by Dani Atkins
I swallowed, but my mouth was so dry, even that didn’t feel normal.
‘Good morning. Can I help you?’ The receptionist was young and smiley; her voice was the sing-song chant airline check-in staff have in films, but rarely in real life.
‘Hello. My name is Chloe Turner and I’ve—’
‘Ah, Mrs Turner, good. We’ve been expecting you.’ She reached for a clipboard, on which I saw a patient information sheet bearing my name. I should have felt heartened by the efficiency. I should be feeling grateful for the wheels that had turned, and stops that had been pulled out, to get me this early appointment. Bizarrely, I realised I would far rather have been left waiting for hours to be seen, or sent back home because a patient with a case more urgent than mine required treatment. As I followed a nurse down the hallway to an examination room, I realised sadly that today that patient was probably me.
The room was empty. In one corner there was an examination table covered by a roll of paper, on the other side of the room was a desk with two chairs lined up beside it. I went for the chairs.
‘Is anyone here with you today?’ the nurse asked, her eyes going to the vacant seat beside me.
‘No. I came alone. Should I have brought someone?’ I tried to read her face to judge if coming alone was a bad thing.
‘No. Some people like to have someone with them; others prefer to do this kind of thing by themselves.’ I almost asked her then what this kind of thing was, but I was suddenly afraid I knew the answer to that one. ‘Someone will be in to see you shortly.’
There wasn’t much in the room to occupy or distract me. The wall behind the desk was dominated by a huge poster depicting the anatomy of the human brain. I tried to dispel my mounting fear by telling myself it looked no more sinister than the pieces of coral we’d seen on holiday while snorkelling in the warm waters of the ocean. I closed my eyes and let my memories carry me back to days bathed in sunshine, the smell of the sea and suncream lingering like perfume on the air. Where the only worry you had was what cocktail you wanted to try next.
The door opened and I came back to reality with an unpleasant jolt. A tall man with a slight stoop, iron-grey hair and a neatly groomed moustache entered the room. I committed his features to memory, as though I might later be called on to pick him out of a line-up. He was the first neurologist I had ever seen. I strongly suspected that he wouldn’t be the last.
Dr Higgins was softly spoken, everything he said sounded almost like an apology. I found myself craning forward at every question he asked, anxious not to miss anything. I craned a lot, because he had a great many questions. And when they were finally done, the physical examination began. He looked into my eyes with a machine similar to one the optician had used. He asked me to touch my nose with my index finger – and then with every other finger in turn. I felt like a particularly unexciting circus performer as Dr Higgins and his team of doctors studied me silently as I did as he asked. Sometimes he nodded, occasionally he muttered an encouraging noise, but at no time did he suddenly interrupt the examination by interjecting Oh, this is absolutely nothing at all for you to worry about. He was clearly a doctor who didn’t believe in lying to his patients.
‘I think at this point, we need to arrange for you to have a CT scan, to give us a better idea of what exactly is going on.’
I should have been expecting this, I was expecting this, and yet I still felt my heart sink. ‘Today?’
Dr Higgins looked almost startled by my question. ‘Yes indeed, today.’
‘It’s just . . .’ I started, knowing how ridiculous my next words were going to sound. ‘I didn’t know how long I was going to be here. I only paid for three hours’ car parking.’
Several of the team of junior doctors smiled kindly at me at that, which only made me feel more foolish.
‘Perhaps one of the nurses could arrange for someone to get you a different ticket,’ Dr Higgins suggested, already heading for the door. ‘I’ll see you later, after your scan.’
It was just as well they found a work experience student to top up my car park ticket. I’m not sure I could have entirely trusted myself to go back to my car, keys in hand, and not drive away, in a last-ditch attempt to pretend that none of this was happening.
Instead, while the helpful schoolgirl was extending my ticket, I was changing into a hospital gown in the radiology department. Now was when I needed Ryan to be there. Now I needed him beside me, cracking some stupid joke about how sexy I looked in my pale blue coverall, still wearing my knee-high leather boots. I needed that humour, I needed that humanisation, I needed . . . I needed him.
My first thought on entering the room beside the ginger-haired radiographer was that the CT machine looked like a giant polo mint. It was a better comparison than thinking of it as a huge gaping white mouth, waiting to swallow me up. I climbed onto the motorised bed, trying to concentrate on the instructions the radiographer – ‘Call me Mike’ – was giving, and knowing that nothing was really going in. Mike had clearly seen that kind of rabbit-in-the-headlights fear before. ‘Pretty much all you have to do is lie down and not move,’ he said, giving my forearm a gentle squeeze. ‘It’ll be over before you know it.’
Lunchtime came and went. Someone brought me a sandwich, but I never even bothered breaking the cellophane seal. As soon as I returned to the neurology ward, I tried to phone Ryan. Having fought – and lost – a battle with my conscience about worrying him, the disappointment at not being able to reach him crushed me like a boulder. I held several conversations with his voicemail, each one sounding a little less nonchalant than the one before. I didn’t want to alarm him, so I never said where I was calling from, just asked him to phone me as soon as he got the message. Two hours later, I’d still heard nothing, despite employing every means of contact my phone was capable of performing.
