by Emily Koch
9
I KEPT WAITING for Dad or Phil to mention why the detectives had been talking to my medical team, but neither of them did. They continued in the normal, yet unique, pattern of their interactions with me. Everyone’s visits were different. In the early days Phil used to talk to me, even if most of what she said was borderline aggressive. ‘Don’t you dare die on us,’ and ‘You’d better be getting well in there.’ Or, ‘You can’t leave me to look after Dad on my own. Don’t even think about it.’ But the underlying message was always that she wanted me to wake up. When she spoke to my doctors she insisted they try every new treatment possible, suggesting things they might have missed. It seemed that she did care about me, after all. She may have been pissed off with me, but she wanted the opportunity to say that to my face when I regained consciousness.
Now she had given up hectoring me. As time went on she visited less, spoke less, and stopped telling me to get better. The only explanation I could come up with was that she was losing hope for that face-to-face confrontation. Perhaps she was trying to wean herself off these hospital trips, in preparation for a time when there would be no one to visit any more.
I always knew when it was her – she was the only woman in high heels to come into the room on her own. There were clipped and elegant footsteps from a female doctor, too, but she was always with a colleague and made much more noise than Philippa. I had no other stiletto-wearing visitors – the thought of Bea in anything other than trainers was laughable. I used to tease Bea by saying her glamour had attracted me to her, and she’d respond by throwing a cushion or book at me with terrifying accuracy and force. She and Philippa were about as different as two women could be.
Philippa would stride in with quiet, businesslike purpose and a choking Chanel breeze. My little sister was the definition of a fiery redhead – something passed down the female line in Dad’s family. I’d been blessed with the same hair, but thankfully not their special brand of blazing, angry oestrogen. Whatever was behind the decrease in frequency of her visits and words, I knew one thing: she was still angry. She may have been furious with me for getting myself into this situation, but I got the feeling she was even more annoyed that I wasn’t getting myself out of it. Rage was the only way Philippa knew to handle difficult emotions. Once more, she was lashing out at the very person she was afraid to lose. Not that she would ever have admitted it.
These days she never stopped at the end of my bed, but walked straight round to my left-hand side, where there was a table with a vase on it. She always brought a new bunch of flowers, but none of them smelled like love; there was a whiff of guilt and duty about them. Once she’d replaced last week’s bunch I heard the crackle and thud of the plastic rubbish bag as she chucked them into the bin in the corner. I never heard her sit down. She’d probably come straight from the office and didn’t want to crease her designer clothes. She would stand still for several minutes at a time. Was she watching me? What was she thinking? I tried to understand what might be happening in her life, but she never told me, and Dad never filled me in. Bea had an even more difficult relationship with her than I did, and the accident hadn’t brought them any closer. Did Philippa have a boyfriend waiting back home? Where was she working these days? Still in family law? I imagined her watching the clock, calculating when her duty was done and she could forget about how mad I made her for another week or so.
We used to be so close. One of the last memories I had of things being good between us was the day I told Philippa that Mum was ill, when I went to pick her up from school. She knew something was up as soon as she saw me – she usually walked home alone. She caught my eye from across the road as she came out of the school gates, cocked her head and looked at me curiously. She said goodbye to her friends distractedly, without looking away from me. ‘Why are you here?’ she mouthed. I just smiled, and started walking.
‘What’s going on?’ Philippa asked, jogging along behind me.
My mouth was dry. Why had I offered to do this? ‘She’ll find it easier, coming from you,’ Dad had said. He would be sitting at home with Mum, now, waiting nervously for us to get home – although he’d given me twenty quid to take Philippa for some food if she needed more time to get her head straight.
‘Don’t freak out.’ Bad start. Why had I said that? She manoeuvred herself in front of me and reached out to my chest.
‘Stop. Tell me.’
‘There’s a bench over there.’ I pointed into the park we were passing. ‘Let’s sit down.’
‘You’re scaring me,’ she said, following me.
When we sat down, she tried to make eye contact. I looked away. ‘Mum isn’t well,’ I went on, and kept staring at my fingers twisting in my lap as I gave her the full explanation that Dad had given me after he’d asked for me to be sent home from school.
When I finished, she didn’t say anything, so I looked sideways at her. She’d turned her face away and she was gripping the edge of the bench with both hands. ‘It’ll probably all be okay,’ I said. ‘She’ll probably be fine.’
She pulled her sleeve down over her fist and used it to wipe her face. ‘I knew something was up,’ she said.
I squeezed her arm, but it felt inadequate.
‘It was only a matter of time, I suppose,’ she said, coughing, wiping at her face again, and turning towards me. ‘Nearly everyone at school knows someone with cancer. It was just a matter of who it would get in our family.’
I smiled, despite myself. I should have known she would come out with something like that – Philippa never said quite what you expected her to, and had always been old for her years. She seemed to be taking it well; maybe we didn’t need to go for dinner before we headed home. I put my arm around her.
‘Don’t let her die,’ she whispered. ‘Promise me you won’t let her die. Not my mum.’
