The Space Between Us

by Anna McPartlin

  He was scribbling down everything she said. ‘Hold on, I thought you were a pedestrian?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘So how could you see the Nissan emblem on the steering wheel?’

  ‘Because I landed in the passenger seat of the car. Through the front windscreen.’

  His eyes widened in amazement but he didn’t comment. He closed his notepad. ‘Maybe we should talk again tomorrow.’

  She knew there was something more.

  I’m missing something, what is it?

  ‘Something else,’ she said. She focused for a minute or two.

  The policeman stood up to leave.

  ‘He was wearing a navy woollen jumper,’ she said.

  The detective smiled. ‘If you were in that car it must have been pitch dark. How could you see the colour of his jumper?’

  She held up her good arm and showed him her hand. ‘Because the wool is stuck under my fingernails,’ she said. He looked sideways at her, fascinated, before he took her hand in his and slowly removed the wisps from under her nails.

  Then she asked him about Ben.

  ‘I’ll ask the doctors and get back to you.’

  ‘When?’ she said.

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Now,’ she said, as though she was in a position to make demands.

  ‘Just a few more questions.’

  ‘I don’t know anything more. I helped you, help me.’

  He agreed to find out. He disappeared. He didn’t come back.

  Eve went into shock officially at four thirty a.m. and disappeared for the final time on that horrific night.

  Lily had the strangest dream: she was in a military aircraft carrier dressed in fatigues and going to war. She spent a few seconds looking at all the boys with her. They were talking among themselves. She wondered what the hell she was doing there. This isn’t a flower-arranging class. Then she wondered if she was there because she was a nurse. Damn it, why did I sign up for this? There was a boy around Scott’s age, maybe a little older, sitting beside her. He was pumped up and excited.

  ‘Is this your first time?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve been waiting to do this for a long time.’

  ‘You’re a kid. You don’t know what a long time is,’ she said.

  ‘Whatever.’ He smiled at her and rocked excitedly. She noticed the engines were getting louder, meaning they had to shout instead of speak. I hate shouting.

  ‘I’m getting married,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘We’re going to have a house and a dog and some kids and a rabbit,’ he said, ‘but first I’m going to kill some bad guys.’

  ‘Get a rabbit or a dog. Do not get both.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the dog will eat the rabbit. It’s nature.’

  ‘Nah, they’ll love one another,’ he said, and he was confident he was right.

  ‘If they told you I was your enemy, would you kill me?’ she asked.

  ‘Who is they?’

  ‘The people who’ve put us on this plane,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re a friendly.’

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘You look friendly,’ he said.

  ‘Not that friendly,’ she said, took out a gun and shot him in the head.

  She sat watching the blood tumble out of the hole in his face, mesmerized by his fixed stare. All I wanted to do was join a flower-arranging class.

  Lily woke up in a cold sweat.

  ‘Lily, are you OK?’ Marion asked, after the change-over meeting. It was clear Lily hadn’t been listening to a word about any of the patients she’d be taking charge of for the next twelve hours.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep very well.’

  ‘You’re pale. Would you like to lie down?’

  ‘Are you nuts?’ She almost laughed. ‘We’re short-staffed and overworked as it is.’

  ‘Why do you keep pulling at your shoulder and guarding your chest?’

  Lily hadn’t noticed she was doing that. ‘It’s nothing – just my shoulder …’ she said, as Adam walked in.

  ‘Let me look at it,’ he said.

  She was embarrassed. ‘No, it’s fine, honestly.’

  ‘She’s been pulling at it since she got here. She’s pale and off form too,’ Marion said to him, as though Lily was a patient.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ she said.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  ‘Bugger-balls.’

  ‘What was that?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She followed him into his consultation room.

  ‘Take off your top,’ he said.

  ‘In your dreams,’ she said, in a tone that suggested that she was joking, yet they both knew her top wasn’t coming off.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Congratulations. Your mother must be so proud.’