The hands of the clock were creeping menacingly around the dial, and at quarter past two, when I was still waiting to see Dr Higgins, I finally asked a passing nurse if she knew when I’d be able to leave. ‘You see, I didn’t realise I’d need to be here this long, and I have to pick up my little girl from school very soon.’
I wasn’t sure whether her look of pity was because of the length of my wait, or for what the doctors would tell me when they did eventually return. ‘I’m sorry, there’s no way of saying how much longer it will be. Could someone else collect her? Your husband, perhaps?’
My smile was tight. It wasn’t the poor woman’s fault that I had no idea where Ryan was, or why he wasn’t picking up his messages. Why hadn’t I listened properly when he’d mentioned being out of the office today? Probably because I’d been too preoccupied thinking about what my own day would entail. It was only now I wished I’d paid better attention to the details of his.
At two thirty, I knew I was going to have to call in a favour and ask someone else to collect Hope for me. My phone directory held the numbers of the mothers I chatted to most frequently at the school gates. There were several who I was sure would be more than happy to take Hope back home that afternoon. But as my finger scrolled down the list of names, I already knew that I wouldn’t be asking any of them.
She answered on the second ring, almost as if she’d been sitting by her phone, waiting for my call. ‘Hello, Maddie, it’s Chloe. I have a huge favour to ask you.’
Maddie
‘I have a huge favour to ask you.’
She was the last person I’d been expecting to hear from. After inviting me to join them on the shoe-shopping trip, I suspected Chloe’s to-do list had a big fat tick beside ‘Include Maddie in something’. I wasn’t expecting a repeat performance, and certainly not one so soon.
‘Go on,’ I urged.
‘I’m at . . . an appointment, and it’s overrun, and I was wondering—’ I didn’t catch the rest of that sentence for it was lost under a peculiar loud trundling noise. Wherever Chloe was calling from, it was certainly noisy.
‘Sorry. Could you say that again?’
&nbs
p; ‘It doesn’t look as if I’m going to get away from here in time to pick up Hope from school, and I was wondering if there was any chance you could collect her and take her back to yours?’
There was something in her voice that should probably have alerted me, even that early, but I was honestly too taken aback by her suggestion to figure out what it was.
‘Of course I can.’
‘You know where the school is?’
‘Yes. Ryan pointed it out when he picked me up to babysit that time.’
There was clear guilt in Chloe’s voice. ‘I’m really sorry to be calling on you at the last minute once again.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m really happy that you asked me.’
‘I thought about asking one of the other mums,’ Chloe began, artlessly making it clear I hadn’t been her first choice, ‘but I don’t know how long—’
‘Mrs Turner?’ interrupted a voice from somewhere nearby. Chloe must have placed her hand over her phone, but not effectively enough to muffle the words, for I managed to hear her say: ‘Just one moment.’ In the background a bell began to ring, well, more of a beeping alarm than a bell. Wherever she was, it certainly sounded chaotic.
‘Sorry, Maddie. I’m going to have to go. I’ll get word to Ryan and he’ll pick Hope up from you later, but I don’t know when that will be exactly.’
‘It’s no problem. Tell him whenever it suits him will be fine.’ Chloe made a small sound, which might have been a cough. Then again, it might not. ‘Chloe?’ I said, aware that I was stepping forward onto ice so thin it was sure to crack beneath my feet. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes. Everything’s perfect,’ she said, and this time I heard the thread of a sob in her voice. ‘I have to go now. I need to phone the school and let them know you’ll be collecting her.’
‘Oh, right. Do I need to take ID?’
This time she did laugh, though it was heavily laced with irony. ‘I think your face is identification enough.’
‘Okay. Right, well, I guess I’ll see Ryan later then.’
They were words I’m sure his wife never wanted to hear me say, but she allowed them to slide straight over her, as though they simply didn’t matter any more. ‘Take good care of Hope. Tell her everything is fine and I’ll see her soon.’
That’s when I knew that, whatever was going on, it wasn’t fine at all. I stood in the quiet of my lounge staring at my phone long after Chloe had gone. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to share her secrets with me. It’s not as if we were exactly friends; our connection was far closer, and far more distant than that. It was so unique, it didn’t even have a name. Chloe might have thought she’d been speaking in carefully guarded riddles, but the background noise, the soundtrack of the last six years of my life, had revealed her location to me. Chloe was in a hospital, and for reasons she chose not to share with me, I realised something was very, very wrong.
‘You’re okay waiting here for me?’ I asked, as I climbed out of the car. The Uber driver reached for a folded newspaper on the passenger seat. ‘Sure. No worries.’
I pushed open the heavy metal gate that led to the school playground and walked towards the clusters of mothers congregated around the school’s exit. I saw several heads turn my way. There were a couple of faces I recognised from Hope’s birthday party, but if I’d ever known any of their names, I’d certainly forgotten them by now. A few people smiled vaguely in my direction, but no one invited me to join them, so I stood a little apart in the cold January afternoon and enjoyed my very first experience of collecting my daughter from school.
