If I Die Before I Wake

by Emily Koch

  Connie gasped. When Philippa didn’t immediately volunteer more information, she prompted her. ‘How …?’

  ‘He pushed him,’ Philippa said, quietly.

  ‘He was so friendly—’

  ‘Alex got all the way to the top and he just …’ Philippa paused. ‘… he shoved him over the edge.’

  So that’s what happened.

  ‘You think the girlfriend was involved?’ Connie asked, patting my chest.

  ‘They let her go.’ Philippa’s voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘I got it so wrong.’

  I drifted into my own thoughts. Bea was free. They had him.

  ‘I’ll be gone in a moment, leave you in peace,’ Connie said.

  ‘No, don’t worry.’ Philippa’s shape had already begun to move towards the door. Clip, clip, clip. ‘Dad and I have a meeting with Mr Lomax.’

  I kept asking myself: when did this start? It began long ago – ten years earlier in Alberta under grey skies. It started when I applied to work at Bow Camp, which came after I decided to take a gap year after school – a decision I made following Mum’s death, which happened because I supported her choice not to continue treatment. I traced it further – would I have gone to Bow if I didn’t climb? It started when I went to Isaac Beaumont’s fourteenth birthday party at the indoor climbing wall in St Werburgh’s Church. It started when Dad bought me my first pair of climbing shoes.

  If I hadn’t gone to that birthday party, if Dad had refused to buy me my own kit, if I had told Mum I wanted her to go through another round of radiotherapy, if she hadn’t died, if I hadn’t felt the need to take a gap year, if I had chosen a different place to go, if Bow hadn’t offered me the counsellor job.

  If I hadn’t been on lifeguard duty that day. If there hadn’t been so many children allowed to pile into the pool.

  Abigail was only seven years old: one of the local kids whose parents dropped them off at the start of each day while they went to work. That day, she had been laughing happily with those friends, laughing under grey skies which promised rain was on its way from the mountains. The legs of those same friends later kicked around her as she drowned. There were too many children in the pool. No one saw Abigail’s body, in her striped red and white swimsuit, slip under the water. No one noticed her long blonde hair floating on the surface.

  When we did finally see her, I jumped into the pool, fully clothed. I picked up her limp body, lighter than I expected it to be but still dragging against the resistance of the water. Children were screaming around me as I half-lifted, half-dragged her out of the pool and rolled her onto her back. Other counsellors were shouting, Bea was screaming for someone to call an ambulance, but the noise felt distant. As I put two hands onto tiles at the water’s edge and heaved my own body out, I looked down and saw Abigail’s lips – thin and blue – and her eyes rolled back in her head. One of her arms trailed over the edge, her fingers dangling into the water.

  I brought my mouth down onto hers and breathed into her lungs, pressed on her chest, started the routine we had been trained to perform. She was freezing cold, already turning grey. It felt like hours went by before I was being pulled away by black-suited paramedics, who took over the desperate attempts to revive her lifeless little body. I knew she was gone. Staggering backwards, exhausted, I somehow found myself walking into the main camp building, watching the windows in front of me reflect the chaos that continued behind my back. I walked down the corridors, shivering, treading on red lino tiles. I was barefoot – we never wore shoes for lifeguarding duty – and I could feel biscuit crumbs and crisp fragments collecting on the hard, damp skin of my soles as I walked. My body felt heavy, inert, and impotent. The weight came from my sopping wet shorts and T-shirt, and my dripping red fleece, but it felt deeper than that, too. My whole body felt heavy and useless.

  Would she have been scared? Did she understand what was happening? Would a seven-year-old know what drowning felt like? I hoped not.

  Was this condition chosen for me, as a kind of karmic retribution for the way she died? I had felt several times that my existence resembled a long, slow drowning. I waved my arms, slapping down on the water’s surface, but they made no noise. I kicked, but my legs were tangled in weeds, pulling me down. I screamed for someone to see me but nobody heard. My head went under, but I managed to keep myself afloat. Just. As the time somersaulted along, those spells under the water felt longer and longer. I struggled more and more to keep my mouth above the surface, to keep the air coming in.

