by Emily Koch
‘So, it’s not Beatrice?’
She shook her head.
‘What’s the right way of saying it?’
‘Bay. Uh. Trees.’ She laughed at the concentrated expression on my face, my lips silently repeating her pronunciation. ‘But don’t worry about it. Just call me Bea. As in bumble bee. You should be able to manage that.’
I nodded slowly. ‘Okay, so you’re the girl with the Spanish name, who isn’t actually Spanish, who smokes outside the back of the counsellors’ dorm when she thinks everyone else is in bed.’
Her eyes widened behind her black-rimmed glasses. ‘You’re thinking of someone else.’
‘Maybe.’ I laughed.
‘Anyway,’ she waved her hand. ‘You want to go and see the pictographs? I’m taking the older ones up there.’ She pointed her thumb over her shoulder.
‘Pictographs?’
‘Rock paintings. Cave art.’
‘I know what they are, but how – I mean, how did you find out about them?’
‘I read about it. I love this kind of stuff.’
‘Right, okay.’
‘You coming?’ She got up, and walked away. I followed. Out of everyone at camp, I expected to have the least in common with her. But I was my father’s son: a geography geek obsessed with rocks and anything to do with them.
I joined the group of kids heading off to see the pictographs. At the far end of the lake we found a set of steps that led us through the canyon. Soon we came to a huge boulder and gathered round the drawings. I moved past a couple of bored-looking teenage girls to stand beside Bea.
I touched the rock next to the painted figure, which seemed to be holding a hoop or a drum. ‘Wow.’
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ She turned to me and smiled. The kids next to us were posing for photos, replicating the stance of the figure in the paintings. She laughed and turned back to the rock. ‘It’s hundreds of years old. They reckon this is red ochre. Apparently painted by the Hopi people, which means this is probably a medicine man.’ She pointed to the figure with a hoop.
She leaned in to study it more closely, shifting her glasses up onto her forehead and then back down in front of her eyes.
‘They reckon it was painted with their fingers because, look …’
As much as I wanted to look at the paintings, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
But there was a point when the nature of Bea’s visits shifted – not long after I’d overheard the detective. Although the change occurred almost imperceptibly, with little else to concentrate on I noticed it clearly. Perhaps it became apparent in the way she paused more often as she spoke, or the way she started sentences but didn’t finish them. I felt like, from that moment, I only ever got half the story from her. Could it have something to do with the police? I listened carefully every time she visited, waiting for any hint or unintended slip.
The day after her second round of counselling, she walked in, kissed my forehead as usual – with minty lips – and explained that she had been nervous about going back.
‘I tried to keep my mouth shut this time,’ she said, stroking my hand. The nurses had rolled me onto my right side and as Bea shifted in the chair in front of me, I listened, urging my eyes to open so I might get a hazy glimpse of her.
‘It was all right, but then afterwards …’ She sighed. ‘I decided not to go back. So at the end, I went to tell the woman running it.’
She sat quietly for a moment. I heard a scrape and a twist and then a chemical smell hit me.
‘I can’t remember if I described her before. She’s about my age, always looks angry about something. She has this really unsettling manner, the way she looks at you and stares …’
What have you got there?
‘… she was a big part of why I didn’t want to go back. For a grief counsellor she was incredibly unfriendly …’
What is that smell?
‘Daniella – that’s this woman – took it really personally. “You can’t expect results after two sessions,” she says to me …’
The fumes got stronger and I saw a flash of Philippa as a teenage girl with her ginger bobbed hair, sitting at the kitchen table admiring her nails.
‘… I apologised over and over, but still said I couldn’t …’
Was Bea painting her nails? She never did that.
‘Then this guy comes over – one of the others. He gave me a cup of tea, and she just walked off.’
The smell made me feel queasy, suddenly aware that my cheek burned where it squashed against the pillow and conscious of the way my scalp itched around the edges of my face.
‘… looked like I needed rescuing. But then I got stuck with him.’
This caught my attention. A knight in shining armour. He liked the look of her, clearly. Why did Bea never see through these acts of apparent kindness? I was always the one to break it to her when she came home and said she’d met a ‘lovely man’ who she had a ‘nice conversation with’. She was oblivious to chat-up techniques. I’d always found it endearing, but then I’d never felt threatened before.
‘We started chatting and he told me how his wife died about six years ago, how he had been to counselling before, but this was his first session with us.’
Tell me you know he was trying to pick you up.
‘After his wife died, he eventually met this other woman and they were planning to start a family, but she left him.’
A proper sob story.
‘It was a bit full on. I was trying to find a way to get out of there but he wouldn’t stop talking.’
Sleazebag. I supposed some blokes would see this kind of group as a hunting ground full of vulnerable women looking for some comfort. Maybe his wife wasn’t even dead. Maybe he’d never been married. At least Bea didn’t seem too interested in him.
‘He asked where I’d met you. He’s travelled round the Rockies too. He’s been all over the place, Europe, Asia …’
A man of the world. How sophisticated.
‘He’s a bit older than us – maybe early forties? A tall guy, kind of strong-looking.’
