by Rebecca Ley
‘It’s Hugo,’ she says, and her voice comes out as a wail. ‘There’s something wrong. He has a temperature.’
Mathilde pushes past her and I follow without thinking, calling out his name. Mrs Donald tells us he’s in her room.
He lies under the covers in her bed, shivering and sweaty. He’s as pale as I’ve ever seen him and his dark hair is stuck to his forehead, clinging to him. He blinks at us as we enter.
Mrs Donald rushes behind us. ‘He just suddenly got worse this afternoon,’ she says. ‘He said he wasn’t feeling well and I thought he was hot but not like this. Then we were trying to have some lunch and he wouldn’t eat, he was sick. I don’t know what to do.’
There’s a bowl of steaming water by his bedside and a bucket with vomit dripping in it, stuck to the sides of the plastic and green, bright green.
‘He’s been sick?’ Mathilde says, to Mrs Donald, wiping the sweat away from his forehead. ‘Are you okay baby Hugo?’ she says to him. She used to say this to him, every day, until he decided he was too old. The sound of it makes me desperate.
He tries to nod at her, and holds out his hand for us.
‘He’s so hot,’ Mathilde says, and looks at the bowl of water. ‘Why is there hot water here?’
‘I thought that helped,’ Mrs Donald says. ‘Steaming it out. I didn’t know what to do.’
Mathilde doesn’t say anything. I go through our rucksacks, burrowing through, trying to find anything we picked up from the pharmacy.
‘Don’t you have any paracetamol?’ I say, to Mrs Donald, ‘Don’t you have anything to give him?’
‘No,’ Mrs Donald says, her face crumpled, her hands around her neck, ‘We don’t have any of that now, it’s all gone. Father Anthony always says he will bring us these things, we just have to wait for Father. Maybe he has something already?’ She starts to wail and I pat her arm.
‘I know you’ve done everything you can,’ I say.
Mathilde gives me a sharp look.
‘Should I ask him? Should I make sure?’ I pass Mathilde everything we’ve already gathered from the pharmacy, but it is only soothing creams and chamomile lotion, and gel for mouth ulcers. Still, I tell her to slather what she can on him, in hopes of cooling him and making him better. I go downstairs to our flat and check every cupboard and there is nothing, we haven’t had painkillers in a long time.
I go back upstairs.
‘Nothing else,’ I say, ‘I’m going to go see Father. Call the doctor,’ I say to Mrs Donald, and she looks at me blankly. ‘Call the local doctor?’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘That’s Father Anthony, too, isn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’ I say, ‘He’s a priest.’
‘He’s a healer,’ she says. ‘There’s no doctor up here. He’s the healer.’
‘Fuck,’ Mathilde says. ‘Putain.’
I bring my hand up to my face. ‘We never checked. We never thought about it. There’s always a doctor, in every village. There’s always someone who has some drugs, or something, who’s hoarded things, who knows things.’ I start shaking Mrs Donald by the arms, ‘It can’t be true, even in the worst places, even in places worse than this, there was always a nurse, there was always someone.’
Mrs Donald shakes her head. ‘God will help him,’ she says, ‘God will heal him.’
I stare at her. My mouth is open. I say, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Go,’ Mathilde says, crouching by his side. ‘Go now, quickly.’
I leave the flat as fast as I can, and see the path beneath my feet disappear in a blur. I break into a run, slipping on the mud, my clothes drowning in the rain. I think of how people used to do this for fun. They’d never run for anything real in all their life. And with every step the pain in my throat grows louder until I let out a noise which might be a scream, on the way to the church, gasping for air. I am watching his face in my mind, telling him I was going to teach him chopsticks on the piano, just like every normal child always did. I was going to make him feel normal, like he wanted, and not like an afterthought. I was going to give him something that wasn’t left behind, or wasn’t used before, or wasn’t leftover. I was going to give him something that was his, like we never had done before. I was going to give him something brand new.