  Adam Wallace laughed. He was the closest thing Lily had to a real friend, and as long as she was clothed, she was at her most comfortable when she was with him. He was a forty-year-old man who had never married but had had his share of beautiful women over the years. The last had been called Caroline. She was a broker and seemed nice when Lily met her at various hospital events, dinners and charity balls. They had been together for four years. She had left when she realized he would never marry her. He was really down afterwards, and he and Lily had become friendly after a particularly boring charity dinner. Declan had been drunk and lording it over everyone at the table but Adam was vulnerable and sad. Declan had thought it was funny to suggest that Adam had paid off his latest beard, then wondered whether it would be cheaper for him just to come out – everyone knew he was gay anyway. That joke had gone down like a lead balloon, and when Lily had tried to make Declan sit down he’d pushed her, not forcefully but hard enough to cause embarrassment. She’d laughed it off and told him to pick on someone his own size.

  Later Adam and Lily had met on the hotel balcony and she apologized for her husband’s behaviour, explaining that he drank so rarely he couldn’t hold the smallest amount with any dignity.

  ‘It’s no excuse,’ he said. ‘There are mean drunks and entertaining drunks. You married a mean one.’

  She nodded. ‘I married a sleeper. He’ll have passed out by the time the band starts to play.’

  ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘Are you happy you married him?’

  ‘I was eighteen.’

  ‘Not an answer.’

  ‘Happiness is a feeling, not a result.’

  ‘How are you feeling tonight?’ he asked earnestly.

  ‘Tipsy,’ she said, and grinned.

  He had laughed, then become serious again. ‘Why is getting married such a big deal to women?’

  ‘Ah, Caroline,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Why is not getting married such a big deal to you?’ she asked.

  He smiled. ‘Good question.’

  ‘And none of my business,’ she had said, drained her glass and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You might not marry but a man like you will never end up alone,’ she said, and moved towards the balcony door.

  He had called her back. ‘One last question,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘If you could do it all again, would you still marry at eighteen?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ she said honestly, and walked away.

  That was the night Adam Wallace had fallen for Lily Donovan.

  Now he placed an arm round her shoulders. He was fiddling under her horrible pink nurse’s tunic. ‘You don’t make life easy,’ he said.

  ‘Funny, that’s what Declan says.’

  ‘Declan doesn’t know he’s born. Do you play tennis or swim?’

  ‘I like to swim when I get time.’

  ‘When was the
last time?’

  ‘1991,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t do sports or exercise.’

  He put his head to one side and looked at her quizzically. ‘So how do you stay so slim?’

  ‘I binge and purge.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Honestly, I eat when I have time and I don’t always have time.’

  ‘Caroline lived on leaves and seeds and she weighed more than you do.’

  ‘Can we get back to my shoulder?’ she said, remembering she had to call in on Rachel and Nancy before she started her shift.

  ‘OK,’ he said, removing his hand from under her top. ‘Try to move your arm inwards and across your chest. I’m going to provide a little resistance.’

  She couldn’t do it.

  ‘OK. Try to rotate your arm inwards,’ he said. He pressed on her chest. ‘Is that painful?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. It looks like you’ve done a bit of damage to the pectoralis major muscle – the connecting tendon seems inflamed. Do you know how it could have happened?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ she said innocently. Flaming Declan and his S&M fantasies.

  Adam prescribed ibuprofen and told her to apply heat. If it didn’t settle with rest, he ordered her to come back to him so that he could refer her to a physio.

  ‘I know them all.’ She laughed.

  ‘Just come back to me and make sure you eat something today,’ he said, feigning weariness.

  She thanked him and left him to stare after her as she bounced down the hall like a teenager.

  Lily walked into Nancy’s room just as Jim was coming out with Dylan. It could have been awkward but Lily didn’t do awkward. Instead she acted as though he hadn’t pretty much propositioned her on the phone the previous night. ‘Jim, how are you?’