She paused again and I felt a change in the room. Every other noise faded away. The smell lost its significance.
Why do you care about what he looked like?
In my mind I saw her blushing as this man stood next to her. I saw her looking at his muscular arms.
‘I guess you have to be strong in his line of work – he’s a builder or something. But get this. He wears his hair in a ponytail. Not like a long, lanky thing down his back or anything – it’s a more of a hipster kind of look, you know? He has a beard too. You’d have a field day taking the piss.’
I didn’t feel like laughing. This wasn’t the kind of man I was hoping she’d find.
She put her fingers against my exposed cheek. Her skin felt cool and soft, and I let myself enjoy it. I could smell that chemical scent on her – I was right, it was definitely nail polish – and her favourite lavender hand cream. But then I caught something else too.
Is that caramel? Vanilla? Perfume?
She never wore perfume. She used to say that she didn’t need any – her citrusy shampoo and ‘Eau de Bea’ were enough.
‘When I told Cameron I wasn’t coming again, he said that it was sometimes more helpful to meet people one-to-one.’ She took her hand away. ‘He said it helps in a different way.’
I’m sure.
‘He asked me if I wanted to meet up for a coffee. I tried to say I was busy and stuff, but we ended up swapping numbers. It was too awkward not to.’
Nice move. Dickhead.
‘I’m definitely not going back,’ she said. ‘God, I hope he doesn’t call.’
My heart punched against my ribs.
You want him to call.
She had enjoyed the attention. She overplayed the line about this guy being ‘full on’, and about not wanting to meet up with him. She liked him. Maybe she hadn’t worked it out yet, but it was clear to me. She liked him.
My head filled with unwanted images. Bea in the arms of another man. Him kissing her. Holding her. More.
I’d never had any reason to feel jealous before. Sure, there had been times when a guy would approach her in a bar, or I’d see her getting on really well with someone at a party. But she always made it so clear that she was only interested in me that I never felt the need to worry. It was only now, hearing about her encounter with this Cameron guy, that I got a taste of what I had put her through in the first year of our relationship while I was in London, when I’d found myself in that girl Josie’s bed. It was a rare example of me not putting a difficult conversation off: after waking up that morning, being reassured by Josie that we hadn’t actually gone all the way, and sobering up a bit, I skipped my lectures and drove straight back to Bristol to confess.
It hadn’t gone well. I grovelled, I promised never to do it again, I cried and begged her to forgive me. After showing me the door, she ignored my texts and calls for two days, and when she did eventually pick up, she made it very clear that I only had one more chance, which she was only giving me because I had been honest about what had happened. We didn’t speak about Josie again and things started to go back to normal. But a couple of weeks later Bea phoned me. ‘I just can’t stop thinking about you with her. That’s the worst thing – how you must have looked at her. What you must have been thinking.’
Bea had always been unwaveringly loyal. She had never put me in the kind of position I’d put her in. What I didn’t know then was that, despite being confined to a hospital bed, I was about to put her through much worse, all over again.
So was this encounter with Cameron part of my payback? My turn to be tormented with thoughts of her with someone else?
Since hearing about her conversation with Rosie about moving on, I had filled my head with noble wishes. What is it that they say? Loving someone means knowing when to let them go. That was my sentiment. I thought that equated to bravery. Martyring myself.
But hearing her talk about him, I saw my mistake. Even though I wanted to die, I wanted to do so as her boyfriend. Yes, it sounded selfish. But she would have all the time in the world to find a new guy, later, when I didn’t have to know about it.
Loving someone means knowing when to let them go? Bullshit.
You don’t let them go. You fight for them. Let them be the ones to choose whether or not they want you.
11
I’M PAINTING A bleak picture of my existence here, but that’s not entirely fair. No matter how much bad news I get in one day, no matter how uncomfortable I am, I have learned that life has its ways of sending something small your way to provide the relief you need to make it through another twenty-four hours. It’s something I’ll take away from here with me, if I ever get out. At any given moment, within a certain undefinable radius of your sorry body or soul, there will be something that can lift you. The trick is knowing where to look.
I’m in no position to go hunting out one of these small comforts when I need it, but if I were able to walk out of my hospital room I know who I would look for: Pauline. At times my favourite nurse feels like the closest friend I have, these days. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate visits from Tom and Bea and Dad, but there’s something in the sheer amount of time she spends with me, the way she talks to me, and the experiences she has shared with me, that makes me feel connected to her in a different way.
She only has to walk into my room and I feel a little bit better. For a start, she smells motherly and comforting, like marzipan – I love it when she leans over me, and I let myself imagine sitting down to a slice of Battenberg. In those days after Bea told me about the guy hitting on her, it was Pauline who cheered me up.
‘There’s a right to-do down the corridor, I’m telling you,’ she said one morning as she gently brushed my hair. She was the only one of them who bothered to do this. It felt good: as close to a head massage as I ever got.
