If I Die Before I Wake

by Emily Koch

  Neither do I.

  ‘I’ve been going through all of your stuff. Everything I can find. Nothing.’

  Because there’s nothing to hide. You’ve got to believe me.

  She didn’t stay long, and I was distracted thinking about why the police would be asking about my visitors.

  When was I going to find out what they were up to?

  It’s been interesting revisiting the events from earlier this spring. Remembering, re-telling. It’s difficult to remember conversations word for word. I guess part of all this is me trying to keep myself alert, prevent the onset of boredom-induced madness.

  But I am trying to be accurate, as far as I can. It is difficult to remember what happened on what day and how much time passed between certain events. But I am doing my best. The problem is that when this all started, I wasn’t well. Another round of pneumonia, my nemesis. My opponent in the ring. We circle each other constantly, size each other up, then close in and throw a few punches before the referee tears us apart. The odds are always on him winning – I’m always the underdog.

  The last time was rough, the worst I can remember since the first few months after my accident. Back in those early days they batted me back and forth between the neuro ward and intensive care, which I recognised because it had a different sound – lots more machines, more beeping, more whispered voices. More last rites being read. ‘May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.’ Death seemed inevitable, each time I went through the disorientating fevers, that terrifying gurgling feeling of liquid filling my lungs, and the all-over body aches. But each time, I pulled through. Antibiotics dragged me out. I have no idea how many rounds I’ve done with the fucker. Too many to count. But the latest bout was one of the worst. So when all of this strangeness – Bea’s phone calls and thinking she was being followed, the police at my door – started, I still hadn’t recovered. I slept a lot, and my waking hours blurred with haziness. I know what I remember, but timing is difficult.

  My efforts to remember get interrupted a fair bit, too. For one, there’s the daily ablutions, as they call them. Except I don’t think that’s the right word. I haven’t been able to consult a dictionary, for obvious reasons, but I think that means ‘washing oneself’. It’s the nurses who wash me. For a long time, when I sank to my lowest ebb, I wished they would leave me alone. I would have lain there and festered in my own stink. What I really wanted was a proper shower. Deep green body wash in my hands, in my hair. Sometimes Quiet Doc smelled like my favourite shower gel and I felt physically sick with envy. I imagined the steaming hot water running down my face into little rivers on my body. Standing there until my neck burned and the smoke alarm went off in the hallway because of all the steam escaping from the bathroom, and Bea having to leave her desk to bat a tea towel at the ceiling to stop the noise. Emerging, dripping onto the bath mat, drying myself off, and sniffing the eucalyptus and pine oils still on my skin.

  It’s not quite the same experience, getting a bed bath.

  But the worst thing is the suctioning – once every few hours, day and night.

  Occasionally I notice one of the nurses walking round to the wall behind me and to the right, and I have a few seconds to work out what they’re about to do.

  No. Not again, not so soon.

  They switch it on. It sounds like a slurping blender, a Hoover, a dentist’s drill, all mixed into one devil machine.

  Please. Not again. Give me a break.

  They stick it into my mouth for starters, then they shove it down my tracheostomy tube and into my windpipe, wiggling it around. It’s as if my throat is the drain under a plug hole and the devil sucker is a wire coat hanger being used to scrape out hair and gunk.

  Fuck off. Take it out.

  It’s like having flaming sambuca poured directly into your lungs.

  No more.

  Like having razor blades casually dropped into your throat as if they are nothing but drops of honey.

  I’ve had a lot of opportunities to experience it. A lot of time to think about ways to describe it.

  16

  I ALWAYS THOUGHT there could be nothing worse than losing your sight. People crossing the road with a guide dog made me feel uncomfortable – a mixture of pity for their dark or distorted world, and relief that light filled mine. I used to think: what would life be like if I couldn’t see?

