by Emily Elgar
It takes me a moment to wrap my head around that one. How can she be pregnant, here on 9B? And more to the point, she looks like a half-crushed beetle on her back; she barely survived, how could a tiny baby? Besides, medically speaking, I reckon she’s even worse off than me. Even coma patients are in a hierarchy. She’s GCS 4 so her consciousness is off on a jaunt, god knows where, but her body is here, and unless my ears are going the way of the rest of me, or unless I misheard Alice, she is pregnant. I will her to be brave, wherever she is down her rabbit hole.
Alice leaves Cassie after a few minutes, pushing the ultrasound back to its place, before going straight back to Cassie. I think I can hear Alice’s excitement ringing through her footsteps, the movement of her stride.
Be careful, Alice, look after yourself, please look after yourself.
I focus on my breathing machine, and count along with the breaths, like the sound of the sea on the shore, it calms me and I remember, all those years ago, how it was when Ange was pregnant. I was even clumsier than normal around her. Sometimes, usually if someone else was around, she’d grab my hand and I’d feel the baby kick. It made me queasy, and panic would rise up like bile as I looked up at Ange’s smiling face and the creature in my shadow would start licking its paws. Then Lucy was born, pink and squirming, and one of the nurses said, ‘She looks like you, Mr Ashcroft. She looks like her daddy.’ At that moment I felt the world slide into exquisite focus, like slotting the final colour into place on a Rubik’s Cube. The creature slept and I felt clear, organised.
‘I am your daddy,’ I said to her red, puffy little face and then she did her first pee on me, which, in years to come, would make Lucy laugh and laugh every time I told the story of her birth. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Alice told me Lucy came every day for the first few weeks, when I was like Cassie, deep somewhere I can’t explain, but Lucy can’t visit so much now. The University College London were good to her and gave her some time off during the first couple of weeks I was in here. I miss her, of course, but I’m pleased she’s back in London, focusing on her degree. She’s the first from either family to go to university. She’s studying English Literature. I want to get better to tell her I’m proud of her, of course I do, but when blinking an eyelid seems like a fantasy, the thought of saying words feels delusional.
Still, Alice always seems to think there’s hope. ‘It takes time, Frank,’ she always reminds me. ‘It takes time.’
Alice stays with Cassie, even after Paula has arrived. She massages her hand, trying to tease blood into her muscles so they don’t petrify too quickly.
I watch them, still trying to wrap my head around the news, silent as the moon, when the ward doors sigh open and I hear voices at reception, a low, urgent man’s voice first and Paula’s laconic response, lazy as chewing gum. I watch as Alice places Cassie’s hand carefully back onto her bed, alert suddenly. I haven’t heard the man’s voice before and I don’t think Alice recognises it either.
Suddenly, the floor squeals like it’s alive as a tall, fair-haired man runs down the ward and into my view. He skips to a stop outside our curtains, ignoring Paula’s shouts behind him. His hair is wild and even from here I can see that his breathing is fast and his heart is beating, like something winged and panicked. His eyes meet mine for just a second; they’re electric. He has the blanched, unpredictable look of someone who has no idea what they’re doing, like a new swimmer who’s just let go of the edge. Then he turns towards Cassie’s curtain, so I can only see the back of his head. Alice is too quick, her instinct to protect far stronger than his wired energy. She closes the curtain behind her and puts herself between the curtain and the man. Paula shouts that she’s calling security, but neither Alice or the man look at her; they’re staring at each other. Alice’s face is rigid, sharp and uncompromising as a knife. His breath is long and laboured now, like something slowly dying.
‘We need someone on nine B immediately, there’s an intruder here,’ Paula says into the receiver.
‘Let me see her,’ he says, like he’s commanding Alice, but Alice stands firm. She won’t let him any closer.
‘Security will be here any second,’ Paula shouts down the ward towards Alice.
‘Please, let me see her?’ he asks again, but this time, there’s begging in his voice.
Alice shakes her head slowly at him.
Careful, Alice.