  I had to get out of there. I tried to move again.

  Move. Move.

  Nothing.

  39

  THE NEXT DAY Bea visited me herself.

  The door swung open with a whine, and I listened as she walked around my bed to sit down next to me. The citrus in her hair was strong – she must have just washed it. There was no trace of vanilla.

  ‘Alex?’

  She scratched her leg: nails on denim, then lifted her hand and waved it in front of my face – like you do to see if someone is awake. My eyes were closed but I sensed the very slight change in light through my eyelids, heard the chime of metal bangles on her arm as it moved.

  ‘Alex?’

  Yes?

  ‘You’re not, are you. You’re not here. He said you had moved – he was making it up, wasn’t he?’

  No. I moved. I really did.

  She took hold of my left hand in both of hers. I tried to push my thumb against the pressure.

  Come on, Alex. Move.

  ‘Everything is so much clearer, now,’ she said. ‘Everyone is treating me like I must be traumatised but I don’t feel that way – I feel …’ she searched for the word, stroking my fingers. ‘I feel calm. For the first time in months.’

  I knew I should be pleased. So why did I feel so apprehensive?

  ‘I’ve written you a letter, okay?’ She let go of me and I heard a piece of paper shake in her hands. ‘I want to make sure I say everything I want to.’

  She sounded so different. The tension was gone. The fear had disappeared.

  ‘Part of me wishes he was right, so that maybe you could hear this,’ she said. ‘But there’s a bigger part of me that hopes you can’t. It would be better for you, that way.’

  I can hear you. You’ve got to believe that.

  ‘So, here it is.’ She took a deep breath and cleared her throat.

  ‘I love you. But I need to let you go.’

  No. Look at my hand. I can move, I know I can.

  ‘I have always done what I thought was the best for you. I have fought for you.’

  She took another breath. ‘But the fight has changed and I think that what is right for you has changed, too. I can’t keep hoping that you’ll wake up. I need to listen to the doctors now. We have to face reality. We can’t keep you alive for our own selfish reasons.’

  Don’t do this.

  ‘I’m sorry that you took the blame for me, and that you landed up here because of it. I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t believe in you, that I didn’t trust that you hadn’t had an affair. I’m sorry for everything before this, for whatever was stopping you asking me to marry you. I think I understand, and I know we would have worked it all out.’

  The ring.

  Oh, Bea.

  We were having a rough patch, and I had panicked about proposing to the woman I was bickering with. Now I saw that it wasn’t clear which of those two things had come first. Were my nerves what started the fighting?

  I wish I’d just done it.

  ‘I know that, because of the wonderful life we had together. You made me so happy, do you know that? Thank you for all those years.’

  Please. Don’t do this. Don’t say what you’re about to say.

  ‘And so, I hope if you can hear me, you will forgive me.’ She grabbed hold of my hand again. ‘After I read this to you, I’m going to talk to your dad. You know what I’m going to say to him.’

  I had one last chance, as I saw it. The tears
came easily once I let them flow.

  Look at my face, Bea. Watch me. This is no coincidence.

  ‘I – I will always love you. For the rest of my life.’

  Don’t go.

  ‘Bye, Alex.’ She whispered the words over my face and kissed my lips. A spearmint-masking-cigarettes kiss.

  Then she saw my wet cheeks.

  ‘Oh, Al.’ She wiped them, gently smoothing the skin just below my eyes. ‘Don’t be sad. We’ve got so many amazing times to remember.’

  Although I knew she thought my tears were involuntary, in that moment it felt like on some level we understood each other.

  She kissed me again, a longer, lingering kiss – but then she stood up.

  Don’t go.

  Footsteps moved away. The door opened, shut.

  I had to step up my game. Bea had been the only one keeping me alive. If she stopped resisting Dad and Philippa’s plans, what would happen?

