Rowan

by Tilly Delane

  “Go to sleep,” I order and laugh at his instant pretend snoring.

  I know full well that he’s nowhere near falling asleep.

  We’re going to clean up, and then he’ll be good to go again before long.

  And this time, it’ll be long and drawn out.

  I know my man.

  Rowan

  I wake up from a deafening alarm going off that I’ve never heard before.

  I shoot up in bed and see Raven already standing next to it, hectically pulling her tunic over her head then climbing into her jeans without bothering with either bra or panties.

  “Ring Christine. House phone. Dial zero then twelve,” she orders without missing a beat. “Tell her we have an emergency and to get her ass over here right away.”

  I scramble to reach the landline phone on her bedside table while she’s already halfway to the door.

  “What do I tell her?” I shout at Raven’s back. “What’s the emergency?”

  “I don’t know,” she shouts back, descending the stairs. “It’s coming from Simon’s room.”

  It’s then that I see the panel of lights integrated into her phone. Five lights, five room numbers. Simon’s room number is flashing while the alarm keeps bleating out of the phone’s loudspeaker. I lift the receiver and in a desperate attempt to shut off the noise, I push the blinking button. It works.

  I dial Christine, and she answers after a couple of rings. I relay the message. Her voice is instantly alert.

  “Go help her,” she bellows at me then hangs up.

  I throw my cargo trousers on, not bothering with anything else, and follow Raven down the stairs. As I arrive at Simon’s room, Charlie is sprinting up the stairs with a defibrillator he must have retrieved from somewhere on the ground floor, while Tristan is standing in the door of his room, pale and disorientated.

  One look at an ashen Simon, laid out on his back on the floor while Raven is pumping his chest, tells me all I need to know.

  Charlie pushes past me and Raven starts instructing him on the defib, until the built-in mechanical voice takes over.

  “Rowan,” she calls out to me just before the machine tells her it’s ready. “Ring for an ambulance. Tell them we have a man in cardiac arrest. Now!”

  Raven

  He doesn't make it.

  We all fight for him as hard as we can. Me, Christine, the paramedic, the EMTs, and later the doctors in the emergency room, but he never regains consciousness.

  And I feel guilty as hell.

  Simon’s last act on earth was to push the red button in his room and maybe if I hadn’t been fucked into oblivion and hadn’t taken so long to wake up, and maybe if I hadn’t been butt naked and hadn’t lost precious minutes getting my clothes on, I might have got there early enough to save him.

  I know the point is mute.

  I know it’s a futile discourse.

  I’ve lost my fair share of patients during my time as a nurse, mostly in training when I was in ER, but some in rehab also.

  Halosan has one of the best track records in the industry for not losing patients, but we are still dealing with addicts and from time to time one of them dies. But it’s never happened in my house, on my watch, before and that makes it feel completely different.

  The fact I’m not dealing very well doesn’t change Halosan protocol, though, and Halosan protocol says that I am the liaison between Simon’s family, the hospital, the police and the coroner.

  The basic tox screen takes ten days to come back from the lab and in the meantime, I’m the go-between for everyone involved, while all I really want to do is hide in bed and never come out.

  Alone.

  Rowan

  I lose my girl the moment Simon loses his life.

  She just vanishes from my grasp while still in plain view.

  Raven and Christine follow the ambulance and return a few hours later with the news that Simon passed away in A&E.

  The Denyers immediately call a whole Village meeting in the therapy hall, where guests are offered the choice between staying the course or going into alternative arrangements. Everybody decides to stay, because nobody is in the right frame of mind to make a decision at this point.

  A couple of coppers come in the afternoon and ask us if we saw Simon use anything. It seems a bit odd, considering he was here for alcohol dependency, but I guess that’s regular procedure when someone dies in rehab. They search Simon’s room and seal it until the coroner’s report comes back. Then they leave to speak to Rothman.

  About ten minutes later, Rothman, all self-important, appears in our cottage kitchen to sniff around Raven.

  I listen to him offer his support with paperwork and with packing up Simon’s stuff for the family, if Raven finds it too hard to deal with on her own, and my blood boils. He’s such a smarmy git. Fucking opportunist. I know people like him. Masking preying on weakness as concern.

