If I Die Before I Wake

by Emily Koch

  An intro. A news article, about me? Was this from the papers after I fell?

  ‘“Alex Jackson, twenty-seven, is believed to have fallen nearly twenty metres when he was out climbing with friends on Saturday morning, on the cliff face above the Portway.”’

  Twenty? How had I managed to fall twenty metres?

  ‘“Members of the Avon Fire and Rescue Service rope rescue team and the Great Western Ambulance Service hazardous area response team were lowered to Mr Jackson. They safely lowered him the rest of the way down the cliffs to the Portway. He was then taken to hospital by ambulance. Police closed the Clifton Suspension Bridge for approximately three hours.”’

  Images skidded through my mind. I had seen the rescue teams at work before, I could imagine them lowering me down carefully, people watching from above and below.

  ‘“It is not known how he came to fall. Mr Jackson is a reporter at the Bristol Post, where he has worked for four years.”’

  Eleanor shook the cutting next to my ear and I felt the tiny breeze it generated.

  ‘“A spokesperson for Great Western Ambulance Service said: ‘We were called at about midday to the Portway, where a man in his twenties had fallen as he was rock-climbing. He was taken by ambulance to Southmead Hospital.’ His condition is described as life-threatening at this time.”’

  I wondered who they’d got to write this. How they had all reacted in the office. When did they find out?

  She sniffed, then read on. ‘“His immediate next of kin have been informed.”’

  Dad. Who had told Dad? How had I never thought about all of this before? Had someone called him? Poor Dad. He would have been a mess.

  ‘“A spokesman for Bristol Climbing Association spoke last night on behalf of Mr Jackson’s family. He said Mr Jackson was in a serious condition in hospital, having broken five ribs, his left arm, and sustained head injuries in the fall.”’

  I cringed. Who had written this crap? Head injuries should come at the start of the list. Most serious first. Had they let a trainee write about me?

  ‘“The spokesman said: ‘Alex is currently in a coma. Friends and family are keeping vigil at his bedside and are hopeful about his recovery.’ Police also attended the scene of the incident.”’

  How have I never heard any of this before?

  ‘The sound you made.’ She was straying away from the article, back into the information I already knew. ‘No matter how many times I go over it I can’t understand what happened. Tom says there’s nothing I could have done differently even if I had led the climb that day, instead of you.’

  I was leading?

  This was news to me. I’d assumed I probably was – I led most of our climbs. But this was another small piece in the puzzle of that day, and it helped me imagine it better.

  ‘It was an awful time,’ Eleanor said, with a sigh. ‘I was a mess. And then Jimmy said he was moving out …’

  Whine, whine, whine.

  With that final burst of rage, cramp kicked in, gripping my left calf first, then the right. It’s bad enough when you can stretch it out, or hobble around the room. But lying there, forced to let it do its worst, unchallenged – the agony mauled me.

  I must have passed out with the pain. The next thing I knew, a nurse was moving me roughly on my bed.

  ‘Come on, you fucking ugly ginger donkey,’ she muttered, pulling me by my arm so I fell violently onto my back. I recognised my nickname, and the prawn cocktail flavouring on her breath was a giveaway too. This was Connie – my least favourite member of staff on the ward. I guessed she must be in her thirties or forties, based on the sound of her voice and some of the things she said. She didn’t talk about going clubbing or the difficulties of still living at home with her parents, like some of the younger nurses did. But she also didn’t mention how many years she had until retirement, like some of the more mature ones. Mostly, she moaned and gossiped, and talked about TV shows she had been watching. She always smelled of her latest snack and had – how can I put this? – a special bedside manner. It would be so easy for her to put me out of my misery by holding a pillow over my face. I often wondered why she didn’t.

  She yanked at my arm again. My whole body tensed in pain: my hips were still twisted to the right and my head felt unsupported by the new positioning of my neck.

  All I could hear other than Connie’s laboured breathing was the tapping of rain at the window. I tried to listen for any sign of Eleanor. She must have already gone.