‘My colleague told you; it’s past visiting hours. We don’t let people run onto our ward, demanding to see patients in our care. Who are you?’ Her voice is like a hand on his chest, pushing him away from getting any closer to Cassie.
The man rakes a hand through his hair, shakes his head, as though it hadn’t crossed his mind he’d meet with any resistance.
‘I’m a friend of Cassie’s, her neighbour. I found her, I found her in the stream. I’ve been at the police station all day, so I couldn’t come any earlier so I just thought … I just thought I’d try and see her now. I haven’t slept for thirty-six hours. I just need to see her.’
They both turn towards the tap, tap of hard shoes running down the ward. He turns back to Alice and I don’t hear what the man says above the crackle of radios and Paula shouting, ‘There, he’s over there!’
Alice faces the man again and I watch as her face folds into a frown, and I know that whatever he’s just said doesn’t make sense to Alice.
‘What are you talking about?’ she asks, but it’s too late. A security man in black uniform is upon him, and it’s clear he’s all out of fight as he holds his hands up in submission.
‘Sorry, sorry, this was a bad idea,’ he says to Alice and he starts to walk away with the security man. Alice’s eyes stay firmly fixed on his back as he leaves and I hear him as he apologises to Paula before the ward doors open again and he’s gone. Alice doesn’t move for a few moments. She’s biting her bottom lip and it’s only then that I notice that Alice isn’t as calm as she appears, that Cassie’s curtain is shaking where Alice holds it, twisted taut around her hand.
6
Cassie
Underneath the hopeful smell of new wood, and the chemical funk of whatever Jack used to stop it rotting, the shed still smells fuggy to Cassie, of rust, lawnmowers and long-forgotten garden tools. Jack started calling it her ‘studio’ but she teased him for being pretentious; it is still, after all, just a shed, with its hollow floor and the whorls in the wood that pop like psychedelic eyes. Cassie thinks April would have approved.
Nicky’s the first person to see the shed since they finished doing it up a couple of days ago. The door creaks on its hinges as Cassie and Nicky step from the sunny March day into the dark folds of Cassie’s current favourite room in the whole of Steeple Cottage.
‘It’s still a work in progress,’ Cassie says, a little shy suddenly, as though she needs her old school friend to know it’s going to get even better. ‘There’s more I want to do.’
‘Oh, Cas!’ Nicky sighs her name, long and airy as she looks around the small rectangular space. Cassie and Jack spent a few days clearing out the shed, stripping back the old wood, patching up areas that had started to rot. Jack said he could only take one day off from work to help, so Cassie did the decorating on her own. She’d laid one of April’s thin Moroccan rugs on the floor, hammered in nails for her painting utensils and carefully unpacked her mum’s and her own painting boxes and canvases. Eventually the sharp smell of oil paints would mask the grimy whiff of engine oil, and the shed would – to Cassie at least – maybe even smell like home.
‘The view’s the best bit,’ Cassie says, a high-pitched excitement back in her voice as she takes Nicky’s hand and leads her to the little window on the far side of the shed. They have to step around April’s old easel that stands proud on its spindly legs in the middle of the shed misshapen by dried globs of paint, the once-bright layers now the colour of mulch.
Nicky drops her long white arm over Cassie’s shoulders and Cassie snakes an arm loosely around her friend�
��s waist as the two women stand to face the window that frames a view of the Sussex Downs, the curvature of the hills gentle as sleeping giants.
‘It’s amazing, Cas.’
‘I know … I can’t believe I get to paint here every day if I want.’
‘Not just this, but the whole thing, meeting Jack, moving here. All of it.’ Nicky lifts her arm off Cassie’s shoulders and as she turns to face her friend, Cassie notices Nicky’s blue eyes are glossed with emotion, but her thin, lightly freckled lips smile. They’ve talked about it many times before, of course, how meeting Jack eighteen months ago has led to Cassie slowly gluing her broken life back together like fragments of a dropped vase, patched up to create an unexpected but more beautiful design.
‘It’s really cool, Cas.’
Cassie smiles gratefully; Nicky never gives compliments half-heartedly. She wants to find a way to tell her friend the same thing could happen to her without sounding patronising, but before she finds the words, Nicky starts talking again, the sparkle back in her voice.
