara in a coma? Please God, no.
‘. . . and so you can come in and see her briefly, one at a time. We will call your father if anything serious happens overnight but hopefully we won’t be in touch and she may even be out of sedation as early as tomorrow.’ He stood up, patients to see, things to do.
‘Call me if you need to,’ Kate cut in, standing with the doctor and placing a small hand on his arm. ‘Don’t bother Dad, he won’t be able to handle it.’
The doctor looked unsure. ‘It is usual to keep in contact with a patient’s parent if they don’t have a partner.’
‘Can you see him here?’ Kate motioned to the waiting room. ‘He really isn’t that strong, Doctor. I’ll keep him informed but me, my brother and Mara’s friends are her main supporters.’
‘All right then.’ He looked doubtful but made a quick note on the chart he was carrying.
And he took Kate through the carefully controlled doors into the inner sanctum, the sound of life-support machines cheeping terrifyingly, before the heavy doors swished shut behind them.
When it was my turn, I stood next to Mara’s bed and held her hand. I was glad to feel it was warm. Machines beeped, monitors tracked her heart rate, plastic tubes ran into her arm, a ventilator covered her nose and mouth. It was like watching TV. But not. Mara wasn’t an actor, this was real life, and I was suddenly angry. This was a person, a really, really special person, lying here. And she shouldn’t be! At that moment I would have gone into battle with any demon to save Mara’s life, I felt so fiercely protective of it.
‘Don’t worry, Mars, we’ve got everything under control. You’re going to be fine,’ I whispered to her from where I stood, too afraid to get too close. Could I kiss her head? I wavered, unsure, but then a nurse bustled up and asked me to leave, and I returned to Claudia and Kate in the waiting room. They were jacketed and ready to go. It wasn’t until we reached the front doors and my phone began chiming with missed-call alerts that I remembered about the gig with Charlie.
57
SAM
I had to hurry to keep up with Ed as he strode into the hospital. I was shocked at how awful he’d looked that morning. He’d travelled overnight to get back to London the previous day and by the look of his glistening eyes set in dark, puffy shadows, he had barely slept at all in the past forty-eight hours.
‘You know, you could go and do something else for a while if you’d like to,’ I suggested, as we entered the hospital together. It wasn’t as if Mara was going to go anywhere. She was still out cold – and the doctors hadn’t given any more indication how long it would last.
‘I can’t leave her, Sam.’ We entered the lift and he sternly punched the button for ICU. ‘I don’t want to be anywhere else but here.’
His sharp tone stung and I tried to remind myself he was exhausted and stressed.
Mara was unavailable to visitors when we arrived so we sat down in the now familiar plastic chairs to wait. Ed stretched his long legs out, his bum right on the edge of the seat, his body becoming as close to horizontal as possible. He closed his eyes, quite clearly not wanting to chat. I wondered what they were doing with my friend that meant we couldn’t see her. Perhaps they were washing her, her body heavy and unresponsive, or maybe they were changing the bag of urine that sat there, so normal now, tucked down one side of the bed. It was so strange that forty-eight hours ago this would have been so strange, so alien, but now it was all so normal that Ed could stretch out and close his eyes.
‘How’s Charlie?’ Ed cut across my thoughts, catching me out.
‘Charlie?’
‘What, is there more than one?’
‘No.’ I felt myself blushing.
‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘How is the fine specimen of manhood?’
‘Oh, he’s fine, yep.’ I peered at him; he had his eyes open but remained stretched out at forty-five degrees.
‘And you guys? How are you guys going?’
‘Oh, good actually. We’ve been seeing a lot of each other lately. Before this happened, of course. He’s really concerned about Mara . . . now.’
‘Now?’ He sat up and stared at me.
‘Yes . . .’ I felt flustered, instantly regretting the use of the blunt clarification of the word now. ‘W-well,’ I stammered defensively, ‘when it first happened, I stood him up without realising and he was really pissed off.’
‘He was pissed off that your friend was in hospital?’
‘No, of course not! He was angry that I didn’t get in touch.’
‘And you didn’t get in touch because you were at the hospital, right?’
‘Yes, but he didn’t know that til later.’
‘Right. What a delightful guy.’
‘He’s not that bad!’
Ed’s face was hard when he looked at me. ‘Whatever you say, Sam.’
