The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  ‘Oh, Oscar, thank God!’ Jane strode towards him and hugged him tightly. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, she’s alright. She’s alive. But she’s been injured quite badly.’

  He couldn’t catch his breath. He felt sick. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Addenbrooke’s. Her parents are with her.’

  The squad car moved away from the kerb, making a three-point turn in the road.

  He looked at Eden. ‘What the hell happened to her?’

  ‘There’s no need to sound so accusatory. This is hardly my fault.’ Eden arranged the lapels of his overcoat. ‘All I know is what the police told me. A van hit her, somewhere on Silver Street.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two, three hours ago. She was on her way to meet us,’ Eden said, nodding towards the fog-cloaked grounds of the college. ‘We were all playing mah-jong in Marcus’s room, and the next minute this policewoman shows up.’

  ‘Did they catch the driver?’

  ‘It was a hit and run—in thick fog—they’ve got no chance.’

  The urge to run was still in Oscar’s feet. His head was thrumming. ‘I need to get to the hospital,’ he said. ‘Now.’

  ‘We all need to get there. Why the bloody hell do you think I called you?’

  ‘I’ll drive us,’ Jane said. ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be okay. There’s no need for any bickering.’

  Oscar had to wait with Eden at the Downing gates while Jane fetched the car. He was too anxious to talk, imagining Iris on the quiet bend of Silver Street, alone and terrified. He began to kick at the kerbstone.

  ‘You know,’ Eden said, looking past him, ‘she was lucky—her cello case took the brunt of it.’ Eden removed a handkerchief from his pocket and blotted the tip of his nose. ‘Then again, if she’d ditched that group weeks ago, like I told her to, she wouldn’t have been coming home from practice in the dark.’

  ‘All I care about is that she’s okay,’ Oscar said. ‘That’s all any of us should be thinking of right now.’

  Eden kept quiet. There was no brotherly concern in his manner; he was leaning nonchalantly against the iron gate, investigating his handkerchief, as if it were a tourist map. ‘My parents are with her. If she was in any danger, they would’ve sent for me by now.’

  ‘Sent for you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eden said, turning his eyes to the quadrangle. ‘They’d have sent a car for me, or one of my mother’s church friends would’ve come to get me. But they haven’t, so she must be okay.’

  ‘I wish I could say that put my mind at ease.’

  ‘Just putting things in perspective,’ Eden said.

  The swirling fog showed no signs of breaking, but Oscar could see a flurry of shadows near the library. He was glad when Yin and Marcus emerged from the mist, heading for the porters’ lodge. They both seemed tired and downcast, but Yin’s face was particularly ruddy, his shoulders slouched in his puffer jacket. ‘That’s the whole point,’ he was saying to Marcus, who trailed behind him, ‘the last time we played mah-jong I had my bike stolen. I’m telling you it’s cursed or something. We can’t play it any more.’

  ‘Accidents happen,’ Marcus said. ‘Don’t get all Chinese about this.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘If you want to blame anything, blame the weather,’ said Eden, stepping towards them. ‘And the fact that my sister can’t look both ways before she crosses the road.’

  Yin folded his arms. ‘Man, I can’t believe you’re making jokes about this. She’s really hurt.’

  ‘Gallows humour, Yinny, not lack of concern. You’re starting to sound like Oscar.’

  ‘She was talking to the paramedics,’ Marcus said. ‘That’s a good sign.’

  ‘We better hope so,’ Yin said.

  Oscar saw headlights approaching from the Hills Road junction. ‘Is that her? Is that Jane?’

  ‘Settle down,’ Eden said, squinting into the darkness. ‘Plenty of room for all of us.’

  The Bellwethers were already sitting in the empty A&E waiting room when Oscar and the others arrived. Theo had an arm around his wife’s shoulder and she was pressing her head into the slope of his neck, eyelids closed. They were dressed as if they’d been pulled out of some grand occasion to be there—he in a dinner suit with the bow tie slightly askew, and she in a sequined gown and a diaphanous wrap that concealed the ageing skin of her shoulders. Theo was idly flipping through a magazine on his knee, one-handed. He didn’t get out of his chair when the five of them entered the room, just raised his chin at them. Mrs Bellwether stirred, levelling herself.

  Theo told them to sit down, and they did, hunching towards him. He told them that Iris had broken her femur. ‘They’ve just taken her into surgery, but the signs are good. It’s not too bad a break.’

