More Than Us

by Dawn Barker

  ‘We need to give him something to calm him down, just a little. We need to get some blood tests and a CT scan to check his head.’

  I felt faint; I grabbed the edge of the bed as the nurse reappeared with a syringe and began to unscrew a little cap on the line going into his hand.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dr Eaton said. ‘It’s not uncommon for people to be confused or agitated after being knocked out. It’s not necessarily bad.’ He smiled a little, but I could see by the way he turned around again to watch the nurse inject the medication that he was concerned.

  ‘Now, I need to double-check his medical history. So, no other illnesses?’

  ‘No,’ said Paul. ‘None at all.’

  ‘So just the anxiety and ADHD? And he’s on Prozac and dexamphetamine.’

  Paul stiffened beside me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Any problems with the medication?’

  Paul was staring at me; my face went hot and the world around me slowed and stilled like I was in a dream. Be quiet, I wanted to say to the doctor. Not now. I could feel Paul’s confusion then anger radiating from his body, but he said nothing.

  I tried to speak; my voice was croaky. ‘No. Just some loss of appetite. Maybe some headaches.’

  ‘Has he been complaining of headaches for a while?’

  ‘No, not really… I…’ I began to see speckles in front of my eyes and my ears were ringing. ‘I’m sorry, I think I’m going to faint.’ I took a step back and looked around, trying to see a chair.

  ‘Go outside, Emily,’ Paul said to me in an even voice. ‘Go and get some fresh air. Then sort out Tilly. I’ll stay with him.’

  I nodded, already backing towards the door.

  Twenty-Six

  Paul

  Cameron was asleep again, despite the noise and chaos of the emergency department being held at bay only by a flimsy green curtain drawn around us. I rested my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees in the plastic chair by his bed. My head was spinning. How could Emily do this, and, even worse, keep it from me?

  I heard the grating of the curtain rings on the rod above the bed, and looked up as Emily tiptoed in. She came over, then sat down on the edge of the chair next to me. She put her hand on my knee. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  I looked up at her, then turned my gaze to Cameron. ‘Em, I… I honestly don’t know what to say. I can’t believe you’d do this without telling me, after we’d discussed it.’ I shook my head.

  ‘He was so much better,’ she said, swivelling her body round to face me. ‘You were away, Paul, and I was on my own and things were getting worse and worse and the school called me in and said he had to see someone. I tried, but I couldn’t get in touch with you. I didn’t know what else to do!’

  I held my hand up. ‘You already told me that, at Tilly’s dance show, and then you told me that you wouldn’t see a psychiatrist or give him medication. You lied to me, Emily. Don’t blame me! You’ve had plenty other opportunities to discuss this with me.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, I blame myself!’ Cameron’s bed creaked as he turned his head, then settled again. I lowered my voice. ‘All I can say is I’m sorry, but this isn’t the place to talk about it. It’s not important now.’

  ‘Of course it’s important now,’ I hissed. ‘He’s here because of you! The medications can give you seizures. They damage your brain.’

  She screwed up her face and leaned forwards. ‘What? That’s ridiculous. He was knocked out in a rugby game, Paul. This has nothing to do with the medication. They help your brain.’

  I took my phone out of my pocket; my hands shook as I typed in ‘dexamphetamine’. ‘Just look, Emily: Psychosis. Tics. Chest pain. Seizures. Sudden death.’ I turned the phone around and put it in Emily’s view. She batted it away. I continued. ‘He had a seizure. You said yourself you didn’t see the tackle, the young lad said it was just a normal tackle and he wasn’t near his head. God knows what happened to him!’

  ‘This,’ she waved her hands over Cameron, ‘has nothing to do with the medication.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Emily! Do you know what this stuff does to you? You’ve been giving him speed. You’ve been giving our son a drug, two drugs! I’ve told you a thousand times, these doctors don’t know what they’re talking about and they prescribe this crap because the drug companies buy them dinner and fly them to conferences. It’s snake oil… no, it’s worse than that because it can kill you!’ I was shaking. I turned away from her, then stood up and paced, breathing deeply. I looked back at Cameron, his chest rising and falling with the hiss of the oxygen machine. I slowed my breathing to match his and my anger drained away, leaving just the fear.