  ‘Why they keep you alive I do not know.’ Connie moved to the foot of the bed, grabbed my legs and straightened them out with a sharp tug. ‘Shitting hell.’ The door slammed.

  Trying to distract myself from the discomfort she had induced, I replayed Eleanor’s visit. She had said she was giving another statement, hadn’t she? Piecing together the police investigation now, I realise that at this point they were still fishing around. At the time I guessed they must be wanting to gather everything there was to know about the climb – but now I see that wouldn’t have been their primary concern. What they wanted from Eleanor were the other things she might let slip.

  And then there was the article Eleanor had been looking at.

  Had anyone read it to me all that time ago? Would they have bothered?

  I didn’t remember the quotes about my condition, or the details of my other injuries. Had I even known that I broke ribs and my arm? Maybe not – I didn’t know how long I had been here before I started to become aware of what was going on. I remembered it had felt like weeks and weeks after I did start to come to before I knew what the hell had happened to me. It would become clear that I didn’t really understand it, even at this point. The newspaper report couldn’t tell me the most important part of the story.

  ‘This weather,’ Bea said when she visited, not long after Eleanor. She paused every few words to chew her gum noisily – a horrible habit, but she said it helped her resist smoking too many roll-ups. ‘It’s creeping me out,’ chew, chew, chew, ‘it feels like a bad omen.’

  I heard the sound of a zip and felt a sudden shower of tiny, cold drops of water on my left arm. I imagined her sliding her arms awkwardly out of the sleeves of her mac. The water felt good – refreshing.

  ‘Look at that sky – it’s like night-time in the middle of the day. It’s unnatural.’

  Her tone changed as she turned away from me, perhaps looking out of the window at the sky she described. It became too much for me. Thirst ravaged me: my tongue shrivelled in my mouth and my throat screamed with rawness. Before she arrived I had entertained fantasies of an ice-cold bottle of Corona with a neat wedge of lime shoved into its neck. I felt the bubbles on my tongue, the sourness of the fruit. But now, with all this talk of rain, I saw myself walking out of the room – escaping under the nurses’ noses. Running down the hospital corridors and out onto the road outside. I turn my head up to the deep purple sky and open my mouth wide, letting it fill with rainwater, gulping it down. My hospital gown is soaked, clinging to my skin, but I don’t care. The water overflows from my mouth and runs down my chin, my cheeks, down my neck. I look at the ground and see puddles forming in the bright green grass at the edge of the pavement; I walk towards them to dip my feet.

  Bea leaned over me, breathing spearmint across my face, rearranged the pillows under my head, then kissed my forehead. I caught that vanilla scent on her again. Like a freshly baked cake, or one of those posh candles she used to burn in our bedroom.

  Who are you wearing that for?

  I felt her sit on the bed next to me – the gentle pressure of her flesh against mine.

  Has he called you?

  ‘I wish I could stay here,’ she said, still chewing nervously. ‘Maybe I’d feel safer.’

  A huge clap of thunder drowned out whatever she said next, and rain began drumming against the window again. I only caught a few of her words.

  ‘… nervous … don’t know who …’

  She shifted her weight against me, put a hand on
my thigh and squeezed my leg. She must have leaned closer because when she spoke again I could hear her more clearly.

  ‘I leave the flat and I’m looking over my shoulder constantly. I double-check the door is locked at night. Triple-check. I jump every time my phone rings.’

  What was she worried about? An uneasy feeling spread through me.

  ‘I mean, I must be imagining it, mustn’t I? Who would follow me? I’m being paranoid.’

  She let out a half-laugh, half-sigh. ‘I know what you’d say.’

  She knew better than me, then. I had no clue what I would have said, because I didn’t know what had been going on.

  ‘But I’m sure there was a woman walking a few metres behind me, on the other side of the road, for ages. And the guy watching me from that parked car yesterday.’

  That half-laugh noise again. ‘There must be another explanation. I must be imagining things. I am, aren’t I?’

