Frozen

by Richard Burke

  “So, what about Adam?” she asked. I concentrated on the road. “You said the treehouse gang broke up. That was you and Verity and Adam, yes? What about him?”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Where does he fit in?”

  I was puzzled.

  “Harry! He's been having an affair with her!”

  I let that roll around my head for a while. I had told her about my confrontation with Adam, and she had been as confused as I was. Verity had always confided in Sam, yet she never mentioned Adam. Why? There was no obvious reason not to tell her, unlike me. And Adam wasn't mentioned anywhere in Verity's Filofax—there were no entries with an A next to them. The only explanation we could think of was that Adam had demanded absolute secrecy: plausible, but not Verity's style.

  Sam fished a packet of mints from her bag and offered me one.

  I shook my head, then changed my mind and reached over. It was sharp and sweet, reassuringly real. Finally, I felt able to reply. “We were all so different. We had this one brilliant summer, and then it all just fell apart. I suppose we reverted to type. Verity went scatty, Adam went all reserved—when he wasn't acting it up for the crowd at school. I went... home. I just holed up and waited for it all to end.” I wound down the window. I needed air. “To be honest, my school years are hard to remember.”

  Actually, I didn't want to remember. Really, I'd had enough. Enough of mysteries and puzzles and secrets and ambulances. And grief and loss. And loneliness.

  I grimaced an apology at Sam. She caressed my thigh. It was good to be reminded that not everyone had gone mad, that some people could still see the world clearly.

  “But you stayed in touch with both of them?” she persisted.

  “Sort of. No, I did. They were my friends. I was a bit of a loner, really, but if I belonged anywhere it was with Adam or Verity.”

  “But not both of them together.” Flatly; a fact.

  I shook my head, and then waved a tense hand in the air, searching for something I could grasp.

  “No,” I admitted finally. “Not together.”

  It was a question only an adult could have asked. As a child, the divisions between us had been as natural as all the other feuds and friendships of the playground. We'd spent a summer together, pursuing one mad project—Verity's project, not Adam's or mine. When the project was done and the summer was ended, there was nothing left to hold us together. With the photos taken, and with the social isolation of the holidays ended, Verity and Adam had little use for each other. Verity had got what she wanted, and Adam settled into life at school: he couldn't risk the mockery of his peers by spending time with a girl two years his junior. But while they drifted apart, Adam and I did not. We shared something. Occasionally, when he was not studying or swaggering with his older friends, we would sit after school and watch the river, or throw stones into a pool; just being there, saying nothing. We'd learned everything about each other that we needed to, months before, one day in Verity's garden when Adam's dad came calling.

  And Verity, poor damaged Verity… why had I stayed close to her? I think that the answer then was the same as it has been in all the years since. It's a thing too painful to name. It has to do with hope.

  Who could have foretold what we all became?

  “How did they even meet, Sam?”

  “Maybe they just bumped into each other, on the tube or something,” Sam offered. “Don't get cross, Harry, but I suspect you think their affair's all wrong because you want it to be wrong.”

  I'd thought of that, of course. In fact, I'd thought of little else. I felt betrayed and bewildered. My two closest friends had lied to me, taken themselves away from me and made a new centre for themselves somewhere else. Verity's jump had shown me I didn't know her at all; and, worse, I knew now that Adam's life had been closed to me as well. That was less of a shock because he had always been private, but the betrayal was real enough. What had he thought on the nights when he and I went out, when he knew he would say goodbye to me and go to her? Or when he had seen her earlier in the day, still warm from her, or sticky, or buzzing with her smell. Adam and Verity, Verity and Adam. Impossible, unbearable, wrong.

  The ambulance turned off the M25 and curved towards the M40.

  I longed for her to come back. She would explain it all, tell me the truth a different way, how I had misunderstood what Adam had said, how she would never do that, not to me—Harry, it's not what you think. I'd never hurt you, Harry. I love you, Harry, you know that.

  Yeah.

  “I miss her, Sam.”

  She looked at me strangely. “I know,” she said.