  ‘Good, thanks, better. Thanks so much for having Dylan last night. I picked him up after you’d left for work.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, and bent down to Dylan. ‘How are you doing, soldier?’ The question reminded her of her dream. All I wanted to do was join a flower-arranging class.

  ‘Nancy has a big plaster over her eye. She looks like a pirate,’ he said.

  Lily smiled. ‘Cool.’

  He agreed that it was indeed cool. He was clearly proud of the part he’d had to play in her new look.

  Rachel came to the door. ‘Well, are you going to sign the papers or are you going to stand in the doorway talking all day?’ she said to Jim.

  He sighed and left.

  Lily pretended she hadn’t noticed the tension and entered the room. ‘Hi, Nancy, how are you feeling, darling?’

  ‘Great,’ she said, with a wide smile.

  ‘That’s good news.’

  ‘She’s a trouper,’ Rachel said. ‘We’re so proud of her.’

  ‘Well, I’m thrilled you’re feeling better, Nancy,’ Lily said. ‘Now I must get back to work. See you soon.’

  Nancy started to open one of three lucky bags.

  Rachel took Lily aside. ‘We really are so grateful,’ she repeated unnecessarily. ‘They think she’s going to keep the sight but obviously there will be scarring on the eye. We don’t know how much yet.’

  ‘Try not to worry about it – it might be almost impossible to notice. Trust me, kids heal so much better and quicker than adults do.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Rachel said, and nodded to herself.

  ‘Dylan seems happier.’

  ‘Dylan’s lucky my father’s in his grave because he would have taken a large stick to him.’

  ‘Accidents happen,’ Lily said, uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going. She wondered where the empathy Rachel had displayed the previous day had gone.

  ‘Not if people act responsibly,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Jesus, Rachel, he’s eight years old!’ Lily said, and instantly regretted it when Rachel gave her a look to kill. It would have been clear to anyone looking in that Nancy was Rachel’s mini-me and princess rolled into one. Lily felt sorry for Dylan. At least he had Jim, but Jim was always either working or, as Rachel often said, ‘making a bollocks of it’.

  Lily made her excuses and left them to it. Her first duty was to escort a patient who had been involved in a road-traffic accident to theatre. She arrived on the ward in time to meet Bob rolling the woman down the corridor.

  ‘Ward Five?’ she asked.

  ‘Ward Five,’ he confirmed.

  She picked up the chart, smiled at the poor mangled woman lying on the trolley and walked alongside it towards the theatre.

  Eve didn’t remember waking but her eyes were open and her brain was half engaged. She was on a trolley looking at a white ceiling. Seeing was more difficult than it had been before she slept. When she closed her right eye she discovered that she couldn’t see out of the left at all. She tried to work out if her eyelid was swollen or the eye gone. My face? What’s happened to my face? The right eye leaked and speaking was difficult again. Eve’s words seemed lodged in the back of her head and she was mentally trying to force them into her mouth, but she couldn’t. She wondered if that was a result of drugs or head trauma. She couldn’t seem to ask about her face so she tried to work out how it felt. It felt foreign. She tried to focus on the nurse but she was standing to her left so it was difficult.

  They stopped at the lift and the nurse switched sides to tuck in the blanket covering her. ‘Just waiting for the lift, we’ll be there soon,’ she said.

  Eve’s lips were bigger than she remembered; she started to purse them and they were swollen and sore. She ran her tongue over her teeth and they were all intact. That’s something. She licked her lips, felt stitching and tasted blood. Damn. They moved into the lift. Her face seemed to roast when she hit the wall of heat and the smell of decay inside. She heard the button being pushed and she heard two women, who had stood aside to allow them in, talking beside her.

  ‘I told Mike that if I wanted that kind of commitment I’d get pregnant but he just doesn’t listen – he didn’t even notice when I hinted heavily in the direction of an iPod.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to let him take care of it.’

  ‘And he’s OK with that?’

  ‘Oh, he loves it.’

