by Susan Gandar
THEY WERE IN THE intensive care unit and she was walking, head down, eyes fixed on the scuffed heels of her mother’s brown leather boots, because she was scared of what she was going to see when eventually they stopped – and she would have to raise her head and look. They passed one bed, two beds, three beds; there was a scrape, a shuffle, a murmur of voices and then her mother’s feet disappeared underneath a chair.
Sam raised her head and stared. She kept on staring in the hope, that if she stared long enough and hard enough, her eyes would swallow up the nightmare; the man, his body punctured with tubes, lying on the bed. She looked more closely. She searched for detail but the more she looked, the more she saw, the pallid skin, the sweat-soaked hair, the blue veins on the back of the hand, the less she could believe, and the less she wanted to believe, that this thing, that was barely human, that looked like a robot out of a sci-fi film, was her father.
Sam glanced over to where her mother was sitting, back straight, eyes wide, her hands clamped onto her handbag as though her life, their lives, the whole world as they knew it, depended on the continued existence of the handbag and everything in it.
Sam recognised that need. It was exactly the same need that had made her get up off the floor, walk over to the sink, pick up the plastic bowl and then go back down to kneel beside her father, holding out the bowl towards him, so that, please, if he was going to be sick, then could he do so, not all over himself, the cupboards and the floor, but into the plastic bowl – so that everything could be kept nice and neat and clean and tidy.
But nothing was nice and neat and clean and tidy. Her father, the same father who hadn’t hesitated to risk his own life in order to save hers, was now lying, hooked up to machines, in the intensive care unit of the local hospital.
Years ago, when she was old enough to have a memory, but not old enough to put that memory into any context, they had gone, the three of them, herself, her mother and her father, out for the day to a village where some distant, long dead, relative used to live. At that age she had very little understanding of how short or long a minute, an hour, even a day, was. A month was completely incomprehensible, a year even more so. Time was measured by how happy, unhappy or, even, how bored she was. An unhappy minute could seem longer than a day, a happy hour shorter than a minute. But Sam knew she was quite happy, even very happy, as happy as she’d ever been, sitting there, looking out of the window, the sunlight flooding in, listening to music while her parents laughed and chatted away to each other in the front of the car.
They got to where they were supposed to be going. They visited a church, stared at a gravestone and then had something to eat. Whether it was lunch or tea she couldn’t remember. The next memory she had was walking between her mother and father along a path, then up a steep flight of steps onto a narrow, wooden bridge. A whistle and a hoot echoed up the valley. They stopped to wave as an old steam train rattled past on the other side of the river.
To the right, the river flowed slow and smooth while, to her left, it tumbled down a weir. And then, for some reason, instantly, there and then, she was filled with a desperation that could not be explained. She tugged, hard, even violently, she might even have kicked out, her father let go of her hand and she plunged down, off the bridge and into the river.
She was under the water, and then she was on top of it. And then she was under it again. She surfaced, gulping for air. People were running up and down the riverbank. A motorboat, a white one, was speeding towards her. The last thing she saw, as the river closed over her head, was her father diving off the bridge into the water.
Her next memory was opening her eyes to find herself lying on the ground with a crowd of people looking down at her. There were nods and smiles. Someone asked if they should call an ambulance. Her father said no, everything was fine, thank you. And then the people wandered off – and her mother started. And she went on and on, all the way to the car and all the way home. Sam could have drowned. Her father had to dive in to save her. He could have been killed.
That evening, back at home, her father came up to her room. He sat down on the bed beside her.
‘Sam, you mustn’t be upset. Mummy only said the things she said because she loves you and she’s terrified of losing you.’
He squeezed her hand.
‘Those invisible friends, the ones you used to see in your bedroom in our old house…’
What they looked like, their names, she had no memory of them, nothing at all.
‘If they do come back, if you see them again, you will tell us, won’t you?’
What she could remember was waking up in a bedroom she didn’t recognise, in a house she didn’t know, and being told that this was her new home.
‘Will we have to move again?’
Her father laughed.
‘I hope not.’
He stood up.
‘You mustn’t worry. But what happened today, on the bridge, was a bit strange…’
She didn’t then, all those years ago, translate into words the feeling of desperation that had flooded through her while she was walking across that bridge on that sunny Saturday afternoon. Everything had been so perfect, so peaceful, and then suddenly, without any warning, out of nowhere, all that had mattered, her mother’s laughter, the touch of her father’s hand, the warmth of the sun on her face, all of it became meaningless.
Yesterday, the three of them had been a happy family. And now the same thing had happened. Joy and pleasure had, in a blink of an eye, been replaced by misery and despair.
‘It would be best if you went home now. Have something to eat, get some rest.’
The young doctor who had talked to the two of them so briskly in the accident and emergency department was standing, sleeves rolled up, stethoscope still draped round his neck, at the head of her father’s bed.
‘Tomorrow at ten we’ll go through the results of the scan. We’ll ring if there’s any change.’
SIXTEEN
HER MOTHER REMAINED SILENT, not speaking a single word, eyes fixed on the road ahead, all the way back from the hospital.