  We slid along behind the ambulance, towards a new home for Verity, where new machines and starched new sheets waited. Where nurses in white would chirp and bustle around her. Where her father waited to tuck her in, and then to say goodbye.

  *

  By the time we'd found a parking space and walked back to the hospital, Verity had already been delivered to the ward. A nurse sat with Gabriel, going through the paperwork. She was quite young, perhaps twenty. Gabriel was hunched in a chair that was designed for leaning back and relaxing in. He was reciting Verity's life for the nurse—full name, age, medical history, known allergies (the nurse read out an entry labelled “symptoms on admission,” and then realised how foolish it sounded for a patient in a coma, and moved on quickly, her ears turning pink). She charted Verity's history with neat ticks and circles and precise, backwards-sloping writing.

  Gabriel nodded at us when we came in, then his eyes glazed again and he returned to his recitation. When it was over, the nurse stood and thanked him, smiled at us with too much compassion, and was gone. Somewhere further down the ward, someone laughed, and then there was silence again, except for the tap and creak of the nurses' rubber shoes against the lino.

  I set down the bag of Verity's belongings, and introduced Sam to Gabriel. Odd that they had never met.

  Sam fiddled with the zoetrope. Gabriel raised his head, and his eyes showed a glimmer of his old stare. She risked a smile. He returned it weakly, and sank back into himself. “Her eyes are open,” he croaked. “Wasn't expecting that.”

  “We should have warned you. Sorry. Yes, it's...” I trailed off. There wasn't a word for it: lifeless eyes in a living person, eyes that used to follow you across a room, used to sparkle and laugh.

  Gabriel put his hands on his knees and pressed himself upright. His eyes seemed almost as dead as Verity's. A purple vein throbbed on his temple, under skin as dry and fragile as old paper.

  Verity had a room of her own, by some quirk of the NHS' mysterious workings. Perhaps they were concerned that other patients on the ward shouldn't see what brain damage could do, or perhaps it was out of respect for visitors. More likely it was luck, or a cock-up in the system. Either way, my immediate reaction was that she'd been fortunate, and that was instantly followed by despair. She would be alone, isolated from the comings and goings of the ward. The laughter of the nurses would always be somewhere else, in another room, in a corridor, not with her.

  The room was nice enough. There was a standard metal bed, a standard bedside unit, standard plastic armchair, a window with a view of a large aluminium duct that leaked a thin trickle of steam. A plastic tube with earphones at the end was twined in with all the other tubes—oxygen, drips, nasal feeding tube.

  She lay under a single clean sheet, which was slightly ripped. She was on her side, set neatly in position by the nurses, one hand reaching towards the rail along the side of the bed. Her empty gaze was fixed on a blank wall. Her new home.

  Sam nudged past me, zoetrope still in hand, and squatted next to the bars on the bedside. “Hey, doll,” she said. “Guess who's here?” The eyes did not move. Nothing moved. “Harry's here, I'm here, and your dad.” She had the happy inflections of a mother talking to a baby, so soft, so gentle. So hopeless. “We've got all your things. And look.”

  As I had earlier, she held up the zoetrope in Verity's line of sight
and spun it. Two blank brown eyes, sagging in their sockets, did nothing at all; there was not a flicker. Her tongue moved briefly, pushing more spittle from her mouth, and then it, too, dropped slackly back.

  “D'you remember it?” Sam chirped. “Remember the photos? It was your idea, wasn't it?” Another spin. Nothing. “Hey, d'you... do you...” Sam let the zoetrope settle to the floor, and her hand drifted to her face, stroked her cheek ineffectually.

  I put my arms round her, and she turned and crushed herself on to me, her body shaking with hard, slow sobs. I stared at Verity's slack face and tried to make it mean something, but there was nothing left. Nothing at all.

  “Be four o'clock soon,” said Gabriel. Meaning, we were doing no good here. He was right.

  Sam mopped at her face and sniffed a lot, while I turned back to Verity and held her unresponsive hand for a wordless minute. Then we trooped out, thanking the nurse in over-cheerful voices. She looked over her glasses at us, smiled efficiently, and bent back to her paperwork.