  What can I do?

  I started going over everything that had happened, trying to remember the order of events. And I started telling myself the story of it all. I began resurrecting the dead and gone days, bringing them back to life.

  ‘More colour, Alex,’ I can hear Bill saying. ‘More details. More colour.’

  I’m not sure how much more colour this story could take, Bill.

  It feels like it has taken me about six days to get through everything. During that time, not much has happened. Tom and Rosie visited once, as did Dad. Bea has been in a couple of times, and either stayed silent or spent the time talking about happy memories that we have shared. She seems relieved.

  But now, I’ve hit the present day. I have no stories from my past left to tell. I don’t know what happens from here. From now on, it’s just me in this moment, experiencing what happens right now.

  Now. Now. And now.

  I lied.

  Something has happened in the last six days. I’ve been pretending it is nothing, hoping it might go away. But it’s getting worse.

  I have a headache. It reaches from the base of my skull, grips around my head to my brow. I need painkillers. My mouth is dry, my lips drier – with each breath in and out I feel the tug of the cracked skin. My throat is sore and throbbing.

  Pauline came in earlier, she propped my door open – maybe to get more air moving through. It’s particularly warm and stuffy today. I can smell food – leftover lunch or the next evening meal being cooked up in the kitchens. It always smells the same. Boiled vegetables, stewing meat.

  But today it doesn’t make me hungry. I have no appetite. The headache. My mouth, my throat. It all points in the same direction. I know what this is.

  Footsteps in the corridor. Coming closer. Clip, clip, clip.

  Philippa?

  ‘My feet are killing me.’

  Philippa. The sound of something clattering onto the floor.

  ‘That’s better. My toes are so swollen.’

  I smell sweaty feet.

  ‘Hottest day of the year so far, they’re saying.’

  Is she talking to me? She never talks to me.

  A hot hand on mine.

  Philippa, touching me?

  ‘How are you?’

  Why are you talking to me? You haven’t spoken to me for months.

  She sounds uncertain. Her grip tightens on mine. My body rolls a little to the right as weight drops onto my mattress.

  ‘Do you remember that time when we were little?’ She’s talking softly. I’ve never heard her like this.

  ‘With the bikes and the dogs?’

  Vaguely. When we lived out in Thornbury, the house with the green wallpaper.

  ‘It was a hot day. Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking about it this week. You could smell the grass, baking. The tarmac melting.’

  Those kids down the road with a tree house. We wanted to play with them but they were older.

  ‘That day, we took our new bikes out.’

  She squeezes my hand.

  What’s going on? Why are you being like this?

  ‘You said to Mum that you would look after me.’

  I tried to be a good big brother. My duty, Dad said. I had to.

  ‘We cycled down that steep lane. We weren’t wearing helmets – you stashed them in a hedge.’

  That was when I still had my black Raleigh Wildcat. Your bike was pink – it had silly streamers coming out of the handlebars. We cycled to see the house with the Alsatians in the garden.

  ‘You told me we should go and see the house with the dogs in the garden. The ones that barked whenever we went past. They couldn’t get out, but it still scared us, it was exciting.’

  She sniffs.

  Are you crying?

  ‘But before we got to the bottom of the hill, you skidded. I was behind you.’

  A rabbit ran out in front of me, I braked.

  ‘I saw you come off, slam your head on the kerb. You lay there in the road. Your wheels kept spinning. I shouted at you but you didn’t move.’

  Another sniff.

  It knocked me out, the bang to the head.

  ‘There was blood on your face.’

  Liquid drips onto the skin on the back of my wrist, and she brushes it away.

  ‘I thought you were dead. I remember thinking – I don’t want him to be dead.’

  She sobs now, properly crying, sniffing.

  ‘It’s always been me and him. We are brother and sister. I can’t be an only child.’

  What’s got into you?

  ‘I know …’ She trails off. ‘All that stuff with Mum.’

  She clutches more tightly at my fingers.

  ‘But you were always my big brother.’