  ‘Oh, thank heavens,’ Jane said.

  ‘I spoke with the surgeon. He’s more than competent. They do these procedures every day.’

  ‘She really had us worried,’ Yin added. ‘We thought we’d lost her.’

  ‘Well, she’s in a lot of pain at the moment,’ Theo said, ‘but she’s going to be fine, thank God.’

  Marcus said: ‘I knew she’d be alright. She’s a tough old bird.’

  Eden didn’t talk. He stood up, walked across the waiting room to the water cooler, and began to fill up a paper cone. He drank it down, then filled another, and another.

  Mrs Bellwether looked at Oscar. ‘Don’t worry, dear, she’s going to pull through. Iris is made of sturdy stuff. She’ll be back on her feet in no time.’ She continued to fold and refold her cashmere gloves upon her lap. ‘When she was a child, she got into all sorts of scrapes. Gashed her knees, cut her tongue, even broke her collarbone once. But she never complained, always healed up quickly. That’s the thing about Iris, she’s always been an incredibly fast healer. Hasn’t she, Theo?’

  Her husband nodded. ‘What? Oh, yes, incredibly.’

  Oscar couldn’t take his eyes off Eden, who had finished at the water cooler and was now walking back to his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when will you be moving her out of this rathole?’

  ‘Soon enough,’ Theo said. ‘When she’s had some recovery.’

  ‘What d’you mean move her?’ Yin asked.

  Marcus leaned towards him, lowering his voice. ‘He means when is she going to the private hospital.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What’s wrong with this hospital?’ Oscar said.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Eden said. ‘It’s just, I want her to be comfortable.’

  ‘She’ll be fine here.’

  ‘No she won’t. She’ll bloody well hate it. Sharing a ward with a bunch of strangers, only a little curtain for privacy? That’s not my sister.’

  ‘We’ll be moving her, son, don’t you worry,’ said Theo. ‘She might even be alright to come home. It depends on how well the procedure goes.’

  Oscar didn’t like the idea of unsettling Iris during her recovery. ‘Sounds like you’re the only one who’s uncomfortable here, Eden.’

  ‘Puh!’

  ‘Iris won’t mind sharing a room for a while.’

  ‘Well, that just shows how little you know her, doesn’t it?’ Eden folded his arms. The sleeves of his jumper were so short that they rode up, revealing pale moley skin. ‘We’re not all capable of dossing down with the proletariat, you know. She won’t even drink water if it’s out of the tap.’ He turned to his parents, as if sharing a private joke. ‘Only been in the picture five minutes and already telling me he knows best.’

  ‘Alright, cut it out, the pair of you,’ Theo said. ‘You’re making a scene.’

  ‘You have to get her out of here immediately. She’ll have MRSA before you can blink.’

  ‘Eden, that’s enough,’ Mrs Bellwether said. Her voice was as firm as it had ever sounded; it echoed against the magnolia walls. Eden looked away, cowed.

  ‘When can we see her?’ Jane asked.

  Theo rubbed his eyelids. ‘She’ll be in surgery for a few hour
s yet. After that, she’ll be groggy with the anaesthesia. Could take a while. You should all go home.’

  ‘We’ve only just got here,’ Oscar said.

  ‘I know, but you’ll be no use to anyone sitting around this place all night. You’ve all got work to do, I’m sure. Go home and sleep and come back tomorrow. She’s going to be fine—just broken bones, nothing that can’t be fixed.’

  Eden pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We’ll see how she is. If she’s okay, we’ll go back to the house. And if she needs us, there’s a bed-and-breakfast over the road. We’ll stay there for the night.’

  ‘A bed-and-breakfast? You?’

  ‘Needs must.’

  ‘Well, I thought it’d take a worse disaster than this—’

  Theo looked at his son, mouth ajar. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I was just saying—’

  ‘Go home, Eden.’

  ‘I just meant—’

  ‘If you think there’s a worse disaster than your sister being in emergency surgery, my dear boy, I’d really like to hear it.’

  Eden stayed quiet, staring at the floor. ‘She’s not dead. That’s all I meant.’

  Jane gasped: ‘Eden!’

  With this, Theo rose to his feet. Mrs Bellwether reached out for him, trying to hold him down, but her effort was limp, half-hearted. Eden seemed shocked by his father’s anger. He wilted into his chair.