‘I mean, imagine how different everything would have been if you’d stayed with Robbie, or worse, that weird hip-hop DJ … what was his name again?’
‘Daz.’
‘Yeah, that was it. Daz. God, he was weird.’ Nicky scoffs and, turning back to the view, says, ‘By the way, Beth said it’s true Robbie got some poor teenager pregnant and has left her to raise the kid on her own.’
Cassie thinks – as she always does whenever someone mentions a young, single parent – of her mum, and she feels her joy dampen. She doesn’t want to think about her mum now; she wants Nicky to keep sharing in the delight of ‘Mrs Cassie Jensen’s’ new life. It’s unsettling talking about her old life here, like remembering a long-forgotten unfriendly acquaintance, someone buried in the past.
Cassie finds she can’t stay still, so she turns away as Nicky slouches against the window and starts telling Cassie about Beth’s new boyfriend. Cassie busies herself, picks up her newly washed painting apron – one of Jack’s old shirts – from the floor, and hangs it back on the nail she hammered in yesterday. She flicks some invisible dirt from the white, silky heads of her new paintbrushes. She waits for a pause in Nicky’s story then pulls Nicky’s arm and, pointing at a wooden box on the old table, says, ‘Check these oils out, Charlotte gave them to me. They’re amazing. Look.’ But as Cassie goes to open the box, she can feel Nicky’s attention is pulled elsewhere.
She’s looking at the two canvases Cassie propped up on the ridge that runs along the inside of the shed. The canvases are small, just a foot square; Cassie painted them in a late-night frenzy in Marcus’s cottage on the Isle of Wight, just days after April told her she had stage-four breast cancer.
Nicky pauses in front of them, but doesn’t say anything. Both canvases are covered in violent reds in various shades that rip and swirl across the surface. In the far-right corner there’s an outline of a small figure. She’s facing away from the viewer, her frame just a thin layer of indigo in all the red. In the second canvas, the figure is sitting down. Her hands cradle her chin; her gaze is fixed somewhere outside the canvas, staring at something unknowable to anyone but her. The canvases seem naive, childish to Cassie now, as though her grief was a bit naff. She should have put something more cheery, something springlike, up in here.
She wishes Nicky would stop staring. She can see a flicker – something not far off amusement – in her friends’ face. The indigo figure is so clearly Cassie: an old, sadder version of Cassie.
Cassie wrinkles her nose at the canvases. ‘I’m going to replace those.’ In fact, she wishes she could start pulling the canvases down right now, but grief always adds a sombre significance to even the simplest thing. If she took them down now, Nicky would worry that Cassie was hiding from the past, not grieving ‘well’ enough.
Honestly, managing others was far more exhausting than the thudding loss itself.
At last, Nicky turns towards Cassie. ‘Has Jack seen them?’
Cassie can’t remember showing them to Jack, these souvenirs from her old life, but she says, ‘Yeah, I think so. Why?’
‘Oh, no reason really.’ Nicky turns back to the canvases. ‘I just remember when you first met, you found it hard to talk about April with him.’
‘No, I didn’t, Nick. I told him about Mum on our first date, you know that.’ Cassie feels a queasy twinge of irritation; sometimes it feels like Nicky’s searching for drama.
Jack and Cassie met at a friend’s party, just a couple of months before April died. Cassie, made wild by her mum’s illness, had drunk so much she was sick, but Jack had still asked for her number and kept sending her the odd text until three months after April died. It was Nicky who had persuaded Cassie to put on some mascara and go for a drink with Jack. He’d been living in Islington but came down to meet her in her Brixton local on a rainy Tuesday evening.
Cassie had wanted to leave as soon as they arrived. She’d been feeling fractious; pissed off with Nicky for making her agree to a date, and pissed off with herself for not definitively refusing his offer.
‘So how’s the painting going?’ Jack had asked.