  She coughs. The sound reminds me how sore my own throat is. Swollen.

  ‘I’ve been so mad at you. I can’t get a handle on it, some of the time – I just feel so angry at the world. But I was talking to Dad about it yesterday and he said something.’

  Why couldn’t you have talked to me like this more?

  ‘I told him, I didn’t know why I was feeling so wound up. And he said, “You know what I think it is? I think you are angry with yourself for never accepting his apologies over your mum’s death. You never made up with him, and you’ve been taking that out on everybody else.” He said he thought I did the same with Mum, I was angry with her, but then I was angry with myself for being angry with her and I couldn’t get out of that cycle.’

  She is still crying onto my hand.

  ‘How could he see that, and I never could? He’s right. He’s always right. I’m sorry. I guess I thought I would have all the time I wanted to make up with you, when I was ready. I didn’t know …’

  She sighs.

  ‘That there would be a time limit.’

  I thought you were just angry with me for being reckless. For leaving you on your own to look after Dad when he gets old. I thought you still hated me for letting Mum die.

  ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is,’ she takes a sharp breath. ‘Despite all our differences. I’m going to miss you.’

  I’m waiting for her to say something else.

  She is crying.

  Still crying.

  Uneven breaths.

  More tears fall on my hand.

  First Bea, and now Phil. I’m running out of time.

  40

  ALL THE OXYGEN has drained from my room. Every time air sucks in through the tube in my neck it barely reaches my lungs. And the heat. My head itches from the sweat trickling down from my scalp on either side of my face. I smell of a night’s hot, soaked sleep. Fresh air – imagine that! A breeze against my skin. But this window never opens, and they won’t take me outside. Once, they wheeled me round the garden – unless I dreamed it – and a water fountain splashed me with its mist. The claw grips my head from back to front, pressing in. In. My lungs sit heavy, filling up, begging me to cough. I’m drowning in fluid: soon there will be no room left for air.

  Stay with me. I have to keep talking to
you so they find me, and send a rescue team to dig me out from deep inside my body.

  Keep talking, Alex. Don’t give up.

  I’m no fool. I’ve felt like this before. Pneumonia. My opponent in the ring, breeding its blackness inside my body to attack me from within. This is the seventh? eighth? ninth? time we’ve faced each other, in two years.

  The tickle in my throat, then the stuffed nose. I spent days ignoring it, convincing myself it wasn’t this.

  It’s only a cold.

  Not a sore throat, maybe an ulcer on the back of your tongue?

  You’re imagining it.

  But there’s no denying it – not with all these symptoms piling in.

  I can’t get ill. Not now.

  What if they don’t let me get better this time?

  41

  ‘… HIS OBS ARE okay. Slight temperature but nothing too …’

  That’s Pauline talking, as she walks in. They’re doing their big ward round. These are the ones that seem to happen once a week, or something like that. When Mr Lomax checks how everything is going with me.

  ‘… pressure areas are intact. Everything under control, Mr Lomax.’

  Everyone is here. Mr Lomax. Pauline. I haven’t heard other voices yet but Sarah the physio is usually here, probably some other doctors, another nurse.

  One of them must be looking at my arm, my hand. Move, thumb. Move.

  ‘Thank you, Pauline.’ The boom of Mr Lomax’s voice. ‘We will keep this brief, although I do have slightly more to say than usual. I want to fill you in on the latest in this case.’

  I focus on the whole of my right arm.

  Move. Move. Move. If I can just show you all.

  ‘I have spoken with Patient’s family.’ He speaks slowly, with self-importance. No one dares to interrupt.

  ‘They all now agree that there is no sign of improvement, despite the tests we have run and our ongoing treatment.’

  The room is full of new smells. Coffee breath, a floral perfume. Armpits. I try to ignore them all and focus everything onto my arm.

  Just a twitch. A flicker. Come on. Move!

  ‘I held a best interests meeting with Patient’s family and we talked through all the options and outcomes. We talked about how we can take things forward.’