by Emily Koch
I have no idea how Bea got the job. She wasn’t anywhere near as sporty as the rest of us, and she made it clear that she didn’t want to be there. But her mum had forced her to apply – ‘I told her she wasn’t going to get many opportunities in life like that,’ Megan later told me. ‘I wanted my daughter to do everything I never did.’
It took another two years for us to get together, although if I’d had the balls I would have made my move much earlier. As always, I procrastinated. We didn’t stray beyond friendship that summer – but we were still inseparable. Bea and Rosie, another camp counsellor, bonded over their outrage at the no-alcohol-in-camp rule, and picked me up as their ally. They liked to look after me, seeing themselves as my big sisters, or something, even though they were only a few months older. Every morning, Bea made sure I put enough factor thirty on to stop my fair skin burning, and on a couple of occasions she put lemon juice in my red hair to try and bleach it. I didn’t get much of a say. Rosie attempted to improve my fashion sense, forcing me to throw away what she called my ‘offensively dreary’ T-shirts. They coached me in a futile effort to get another girl at camp to go out with me, suggesting chat-up lines and engineering situations for us to be alone together. I didn’t even like the girl particularly, but I went along with it because they seemed to enjoy themselves so much.
Bea and I would stay up late sometimes after Rosie had gone to bed, and she listened as I tried to make sense of what had happened shortly before we arrived in Canada. In the winter, my mum’s wish to die had been granted. It was her idea that I should take a year out before university. ‘You’ll need some time off after all this,’ she scribbled on her notepad, in one of her ‘when I’m not around’ written lectures, which I actively avoided. Bea listened for hours as I tried to get my head around it, and the few things she said always made me feel much better. It started as a shy drip of memories and obvious thoughts – ‘how is it fair that someone who never smoked in her life could get mouth cancer?’ and ‘my dad says he’s fine but I don’t think he is’ and ‘what do you think it feels like to die?’ But the drip became a burst main in September, when one of the children died in an accident in the camp swimming pool just before we were due to go home.
In the last evenings at camp, everyone was upset. We’d sit against the wall outside the back of the counsellors’ dorms, my arms around both Rosie’s and Bea’s shoulders, and their heads on my chest. We’d drink our smuggled beers and take it in turns to share a set of headphones to listen to our favourite songs of the summer. We’ve got to live like every day is our last, I’d say, and the girls would nod their heads against me, wiping away tears. I didn’t take that advice. I wasted far too much time before my accident: whole days spent hungover in front of the TV, weeks moping around the flat when I failed to get my act together and book a holiday during my annual leave, not to mention the years coasting as a reporter when I could have been pursuing my ambition to make documentaries.
Years later, our little gang of three was reunited when I moved back home to Bristol after graduating from UCL. By that time Bea and I were going out. She had been studying graphic design here while I was in London. Rosie ended up joining us after travelling through Europe as an English-as-a-foreign-language teacher. (‘If I’m coming back to the UK, I may as well live near you two.’) Our knot tightened when she got together with one of my climbing buddies, Tom. During my hospital incarceration the two of them were always welcome visitors – an entertaining double act. Before my accident, Bea would say to me that she wondered how other couples behaved behind closed doors. Were we different? Did we argue more? Did we have as much sex as everyone else? I got exactly the chance she would have loved – to be a fly on the wall in another relationship – when Tom and Rosie came in.
Not long after Bea told me about her grief counselling session, they visited me. My eyes were creased open for a few hours that day – only a slit. I didn’t have the control to open them wider or close them. I could make out greys, blacks, whites. Amorphous shapes, light and dark. But I couldn’t focus on anything. When they walked in, they interrupted me listing all those climbs in the world I hadn’t done and never would, if my plan to die worked. El Cap, Wharepapa, Meteora, Les Calanques: a list of places I needed to say goodbye to, mentally. I could make out movement to the right of the room in front of me as they flung the door open; I could see the darkness of Rosie’s long black hair and Tom’s tall lanky figure, but I couldn’t see their faces.
‘… you said you were going to do it,’ Rosie was saying.
‘And I will,’ Tom said. ‘When I want to.’
What was it this time? The weekly food shop, perhaps. Or painting the spare room.
‘You promised me that you would help me out. I’ve taken over so many extra classes since Janice left. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get all this done with the lessons I have to plan.’
Tom’s grey shape approached the left side of my bed, his flip-flops smacking on the floor. ‘Look at him,’ he said, as he sank down into the chair. I smelled familiar lemony-sweet climber’s balm as he put his hand on mine. He was never a big talker, but I’d really noticed it in the last year or so. He could say what he needed to say in about a third of the words it took Rosie to express herself. ‘How do you think he looks? A bit better?’
‘He looks no different. Absolutely the same. Come on.’ Rosie’s voice came from further away, and I could make out shifts in the light at the end of my bed where she stood.
‘Come on what?’