  ‘You better hope those words don’t end up haunting you, son,’ Theo said, stooping over him. ‘All surgery, any surgery, is life and death. What the bloody hell is wrong with you? I’ve just about had it with your glibness.’

  Eden gave an apologetic tilt of his head, but Oscar thought he could see him repressing a smile; his mouth seemed to draw upwards into the slightest, most imperceptible of sneers. Nothing seemed to register behind his eyes; he was not tearful, not obviously rattled nor openly remorseful. He just got up and said, ‘Well, if that’s all,’ and walked right out of the waiting room. The automatic doors parted and closed behind him. Nobody followed. Outside, the fog was still heavy, moving like the slowest cloud that ever passed across the sky.

  Oscar couldn’t leave the hospital until he knew that Iris was okay, until he’d seen that for himself. He said goodbye to the others—to Jane, who offered her car for him to sleep in; to Marcus, who wrote down his mobile number and asked to be kept in the loop; and to Yin, who gave him the coins from his wallet so he might have some change for the coffee machine. If the truest measure of people is how they act in an emergency, then they were all good people, he thought. He could not say the same about Eden.

  The Bellwethers stayed with him in the waiting room, until an RGN came through the swing doors and told them there was a more comfortable room upstairs, closer to the operating theatre. They went up silently in the lift. Theo’s arm didn’t move from his wife’s shoulder. He kept leaning to whisper consoling words into her ear. When they got to the family room, she lay down on one of the couches and Theo covered her with his dinner jacket. He went to sit beside Oscar, staring across at his wife as she slept. ‘We were at a function,’ he said, gesturing at his dinner suit almost apologetically. ‘Wren Library benefit. Hence the attire. My mobile rang and—well, here we are.’

  ‘I was sleeping,’ Oscar said. ‘Came as quick as I could.’

  ‘There’s no need to stay, you know. I can handle this. No harm will come to her on my watch.’

  ‘The harm’s already been done.’ Oscar stared down at the linoleum. ‘I can’t go home. I love her. I need to know she’s okay.’

  This seemed to get through to Theo. ‘Yes, I suppose you do.’ He made a small sound with his nose—a tiny release of air. ‘Want to know the irony of all this?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought if anything was going to derail her school year, it’d be you. Medicine doesn’t let you take any lateral steps. You can’t skip a lecture or not do the reading. You certainly can’t miss an entire bloody term. This is really going to set her back.’ He gave Oscar’s thigh a swift double-tap, getting up. ‘Shall I go and see if I can find anything out?’ He headed for the corridor, tucking in the loose tail of his shirt.

  Oscar waited. The hands on the wall clock hardly seemed to move. In the corner of the room there was a tiny red table and a chair—a kid’s desk-set. White paper, crayons, and felt pens were spread out upon it and a few messy pictures had been taped up on the notice board, beside posters for group therapy, grief counselling. He thought about writing Iris a letter, something she could read when she woke up from surgery. He knelt down at the tiny table, took a sheet of paper and a pen, and tried to write, but the words just wouldn’t come. The clock crept around to three a.m. He closed his eyes and thought of her.

  He imagined them together, drinking Pimm’s under the apple trees at The Orchard, lying in the lush grass. And he smelled the scent of her, still on his clothes—the same smoke and bergamot that clung to everything in his flat; he could smell her on the pages of every book she’d ever pulled from his shelf. He heard the voices of the King’s choir whenever he came through his front door, and the sound of Fauré whenever he crossed the Magdalene Bridge. She had made his life worth writing about. So he wrote it down the only way he could.

  Around four, Theo came back. He gently nudged his wife awake with two poised fingers. ‘They just brought her out,’ he said, looking at Oscar. ‘The surgeon’s on his way.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Only briefly. They were wheeling her into recovery. She looked fine. I think it went well.’

  The surgeon—a towering black man with a moustache and a kindly face—came in to speak with them. His name was Mr Akingbade and he was still wearing his pale green scrubs. Oscar could see no bloodstains on him, just two large sweat patches underneath his armpits and one on his chest. A nurse in a blue uniform lingered near the doorway, her back against the dimmer switch.