When they passed the angel statue and turned left, off the promenade, to drive up the hill, the house was still there, standing in a row, with all the other houses. It was identical to the one she had left earlier that afternoon with her father in the ambulance.
It was the same height, and the same width, it had the same number of windows, the same front garden, and the same path leading up to the same front door. But at the same time it looked and felt completely different – it was a stranger to her. Another family lived there, another mother and father with a spiky blonde-haired daughter called Sam, not her own.
The curtains, which her mother had sewn together out of material she’d picked up at a car boot sale, were still hanging downstairs in the front window. In the summer, when all Sam wanted to do was spend every minute of every day down on the beach, the multi-coloured stripes fluttering cheerfully in the sunshine had encouraged her, waved her on, as she trudged up the hill after a very long and very boring day cooped up at school. Drooping there in the window, the same curtains now looked dreary, even desperate.
Her mother parked the car in the usual place. Still in silence, her mother ahead, Sam trailing along behind, they walked up the garden path towards the front door. Her mother put her key in the lock. Sam expected it to jam, the door to be opened by a woman who would look at them in puzzlement before telling them that they must have come to the wrong house.
The key turned and the door got stuck where it always got stuck. Her mother kicked and it opened. They walked into the hallway. There were the boots piled up in the basket to the right of the front door and the same coats, her dark blue one and her mother’s red and her father’s brown one, hanging up in their usual places.
The same poster of a white house with a scarlet door, and a balcony with a table and two chairs, looking out towards a turquoise sea, hung in its frame on the wall opposite the bottom of the stairs. Sam remembered her mot
her buying it. They’d been on holiday in Greece, staying on an island the name of which Sam couldn’t remember. Her mother had said it was the sort of house, in the sort of place, she’d like herself and Sam’s father to grow old in.
They walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. Sitting there sipping coffee and eating great big, thick, slabs of toast smothered with peanut butter was a Sunday morning tradition. Especially if Sam had stayed out late on Saturday night – it would be the glue that stuck her sleep-deprived body back together again. But that happy, homely, lounging around, doing nothing in particular Sunday morning sort of smell, and all the memories that went with it, had been swallowed up by another that was far stronger and more insistent.
‘Don’t bother to put the chicken into the fridge. Just leave it out. I’ll make that casserole. You must be starving. You haven’t eaten anything since breakfast …’
Sam slammed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. She ran along the landing and into her room. She threw herself down onto the bed. Her father was in hospital, lying there in the intensive care unit, hooked up to machines, and all her mother could talk about was food.
There was a knock.
‘Sam?
The door opened.
‘Are you all right?’
No, she wasn’t.
‘Shall I make you some tea?’
Tea was the last thing she wanted.
‘I’m fine, just really tired. I’ll come down later…’
The door closed.
She checked her mobile. The first message was from Katie asking if Sam was feeling better, that Leo really liked her and wanted to see her again. The next message was from Lou saying, in her own dreamy I’m-here-but-I’m-not-really-here sort of way, pretty much the same thing. The third was from Shelly and it was all about the boy at the fair, the short, stocky one who kept punching the air, what he’d said, what she’d said, what he’d done, what she’d done, on and on it went. Sam was about to turn the mobile off when she realised there was a fourth message, one she’d missed earlier:
“Sam. It’s Dad. I don’t know whether you’ll get this message – suspect you’re still in bed, fast asleep – which is where you should be at this time on a Sunday morning. Wish I was. But if you don’t it doesn’t matter because I’ll ring you again as soon as I get to the airport. It’s just that after what we talked about last night, about what Mum said, about me leaving, I just wanted to tell you that you really mustn’t worry. It will be all right. We’ll sort something out. Traffic’s moving so I’ve got to go. Love you lots. Always have. Always will.”
SEVENTEEN
ONE. TWO. PLEASE, NO, it couldn’t be. Three. Four. The clock chimed five. But what clock? And where? Because there was no such clock in the house, there never had been. Sam hauled herself out of bed. Where was she? Everything was wrong. This wasn’t her bedroom. The ceiling was too low and there was just one window. The floor was wooden and black rather than carpeted and brown. There was a fireplace instead of a radiator and just in front of her, where there should have been a door, there was a wall.
Her mind followed her legs over to a washstand. Her arms and hands poured water out of a jug into a bowl, picked up a rough cloth, soaked it in the lukewarm water and washed her face. They unbuttoned the top of her long-sleeved nightdress and, reaching down inside, gave each armpit a good scrub. They did the same between her legs. They dragged a comb through her hair and then tied it back in a ribbon.
A pile of clothes lay in a crumpled, unwashed heap on a rickety chair beside the bed. First one thick, black, wool stocking, then a second, was rolled up her leg and over her knee. Next were a pair of knickers that were so long and baggy they would have been too large for someone three times her size.
The nightdress she was wearing was tugged off and a sleeveless, knee-length slip pulled over her head. A corset was jerked up bit by bit over her hips until the top was digging into the skin below her breasts. She looked down, through somebody else’s eyes, powerless to stop what was happening, as her hands tightened the laces, forcing her chest out and her waist in.