‘He looks the same as always, and I don’t know why you ask that every time we come here. It kills me. Stop doing this to yourself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You. Thinking he’s going to come out of this.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not going to happen. He can’t hear us – you know what the doctors have said. He doesn’t know we’re here.’
‘I guess.’ Tom didn’t sound convinced. I heard a rattling noise. ‘But does he look comfortable?’
No. I’m really hot. And I’d kill for a beer.
‘Huh,’ Tom said. More rattling. Some tapping.
‘What’re you doing?’ More rattling. ‘Tom?’
More tapping. A thud.
‘Tom, I know you can hear me. I’m a metre away from you. Tom?’
‘Arm of this chair’s a bit loose,’ he said. ‘Remind me to bring some wood glue next time.’
Typical Tom. Fixing stuff. Always tinkering with things – and far better at DIY than me. ‘It’s an engineer thing,’ he used to say to me, when I’d resort to calling him over to help me put shelves up, or unstick a window. ‘I can’t string a sentence together like you,’ he’d say. ‘Just like you’re a total fool with a hammer.’ Bea had quietly resigned herself to the fact that she’d picked a dud man-of-the-house. I’d become used to coming home to find Tom fixing a tap or mending the dishwasher. Bea called him before even bothering to tell me there was a problem.
Rosie sighed. ‘It’s not your job to repair the furniture. We’ll just tell the nurse. Or something. Stop fiddling with it.’
He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was actively ignoring her. He’d bring the glue next time. She couldn’t stand in between him and a project – no matter how small.
Rosie’s footsteps moved around the right-hand side of my bed, opposite him. Her petite shape dropped into a chair. The coconut fragrance of her perfume hit me, mixed strangely with the pungent scent of whiteboard markers; she always smelled a bit like that after a day of teaching. I braced myself for the usual conversational ping-pong that occurred when they sat either side of my bed like this.
‘You okay?’ Tom asked.
‘Not really,’ she groaned.
‘Is this still about Bea?’
‘It was awful.’
‘What was?’
‘Tom!’
‘What?’
‘I told you last night. Weren’t you listening?’
‘Don’t tal
k to me like I’m one of your students.
I was knackered.
Alberto made me try some
really tough sections.’
What routes did you do? Any new ones?
Rosie didn’t say anything. I tried to see what she was doing, but I was lying on my back, sitting up slightly and facing the wall at the end of my bed. She remained on the periphery of my vision.
‘She was so massively pissed off with me,
but could I honestly call myself her friend if I
didn’t tell her she needs to move on?’
Had I just heard her right?
‘You know what I think about this,’ Tom said.
I hadn’t heard about anyone confronting Bea like this before. Feeling as I did about the course of the rest of my life, I was glad Rosie had had the guts to raise it.
‘He’s not going to come round,’ Rosie said gently.
‘Come on, you know what the doctors have said.
Not now he’s passed the twelve-month point.’
‘He might.’
Tom pulled his hand away
from mine and started cracking his knuckles.
I’d never have guessed how deep Tom’s loyalty went. I almost felt bad for throwing it back in his face, but I wished he would let go.
‘Okay then – when will it happen?
And in the meantime Bea
is there, what? Waiting?
What about her?
What about kids?’
‘Kids?’
‘Children, a family, all that kind of stuff.
Everything is totally on hold for her. On pause.’
Tom stopped cracking his knuckles.
‘Do you want children? Now?’
‘No. Not now.’
‘Just checking.’
‘But soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘A couple of years?’
‘Just checking.’ Tom exhaled.
When are you going to grow a pair? Count yourself lucky you can be a dad.
They sat in silence for a few minutes and I could make out his fidgeting from the corner of my eye. My room was really warm. Airless. My pyjamas were damp under my sweaty skin, between my back and the mattress. Weren’t they hot too?
Eventually Rosie started talking again.
‘It didn’t help that I mentioned
that random girl – you know, in London?’
What? Why remind her of that?
‘Why would you bring that up?’
‘I was trying to say that maybe
Alex didn’t have such strong views on loyalty
as she did – I don’t know. I thought
maybe it would help persuade her.
I didn’t think it through.’
I hated to think about Bea remembering my mistakes.
That first year we were together – me in London finishing
my degree, her in Bristol – felt like a lifetime ago, but I could still see her eyes as I told her what I’d done.
I was an idiot to have risked everything.
We’d been over it, she’d forgiven me. It was forgotten.
Why bring that up again?
‘Obviously not,’ Tom said.
‘Don’t, please – I know. I can’t believe
I thought it would help.’
‘Would you up and leave if it was me lying here?’
‘She’s
thirty next year, and she’s sitting
here waiting for something
that won’t happen. She knows that, really.’
‘What about all the stuff with his dad?
How did she take that?’
‘Mmmm … she wasn’t impressed
that I’d spoken to Graham about it.’
Tom coughed.
‘I knew she wouldn’t like it.
She’s been so touchy lately
anyway, even before this.
But he called me. I couldn’t say no.’
‘Maybe he should have spoken
to her himself.’