There was a big group of blokes in the pub, rugby types, slamming their fists on their table, laughing as though they were in competition with each other to have the best time. Jack had ignored them, and kept his eyes fixed on Cassie, as though he could wait forever for her answer. He’d wait for a long time; Cassie wasn’t prepared to tell a stranger how she cried every time she tried to paint, how she’d resigned herself to a mind-numbing future in soul-sucking admin jobs.
She’d taken a couple of big gulps of red wine and once the other table had quietened down she’d said, ‘Look, Jack, I’m really sorry. I probably should have cancelled tonight. The thing is that I’ve had a shitty few months – well, a shitty couple of years actually – and I thought I was ready to go for a drink, but, really, I’m not, so maybe we could do this another time?’
He’d nodded slowly again, and had looked down at his pint briefly as if deciding what to say before he’d asked, ‘Is your mum still ill?’
The pub had seemed to swell around Cassie before it shrunk to normal again; she must have told him April had cancer when she was drunk. Her jaw had felt rusty as she’d tried to answer; she’d felt it move like a ventriloquist’s dummy as she’d fired two words at him like arrows.
‘She’s dead.’
But Jack hadn’t looked away, or shifted in his seat. He’d just kept calmly looking at Cassie, as if her two hard monosyllables hadn’t hit him, as if they hadn’t even grazed his skin. Her tragedy hadn’t made him uncomfortable, not like everyone else.
Instead, he’d kept his eyes on Cassie. He’d cleared his throat gently. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Cas. My dad died when I was fourteen. It’s still, twenty years on, the hardest thing that’s ever happened to me.’
‘Your dad died?’ She’d almost heard the hinge of her jaw creak around the words.
‘Heart attack,’ Jack had said simply. ‘He was the hero of my life, really. I idolised him. When did your mum die?’
Fat tears rolled in waves down Cassie’s cheeks; she hadn’t bothered wiping them away, and they’d disappeared under her T-shirt. Jack had handed her a napkin from the dispenser on their table.
‘July twelfth, eleven weeks and three days ago.’
‘So you’ve had, what, twenty-seven years believing she was always going to be in your life and less than three months trying to get your head around the fact she’s not alive any more. I’m not surprised you’re not ready to sit in a noisy pub with someone you don’t know that well.’
Cassie had blinked at him across the table. Suddenly, she’d felt like giving him a chance.
‘Most people don’t get it at all. They think they can fix things with tea and sympathy and it’s like they’re pissed off with me that they can’t; they think it’s my fault somehow that they don’t make me feel better.’
‘I remember that. I got so
fucked off with people avoiding the fact that what felt like the worst thing in the world had happened. I was a right little shit for a while. The thing is, I think grief makes people uncomfortable. It’s so final, so unfixable. That’s why it scares people shitless; they’re just trying to make it better for themselves and for you.’
‘I know, but they’re not.’
‘Of course they’re not, they can’t. Often, through no fault of their own, they make it worse. It’s belittling; they think grief can be cured with a biscuit. Most people don’t understand. Grieving is a kind of art. You have to let yourself be creative with it, own it. You can’t let other people tell you how to do it, otherwise it won’t be done right and you might end up in a pickle.’ Jack had paused before he’d asked, ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘I’m laughing because what you just said is the best thing I’ve heard in weeks and you ended it with the phrase “in a pickle”.’
Jack had looked at Cassie and blinked. ‘Shit. That’s exactly the sort of thing my mum would say.’
Cassie had wiped her damp cheeks and neck with the napkin. She’d liked the way Jack had interlaced his fingers around his pint glass, and she’d liked his hands, big, firm hands, the sort of hands she could imagine holding her. She’d wanted to carry on looking at those beautiful, safe hands, and she’d wanted to carry on talking to Jack.
‘There’s a pizza place around the corner. They give you a fiver off if you can finish their calzone. We could give it a shot if you’re hungry?’ Cassie had asked.
Jack had drained the last of his pint in one go and stood up from the table. ‘Starving.’
Three months later, Jack had moved into Cassie’s Brixton flat, three months after that they were engaged and now eighteen months from that rainy evening in the pub, Jack is making lunch in their beautiful, newly converted three-bedroomed cottage.