  CHAPTER 19

  I HADN'T BEEN back to Wolvercote for several months, and it didn't feel right. We parked, and stood uneasily while we said goodbye to Gabriel and watched him prowl the five or so yards to his own front door.

  I had packed one bag for both of us, and I was feeling uneasy about it. How would Mum react? Sam had pointed out that it was only one night, so two bags would be daft; and arguing with her had seemed less appealing than brazening it out with Mum. Besides, this was my home too. The door opened when we were a few paces away from it—Mum must have been watching from the living room—and there she was, all nervous smiles, brushing down the front of her dress with hands that wouldn't stay still. She hugged me and pretty much ignored Sam until I broke away and introduced them. She shook hands uncertainly and invited us in.

  “I've made up the spare bed,” she said over her shoulder, as she scuttled indoors. So she expected us to sleep separately. I pulled a face at Sam. She blew me a kiss. Relieved, I dumped the bag and headed after Mum towards the kitchen.

  “So, how are you?” I called. That would keep me from questions for the next half an hour or so. I paused long enough to let Sam bump into me as she followed, and reached behind me with both arms to squeeze her. She pressed back, and held my hand as we filed into the kitchen.

  Mum's habitual tale began. There was never enough money, but you found ways, cut down on what you wanted from life; she never saw enough of me, she understood and she didn't want to impose but surely a weekend now and then; Mr. Winston was dead, Mrs. Winston was carrying on with old Mr. Thompson, but of course that was hardly news, they'd been at it for ages. It was a stream of consciousness: there was rarely any need to interject. She moved around the kitchen, drying already dry mugs from the draining-board, pausing to elucidate some point of village politics, vaguely putting the mug back on the draining-board and fiddling with the stacks of glasses in a cupboard, picking up the same mug, polishing it some more. I glazed over, and Sam stared out bleakly at the wizened apple tree at the end of the garden.

  I love Mum. How could I not? She has been the one constant element of my life. For three and a half decades she has been there, always the same. When she split with Dad there was talk of change, new opportunities, but it never came right for her. She took her nervousness with her into every new venture, her self-fulfilling conviction that it would all turn sour and that the fault would be hers. She also took her generosity, and her willingness to let others take credit, while she backed quietly away from the light. She would come home and cry, and then tell me she was sorry, she was just being stupid, it would pass. I knew that it wouldn't. It was just how life was for her. For me to leave home was the cruellest blow of all, but what could I do? She had kept herself busy, and therefore contented. When I came up to see her we had fun. We'd get drunk and gossip and laugh about things from years before, and she'd lecture me about the future, and women, and about how she was right to worry; it was only natural for a mother. She wanted, always, above all, to know that I was happy. Well, life's more complicated than that, isn't it? But, yes, I'd say, life is good for me, all of it good. And she'd pinch my cheek and her eyes would mist over, and she'd busy herself for ten minutes making a single cup of coffee. She wasn't without friends or support. She wasn't even without a son. But we both knew that she was without something. Perhaps it was a future.

  Sam, bless her, fitted straight in and made all the right noises. After ten minutes, it wasn't me prompting, “And what did he say?” It was her; and ten minutes after that, Mum stopped ignoring her and the two of them began to talk. After half an hour, I was surplus to requirements. They had settled at the table, elbow to elbow, and were complaining about the inadequacies of men—including, I might add, me. When I protested, Sam told me, accompanied by a huge wink, that I might as well push off, they were only just getting started. I grumbled my way out of the room. Behind me, I heard Sam say something in a low voice, and the two of them erupted into coarse laughter.

  I found my old football in the back of the shed at the garden's end, now a shapeless, deflated lump of sun-bleached plastic. It was on top of an ancient ripped-out kitchen unit, alongside a pair of broken shears and a bundle of sticks and twine. I peered inside the cupboard: age-blackened wrenches, a rusting saw—Dad's old tools, part of the past which Mum swore she no longer clung to, but which she couldn't bear to throw away. I carried the ball into the garden. There was no chance of toe-flipping it into the tree; the fork was covered in new growth, and the old familiar shapes were gone. I slung it back into the undergrowth.