‘I won’t.’
It was a promise that I hadn’t been able to keep.
Our relationship deteriorated after Mum’s diagnosis, when Philippa started acting up. And then Mum’s death – and my part in it – fractured any remaining bonds between us.
I tried to make it better. Every time I attempted to speak to her she shut me down. While I was in Canada and then at uni in London, she didn’t reply to my emails. Whenever I called home she would get Dad to tell me she was too busy to speak to me, and she avoided me when I was back for the holidays. So then, I tried giving her space, but that didn’t change anything, either. I wrote her a long letter in my second year of university, when she was a fresher in Newcastle, explaining why I had done what I had done, apologising for upsetting her, and saying that Mum wouldn’t want us to still be fighting about it. She never even acknowledged that she had received it.
Then, finally, I tried pretending that everything was okay. That seemed to work for her. When we were both at home, I didn’t mention Mum – we just chatted blandly about neutral topics. Dad looked pleased that we were talking, at last, but it was superficial. Eventually she moved back to Bristol too, wanting to be closer to him, and we would occasionally meet for lunch at a café halfway between our offices. I used to say to Bea that I thought she only did it to keep Dad happy. She had one soft spot that I was aware of, and that was him.
These lunches were only just civil – Philippa clearly still hated me. She usually found a way to take her simmering feelings out on me by criticising my hobbies (‘You’re not still climbing, are you? Aren’t you getting too old?’), slagging off Bea (‘She just doesn’t seem your type, that’s all’), telling me I didn’t do enough to help Dad (‘When was the last time you offered to mow the lawn?’), and – her favourite – picking out faults in my court reports. She would bring a copy of the paper along to our catch-ups, and my latest article would be covered in red pen. I did my best to bite my tongue, because the point of these lunch breaks was to keep things friendly between us, not to make things worse. But it was hard, because although she had never set foot in a criminal court, she always thought she knew bet
ter than me. Tactfully, I tried to suggest that things might be different in county court, where she spent her time dealing with things like custody battles, divorces and prenups.
How long would we have been able to keep those polite coffee shop conversations up? I was convinced that one of us would have cracked, eventually. Would our relationship ever have returned to how it had been before Mum’s cancer?
Lying in my hospital bed as Philippa stood silently, watching me, I often wondered if she was thinking the same thing.
Then there was Dad – another type of visitor entirely. I listened over the months as his uneven tread worsened – the coins in his trouser pockets clinked in a jagged rhythm as he moved. Was there a problem with his leg, or his hip? I would feel my mattress sink as he put one hand on my bed to lower himself into the chair. He sometimes chatted, but I almost wished he wouldn’t. He told me about his new students, the big news stories of the day, what was happening in the Premier League. He never mentioned having close contact with anyone other than Philippa. Through the mundane and lonely updates, the pain strained his voice, betraying what he was really thinking.
On most visits, he used to get his book out to read to me. I got snippets of good stories which succeeded in taking me into them and away from myself, but he clearly didn’t think I could hear. He never started from the beginning or took me right through to the end. And he never told me the name of the book. I knew what happened in the middle of a spy thriller set in Amsterdam, the end of what seemed to be a wartime crime novel about a family hiding a German soldier, and only the opening chapter of a book he introduced as ‘the one everyone was talking about’.
Very occasionally he brought his guitar to play to me, as I’d loved him to when I was a boy. ‘They say it might help,’ he would offer by way of an introduction. ‘How about some Beatles?’ It was always the Beatles; he knew most of their hits. Without fail, he played my favourite, ‘Let It Be’, a song that I once told him had taken on new meaning for me after Mum died. I read once that Paul McCartney was referring to his mother, not making a biblical allusion. She died of cancer when he was a teenager, and he wrote the song after having a dream about her where she said, ‘It’ll be all right. Let it be.’ I wanted a dream like that with my mum in it.
I had other visitors. Rosie and Tom came in regularly, and always together, normally in the middle of an argument. Then there was Auntie Lisa – Philippa and I always used to call her Lisa Loudmouth when we were kids. She brought in muffins that smelled fresh and nutty for the nurses and doctors, and I would hear her laughing with them in the corridor. ‘Got to keep you all well fed with all this hard work you have to do. Go on, take a second one for later …’ Then she’d shut the door behind her and sit in complete silence by my side. She had words for every situation but this one, it seemed. There were a few more random familiar voices – other members of the climbing club, old work colleagues – but they became rarer as time went by. Most didn’t come back after their first time. I lost count of the number of friends who came in the early days, took one look at me, said ‘Oh my God’ and then stood awkwardly at the end of the bed for the shortest amount of time possible before they could justify leaving. ‘We brought you this, thought it would cheer you up …’ they might say, leaving an unnamed and completely useless gift on my table. It was only when one of the nurses came in and said something along the lines of, ‘Who left these CDs here?’ or ‘I’m not sure you really need this TV guide, do you, Alex?’ that I would find out what I had been given.