‘Tell me about it. He also asked me
not to say anything to Alex’s sister about
it all – says she wouldn’t agree.’
‘I’m with her on that.’
‘I get the point.’
I wanted to know more, but Rosie didn’t give anything else away. They stayed a little while longer. I didn’t follow what they said after they stopped talking about Bea – instead, I thought about her ranting about the impossibility of leaving me. I knew her. The more she said she couldn’t, the more I knew she would be considering it, even though she hated herself for it.
Would I blame her for falling for someone else and carrying on with her life, without me? No. It was only natural. Rosie had done the right thing. I hoped Bea would come round to the idea.
Those thoughts came easily without another man actually on the scene.
7
‘… SHOWN NO SIGNS of awareness in more than eighteen months patients in a vegetative state are balancing between life and death they are somewhere between consciousness and nothingness so is he in a coma no we call it permanent vegetative state coma is slightly different the patient wouldn’t be awake or aware but he is awake so he can hear us no we don’t think so as I said no signs of awareness since the accident we have run tests but he is not aware of his surroundings at all he does not respond …’
I woke up groggy, with a dry mouth and aching legs. I could hear voices – one I recognized. A doctor? Two others I did not. Three men, talking a few metres away from me. They sounded similar and I could barely make out when one stopped speaking and the other began. My eyes were open enough to make out shapes moving in the doorway to my right.
I tried to strain my neck muscles, desperate to lift my head and look in their direction.
‘… what happens next there’s the possibility of withdrawing treatment or nutrition effectively his life support this may have to be referred to the courts that changes things yes that would change any charges I’m sorry detective I’m not sure I follow we have new information we wanted to start by seeing how Mr Jackson is doing and then shall we step into my office …’
My door clicked shut, and the volume of the noise from the ward behind it dropped.
What’s going on?
My forehead itched and tickled. Sweat breaking out.
Who are you?
The police? What ‘new information’ were they talking about? I waited, but they didn’t come back.
They must have been police. Charges. Information. Detective. And there was something in the way they spoke – not just the words they used.
Were they looking at my accident again? Perhaps the insurance company needed more from them. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t think why the police would be interested in me now. Maybe someone else had been injured and one of the manufacturers of my equipment was being sued.
No – it couldn’t be. I knew my kit. I knew it was safe. I trusted that kit more than I trusted these policemen – that was for sure. I was still sweating, agitated by old feelings of suspicion. I’d always respected the officers I dealt with for work. I would roll my eyes when a reader called in to complain about the ‘pigs’, and I automatically tended to believe the police’s version of events over an alleged criminal’s in court. That changed when I was working on one of my last big stories, a campaign to release a convicted murderer we believed was innocent. Not only did I discover that they had blatantly coerced a murder confession out of this guy – who was learning-disabled and vulnerable – but they also tried to stop me reporting on his family’s attempts to appeal. ‘It’s not in the public interest,’ the press office had told me. ‘Stirring up the idea that someone else might be responsible will only scare people unnecessarily.’
I told them they should be more concerned with working out who the real killer was than keeping me quiet. Who had really murdered Holly King? Who had beaten her to death with a spade and left her to die i
n a cemetery? That man was still a risk to the public. Needless to say, they didn’t like me telling them how to do their job – but if they were going to try and tell me how to do mine then I was going to give as good as I got.
Ten years. This poor guy had been in prison for a decade – missed the freedom of each and every year of his twenties. So far, I’d only lost, what? Eighteen months or so? Even before the police stopped by that day, I had thought a lot about him and our parallel custodial existences. I had been right in the middle of that case when I ended up in here. Was he still stuck in a cell? Or had they got him out? The letters his mother had shown me were full of his fears, full of the physical claustrophobia, the words dark and heavy with the lack of daylight he wrote about. Within weeks of reading them I was in my unique version of his prison: my own body.
For the rest of that day I itched more than normal, along my arms and down the insides of my legs, where the skin clung together in clammy dampness. I felt as though flies covered me, walking their shit-soaked feet all over me. And they wandered into my head, too. They circled in my mind, tormenting me with questions.
It seemed like days since Bea had last visited me. She hadn’t mentioned having spoken to the police, and neither had anyone else. Were my family hiding it from me, or did they not know that something was going on?
Why did nobody ever tell me anything?
Back when I still had things to lose and the ability to lose them, it would drive me nuts. Once, I spent hours looking for a small deep red sandstone pebble that I’d found at Rhossili when I was a kid, walking along the beach with Mum. She turned it in her hands and said I should keep it, that it reminded her of Ayers Rock. ‘You wouldn’t believe that place, Alexander, it’s magical.’ I didn’t know anything about Ayers Rock, but I looked it up in my encyclopaedia when I got home, and after that I kept it in my school pencil case alongside my pens, set square and Tipp-Ex. When I got older, I used to leave it in the toe of one of my climbing shoes at the bottom of my wardrobe as a kind of good-luck charm.