I enter the church and it is dark. I push open the heavy door and it’s cold and there is a draught coming from the corners of the building. I shout Father Anthony’s name. I stand at the bottom of the aisle and put my hand against a pew. I call his name again. I call it until a match is struck and a lamp moves down the aisle towards me.
‘Jaminder?’ he says, and his face is opposite mine. In the dark I barely recognise it.
‘Father, Hugo is sick. We need help, we need medication. There’s no doctor here,’ I say, as though he doesn’t already know.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ he says, and he doesn’t move, holding the lamp in front of him.
‘He has a fever, he’s been sick,’ I look up at the stained glass and I can’t see it in this light, there’s no colour. It’s not there. ‘Please, hurry.’
‘I can’t,’ he says, and still his arm doesn’t move from in front of him. And his face doesn’t change. ‘I’m sorry he’s unwell. I can give you some of my oatmeal, and water. I can offer you prayer, I can offer to heal in this way, but I have nothing material to give you.’
‘What do you mean?’ I say, calling out to him, ‘You’re the priest, you own this town, you must have something. You must have medicine, you must help us.’
‘Oh, my child,’ he says, lowering the lamp. ‘I’ve tried. I’ve called out, I’ve asked for help, but none has come. I’ve failed.’
I shake my head, ‘Why can’t anyone help us?’ I reach out to his arm and grab it, pressing down, and he steps back from me, a look of horror on his face.
‘Because there is nothing left.’
‘There’s something,’ I shout, pleading with him, ‘They still have things in London. They have so much. They said you might have something. There is still something.’
‘Not here,’ he says, ‘Not now.’
‘What should I do?’ I gasp out, up to those high bright windows. ‘He has a fever. We have nothing to give him.’
‘You’ll take care of him, it will pass.’
‘People don’t survive these things any more, people don’t make it like they used to.’
‘You must pray, Jaminder, you must pray to God.’
I, in turn, step back from him. ‘That won’t save him. We’ll die here. If we stay here, we’ll all die. I don’t know why we came here.’ I turn to walk away, thinking about how I haven’t needed God and he hasn’t needed me. To talk to nothing now would be akin to madness, futility in its worse sense, selfishness and entitlement. It would be fraudulent of my own thoughts; words called into the air, addressed to no one. ‘After everything I did, why would I pray to him only now?’
‘What do you feel guilty about, Jaminder?’
I stop before the door, with my back to him. I look up at the ceiling, and my eyes blink in the darkness. ‘I thought it would be difficult, I thought it would hurt me, and I’d be afraid. But it didn’t and I’m not.’ A sickly lump catches in my throat. ‘I’m not sorry for what I’ve done. I don’t feel guilt.’ I turn to him, and he is unmoved, holding the lamp up above him. ‘I’m more afraid of this place, of what there is for us. I’m more afraid of this darkness than of the things I’ve done. I’m more afraid of the idea of God than of my own sins.’
‘You shouldn’t fear him,’ he says.
‘I’ll never be sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ll never repent. I’ll never feel bad about it.’
‘Then why do you continue to search for something? Why are you here?’
‘I don’t think you have to believe in God to look for something. I don’t think you have to believe in God to be kind.’
I turn away from him. I push the door open into the wet night air. I walk home with nothing to offer upon my return.
We sit around Hugo and stay with him through the night. We have candles lit, of course, so Mathilde remarks that we are taking vigil. We leave the fire unlit, so we are huddled and cold, as we try and lower his fever. We bathe cloths in cold water meant for our bath and place them on his forehead, but it only makes him shiver. He is asleep, but in a fitful state, and I grasp Mathilde’s hand. We wait.
‘Do you think parents always worried about their children like this?’ she says to me, her palm sweating beneath mine, despite the cold.
‘I think they did,’ I say, ‘I think my grandparents worried about me. I think they sat with me and worried.’
She places her head on the side of his bed, forehead to sheet. She exhales. ‘I keep thinking about how old I thought my mother was. Not just when she died, but when I was a child. She always seemed so old. But she was only in her thirties, and now I’m approaching it, and I feel in many ways older than she ever was. These five years have been a lifetime, haven’t they?’
