by Matthew Crow
In the weeks after DS Bradshaw came into our home Mum started behaving suspiciously. She would take phone calls while locked in the bathroom, with the taps running, sometimes for up to an hour. I’d time her with the stopwatch on my phone.
More than once she left the house, too, in the middle of the night, then denied all knowledge of her nocturnal activities the following morning.
“I watched you leave,” I told her while I was making my way through my oatmeal, having jotted down a brief timescale on the notepad I’d bought to take onto the unit.
“It must have been a dream,” she said, and seemed unwilling to consider the concrete evidence in the form of my Diary of Observations.
Even Chris became distant with me. When I told him about Mum’s activities he would simply shrug off my concerns and try to change the subject.
“I think she might be running drugs,” I said eventually, feeling lighter for having voiced my deepest fear.
“Well, if she was only gone an hour and twenty-two minutes, then I very much doubt she could have made it to Colombia and back,” Fiona said, when I tried to make an ally of her too.
That night, in the bath, I lay back and dragged my hands through the proud stubs of hair that had begun to sprout from my head. I poured a glob of shampoo into my palm, the size of a fifty-pence piece, as the bottle recommended, and lathered my soon-to-be mane.
Just as I was about to rinse and repeat my phone buzzed and began to jerk wildly on the toilet lid.
I grabbed the sandwich bag and felt the zip-lock slip between my soapy fingers twice as I furiously tried to yank it aside.
I managed to unfurl my phone from its wet suit and felt a shiver as I saw the two words I’d been dreaming of for weeks:
Message Received
Then, in bleak slow motion, the phone slipped from my lubed hand and sank straight to the bottom of the bathtub. The “crack” it made against the porcelain seemed to vibrate through my whole body.
I retrieved it from its watery grave and dirty water trickled from the battery slot. The screen was blank, each button unresponsive.
I yelled for Mum, pulling on my clothes without drying myself. She didn’t answer. Her bathroom door was locked, but I could hear that she was on the phone.
“Mum, there’s been an emergency!”
“Hold on one second . . .” I heard her say down the line. “Are you okay?” she called to me.
“My phone dropped in the bath and Amber texted me and I need it sorted now.”
There was a long pause. Mum said something else down the phone and then shouted through the door again.
“Chris is downstairs. He’ll sort it for you.”
“But I need it now,” I called. “It’s an emergency.”
“Francis,” Mum said, “I’m warning you. Not now.”
Even if the phone was a lost cause, one thing I knew for certain was that Mum’s campaign of deceit was coming to an end. She was no match for me when it came to cunning and innovation.
All the laptops in our house had wireless Internet. Only the battered old PC in the spare bedroom was dial-up. If you tried to connect it to the Internet when someone was on the phone their conversation would play out through the furry speakers that slotted into the monitor.
Mum would rue the day she’d tried to get one over on me, I thought as I turned on the machine. It coughed and spluttered and then gave the old-fashioned six-bar refrain that meant Microsoft was welcoming you to its world. Three different virus warnings sprang onto the screen but I ignored them, like an action hero wading through heavy fire to defeat the enemy.
I clicked on to the Internet and pressed connect, turning the speakers to their lowest volume.
“I know . . .” I heard Mum say through the speakers. Someone was crying down the line, a woman, but I couldn’t hear who. “. . . and I’ll have my cell phone on. It’s only down the road, so if you need anything, anything at all, you just get in touch.”
There was a long silence before a woman’s familiar voice answered her.
“Thank you, Julie.”
It was Colette.
The line went dead.
“What’s going on?” I asked Chris. He was sitting at the kitchen table and looked the way he did when he had a hangover, all red-eyed and distant.
“What?” he said, glancing up at me. “Frankie, you’re soaking wet. You’ll catch your death. . . .”
I told him about the text, about the phone/bath disaster, and about Mum’s secret conversations with Colette, but Mum interrupted us before he’d had a chance to reply.
“Right, lads, change of plan.” Mum said that she had rung school and postponed my return. Instead she had arranged a trip to see Aunty Carol in York.
Aunty Carol is not my real aunty; I just call her that because she has known me since I was a baby and Mum says it makes her feel special. She used to live across the road from us, and had four cats and no husband but two children who moved down south and didn’t visit very often. Mum used to take her shopping once a week. Aunty Carol met a man on the Internet and moved to Yorkshire to live with him and help him make pottery bowls that they sell at markets. We have visited her just three times. Once when Emma died. Once when Dad left. And once when the doctors said Granddad wasn’t going to get better.
“No,” I said. “Amber texted me. She’s better.”
“The text wasn’t from Amber,” Mum said.
“Nobody else texts me.”
“He knows you were on the phone to Colette,” Chris said, rubbing his hand across his mouth.
“I demand answers!” I said, holding up my sodden cell phone for dramatic effect.
“Give us a minute, love,” Mum said to Chris. “I’m so proud of you,” she said to me once my brother had shut himself in the conservatory. She’d sat down next to me and was forcing a smile. “My brave lad.”