Fingers she didn’t recognise did up the ten buttons on the long-sleeved, floor length, brown dress. They tied an apron securely around her waist. Her feet slid themselves into a pair of lace-up, black leather ankle boots lying on the floor beside a chair.
Her hands straightened the bed and plumped up the pillow. Her feet walked her over to the door. Her right hand opened it. On the floor, directly outside the bedroom, was a glass jar. Inside the jar was a single white rose.
Sam opened her eyes. Her heartbeat slowed. She was inside her own body, in her own room and she was lying on her bed. The ceiling was not too low. There were two windows and brown carpet on the floor. And the door leading out onto the landing was exactly where it should be, on the other side of the room. And it was seven o’clock at night. Not five o’clock in the morning.
She’d definitely heard those chimes. But her mother had always refused to have a grandfather clock or anything similar; the constant chiming, on the hour, every hour, would keep them awake all night. And the chimes had sounded very distant. As though they were coming from a long way down in a much larger house, the sort of house that had attics, a basement and several floors. Not the modern, brick box type of house Sam and her parents lived in.
She slid off the bed and padded over to the window. The lights along the promenade always came on at sunset, as late as eight o’clock in the summer and as early as four o’clock in the winter. Today was Sunday, it was November, and the wind was howling in off the sea and there they were, twinkling away off into the distance, even though there was nobody around.
The first time she’d been at the fair, on the ghost train, sitting in the cab with Leo. The second time, she’d been running down the road, trying to reach her father’s car. She hadn’t really thought about it, she’d been so worried about the accident, her father being in hospital, whether he would ever come home again, but now this slip into another world had happened again. And this time when she was asleep, in her bedroom, safe inside her own home.
She opened her bedroom door. There was no glass jar and no white rose. She padded down the landing. The door to her parents’ bedroom was closed. She raised her hand to knock and then lowered it. She should let her mother rest.
She went on, slowly, down through the silent house. The rain started as she entered the kitchen, a single drop, then several, then a squall. She pulled down the blind and closed the curtains.
It could have been any other Sunday evening. The kitchen was filled with the smell of her mother’s chicken casserole simmering in the oven. Apples, bananas and oranges were neatly stacked in the blue and white bowl her parents had brought back with them from Morocco and a bunch of lilies, pink ones, were sitting in a glass vase on top of the bookcase which contained her mother’s constantly expanding collection of cookery books.
A bottle of red wine was sitting there, opened and only partly finished. She poured herself a glass. She took one sip. And then a second sip. There were some lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and a packet of mixed peppers in the fridge. She would make a salad and then go upstairs and wake her mother.
She sliced up the green and then the red pepper. And she poured herself another glass of wine. She cut the cucumber into thick slices and then cut each individual slice into four. She poured herself a third glass of wine.
She couldn’t remember drinking her very first glass of wine. It was probably on holiday, with her parents, perhaps when they were on one of their camping trips in France. And the glass had probably contained more water than wine. But she could definitely remember smoking her first cigarette. Her mother was out, and her father putting up some shelves downstairs, when she sneaked out of her bedroom, down the landing and into her parents’ bedroom. She unzipped her mother’s handbag. She searched through all the tissues, used and unused, the soggy chocolate bars and the crumpled up parking tickets and shopping receipts until she found a lighter and
a packet of cigarettes.
She sneaked back down the hallway into her room. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with the door closed and the window wide open, she smoked first one, then two, then three. It was when Sam was smoking her sixth that she began to feel as if there was a cheese grater lodged inside her chest. She lit and then took a drag on the seventh. She stubbed it out. All she could taste, all she could smell, was cigarettes. They were in her hair, on her clothes; they were everywhere. There was no way either her mother or father, if they came into the bedroom, would not know, instantly, that she had been smoking.
She opened her bedroom door and crept down the corridor to her parents’ bedroom. She unzipped the handbag, put the cigarettes back where she’d found them and then zipped the handbag shut. She crept back down the hallway into her bedroom. It still stank. And the mug she’d been using as an ashtray was full of cigarette stubs.
Back out into the hallway, this time into the bathroom. She closed the door, locked it and then emptied the stubs into the toilet. She flushed and then flushed again. The stubs were still there. She closed her eyes, flushed again and then opened her eyes. They were still there, bobbing up and down in the bottom of the toilet. Someone tried the door handle. There was a knock. A voice, her father’s, asked if she was all right. She said nothing. He asked her to open the door. She did so. He walked into the bathroom, glanced down at the toilet and then turned to look at her. And he laughed.
Her parents hadn’t had an argument. No one had asked anyone to leave. Her mother and father were together and everything was going to be fine. It was somebody else’s father, not her own, who was in the intensive care unit. In just a few minutes, her mother would walk into the room and they would sit, the two of them together, at the kitchen table. Her mother would scold her for drinking the wine and then pour a glass for herself.
The phone would ring, her mother would answer it and it would be her father saying that he was in his hotel room and he was missing them. Her mother would hand her the phone and he would ask her how she was and what had she done that day. She wouldn’t tell him about the three glasses of wine she’d drunk. But he would guess – and he would laugh.