I forget that she’s younger than me. I forget that I’ve entered a new decade without her. It doesn’t really matter, up here. We’re as old as each other, because of Hugo, because of the life we’ve lived. I look over at him.
‘It’s been a lifetime for him,’ I say. ‘This is all he’s ever known. London, Mrs P, the lot of them, it all seems so far away.’
‘Do you think we’ve done something terrible?’ she says. ‘Do you think, if we’d stayed in London, or further south, there’d be more for him? Is this because of us?’
‘What, Auntie Knows Best?’ I say and grasp her hand firmer in mine. ‘I don’t know. We didn’t have the privilege of choice. We knew when we had him that it would be nothing like London, that it would be hard.’
She looks at me like I’ve insulted her, and pulls her hand away. ‘You think we made the wrong choice having him? You think we shouldn’t have wanted him? You think I should’ve wanted to get rid of him, like you did?’
‘You know I didn’t want that,’ I whisper. ‘You know that.’
We never speak of the decisions we made to bring us here. So I hate her for it, when she brings it up, when she reminds me of the person I was almost six years ago, the person who is different from now and separate, who exists in a separate world. I hate her unkind face that is only unkind because it is scared. She raises her eyebrows at me to say: I am right and you are wrong. I think she might be misremembering in her unhappiness, I think she wants to say that she loves Hugo more than me, and she wanted him more than me, but it’s not true.
‘I know what you really thought,’ she says. ‘That it wasn’t right for a child, this world. But I knew,’ she pushes her hand against her chest in self-righteousness. ‘I knew he was worth it.’
I shake my head. ‘I always wanted him! I just didn’t know, we didn’t know how we could do it. If it was worth living like that. You know that, we both thought that. It was a valid choice, either way, in that situation, wasn’t it?’
‘And now you’re saying it’s not worth it? You think we should never have had him? He’s our son, too, he’s our son, and you don’t want him?’
I hate her, in this instant; I hate her for the things she’s made me do. I hate her for attempting to love you, even if it was only for a moment. I hate her for assuming that because I considered not wanting Hugo, I don’t love him now.
‘I’ve been teaching Hugo about France,’ I say, because I know this will hurt her, I know this will upset her more.
‘In secret?’ she says, ‘Why would you do that?’ Her mouth is tight like her words.
‘I thought he should know where he’s from.’
She snorts, a vicious snort. ‘He’s not from anywhere.’
‘Well, that’s a stupid thing to say.’ The accusation hurts me. ‘You should’ve spoken to him in French. You should’ve spoken French, sometimes. Just a few words. You should’ve taught him something.’
‘I can’t,’ she says, in that same forced way. ‘I don’t think I even could if I tried. It’s gone.’
‘Where has it gone?’ I wave my arms around, gesturing about the room. ‘Your first language can’t just vanish.’
‘It can,’ she says, quietly. ‘English words come first now. It’s been so long. I’ve forgotten the French for so many things, or maybe I never knew to begin with. If I had to have a conversation like that now it would be stilted. My brain blocks me from retrieving the words.’ She looks up at me, pained. ‘I’m a foreigner in my own mind.’ She prods at her temple, a little too forcefully, and I want to take her hand in mine. ‘So how could I teach him? What do I have to teach him? And what about the words I can’t describe in French or English? The things that don’t have a name?’
‘That’s not right,’ I say. ‘Some words have to be spoken.’
‘I can’t help it,’ she says. ‘That’s just how I feel. It’s not your right to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do. It’s not your right to teach him about where I came from. Whatever sense of culture we have left, whatever history there is, it’s gone now. What do you know of it anyway? What does it mean to you?’
‘I only do it because he should know. He should know where you’re from, who you really are.’ I want to hurt her. ‘Do I even know who you are?’
Now her mouth is open and wide and pulled back from her teeth. She is not trying to restrain it. ‘You know nothing!’ she says, screaming in every way apart from the volume of her voice, lowered for Hugo’s sake. It is a rasp, forced out. ‘You left somewhere that wasn’t even your home, voluntarily, when you were a child. My whole life was obliterated. You can’t know what that does to a person.’