I shrugged.
“You’re coming on in leaps and bounds, you know. You’re looking better. Getting better. That’s really all we need to be thinking about at the moment.”
“I thought that was all we were thinking about.”
Mum nodded, then let out a long, single sigh of exhaustion, like a bouncy castle being burst. Looking down at the table, she began to explain.
“Francis, do you know what ‘palliative’ means?”
I said I did, because I hated it when she knew what words meant and I didn’t. Mum only completed half of her college entry exams before giving up and taking the first job she could get. With a track record that never strayed beneath a B, I was already her intellectual superior and didn’t want her getting ideas above her station.
“What exactly do you think it means?” she asked me.
I guessed at something to do with color.
Mum shook her head.
“Palliative means they make you comfortable when you’re unwell.”
“Like when I was on the unit?”
“No, love,” she said, shaking her head. “It means they make you comfortable because that’s all they can do. Because there’s nothing else to try. They make you comfortable because they can’t make you better.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Mum said, still not answering my question. The question I hadn’t really needed to ask in the first place. When Granddad was ill one last time, they took the tubes out of his nose and left him in his hospital bed until he was quiet and still. Until he just stopped. “Comfortable” was the word everybody kept using then. I never understood why nobody thought to question this. How could they know that? What if he was actually in pain? What if he was fighting it, desperately trying to find the energy to ask us to plug him back into the machines and the drips and the medicine that they’d fed straight into his veins?
“Do you mean Amber?” I said. Mum nod
ded. “But she’s getting better. She texted me.”
“No, sweetheart,” Mum said in a whisper.
“I love her,” I said.
“Francis, you’re only fifteen. . . .”
I think there was probably an end to the sentence but I didn’t give her the chance.
“What do you know about anything anyway? You never even went to college. And I do love Amber and I know I mean it. You wouldn’t even understand because if you’d loved Dad more he probably wouldn’t have left you in the first place. . . .” I said through tears.
I went on and on like this for minutes, until I had spoken so much I had to inhale two desperate lungfuls of air that made me feel faint. I wanted to hurt Mum. I wanted everything I said to stab straight through her, so she’d double over in agony and feel as ruined as I did. But she didn’t. She didn’t even react. Everything I said seemed to bounce off her like chucked balls of newspaper.
“Come here,” she said, trying to hug me.
“No.”
I could hardly see through the tears. As I stood up the chair fell over and made a sound like lightning striking the kitchen floor.
“Francis . . .” Mum said as I left. “Francis, where are you going? Francis . . . come back!” she yelled.
I could hear Chris calling my name from the conservatory, but ran to my room and barricaded the door shut.
I dried myself, and changed, and filled my pockets with the essentials I needed. Then I listened carefully until I heard the conservatory door open and shut. This was my moment.
The taxi dropped me off outside the hospital and I made my way to the unit where Jackie was at the nurses’ station.
I told her I was there to see Amber, trying to crane my neck to see if she was inside.
Jackie nodded and gave me a hug, and I took the opportunity to peek over her shoulder to see if I could spot Amber. Her bed was empty. Kelly was asleep and a stranger was in the bed that had once been mine.
“She’s not on the unit anymore,” Jackie said. “Does your mam know you’re here?”
“Yes,” I said. “She dropped me off.”
“All right then,” Jackie said, “follow me.”
Amber’s room was square and empty. The walls were white, and chipped toward the ceiling. There were no posters or photographs, no keepsakes or mementos. There wasn’t even a bedside table, just one machine that beeped and hissed, attached to her thin arm by a tube.
Colette didn’t say anything when I walked in. I think she knew I was coming. She took Olivia by the hand, kissed Amber on the forehead, and walked slowly past me into the corridor.
“There’s a button by the bed, if you need anything,” Jackie said, closing the door behind her.
Amber’s skin hung from her like a sheet thrown over a coat rack, and her chest heaved up and down with each tiny breath she took.
“Where’s my dad?” she asked weakly as I sat down beside the bed, terrified to touch her.
I said I didn’t know, because that was the truth. Amber seemed to recognize my voice. She rolled her head and looked straight into my eyes, before turning her gaze back toward the ceiling and scrunching up her face tightly as she drew in one long, high-pitched breath.
I said her name out loud, and her face relaxed a little. I said it again.
“Amber, I need you to get up,” I said, stretching my hand toward her arm. I stroked my fingers across her cool skin, trying to warm her up without pressing too hard, like an apple straight from the fridge. I ran my fingers up her arms and down toward her hand that was so pale it was virtually camouflaged against the bedspread.
“Amber, I know you’re tired,” I whispered, “and that you’re unwell. But if you could just get up, just for a bit, I think you’d see things differently.”
She turned to look at me and tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.
“I want my hair back,” she said, with utter conviction. “I don’t want to go anywhere without my hair.”