  It did sound like a possibility. What did she think I would have told her, if I could? Well, first of all, she was forgetting that in the real world – the world before my accident – she probably wouldn’t have told me any of this. It would have left her vulnerable to me taking the piss out of her, even though I would only have done it to reassure her and cheer her up. But let’s say she had let some of it slip. I would have said, ‘Forget about it – why would anyone be following you? It wouldn’t make any sense.’

  And then I probably would have held her face firmly under the jaw, and kissed her Cupid’s bow scar, before saying, ‘You think you’re special, do you, Honey Bea?’

  Feigning dismay at the nickname, she would have screwed up her nose, and when I kissed the bridge of it I would have felt the skin wrinkling beneath my lips. ‘Think you’re important?’

  I’d have traced my mouth upwards towards her brow, and kissed her eyelids as she closed each one for me. ‘Worth MI5 sending their best spies out for?’

  Then I’d have pulled her close, drawing her body towards mine so that my chin rested on top of her head and I could smell the orange scent of her hair. ‘Don’t worry,’ I would have said. ‘Why would anyone be watching you?’

  12

  I CAN’T SEE my body, but I can feel how little there is to it these days. The hollowness of my stomach – as if my belly button has sunk to touch my backbone. Not an ounce of food or drink has passed my lips for months. My breakfasts, lunches, suppers, late-night kebabs, Christmas dinners, birthday cakes, charred burgers, lemon and sugar pancakes: all of these have been replaced by this tube running directly into my stomach. There’s no pleasure in it. Whichever nurse is on duty sits me up at a forty-five-degree angle to prepare me for what will be a fourteen-hour overnight feed. She presses a few buttons on a machine next to my head. A whirring noise begins – my lullaby for the night, unless the tube gets kinked and the machine starts beeping until a nurse notices it.

  I didn’t appreciate how much I enjoyed my food until I didn’t have the chance to eat it any more. Bitchnurse Connie likes to put cookery programmes on my TV, and then she leaves me listening to the torture of dish after dish being described and tasted. The saliva glands in my mouth work overtime, thinking they are about to get a piece of that chocolate cake or a spoonful of that beef stew. They can forget it. These days, liquid food is pumped into me to keep me alive, but only just. I can still sense my weakness, my skin-and-bone limbs, and I imagine my starved face – all cheekbones and eye sockets.

  I remember a conversation I once had with serial-dieter Rosie. ‘Have you ever thought about where your weight goes when you lose it?’ I asked her. I can’t remember important things, like the day of my accident, or the last time I kissed Bea. But I can remember reading about weight loss in a magazine, and then boring Rosie with it. All that fat you are losing quite literally disappears into thin air. You breathe it out. A little leaves your body as sweat and piss but you puff most of it out through your mouth as carbon dioxide.

  Those images have stuck in my brain. When I get a sniff of the stink of my sour sweat on the days the nurses miss a bit of me with their soapy water, I can’t help but think of my body expelling my fat. When my catheter somehow breaks free and I lie in bed, soaked and unable to call for help, I think of the weight I have lost. And when I rasp air out of my lungs I imagine myself losing a few more ounces, ready to be filled up by more flavourless, liquid calories. Philippa used to say to me, ‘You’re so lucky to be alive.’ She has more sense these days.

  I never used to think I had much of an imagination when I was younger. I didn’t get into journalism because of my love of storytelling. I saw an ad for a job going on the UCL student newspaper, and something made me go for it. So I ended up on the university newspaper and then on a journalism master’s before my first proper job back in Bristol at the Post.

  But even then, I didn’t see myself as creative. At work I enjoyed meeting people, getting their stories, digging for the information that officials wanted to bury. Writing the article only involved getting the words typed up quickly – and even that got in the way of me finding the next story. I didn’t waste time crafting an elegant piece of prose, and as a result my copy often appeared heavily rewritten by my news editor when I saw it in the next day’s paper. No one would ever have called me a raconteur, or said I wrote beautifully. And I was never tempted to write anything fictional – even writing a first-person opinion piece felt a bit too inventive and took me well out of my comfort zone. I preferred cold, hard facts. I wasn’t one for daydreams. I never saw much point in imagining my life any other way. But now? Now I can see the advantage of it.