  But when I was younger, as a boy, I found blindness intriguing. One Christmas morning when I was seven or eight, I made what Mum called ‘creative use’ of a boring tie Auntie Lisa gave me, by tying it round my head in a blindfold and opening the rest of my presents without looking. I tried to work out what was hiding under the wrapping paper, then tore it off and felt the shapes, materials and weight in my hands, identifying a remote control car, a Discman, and the new dinosaur encyclopaedia I’d asked for. I walked, arms outstretched like a sleepwalker, across the room to find Dad, Mum and Philippa, to give them the traditional Jackson family Happy Christmas kisses. Philippa giggled with delight as I tripped over her present on the floor, and begged me to let her have a go with the blindfold. Up in my bedroom I manoeuvred myself by running my hand along the wall, fingers tripping on the edges of Blu-Tacked posters of my Liverpool heroes – John Barnes, Ian Rush, Robbie Fowler. But after an hour or so I got a bit scared by my own game. I panicked, ripped off the tie, opened my eyes again and looked around.

  Because I could.

  Now, I knew what it was like to be blind – even if it was only for some of the time. I still got that sense of claustrophobic panic, like I did as a kid with the tie around my head. Many of my hours were spent in total darkness, with my eyelids shuttering out the view, but there was the rare day when I woke up to find those shutters slightly lifted for a while.

  Exhilaration pounded through me at those precious times and I would try to ignore the dry burning – only relieved when a nurse put drops in – desperate for Bea to walk in so I could see the shape of her for once. I could make out her rough outline when her visits coincided with those moments. I saw her body, the movement of her light-coloured limbs and the tilt, turn and dip of her featureless face. But not the perfect line of her nose, the brown-flecked green of her irises, or the small scar above her lip. Never the soft white blonde of her cropped hair dropping into a kiss-inviting V on the back of her neck. No. As much as I treasured my infrequent glimpses of her, they were cruelly incomplete. My eyes only let in distorted visions – and all in shades of grey. Blurred shapes and hues of black and white swayed in front of me, totally out of focus.

  To my left: I could make out the bright whiteness of the window, the glow shooting off from it in shards;

  straight ahead of me

  the drab darkness of the walls,

  beyond the grey lumpiness of my body

  underneath the sheets;

  a subtle change in the light to my right,

  where I knew there was a door, after

  hearing countless people walk in and out of it.

  But still, no matter how imperfect my vision was, I wished Bea would realise that I had some sight. If she lifted my eyelids when she visited, I would have seen a version of her more often. As it was, only nurses and doctors opened them – people whose faces I had little interest in.

  They did this when they wanted to run a few tests on me, check that nothing had changed. Around the time of Bea finding the letter, my consultant Mr Lomax brought a team of medical students to gawp.

  Get them out of here.

  ‘First, we lower the lights in the room,’ Mr Lomax said, standing to my left. The overhead brightness dimmed like a cloud passing between my closed eyes and the sun. ‘We want to make sure Patient isn’t dazzled.’

  I know what you’re going to do to me. Get out.

  ‘As part of our assessments, we will now test how the eyes react to certain situations. Eyelid, please, nurse.’

  The warm pressure of a finger on my right eyelid stretched it up, holding it in place next to my
eyebrow. I could smell Pauline’s marzipan scent close to me. Cool air teased my eyeball, and the brightness struck me even with the lights lowered. My hands prickled with the desire to rub the blurriness from my eyes.

  I could make out the black-rimmed circle on the wall ahead of me which I had decided must be a clock, and a row of white-coated bodies standing below it. The window let in the daylight, but I knew the futility of trying to turn my eyes in their sockets to look out of it – they would refuse. What kind of day was it out there? They kept the hospital stiflingly hot year-round, but I was sure I felt the presence of summer outside. When Dad had been here the day before, the skin of his copper-smelling hand had been clammy and hot against my cheek; I had heard the slap of flip-flops the last few times Tom visited. So maybe the sun shone outside – people would be walking along the streets in brightly coloured shorts and T-shirts, sunglasses on. The trees would be full of green leaves.