  ‘Paul, I—’

  I held my hand up. ‘Just don’t talk to me. All I care about right now is Cameron.’

  She nodded. I sat again and we both stared at our son.

  * * *

  Emily and I barely spoke as we waited for the doctor to come back and tell us the results. I asked where Tilly was; she told me that Alasdair and Jane had picked her up, and her car. After the scan, they let the sedative medication wear off. Cameron had woken up, seemed more like his old self, then had dozed off again. I itched to call Damian. I was frightened of my anger at Emily, at my reaction and the way that feeling so scared and enraged made me want to shout and scream or have a drink or find something to lose myself in. I wanted to tell someone who would understand why I felt like this.

  I glanced up at Emily – she was staring at Cameron, biting her thumbnail. I forced myself to stay where I was. This wasn’t the time to flee. I had learned that I used to run away when the pressures at home become too high. Emily was right, partially, when she said I had always left her to deal with Cameron. I had. I know that. I ran off to work, where everyone propped me up and flattered me, and then later, I ran to gamble, to give myself the thrill that I just couldn’t feel at home any more. And where had it led me? Right here, with my son in hospital. By running away, I allowed Emily to make decisions, and this was what had happened.

  A doctor poked her head through the curtain. Dr Eaton had gone off shift and she was his replacement, she explained. She looked tiny in scrubs that were clearly too big for her. She reminded me of Tilly. Tilly; we must call her. She must be frantic.

  ‘Everything okay in here?’ the doctor said as she stepped through.

  Emily sat up straight and nodded. ‘Have you got the results?’

  ‘Yes, all good,’ she said brightly. ‘The CT scan is normal so there’s no bleed or fracture or anything like that to worry about.’

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Emily said.

  I let out a breath. ‘That’s great. Great.’ My head was reeling.

  ‘So, it’s just a concussion?’ Emily said.

  The doctor cocked her head to the side. ‘That’s most likely, yes. But we need to keep him in for a day or two. I want the neurologists to see him, to investigate other causes of the seizure. And we need to observe him for at least twenty-four hours, he was pretty confused for a while there.’

  ‘Mum? Dad?’ Cameron’s voice croaked from the bed.

  ‘Hey, mate,’ I said, reaching over to take his hand. ‘You’ve woken up.’

  ‘Cam,’ Emily said softly. ‘This doctor just told us some great news, that your head scan was normal, but they need to just keep an eye on you for a night or two, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it. We’ll transfer him to the ward in a couple of hours. I’ll talk to you later.’ The doctor went back through the curtain.

  ‘You alright, Cameron?’ Emily said. ‘Did it make sense, what the doctor just said?’

  He shrugged, opened his eyes. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘I know, sweetie,’ Emily said, her voice breaking. She swept his hair back and left her hand gently on his forehead. ‘Just go back to sleep, darling, it’s been a big day.’

  ‘You hungry, mate? I’ll pop out soon to get
something to eat. Can I bring you something back? Some hot chips?’ I knew he liked them, despite the fat and salt. Now, I would make an exception.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, then his eyes closed.

  We sat in silence for another few minutes until it was obvious he was asleep. ‘Come with me to get some food,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘No, you go, he might wake up—’

  ‘You need to eat. We need to talk. Let’s go. We’ll tell the nurse and she can call us if he stirs. We won’t be long.’ Shame shivered through me at the tone of my voice, but this was serious.

  Emily’s eyes lingered on me and I sensed her apprehension, but I wasn’t going to run from this anymore. She stood up and picked up her bag. I put my hand on the small of her back, steering her out.

  We exited the emergency department into the car park where the ambulance had entered. There was a bench next to a slip lane for taxis and people being dropped off, but a man with his leg in a cast sat there. Emily turned and started walking towards the main hospital building.

  ‘Emily. This way.’

  ‘He wants hot chips. There’s a café in there.’

  I walked in the other direction, towards the main road; she followed. We fell into step beside each other, she clutching the strap of her bag, me with my hands in my pockets.