We’re playing that game people sometimes play: who has it worse, who has suffered more. There’s no answer, and no sense of being right, there is only its antidote: empathy. But it’s hardest to come by with people who know you the best.
‘It was obliterated,’ I say, slowly, ‘and now you obliterate it faster, farther – you didn’t try to keep anything of it, you just lost it, you let it slip away.’
‘Because I’m not like you,’ her voice is a hiss of a sound and her body is straining forwards as though under a weight, ‘I can’t bear it.’
‘And I can?’ I jab at my own chest now. ‘Did I not take a bullet for the both of us once?’
We don’t like to think of it this way: she did one thing, I did another. We like to think of it as though we were both complicit in every action the other took. But that only works half the time. The other half we blame each other, we resent each other, we are jealous of the other.
‘I never asked you to do it.’
‘You never stopped me.’
‘All right,’ she says, her arms are up, her face is wet. ‘I’d be nothing without you.’ Her tone is mocking and cruel. ‘I’d be nothing without you.’ But as she repeats it she meets my eyes, her face is sincere. She says it slowly: ‘I’d be nothing without you.’
I shake my head. ‘I wish I could’ve done more.’
She leans closer, she strokes my hair. ‘We’re doing all right, aren’t we? We’re okay.’ She looks at me guiltily. ‘Jusqu’ici, tout va bien.’
‘What does that mean?’
Her eyes are large and brown and brilliant, like she’s a child, like she’s apologising. ‘So far, so good.’
I want to tell her, I want to explain: that she’s hard to get at, that she doesn’t always let me in. That I wanted to be around her, always, and her presence at those parties helped me in ways she can’t know. That her presence took me here, and as much as I might protest it, I couldn’t have done it on my own.
But she is also a wall, and I don’t always like the way she does things. I don’t like what she hides from Hugo, and I hate what she hides from me. I wish she’d embrace herself, and maybe I hate it in her because it’s the worst part of me, too.
I might hate the way she holds her fork and the way she says that affected ‘dig in’ when it should be ‘bon appetit’, but I also love her. S
he’s an incomparable beauty, in every sense, down to the creases of her knuckles and the freckles on her ear lobes, and she is just one of those people – in the way that some people are – that you want to possess. And that might have got her into trouble before, but it’s got me into trouble too because I don’t know how to reconcile it. I don’t know how to want her and save her and hold her and help her and also hate her, let her upset me, for always wanting things for her, and never being able to rescue that feeling, never being able to make it better.
I know she wants that for me, too. But it’s different. The responsibility of feeling and decision of feeling has always lain with me.
I never told her what they did to people like me. How they changed us if they found us, took away the parts of us that made us human. I was never able to tell her. I never knew how to tell myself, even after Gloria. I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to explain to her the myriad of things they took from me, my own sense of self. I wanted it to remain invisible. But things that are pushed to invisibility have a way of coming out through the cracks. And she is one of those cracks in a dark wall, where all the light forces its way through, and I see it as clearly as anything. Although I hide it from her, she knows what I’ve given up. I want to embrace her, I want to be near her, always. I want to touch her, I want to make her happy. But I know the only way to do this is to keep what little distance we have left between us. So I keep it. I keep myself from her.
So I hate her, too, in these moments, but I also understand her. We’re the only two in this world that could understand the other. Because of how our bodies are woven with fear, and how that gets to you, after a while. How living a life that is only a memory of other things makes you something else. And how you try, despite this, every day, in the tiny ways you can do it, to stitch it all back up.
I know her so well, every line of her, every space. I see through her, in its most privileged sense. That is why I take her hand and tell her, ‘He’s going to be all right, Mathilde. He’s going to be fine.’
‘We’re going to lose him,’ she whispers to me, head turned towards me, leaning against his bed, her hand limp in mine. ‘We’re going to lose him to the flu. Can you imagine a thing more stupid than that?’