  ‘Now, we use a torch to take a look at the pupil,’ Mr Lomax said. A mass of white hair; bushy black shapes which must have been his eyebrows. A sweet whiff of last night’s drink on his breath. Whisky? Brandy?

  Get away from me.

  ‘Let’s take a look.’ He shone a torch in. I couldn’t blink away the discomfort as I was forced to stare right into the dazzling silver circle. My eyelashes appeared, illuminated, as two rows of tiny white stars. They would almost have been pretty if I wasn’t so distracted by the intense itching of my unlubricated eyeball.

  Do you have any idea how much this hurts?

  ‘The pupil is constricting. Now, left –’ he flicked off the torch. One of the bodies at the end of my bed coughed.

  Pauline closed my right eye, and as soon as she had opened the other Mr Lomax shone the torch into it.

  ‘Again, constricting nicely. Can anyone tell me what we would expect to see in a brain-dead patient?’ The change in his voice told me he had turned away to address his students. In my left eye, still open, the burning white afterglow from the torch obscured the room.

  ‘No response?’ a girl said.

  ‘Correct!’ he bellowed. ‘But how would we know if there was no response? What would we see?’

  I’m not your toy to prod and experiment on.

  ‘The pupils wouldn’t change size,’ the girl ventured, stumbling over her words. ‘They wouldn’t – they wouldn’t react to the light.’

  ‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘Both eyes, please.’

  Pauline obeyed the instruction, and lifted my right eyelid again so that both were now open.

  ‘Now we will check the oculocephalic reflex. Can anyone tell me another name for this?’ Mr Lomax leaned in. Silence met his question.

  ‘What do they teach you in your lectures these days? Too many multiple-choice exam papers, if you ask me.’

  ‘Is it …’

  ‘Yes?’ he barked.

  ‘Is it the doll’s eye reflex?’ A male student, sounding more nervous than the girl.

  ‘Bingo. The doll’s eye reflex. What we do is turn Patient’s head from side to side.’ He placed a hand under my chin and turned my face towards the window, back to the middle, and to the other side. ‘The eyes stay looking ahead, where they are looking when the head is centred. If Patient was brain-dead, we would see the eyes fixed mid-orbit – what we call negative doll’s eyes. Finally, for now, we will do the caloric reflex test.’

  I knew this one.

  Piss off.

  ‘Cold water please,’ he said.

  The clap of a solid object being placed in his hand. He grunted.

  ‘We put cold water into Patient’s ear, like so.’

  Cool liquid dribbled into my left ear, and simultaneously my view of the room shifted to the right – more shapes in grey, black and white.

  ‘See how his eyes slowly deviate away from the left ear, where I put the water? That tells us the brainstem is intact.’

  ‘Is he definitely unconscious?’ This came from another male voice among the students.

  ‘Did I say you could ask questions?’ Mr Lomax barked.

  The student didn’t take the hint. ‘It’s just that I was reading about a case where the patient didn’t respond to eye tests like these but then they discovered that he—’

  ‘That’s enough, thank you,’ Mr Lomax interrupted.

  They discovered what?

  ‘But he could be aware, couldn’t he? Just unable to move and talk. It’s this rare condition called L—’

  ‘Will you please be quiet!’ Some of Mr Lomax’s spit landed on my face. ‘Funnily enough, I am aware of what it is called, but thank you for the lesson, young man.’

  Why wouldn’t he let the guy finish what he was saying? This condition, what was it called? ‘L’ something. Is that what I had?

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend …’ the student stammered.

  Mr Lomax muttered to Pauline, ‘One is reminded why one doesn’t like having students tagging along. Thank you, nurse.’

  Pauline, bless her soul, blotted at my ears with a tissue, but didn’t close my dry eyes. ‘There you go, my love.’

  Thank you.

  I listened to the students shuffle out, none of them daring to speak as Mr Lomax herded them to their next destination.