  So, while slightly-too-cold liquid pumps into my stomach, I pretend I am sitting down for a steak dinner with a bottle of deep crimson Merlot. Blood oozes out of the medium-rare meat. On the side, there are golden triple-cooked chips (I never understood what that meant and now will probably never know, but they sound good). A pile of bright green runner beans. Fucking hell, vegetables. Who knew you could miss them this much? The waiter is friendly, and brings out extra portions of whatever I want.

  On other days I might have an imaginary takeaway with Bea – unnaturally red crispy shredded beef, duck pancakes with spring onions, egg fried rice and sweet and sour pork. The reek of garlic and ginger fills the flat so that when we go to bed I will be able to smell it on the pillow as I lie at her side, kissing her neck, running a hand over her hips. There are prawn crackers that remind me of the shoulder pads Mum used to stick into her jackets when I was little. Sweet chilli sauce. I lap up the salt and fat and decadence of it – no need to watch what I eat in the restaurant of my mind.

  Clearly oblivious to the fact that the police had asked Eleanor to go over her statement, Bea spent a lot of her time with me worrying about what Rosie had said to her, about moving on. On one visit she sat next to my bed, her feet tapping nervously on the floor.

  ‘I can’t do that to you.’ Tap, tap.

  ‘Even if—’

  Tap, tap. Through my half-open eyes I saw the shape of her head dip down. She kissed my knuckles.

  ‘I had so many plans for us.’ Tap, tap, tap. I was facing her, and I could make out the agitated jiggle of her legs. She leaned down to her bag on the floor, and when she sat up again I could see another movement – her hands fidgeting in her lap? There was the rustle of paper. A rich, moist aroma wafted up to me. She was rolling a cigarette.

  ‘There were places I wanted to travel with you,’ she said. I tried to ignore the fact that she was talking in the past tense. She stopped talking; there was only the sound of paper between her fingers as she finished rolling the cigarette, and the tap, tap, tap of her feet. Where did she want to go with me? I wondered. We didn’t have any holidays planned when I’d had my accident – not that I could remember. The only thing in my calendar – pencilled in for the Easter holiday break – had been a trip to France with my dad.

  It was his idea – he wanted to take me to see the Gouffre de Padirac, a huge sinkhole near the Dordogne. It was once th
ought that the chasm had been created by Satan but, actually, he explained, it was down to the formation of a massive underground cavity, whose roof had collapsed. As a kid I’d been enthralled by his description of the stalactites that looked like the peculiar pairing of cauliflowers and fireworks, hanging from the ceiling of the network of caves.

  One weekend before my accident I had been over to his. We were going to have a takeaway and plan the finer details of the trip. It may have been seven months away but Dad wanted to make sure we had everything covered.

  I found him bent over his desk and navigating his way through a series of open windows on his computer screen to find the website he was looking for. ‘I think we ought to camp in Carennac – it’s this village – oh, where is it—’

  He kept clicking away on his mouse, sliding it across the desk dramatically, far beyond the confines of the mousemat.

  ‘Here it is! Here it is, look – Carennac.’ He was still standing, apparently too excited by it all to sit down. ‘It says here that “Carennac is one of the most beautiful villages in France, along with one hundred and forty-eight others”.’

  ‘Where are you reading this?’

  ‘Wikipedia. It’s a very useful webpage. “The summer months are notably warm and dry, temperatures averaging 30 degrees”.’

  ‘But we’re going in April, aren’t we?’ I sat down on the edge of the desk and started flicking through some of the test papers piled up by his computer.

  ‘And then I thought we could go to Collonges-la-Rouge. Heard of that?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’ I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t seen him this happy in a long time.

  ‘It’s a village built entirely with red sandstone,’ he said, turning to look at me. ‘Can you imagine? Your mum loved red sandstone. I should have taken her there, but I only just found out about it.’

  I got up and put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Shall we talk about this over some dinner?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, taking his glasses off and rubbing them clean on the bottom of his jumper. ‘I’m going off on one, as your sister would say.’