‘I don’t know why I find it so funny,’ she laughed. She wasn’t usually one for gossip, but this had clearly entertained her too much for her not to share with someone. ‘One of the older men down the corridor – well, I say older, but he must be about the same age as me. Sixty going on sixteen, he is. Keeps proposing to all the nurses.’ She smoothed my eyebrows with her fingers, and laughed again, quietly. ‘A regular Romeo. We don’t get many folk who are so well as him in this ward, I can tell you. No offence, my love.’
None taken.
‘And such a joker. It’s the way he wraps himself in that bed sheet that gets me. Top to toe, like a mummy.’ She was almost crying with laughter now. ‘We have to peel it back to check on him, and he’s always pulling a silly face when you get the sheet down past his chin.’
I wasn’t convinced it was that funny, but maybe you had to see it to get the full comic effect. Nonetheless, I let Pauline’s amusement seep into me and allow a little light into my dark.
Something as small as this – not even finding something particularly funny myself, but being around someone who did. It’s a trite thing to say, but laughter really is infectious.
‘Now, that’s better, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘We need to have you looking your best for when you’re ready to start proposing to us yourself.’
Still got it, have I, Pauline?
‘Let’s have a look at the rest of you,’ Pauline said, running a hand down the stubble of my cheeks towards my jaw, and stopping by my mouth. ‘Collecting some dust there, are we, my love? Saving a snack for later?’ She swept a finger over my lips, and I permitted myself the fantasy of imagining she could feel me trying to move them, to say thank you.
For a long time I didn’t know what exactly had put me on this ward with its changing cast of patients and under the care of my consultant Mr Lomax, Dr Sharma and the less distinguishable team of more junior doctors like Quiet Doc. From comments people made, I knew that I’d fallen in a climbing accident – but other than that I had no idea. My memory was blank. What route did we climb that day? The Crum? Gronk? How had I managed to have such a serious fall that I ended up like this? Now I knew that something had happened that meant that the police were involved again, a year and a half after the event. It had to be an insurance issue, didn’t it?
Eleanor finally filled in a few of the details for me. She stopped by around the time of Bea’s second counselling session, sniffling away with hay fever. Yet again, I assumed my role as a priest behind a metal grate, hearing confession. ‘Forgive me, Alex, for I have sinned. It has been five weeks since I last came here to offload my problems on you.’ She was talking about her ex, Jimmy. I wondered if things hadn’t worked out between them because of how she felt about me.
I listened to her bunged-up voice behind me as I lay on my right side. ‘I know I should be over him …’ she said, shuffling around the room.
‘It’s hard, though, when you don’t meet anyone else …’
I let my attention drift. Had I just not seen this side to her before – or had she changed since I had been hospitalised? We’d climbed together for about five years, ever since my previous partner moved away. I’d known her for a while before that, climbing indoors over the winter with her as part of a bigger group of friends. She was tiny and not particularly muscular, but she had such great technique that she was able to get up most of the same climbs as me. While I looked for a new partner I tried climbing with a few different people, and the reason I enjoyed partnering up with her the best was because she was solid, trustworthy, and didn’t make a fuss. Tom, for all his good qualities, could get really wound up when he was struggling with a particular climb. Eleanor just got on with it. Alberto – who ended up becoming Tom’s climbing buddy – would get pissed off with me for being late (I often was). Eleanor never seemed to care. Another girl I tried climbing with spent the entire car journey to and from South Wales talking at me. She was fun to be around in small doses or when diluted by other people – but one-on-one it was too much. When Eleanor got in my car the first time we went
out together, she stuck a CD in the player and only spoke to talk about a new route she’d heard of and wanted to try. And that was what she had been like ever since: constant, calm, no big dramas. So what had changed? Maybe she had been bottling all these thoughts up over the years, and now, finally, she had found a way to let it all out.
‘Sometimes I think I should have just …’
I should have been more sympathetic, but I couldn’t find the strength. Here she stood: perfectly healthy. She was still able to have a relationship with someone, hold them, kiss them … Just because she couldn’t have Jimmy any more didn’t make me feel sorry for her. She was still walking, talking. Still climbing. I could see her in my mind – skinny-limbed, her long blonde hair tied back, moving lightly up the rock face. Still moving, still climbing. Every self-absorbed word she said made me angrier and amplified the throbbing ache in my feet and hands. I’d never noticed that her voice was so nasal before – and not just because of her allergies. It was so whining. I couldn’t bear to listen to it.
‘And I know he isn’t seeing anyone either …’
I used to think I had things to be unhappy about. I had no idea how fortunate I was. ‘Glass half-empty?’ I wanted to yell at my old self, and Eleanor. ‘Fucking fill it up then! It’s half-empty because you’ve already drunk a load of it!’ I couldn’t find any reserves of compassion to draw on.
I felt her touch my shoulder. I really wished she wouldn’t touch me.
‘… need to go over what happened to you, remember exactly what I saw …’
She squeezed at the material covering my collarbone.
What? What are you talking about now?
‘… ready to go back over my statement …’
Statement?
Her hand moved away. I heard a creak behind me as she sat down, and the sound of skin smoothing over paper.
She started reading, ‘“A Bristol journalist is fighting for his life in hospital after a rock-climbing accident in the Avon Gorge.”’