  I wanted to know who my letter was from and what the police were up to, but that couldn’t change my mind. Encounters like this only served to reinforce my belief that I wanted a way out of this dead-end existence. The doctors had written me off. Even if I got well enough to get out of bed, would my eyesight ever improve? Did I want a life without colour? A life where I wouldn’t be able to see well enough to climb?

  No. I was doing the right thing.

  ‘… worried about her.’

  Rosie and Tom walked in later that day, mid-conversation as usual.

  ‘But she looks seriously ill. It’s this whole stalker thing. Did I tell you she thought someone had been in her flat?’

  ‘No.’ Tom walked around to the right-hand side of my bed, his flip-flops slapping on the floor. By now I was lying on my side, facing the door. I saw his body pass my cracked-open eyes.

  ‘Because it smelled funny,’ Rosie continued. ‘She isn’t sleeping. Or eating.’

  ‘Huh.’ Tom rearranged my pillows, gently lifting my head as he did so, the sweetness of the ever-present balm on his fingers.

  I saw Rosie’s slim shape drop into the chair next to him and caught a draught of her coconut scent. It made me think of holidays – cocktails on the beach.

  ‘He looks weaker,’ Tom said.

  He prodded my arm where my biceps should have been. ‘They should rig up a pull-up bar, and strap his hands to it. Lift him up and down.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I could make it,’ he said. ‘We’ve got that bit of pipe at home. I’d just need to …’ I heard him rattling at fittings in the room, tapping on the wall.

  ‘Tom? What are you on about?’

  ‘Trigger his muscle memory. Good as anything else they’ve tried.’

  ‘They’re not going to get him doing pull-ups.’

  Tom squeezed my lower arm. ‘We were working towards little finger, one-arm pull-ups. Before.’ He lifted my little finger, flexed it.

  ‘Tom.’

  He cleared his throat, holding his hand over mine. ‘What’s the latest on the letter?’ he asked, with forced brightness.

  ‘T.’ I could just make out part of Rosie’s body reaching out for him.

  ‘Tell me about Bea,’ he said.

  ‘Okay.’ She sounded reluctant. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Tell me about Bea.’

  Rosie exhaled. ‘She says she can’t abandon Alex, not until she knows exactly what the letter means. Which makes sense. I suppose.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I don’t think I would keep coming back here, in her position. What other way is there to read it? He screwed someone else.’

  That’s not true.

  Tom’s fingers
squeezed mine. ‘We don’t know that for sure.’

  He let go of me and I felt his weight on the edge of the mattress as he sat down on my bed. My body tipped forward.

  ‘It makes me angry, imagining being her, imagining if you’d done this to me. It makes me furious. With you.’

  ‘Me? But I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Rose.’

  He stood up and walked away from me, out of my field of vision. The flow of air around me, caused by his movement, irritated my eyes.

  ‘Maybe she comes back out of habit,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Or guilt.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ She was cross again.

  ‘Only that—’

  ‘She hasn’t done anything to him. He’s the one who’s messed around.’

  ‘We don’t know that. Stop saying it. Maybe she feels guilty for being the one who’s still healthy, when he’s like this.’

  ‘How can you say that when she’s done nothing wrong? Typical.’ I heard her push the chair back, and her greyness moved in front of me.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I can’t stay in this room with you right now. I need a coffee.’

  ‘Rose.’

  ‘How can you say that? How can you say that she should feel guilty?’ There were rushed footsteps and the door slammed.

  In the silence that followed, I could swear Tom said, ‘Because that’s how I feel.’

  17

  AFTER MONTHS OF boredom, my mind suddenly had a lot of material to turn over. I kept coming back to the same questions.

  What were the police looking for? Why were they interviewing Eleanor again? Little did I know then that they had several more ‘fact-finding’ conversations ahead. There were floorboards to pull up and search under. People to intimidate.

  And then there was the letter. Who had sent it? Was I really a dad? Did my child know about me?

  Was someone following Bea? I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was hiding something from me.

  What about the plans to let me die? Had Dad persuaded Philippa yet? Had he spoken to Bea again?