  I can’t believe he’s using this as an opening to get into her pants. He even makes her a cup of tea while he asks her how she is coping and all that. The joke’s on him ‘cause she doesn’t drink tea.

  And, of course, she keeps him at a distance, informing him in her prime clipped nurse’s voice that she is fine, and that Simon’s stuff is not to be touched until the police give it the all clear and unseal the room, but that she’s sure she will be able to manage once the time comes.

  He buggers off again with his tail between his legs.

  Next, a shallow kind of grief descends over The Village like a lead blanket, and that thing happens that always happens when somebody dies that nobody truly liked yet nobody hated either. Everybody, even people in houses we barely have had anything to do with, suddenly knew the cunt really well and liked him lots.

  I keep out of it. I am not hypocritical enough to join in that chorus. But I’m not impervious either. My mind keeps wandering to his wife and kids. To that last spark of hope between them. I feel for them. But in the grey light of morning, after yet another night alone in my bed and when there is nobody around to see the truth in my eyes, I can admit to myself that what really pisses me off about Simon’s death is that it has finished whatever there was between Raven and me.

  It’s not that I didn’t try.

  I intercepted her on the landing at bedtime that first night. Just stood there and waited for her to come out of the bathroom and wordlessly opened my arms to offer her a hug. She looked at me, shook her head once and disappeared into her room.

  I’ve never known one measly shake of the head to be so devastating, but what really haunts me is the expression in her eyes.

  She blames herself.

  She blames us somehow, though I’m stumped as to how she came to that fucking conclusion.

  But there it was, in her eyes, as clear as day.

  I tried again the next night.

  She wouldn’t even look at me.

  And the next.

  “Just stop,” she hissed.

  Then the first chance she gets, she moves down a floor.

  We’re over.

  The sad thing is, I deserve it. I pissed all over Silas’ happiness with Niamh. So why should I get to keep the first woman I ever fall in love with?

  ‘Cause that’s what I am. Totally, utterly, irrevocably in love with a woman who now looks at me as if I am the devil incarnate.

  Well played, Karma, well played.

  Raven

  Charlie is the first one to fall.

  He comes to me on the Thursday morning following Simon’s death and tells me his parents are collecting him the next day. He makes a feeble joke about how he’s spoken to the Denyers and will get a whole freebie stay next time.

  I smile sadly.

  “I hope there isn’t a next time, Charlie,” I tell him honestly.

  He grins.

  “Don’t be silly, woman. Of course there will be a next time. I’m a fucking rock star!”

  He turns away from the bottom of the stairs, where we are having this conversation, an
d starts bounding up. Three steps later, he turns around, comes back down, throws his arms around me in a tight hug and lifts me off my feet.

  “But it won’t be the same without you, Ray,” he whispers into my ear.

  Then he sets me down and runs back up the stairs.

  “That’s not my name!” I shout after him.

  “You need to take that up with Elias, Ravenna,” he hollers back and then slams the door to his room shut.

  As soon as he is gone the following morning, I move down to the floor below.

  I can’t bear being that close to Rowan any longer. He keeps looking at me with so much love, and it hurts to deny him, but I just can’t go there anymore. It’s like I’ve snapped out of a trance. And in the stark light of day, I’ve finally realized that what we were doing was wrong on so many levels it makes me want to hurl.

  The moment I move down onto the floor below, Tristan comes to me.

  He knocks on what was Charlie’s room and is now mine, just after I’ve plugged the master phone into the socket. I’m in the middle of staring at the emergency alarm buttons on it as if I could turn back time and somehow undo what’s happened, if I just hypnotize this phone long enough, when he raps gingerly on the open door.

  “Raven?” he asks tentatively, and I turn to face him.

  “When is she coming to pick you up?” I ask him before he can even tell me that he’s called his mom.

  To be honest, I’m impressed he didn’t leave first. I think he might have even stuck it out, if Charlie had stayed and if the atmosphere between Rowan and me wasn’t so fucking weird.

  “She’s not,” he says. “I’m taking the train from Poole this afternoon.”

  “How are you getting there?”

  “Hiking part of the way. Then bus. Rowan is coming with me.”