I picked up a magazine and opened it purposefully. I didn’t have to listen to this. I knew he didn’t think much of Charlie, and I’d shared a little story about something slightly annoying about him, but he wasn’t meant to get angry about it. I thought we might laugh wryly together about the incident. No need to take it so personally. I was chewing together a good case for feeling quite cross with him when the consultant came through the door.
‘Edward Minkley?’
‘Yes?’
‘You can come on through. We’ve taken Mara out of sedation and she’s responding.’
I felt my tummy turn over and I raised my hand to my mouth. She was awake! Ed stood up immediately and went quickly to the door. As they were about to go through the consultant turned and caught my eye.
‘Do you want to bring your—’
‘Friend, she’s Mara’s friend,’ Ed cut in quickly. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
I looked at Ed, expecting him to say something to me, but he strode through the door without even looking back, leaving me with a large man and his rat-faced child sitting solemnly at the other end of the room. I leant back in my chair and let the magazine fall flat onto my knees, feeling utterly redundant. It was amazing, I thought, how effectively Minkleys made me feel like a child. Like I wasn’t mature enough for their grown-up take on life. I wanted to be in there when she woke up and show Mara how much I cared. Well, sod it. Maybe I should just go then, leave them to it. I stood up and strode out of the waiting room but stopped at the first window I came across. It was sunny outside, the kind of glorious, spring-just-round-the-corner day that Mara loved getting out into. I sighed and leant against the window. Of course I wouldn’t leave. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. And they were right to treat me like a child anyway, when I could act like one so easily. I stood there for a while then returned to the waiting room to wait impatiently.
Half an hour later Ed came through the door again, and something about his face made me get up and cross the room, and put my arms around him before I could think it through. He held onto me, hard, and I was alarmed to feel him weeping into my hair.
‘Ed? Talk to me, what’s happened? Ed?’
‘She’s OK,’ he choked, ‘she’s OK!’ He let go and stood back, and wiped his eyes sheepishly. ‘Sorry.’
I kept my hands on his upper arms, not sure if he could stand alone quite yet. ‘Don’t apologise.’ I let go of one arm and pulled him out the door by the other, and took him to the window. ‘Talk to me.’
Ed took a deep, jagged, breath. ‘Oh, Sam. I’m just so relieved, I was so—’ He welled up again, unable to speak for a moment. ‘Sorry, I was so fucking worried about her. But she’s awake now. She knows where she is!’
‘Thank God.’ I turned to the
window, enjoying the relief of good news. When Ed had started crying, I thought the news had got worse, not thinking for a moment he could be crying out of happiness.
‘Thank the doctors.’ He leant his forehead on the window, a good head above mine, adding in a much smaller voice, ‘I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t pulled through.’
We stood silently side by side for a few moments. Then, ‘Sam! What am I doing here, looking out the window? I need to go and call Kate and Dad.’
‘And Claudia,’ I added.
‘Yes, and Claudia. I think I’ll go downstairs to do that.’
‘OK.’
Ed started down the corridor and then turned and smacked the side of his head with his palm. ‘I’m so stupid – I forgot to say go in and see her! Come and find me outside when you’ve finished.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course, why wouldn’t I be?’ Ed called back, a puzzled look on his face.
I could tell as soon as I neared the bed that Mara was different. I couldn’t quite see her face yet, with machines and a curtain in the way, but even the way her legs lay under the thin blankets was different. She was present again. Without thinking about it, I started grinning as I rounded the bed and saw her face.
There she was. Dark hair recently brushed, her face pale, but without that freaky mask. And they’d propped her up a tiny bit. I struggled to keep the lump in my throat down.
‘Hello, you.’
‘Hiya,’ Mara replied, very quietly, her voice a little rusty. ‘I hear I’ve given you all a bit of a fright.’
‘That’s putting it lightly.’ I sat down in a chair next to the bed, still warm from Ed’s bum, and took her hand.
‘Sorry.’
‘Shut up with that.’
‘How are you?’
‘Mara, who cares about me? How are you feeling? Can you remember what happened?’
‘No but they told me I rode into the side of a lorry.’
‘Bloody stupid.’
‘Bloody stupid all right. Ed was just telling me he’s been on my case to get my brakes fixed. I can’t remember that. I thought he’d flown in from India to be with me but he hadn’t. He’s been here for a while.’
Chasing Charlie Page 27