  ‘So really he bought the dog for himself?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And you hate dogs.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So now you’ve got a dog in your house that you don’t like.’

  ‘Well, I’ve had a man in my house that I don’t like for two years so I might as well have a dog too.’

  ‘Well, you’re a better person than I am.’

  ‘Not really. I stole his bank Link card and bought myself an iPod.’

  The lift stopped and they got out. The nurse leaned over Eve and brushed a strand of bloody, matted hair off her forehead. ‘Nearly there,’ she said again, but Eve was somewhere else, thinking about Ben. Where is he?

  The lift stopped and they were on the move again down a corridor. For some reason the pace had picked up: the lights on the ceiling seemed to be flashing past.

  Suddenly and abruptly they stopped and she heard a man tell the nurse he’d see what was going on. Eve heard her push down the brake on the trolley with her foot and felt it jerk slightly.

  ‘It shouldn’t be too long now. I know it doesn’t feel like it but you will be OK,’ the nurse said.

  Eve thought her voice sounded familiar, like a song she knew and could sing along to although she couldn’t place the singer. Silence followed and her mind drifted back to Ben. I saw him. He was with me. She remembered that Ben had a wife and that she’d be worried for him. If they’d found his phone and called her she’d wonder what he was doing on that road. There were police involved. It would be hard for them to conceal the truth. Lying on the trolley, waiting to go into surgery, it dawned on Eve that her no-strings-attached secret affair that was never intend
ed to hurt anyone could potentially devastate Ben, his wife and family.

  The man returned and Eve’s trolley started to move. The nurse quickened her step and took Eve’s good hand in hers. Eve focused on her face. That was strange: she looked a lot like her old friend Lily. Is that you, Lily? Can’t be. Can it? It looks so like you. Your hair is different but if it is you then a bob suits you and you’re still beautiful. That’s nice. If it’s her surely she’d recognize me – but maybe not, maybe I’m unrecognizable.

  They arrived at a door and the trolley stopped. Lily leaned down and smiled at her patient. ‘Don’t be scared. I know the guy who’s operating and he’s the best,’ she said, and winked.

  ‘Lily?’ the woman whispered.

  Lily looked at her patient. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Eve,’ the woman said, pointing to her chest.

  Oh, my God. Eve.

  Lily covered her mouth.

  ‘That bad,’ Eve said.

  ‘No,’ Lily said, recovering. ‘No, not that bad, Eve, not that bad at all.’

  ‘I missed you,’ Eve said.

  ‘I missed you too,’ Lily said. She felt like crying.

  They reached the door to the theatre.

  ‘Ben?’ Eve said.

  ‘Ben?’ Lily repeated.

  ‘Ben Logan.’

  ‘Ben Glenn Medeiros Logan?’ Lily asked in shock. What the hell?

  ‘Please find him, Lily,’ Eve said.

  Lily nodded. ‘I will,’ she promised.

  The theatre doors opened and Adam stood waiting in his scrubs. He waved at Lily. Bob pushed the bed through the door and Eve was gone.

  4. Only the lonely

  Wednesday, 11 July 1990

  9.15 a.m.

  Dear Eve,

  OK, I’m a bad friend. I feel horrible and I did try to call you twice last week after I sent the letter but there was no answer. Besides, I’ve got a question – are any of you Hayeses ever at home? And have you people ever heard of an answering machine? On Friday I walked to the phone box in the pouring rain (so much for it being mostly sunny here) and stood outside it for twenty-five minutes while the town gossip called every dog and duck she knows to fill them in on the exploits of a woman named Lucille Thomas who discovered her foreign boyfriend Benito kissing her brother in the back garden. Initially she was whispering but when I pushed my face up to the window in a bid to get her to hurry up, which obviously didn’t work, she stopped whispering, and by the time she was on her fourth phone call, she was shouting because apparently the person at the end of the line was partially deaf. I think she saw my tan and thought I was a foreigner who couldn’t speak English.