  ‘I don’t want to talk in front of Cameron,’ I started, my voice calm. ‘But I’m really struggling to understand why you’d do that and I need to talk about now or I swear I’ll explode.’

  She said nothing. I waited.

  She sighed. ‘I told you Paul. You were away, and things reached a crisis point, the school said I had to take him to a psychiatrist. And then… I tried to tell you, I really did, but I don’t know how to talk to you now, you think a lot of… things now, Paul. If you’d come with me to the doctor you would have had some say in it.’

  ‘Did Cameron get a say in it?’

  ‘He’s a kid. He’s ill.’

  ‘He’s not ill, he’s fine, and he’s his own person. You can’t just poison him.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Paul, stop saying it’s poison! You’re sounding like a crazy person! That’s why I couldn’t talk to you about it, you’re impossible to talk to, you don’t think logically!’

  ‘You deliberately excluded me from making a decision about our son.’

  ‘Because you made it quite clear that you were happy with the way he was.’

  ‘He was born like this! It’s not like we had a different child who suddenly caught a virus!’

  ‘He’s unhappy. Why don’t you want him to be happy?’

  I stared at her, then dropped my eyes. ‘It’s you who’s unhappy, Emily.’

  ‘No, I’m…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I’m only unhappy because he is.’

  We both knew what I was thinking: that if she wasn’t spending all day worrying about Cameron, what would she do? The children were growing up, growing away from us, and she didn’t know any other way to be than an anxious mother. ‘Emily, maybe it’s you who should be getting some help. Why don’t you come with me—’

  ‘Piss off, Paul.’

  I whipped my head round to look at her, but she was storming off. My eyes focused on her silver flats walking one after the other along the pavement.

  ‘Emily, stop.’ I ran to catch up to her. She had to understand. ‘That stuff can give you heart attacks, high blood pressure, make you hallucinate, stop you growing.’

  ‘That didn’t happen to him!’ She stopped and turned to me, at the edge of a side street, her eyes wide and blazing.

  ‘You don’t know that!’ I hissed through gritted teeth. ‘You’re not listening to me! What do you think I learned in all that time I was away from you? I hated being away from the kids, but I had to because something had to change. I learned about our minds, and how we are poisoned by all the crap in the world, in our food, in the television and above all, these so-called medications! You see what state I was in, and I didn’t need medication; I just needed to learn about myself. Cameron doesn’t need medication, he never did, he does not need to see some pseudo-doctor—’

  ‘Dr Davidson isn’t a pseudo doctor, she’s a real doctor. She’s been to medical school and done her specialist training for years, which is more than you have! You can’t learn about medicine from a month or two in some rehab run by loonies!’

  I shook my head. ‘That rehab saved my life.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘And why didn’t Cameron tell me?’

  She frowned. ‘He—’

  ‘Did you ask him to lie to me too?’

  ‘No, no…’

  I started to step off the kerb. A car sped past us; I stuck my middle finger up at him. ‘What does that dickhead think he’s doing? Speeding along like that next to a hospital where there are kids!’ I shook my head then strode out behind the car. I heard Emily hurrying after me.

  Emily put her hand gently on my arm as we reached the other kerb. ‘Paul, slow down, stop, please.’

  I stopped and spun around to see her, my head pounding. Her eyes were full of tears. ‘Listen, don’t be angry at Cameron, don’t blame him. It’s not his fault. I thought I was doing the right thing. He was getting better, so much better…’

  My heart was racing. ‘What?’

  She spoke rapidly, eyes flitting from the ground to me and back again. ‘Look, I had to make sure he was taking his tablets. Maybe he started taking them too.’

  ‘Emily. You’re not making sense.’

  She wiped at her eyes and stepped towards me and took my hands in hers, speaking in barely more than a whisper. ‘Don’t blame him. He didn’t want to take them. He doesn’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was giving them to him. He didn’t know. He did take them then he stopped them. He didn’t want to take them. He was hiding them, I found them all, so I was giving them to him in his juice, but he didn’t know, and maybe he started taking them too, I don’t know!’

  My heart almost stopped. ‘You are kidding me.’