From somewhere within the building I heard the distant trill of a bell, and then several moments later a middle-aged woman came to the glass doors, threw them open and an excitable horde of primary school children dashed past her into the playground to find their parents.
The first wave of escapees didn’t include Hope, so I silently skirted behind the throng and approached the door from the side. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the slightly harassed-looking teacher who was on door sentry duty. ‘I’m here to collect—’
‘Hope Turner,’ she finished for me. ‘Her mother called a short while ago. Hope’s just getting her coat on.’ She glanced back into the building, checking that Hope wasn’t already there. ‘I do hope everything is all right. Mrs Turner sounded a bit . . . stressed.’
‘Everything is fine,’ I said, as I caught sight of my pretty little girl hurtling down the corridor towards the doorway, coat undone and pigtails flying. She cannoned into me, and flung her arms around my waist as though it had been far longer than twenty-four hours since we’d last seen each other. I held her close, savouring this special moment, which Chloe got to experience every single day. ‘Everything is absolutely fine,’ I reiterated to Hope’s teacher, proving there was yet one more thing that Hope’s two very different mothers had in common: we were both pretty good at lying.
‘Is this one your bedroom?’ asked Hope, barrelling into that room, like a sniffer dog following a scent. She jumped onto my double bed, trampolining on it in her thick grey school socks, in a way I was pretty sure wasn’t allowed in her own home.
She executed a fairly impressive seat-drop onto my duvet and then stopped suddenly. The mattress rippled from the impact, but her attention was on the twin bedside cabinets and the collection of framed photographs upon them. Too late, I realised my mistake.
‘It’s me!’ she cried joyfully, her eyes going to the collection of snaps I’d extracted from the album Ryan had created for me.
‘It is you,’ I agreed, holding out my hand, hoping to entice her away from the bed, but I should have known I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
‘And that’s Daddy!’ she cried. I nodded, feeling the tiniest bit sick, for Hope’s eyes were riveted on the photograph I should have had the good sense to have hidden away. ‘And it’s you,’ she exclaimed, her voice a curious blend of surprise and confusion. It was one of the last photographs taken of us together, on our final holiday. The holiday when Hope had been conceived – a fact she was definitely never going to hear from me.
Ryan’s arms were around me in the photo, and we were half turned towards each other. I remember that he’d kissed me only seconds before that photograph had been taken, and my lips were still parted and pink, as though waiting for more. Every other photograph of us had been securely locked away in an old suitcase, but this one, when we were both so obviously in love, so obviously together, refused to stay hidden. It screamed out to me from the bottom of my jumper drawer. It called from the depths of the back of the wardrobe. The only way to silence it was to allow it to sit beside my bed as a reminder of things that once were, and would never be again. But how do you explain that to a six-year-old?
It turned out you didn’t have to. ‘Daddy’s hair looks funny. But you look pretty,’ she declared innocently, turning away from the frame and leaping off my bed like a small Russian gymnast. ‘Can I have a snack?’
‘You can have anything you want,’ I said, which I’m sure no parenting manual will tell you to say. But what the hell.
Chloe
There’s a phrase I’ve often read in books which talks about a phone ringing urgently. It’s always struck me as an odd description. A ring is surely just a ring; it has no ability to convey emotion. And yet when Ryan finally called me back, the ring wasn’t just urgent, it was imperative.
‘Chloe?’ My name had become a question, a whole jumble of questions, but I knew which one he needed answering first.
‘Hope is absolutely fine,’ I reassured him.
I heard the exhalation and his relief. ‘Where are you? Is something wrong?’
I’d practised how to tell him in the hours while I waited for his call, and yet when I finally had my cue, I fluffed my lines, getting them all wrong.
‘I don’t want you to panic—’ That was a terrible way to start. Of course he was going to panic, when a sentence began like that.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Has there been an accident?’ Ryan’s voice was heavy with dread. Naturally that’s what he would think. How could a man see the woman he loved thrown through the air after colliding with a van, and not automatically assume that was the worst thing that could ever happen?
‘No. It’s not an accident. I . . . I had an appointment here today.’
‘You did? What for? Why didn’t you tell me?’ And then, before I could stop him, he jumped to completely the wrong conclusion. ‘Are you . . . Are we going to have . . . ?’
Stupid, stupid, me. We’d been talking about trying for a baby, and although we’d put those plans on hold after Maddie woke up, it was still an understandable mistake for him to have made.
‘No. It’s not that. I wish it was. I’m in the Neurology Unit.’
‘Are you hurt?’ The concern was back in his voice.
‘No. They’re doing some tests. It would be . . .’ And that’s when I started to cry. ‘It would be really good if you could get here as soon as possible.’
I don’t want to think how fast he drove to achieve it, but he was there quick enough to have left a trail of speed camera fines behind him. I heard his voice asking for me, and moments later he was standing in the doorway, his eyes the only colour in a face bleached of all pigment.
The nurse who’d led him to the bay where I was waiting, faded away like a ghost. I swung my legs off the bed I was lying on, but he was quicker, covering the distance between us in a blur and gathering me into his arms. We didn’t speak for what felt like minutes, we just stood, clinging to each other like shipwreck survivors before the collision.