  My heart stops and searing pain slices through me where relief should have set in.

  He’s leaving me.

  I take a deep breath and try to focus on the boy in front me.

  Tristan shyly takes a couple of steps into the room and holds out both his hands for me to take. I slip my palms into his clammy ones and squeeze them.

  “You did well, Tristan,” I tell him.

  He shrugs and looks over my shoulder at the wall but doesn’t let go of my hands. Tears pool in his eyes.

  “I really didn’t like him,” he says then looks at me with a vague smile through the tears. “But I think maybe he taught me more than this entire program did.”

  “Did he?”

  “His death did, yeah.”

  He nods and the nod pushes a tear over the edge. He takes his right hand out of mine and wipes at his cheek with the back of it. I wait for a moment, but when he doesn’t elaborate, I just pull him into a hug.

  “You take care of yourself, kid. There is a whole world out there. There is a whole load of life to live. Don’t waste it. Save the gaming for when you’re old and weak and your body won’t let you do the real thing any longer.”

  He laughs a watery laugh at that.

  “That’s kind of where I’m at,” he says as he withdraws from me. “Thank you, Raven, for everything.”

  Rowan

  “Are you certain about this, Rowan? I think we’ve made great progress, but I’m not sure you’re ready to go back out there just yet,” Lewin says, looking at me with critical eyes.

  I’ve just told her that I’m leaving with Tristan this afternoon. She’s not exactly shocked.

  “You think I’m gonna go gamble Sheena’s house away again?”

  There is surprise on her face when I say it, and then she laughs.

  “You know what? I had actually forgotten that’s why you’re here. So no, I don’t think so. To be honest, I don’t think the gambling was ever your actual problem. More like a symptom of an entirely different issue.”

  “Isn’t that true for all addiction?”

  “To a point. But you are a very different kettle of fish from most people who come through here.”

  “I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted.”

  She grins.

  “Oh, always flattered. It’s the unusual ones that make a counsellor’s heart tick.”

  “I thought you were supposed to see the weird and wonderful in all your clients.”

  “Yeah,” she utters dismissively. “That is the theory. So, are you certain about this? I understand if you don’t want to stay in Ravenna’s house right now with what’s happened and everyone else leaving and with a room that’s still sealed by the police.”

  She pauses to pull a face which says, ‘I wouldn’t want to stay there either’.

  “But we could arrange something,” she carries on. “I believe one of Matilda’s guests left before all of this occurred, so she has a vacancy in her house. You could finish your course of therapy. I know there is only a week left, but I feel that you would be so much stronger if you finished what you started here. “

  I actually pretend to think about it for a moment, although I know I could never do that.

  Leaving here is one thing.

  Moving into another house would be a kick in the teeth for Raven that she doesn’t deserve, no matter how much her rejection hurts me right now. No, it’s best that I take myself out of her sphere completely. Give her space to breathe, to come to terms.

  I shake my head.

  “No,” I answer Lewin. “I want to go home.”

  Lewin sighs but nods acceptingly.

  “So what are you planning on doing when you leave here? Where is home?”

  “Sheena’s house,” I say and shrug. “No idea what I’m gonna do to make money. No more fighting, though. Venue security, maybe. There are a lot of bouncing jobs in Brighton. Or I’ll ask Sheena if they need a night watchman at the hotel where she works. Personal trainer. Whatever. I’ll figure something out.”

  “Okay,” she smiles, a wide smile I haven’t seen on her before, and blows one of those wisps of hair that always frame her face out of her line of sight. “I want you to think about maybe doing something with your brain, Rowan. ‘Cause there is a lot of it. And you know that Tristan was one of my clients here, too, right? Without breaking confidentiality, let me say that I have a strong suspicion you really helped bring him out of his shell. I hear you are a great swim coach. A great teacher. Just putting that out there. Sometimes these things run in families. And I want you to think about whether you want to carry on using your body to get through life or whether maybe it’s time to engage your grey matter. But you’re right. All of that is just the fine print. And as much as I would have liked to help you figure out the fine print, you are done here.”

  She stands up, pulls her cardigan closer around herself, despite the fact it is still hot as hell on Purbeck and offers me a hand.

  “Don’t fuck it up again.”