  She was silent; I glanced over and saw her wipe away a tear.

  I couldn’t keep all the thoughts in my head in any coherent order. ‘Let me get this straight. You were sneaking them into his food but still pretending that you didn’t know he wasn’t taking them. So, he could have been taking double the dose?’

  ‘He wasn’t though, he wasn’t taking them, I know it. Paul, I’m sorry.’ She started sobbing, in the middle of the street, with people walking around us hiding their glances at us.

  ‘Shh. Stop crying.’ I looked around us. A middle-aged man walking an Alsatian stared at me; I glared at him. I let her sniffle for a while then held her shoulders and stepped back so I could look at her. ‘You need to tell them. You need to admit what you’ve done. It could be critical.’

  ‘He just got knocked out, Paul! Don’t say it like I did this,’ she said, waving her hand back towards the hospital. ‘I was trying to help. I knew that when he got better, he’s understand.’

  ‘You can’t make those decisions for him, Emily.’

  ‘Yes. I. Can.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘Someone had to. You weren’t there.’

  ‘Yes, I was. I’ve been there every day—’

  ‘No, you haven’t.

  I just shook my head. ‘I can’t talk to you right now. Let’s go back.’ We had turned left again, heading back towards the hospital.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let him play,’ she said, tears streaming down her face. ‘He’s just trying to get your attention, he’s not even interested in—’

  I groaned. ‘Why do you keep going on about that? I never forced him. I never wanted another me. Why would I?’ Even when I was at my peak, I was miserable, propped up by people telling me how wonderful I was but torn up with doubt. I breathed deeply. I would not give her the satisfaction. ‘Emily. Not everything in our life is my fault. Him being in that hospital bed is not my fault.’

  Th
ere was nothing more to say. Emily said that I couldn’t think logically but neither could she. I was no more willing to change my view that my son did not need psychiatric treatment any more than Emily wouldn’t change her view that he did. Our argument was so familiar that our brains didn’t even need to register it. Our mouths and bodies just went through the motions, like riding a bike.

  We bought the hot chips, walked back to Cameron’s room, and both pretended to him that nothing was wrong, the same way we’d been pretending for our entire marriage.

  Emily wanted to spend the night at the hospital; I couldn’t persuade her otherwise. There was only one recliner chair to enforce their rule of only one parent staying the night. I needed to get away from her anyway; I needed to think. Feelings of rage kept peaking, then ebbing as sorrow and regret took over, a depthless sadness that Cameron was the one lying in a hospital bed, not me. How could we move forward from this?

  Cameron was in the shower in the bathroom adjoining his room. Emily was moving around the room, smoothing his sheets, folding up the gown he’d been wearing. She blinked several times as she lined up his muddy rugby boots at the end of his bed.

  ‘I’ll go and pick up Tilly,’ I said. ‘Take her home to her own bed.’

  ‘She’s okay. Ceecee texted me. Your brother dropped her there for the party after they left here this afternoon. She and Ruby are already in their pyjamas and watching a movie in bed, just let her have a sleepover.’ Emily’s voice was hoarse, her eyes rimmed with dark shadows.

  I nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Cameron seems better,’ she said.

  He did – groggy but coherent. ‘Yes. Let’s see what the EEG tomorrow shows.’ They wanted to check for epilepsy and have a review with the neurologist. They also wanted to talk to the hospital’s psychiatrist; I was not going to miss that.

  I kissed Cameron goodnight, promising to be back in the morning, and nodded at Emily then left the hospital.

  * * *

  It was dark outside. I walked to the multi-storey car park where I’d parked this morning and as I closed the car door behind me, I folded my arms on the steering wheel and lay my head down. My mouth was dry. I wished Tilly was home. The house was going to be empty and my own company was always the most dangerous when I was upset. My mouth began to salivate with the thought of the taste of a gin and tonic: slightly bitter, cold liquid sliding down my throat. It would take away some of this tension, let me relax and think clearly. And before I knew it, my mind had jumped forward and I could feel the relaxation and exhilaration and excitement of hitting that button, spinning that wheel, feeling like a winner even just for the briefest of time.