  *

  The path to Gabriel's door was lined with weeds and dry moss. Just as when we'd arrived at Mum's, the door opened before I got there. It must be something about villages: not enough to do.

  Gabriel shuffled ahead of me along the hall towards the living room. There was a bottle of whisky by his chair, and a glass. He was hitting the hard stuff and it was barely five o'clock—although, to give him credit, the bottle was less than a third empty. He trudged to a sideboard and bent painfully to peer inside for a second glass. He scooped up the bottle, and poured as he walked, filling the tumbler to the brim and handing it to me. He headed back to his chair, bent at the hips, head bowed, his bushy frown directed at the age-stained floorboards.

  I settled into the tattered chair opposite. The whisky fumes did their usual thing, acid vapour penetrating the back of my nose, my eyes starting. It tasted foul; this wasn't your single malt, this was the stuff they use to run generators in Africa. He contemplated me for a moment before raising his glass and an eyebrow, and then downing a generous slug. If he'd drunk a third of a bottle at that rate, the whisky wasn't going to last more than an hour. From the look on his face, he intended me to help him finish it off.

  He waved his tumbler in a vague toast—“Verity”—and sank his face into his drink again.

  I couldn't reply. Verity what? Verity, goodbye? I didn't want to say that with cheap whisky and a sad old man in a dingy room. Actually, I didn't want to say it at all. Verity, come back? Verity, why—why Adam? Why didn't you call me? What I heard in his toast wasn't goodbye, come back, or anything: it was self-pity. Somewhere behind those shrewd eyes, he had given up. Gabriel was mourning himself.

  He attacked his glass with savage conviction, refilled it with a haphazard wave. He held out the bottle to me to top up my glass. When the bottle ran out, he found another—mercifully only half full. There were sounds in the silence between us. There was a clock, there were birds and a breeze outside, sometimes a car would whisper past; and there was us. I fancied I heard Sam and Mum laughing next door, but it was distant and then it faded.

  Time passed. The clock ticked.

  “What will you do?” I asked, at about six.

  He sniffed. He pursed his lips and shook his head. Ten minutes later he answered, slowly and indistinctly, “Nothing. Can't look after her, can I? She should have died.” He was breathing heavily, his lips pressed together, black eyes fix
ed on the floor and glistening. He fought the tears for a minute, and then seemed to crumple. The tension left him, his shoulders folded, and another small piece of him seemed to vanish. It was unsettling.

  What must it be like to lose a daughter? I don't have children, but I can imagine the loss. All that long history gone, all that potential, the hope, the certainty of a future. All vanished. I'm in my thirties, but Mum still treats me like a child. She seems to think she has the right to criticise, question, cut me down to size—and I let her. In a funny way, as well as being patronising and irritating as hell, it's proof that she loves me, and that she always did. It's a familiar old pattern, clinging to something that, in truth, evaporated with childhood. Mum needed the illusion, so I collaborated. Looking at Gabriel, I knew that it must have been the same with Verity and him. What must it be like to lose a child? You lose all the meaning of all the love you ever gave.

  And what do you do?

  He didn't answer, and I knew it was a crass question, casual conversation in the midst of a crisis. Verity needed constant medical attention. There were decisions that he would have to make. If she got pneumonia, should they treat it? If her lungs gave out, should they put her on a ventilator? Decisions made in the absence of hope. He couldn't bring her home. He couldn't live at the hospital, and care for a girl whose mind had gone forever. What do you do? It didn't matter to her where she was; the people who loved her didn't matter to her, even her own survival meant nothing. She hadn't died, but he had lost her anyway, as he had lost his wife all those years before. All the love he had ever given was wasted.

  “You mustn't blame yourself, Gabriel,” I mumbled, because I thought it might help, because I was drunk, because I couldn't bear the silence—and because I meant it. He looked sharply at me.