  ‘It went as well as it could have,’ Mr Akingbade said. ‘I am very confident.’ In his slow, African voice, he told them he’d repaired the femur by drilling through the bone and driving a metal rod through the hollow, then stabilising it with a series of screws. It was an intra-articular fracture, a bad one, but not as bad as some he’d seen. ‘We’ll keep an eye on her, of course, but she’s going to be alright. In a few days, you’ll be able to take her home.’

  Theo pulled Akingbade aside to discuss the finer details of the surgery; they talked in hushed, murmured sentences, all nods and gestures. The nurse stepped forward and said: ‘Would you all like to see her? You can’t go in, but you can look through the glass.’

  They walked down the corridor and stopped outside a large room with a viewing window. Curtains were drawn across it on the inside, and the nurse went to slide them back. As the door opened, Oscar could hear the steady blips of a heart monitor.

  Iris lay helpless in the bed, an oxygen mask over her mouth, both hands resting beside her. Her left leg was braced with a foam and metal contraption. The line of a drip was connected to the back of her right hand, and a series of round discs were stuck below the neckline of her hospital gown. She was still under the anaesthesia, but there was a serene expression on her face that he recognised. He knew then that she would be okay. He allowed himself to breathe out.

  Mrs Bellwether had said nothing in the surgeon’s presence. Now, her eyes swelled and she seemed to sniff back an emotion that was rising in her—Oscar couldn’t tell if it was sadness or exhaustion. Then she turned to Theo: ‘Do you think the Mulgrews found it strange, the way we ran out like that?’

  ‘I’m sure somebody will have told them it was an emergency.’

  ‘I don’t want them to get the wrong impression. It was such a lovely benefit. I hope we didn’t put a dampener on things.’

  ‘Darling, that really doesn’t matter right now.’

  ‘We should go,’ Mrs Bellwether said. ‘It’s four in the morning.’

  ‘Are you staying,
Oscar?’ Theo asked.

  ‘Just a bit longer,’ he said.

  They said goodnight to him, and went down in the lift. Oscar stood at the window, peering in at Iris, soothed by the regular noises of her monitor. He watched her until he could hardly keep his eyes open any longer. On his way out, he gave his letter to the nurse. She told him she’d leave it on Iris’s bedside table.

  Dear Iris,

  I tried to find another way to tell you how I feel about you, but nothing seemed quite good enough. So I offer you this: an attempt at a poem that I’ve been working on for a while. I know you’ll think it’s far too gushing and sentimental. And okay it owes too much to good old Sylvia. It might just be the worst poem you’ll ever read (or at least the worst poem you’ll read tomorrow). But that’s just it. That’s why I wrote it. Because I can’t wait for you to tease me about it the next time I see you. I can’t wait to see you laugh and look at me with pity, because, after tonight, any look from you will be enough. You make me want to write my whole life down.

  I love you,

  Oscar xxx

  PETRICHOR

  You are the first thing about the morning that I recognise.

  Not the way the sun crowns in the window, spears drawn,

  the dose of salts the new day throws upon my other pillow

  where old impressions of your breath still maunder like a sigh.

  Not the sound of hot brakes spraining at the junction, buses

  clearing out their throats when sweat-back joggers hoof on by

  with music cranked to cancel out those airborne noises.

  No, I smell your risen voice and know that I have woken

  into something that feels better just for knowing. You are there

  like a linen cast over an easel: a concession to a coming afternoon.

  Oscar didn’t go home. He went to Cedarbrook and slept on the futon in the staff room, because it was only four hours until the start of his shift. He took a shower and changed into a spare uniform, then ate breakfast with the early-bird residents in the day room with the sun half-risen. Somehow he managed to mumble and stagger through to lunchtime without anybody noticing his tiredness, until Mr Cochrane on the second floor asked him, with a tone of contempt, whether he was taking any recreational drugs. On his lunch hour, he went to talk with Dr Paulsen, who was eating his meal alone in his room, as usual. The word from Deeraj was that the old man wasn’t in a fine mood—he’d barked at one of the agency nurses when she tried to change his duvet. But Oscar saw no signs of Paulsen’s foul temper when he went in to say hello. The old man was standing at the bookshelf, reading The Girl With the God Complex. His body was leaned awkwardly—one hand gripping the book, the other gripping the shelf—and his cane was lying by his feet. ‘I don’t remember this book being so interesting,’ he said, turning a page and peering at him. ‘Thanks for bringing it back.’