My climbing partner Eleanor came in every now and then and told me things she wouldn’t ordinarily say to anyone. She confessed to one-night stands; admitted when she had voted for UKIP (and then regretted it); she even told me once that sometimes she wished her father would die, because it was the only way she could see herself being able to get over their difficult relationship. Quite early on in my confinement, she also revealed why she had stopped climbing for a few months in the year before my accident. At the time she’d said she had tendonitis in her elbow. Looking back, I could see that she had gone to great lengths to convince me that this was the case. When I went round to her flat to see how she was doing, she would bring out an ice pack or do a series of stretches. But I only saw her a handful of times – whenever I called she was seeing other friends and when I tried to suggest she come round for dinner with me and Bea, or out for a pint with me and Tom, we could never find a time when she was free. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it all fell into place when she came into my hospital room one day and made another confession.
She had been sitting, without saying anything, in the chair next to me for several minutes. I knew it was her from the small noises she had made, her sniffs and sighs. Several times she had seemed about ready to say something – and then stopped. When she did speak, it came out in a rush.
‘I don’t know why I feel the need to tell you this,’ she said. ‘But I had a massive crush on you last year. I thought I loved you.’
She was joking. She had to be joking. Me?
‘I guess I always thought I would tell you one day, and we could have laughed about it. I guess that’s why I want to tell you, get it out in the open. I never told anyone else.’ She stood up and walked a few steps away from me.
How had I known nothing about this? I had never had any indication from her that she wanted to be anything more than friends.
‘That’s why I stopped climbing.’ She sniffed. ‘There was no tendonitis. I just couldn’t be around you every weekend. It was driving me crazy. I thought I’d be better off without you in my life. If I couldn’t be with you like that, then—’
This is madness, Eleanor. What were you thinking?
‘It took me those few months to sort my head out. When I started again I thought I was over you, and I really missed going climbing – I thought it would be okay.’
I never led you on, did I? I didn’t make you think something could have happened between us.
‘I wouldn’t have done anything to try to split you and Bea up. If you’d been single, then maybe, but I couldn’t say anything.’ She walked back towards my bed, and put a hand on my arm.
It felt strange, her touching me, after she’d said this. I didn’t like it. I didn’t feel the same way about her, and it felt somehow like I was being dishonest to Bea. It was the kind of thing that I would have told Bea about if it had happened in ‘normal’ life. It would have felt wrong to keep it from her, even if it had made things difficult with Eleanor.
‘I wish I could talk to you about it and we could have a laugh, you’d tell me I was an idiot and we could move on,’ she said, without taking her fingers away.
‘That day. I can’t stop thinking about the noise you made, when you hit the rock. It isn’t getting any better; I dream about it, I hear that sound whenever someone drops something on the floor, when a car door slams.’ This was to become a theme in her visits – she went over it nearly every time. ‘How could you have slipped so badly?’
The way she spoke about it naturally led me to assume I had fallen because of a terrible mistake I couldn’t remember making. And, in some twisted way, I had.
10
IT WAS POSSIBLE that Dad and Philippa would not mention this ‘new information’ the police had about my accident. But I thought I could rely on Bea to tell me.
If Eleanor’s visits were among some of the worst after her revelation about her feelings for me, Bea’s had always been the best. She would come in about three times a week, and I hated it when she left. I wished she would crawl her little body into my bed and fall asleep with me. She talked and talked – more than she ever did before. When I got home from work she would often still be sitting at her desk, working on a magazine illustration or a logo design for a new restaurant. She would raise her green eyes to me behind her glasses, just for a moment to say hello, but I knew not to speak to her until she finished. And even when we did discuss our days, it was always me that did most of the talking.
Since I found myself in hospital, she’d spared no details. She let me into her mind, told me how she felt and what she saw and re-enacted whole conversations, leaving me exhausted after the onslaught of life-lived detail. This new version of her made me fall in love with her a second time.
The first time was not long after we first met, but still a good two years before anything happened between us. Her prettiness hadn’t escaped my attention in the first couple of weeks in Canada – but I first really noticed her when we took a group of kids hiking up to the Grassi Lakes. The trail took us up through forests to look down over two small, spectacular pools of bright blue. We sat above the upper lake, sorting out a picnic lunch for the group, and as I jealously watched other hikers setting up their kit to take on steep climbs on the grey cliffs towering over us I promised myself I would come back on my next day off. Bea came over to sit next to me.
‘You’re the climber, aren’t you?’ she asked, through a mouthful of ham sandwich. ‘I don’t think we’ve properly met yet.’
‘That’s me. And you’re the Spanish girl.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you Beatriz? Beatriz R—’. I stumbled on the surname.
‘Romero.’ She shook her head, swallowing her food. ‘Spanish name. Doesn’t make me Spanish, as such.’
‘But your first name is Spanish too, right?’
‘Dad got all sentimental when I arrived, you know? Named me after his great-grandmother. He can’t pronounce it, though – he can order a beer in Spanish and ask for the bill but that’s as far as it goes. He says Beatrice, like you just did.’ She raised an eyebrow.