“It grows back when you’re better. Look,” I said, bending down and passing her hand across the crown of my head, letting her limp palm rest against my proud new patch of hair.
I sat up again and Amber turned her face back toward the ceiling, tears cutting down the sides of her face like condensation on a bus window.
I took a tissue from my back pocket and wiped away each one.
“The thing is, Amber, I need you to get better because I’m getting better, and the problem is I can’t really remember what I ever did before I knew you. Before we were us. I know you must feel scared about being ill, but I’m starting to feel scared about getting better . . . about having to do anything without you.”
Amber closed her eyes gently and breathed in deeply while I spoke.
“And even if you don’t always love me, even if we don’t always know each other, I think the world will always be a more interesting place with you in it . . . so with that in mind I think what you’re doing is really irresponsible,” I said, trying to claw back my breath as Amber’s image became blurred by my own tears, like a firework squinted at through watering eyes.
“Please, Amber,” I whispered in her ear, “please just get up. Prove everyone wrong one more time.”
I felt her breath on my neck, soft and uncertain like a baby’s.
Amber’s chest began to move in steadier, shorter bursts, like rippling tide.
Amber was designed for life. She was designed for color and movement. She was not a girl born for the click of the camera’s lens. No device could capture her, the way she was, the way she was meant to be. She was not born to be still or stationary. Without her color she was broken, a faulty image that could never be fixed. Without her voice she was nothing. Amber was gone. At that moment it was all clear to me. Everything to come was just a formality.
When I realized there would be no answer from her, I stood up and kissed her gently on the forehead.
I whispered something in her ear and, from my back pocket, took out the lock of her hair, and slid it beneath the palm of her right hand.
Mum found me in the entrance hall on the way out of the hospital. I was half blinded by tears and light-headed from sobbing so hard. I saw her coming toward me down the corridor and tried to avoid her. I speeded up, edging my way toward the farthest wall as best I could, and nearly made it.
“Francis sweetheart,” she said, taking hold of my arm.
“Don’t,” I said, pulling away, but she held on tight and dragged me toward her. I felt her wrap her arms around me, tightly, like a safety belt.
“I know . . .” she said as both of us felt our knees give way beneath us until we were sitting on the floor. “I know.”
We ended up huddled together in the hospital corridor, where we sat until I couldn’t cry anymore.
When we did get home Mum followed me upstairs and sat with me in silence on my bed.
“I have something to give you, Francis,” she said eventually, “but if you think it’ll upset you too much I can keep it for as long as you need me to, okay?” I nodded. “It’s from Colette,” she said, taking a thin white envelope from her handbag. “Amber asked her to give you it. I’ll leave it on your bed. But if you don’t want to open it, you just remember what I said.”
Once she had gone I stood up and opened the letter. I picked along the seal with the sharpest edge of my nail scissors, so that none of the paper ripped, and carefully removed the folded white sheet from inside.
When I opened the letter hundreds of gold stars, tiny like glitter, tumbled down from the folded page onto my lap.
The handwriting was Amber’s, each letter pressed hard into the page like she was shouting.
Dear Francis,
. . . Shut up and deal.
Always,
Amber
That night I slept in Mum’s bed. I didn’t ask. I j
ust crawled in sometime after nine and let her wrap her arms around me from behind, drawing me toward her until our breathing became synchronized and I fell asleep, slowly but steadily, like a film fading to black.
At thirteen minutes past one in the morning our phone rang. Mum picked up, even though she didn’t have to.
When someone phones that late it can only mean bad things.
And it did.
AFTER
It’s six years later and we are traipsing toward a wedding.
Can you guess whose?
I’ll give you a clue. It’s not actually a wedding; it’s an interfaith blessing of a lifetime’s commitment. The priest is actually a member of a folk band, and two of the bridesmaids (the ones who aren’t Mum) are wearing tie-dyed kaftans.
Also, it’s not in a church. The whole ceremony is being held in a forest.
It seems Christian wasn’t as soppy as Amber always said he was, because after it happened he and Colette became acquainted in all sorts of ways that wouldn’t have been legal were he any sort of doctor. They were an item by the following Christmas, and got engaged during my gap year.
Mum’s voice went shrill when she found out.
Much to her pleasure, she was made responsible for the bachelorette party. After nixing a night on the town, Colette had agreed to a civilized meal at our house with some of her closest friends.
When Colette’s clique arrived Mum sat them all down, then locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of rosé.
“Oh, love, it looks like a therapy group in there,” she hissed down the line at me. “These aren’t my people, Francis . . . they won’t even watch Pretty Woman because of sexism or something.”
Things started to pick up later on and Mum must eventually have found the merits of both Colette’s friends and the homemade wine they had all brought. I know this because at half past one in the morning she rang me to sing “Come on Eileen” with her New Best Friends for Life (her words).
On the day of the wedding Mum was manic before I’d even had time for breakfast. Chris and Fiona had got blind drunk the night before with Christian, and Mum couldn’t get either of them out of bed.