Page 32 of The First Time I Saw You
‘I don’t think you can cause pneumonia, Helen.’ I stir the sugar into the cup and add milk.
‘You can. I’ve googled it. It can be caused by pulmonary contusion,’ she stretches her voice into something official sounding. ‘Chest trauma.’
‘I’m sure there would have been an inquiry, if there were any signs of—’
‘I don’t even have a photo of my mum, did you know that? Not one. At least you have that.’
‘I do.’ I lower myself into a chair.
‘There was flour all over the floor next to her body,’ she whispers. ‘I cleaned it up before I rang the police . . . I didn’t want to spoil your surprise.’
‘My surprise?’ I ask, eager for more but not wanting to break her train of thought.
‘I loved her very much, Soph, but I had to look afteryou. Everyone was always asking howyouwere, how sad it was foryou, how awful it was foryou. . . Do you know that I didn’t sleep more than two hours at a time until I was twenty-five? I was always too scared to let myself rest for too long in case something happened and I missed it. It was my fault.’ Pain grazes her voice, quietening her: she feels so very far away.
‘Helen?’
‘It was all my fault.’ I hear her sniff and then the phone is dead.
‘Just give her time . . .’Mum says.‘She’ll tell you . . . just give her time.’
Week Eleven
Samuel
The gauze has been replaced across the right side of my face and it’s healing nicely – apparently. I look down to where the male nurse, who smells strongly of garlic and sweat, is wrapping fresh bandages around my arms, whilst laughing at whatever hilarity the sit-com family are involved in today. I look away. I hate it here. I’m now on a ward filled with the lives of strangers, the sounds of their day-to-day existence, heightened by the restrictions of my vision.
Only Sarah knows the truth of what is happening to me. I’ve asked the doctors not to mention it to my parents until I’ve had a chance to explain. I’ll tell them soon, but not here, not surrounded by unfamiliar people . . . I’ll tell them once I’m home.
So here is what it feels like: raise your hands and circle them into binoculars – just like you used to when you were a kid looking for pirates on the horizon or looking for Prince Charming to rescue you from the tower. Now take them away from your eyes . . . see how the room expands, see how it is filled with colour, see how free you feel. Pop your binoculars back on, but this time use just one hand and close your other eye – it’s easier for me to explain if we do it this way. Now slowly start to close your fist. You should see your world shrinking and disappearing; you have just lost what lies in the corner of your eye. Take your fist away and enjoy the sights around; you don’t have a fist squeezing your life from you. I, on the other hand, can’t twist and turn away from the fist that has grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, like Daniel Byrne did when I was eight. I can’t use brute force to escape it like I did back in the day. This fist has a hold on me that I can’t escape, and it’s only going to get stronger.
I have a song stuck in my head and I can’t get rid of it: ‘Unchained Melody’ by the Righteous Brothers. It’s the one from the saucy clay-moulding scene inGhost– the line about time going by slowly – it’s like the record is scratched and it keeps replaying the same line over and over again. Time is still going by slowly. My sight is going and I’m wasting it, stuck in this hospital looking at peach curtains and magnolia walls. My sight is being wasted on magnolia. Jesus, I want to go home. I need to see Ireland, then I need to find Sophie. But until my temperature goes down and I’ve fought off this infection, I’m stuck here in the peach and magnolia with the sounds of loud Americans.
Sarah is trying to arrange my flight home. A long flight in a neck brace: now, that sounds like fun.
The itching beneath the gauze and beneath the plaster on my leg is driving me insane. I need to get out of here. A quiet nurse with a soft, whispery voice appears in front of me, making me jump. The pain screeches up my spine and my eyes water. This is becoming a regular thing, people sneaking up on me, except they don’t: I just can’t fecking see them.
Let’s do another experiment, so at least you can ‘see’ where I’m coming from. Take your left hand, keep your fingers together, cross your body and hold that hand – pinkie facing forward – against your temple; now stretch out your right arm, again, like you did when you were a kid pretending to be an aeroplane. Got it? Now slowly bring your arm forward so it’s pointing straight out in front of you . . . how long did it take you to see your fingers? Put your left hand back down and go back to aeroplane mode and do the manoeuvre again . . . see how much sooner you can see the arm moving?
I forgive the nurse because she is here to give me my meds. I watch her flick through a few pages of my chart. I give her a smile and a thanks, but her response is of pity and understanding, a sort of head-tilted, tight-lipped, poor-you kind of smile. I close my eyes and wait for the cool feeling that calms the itches and blows out the fire.
My mind drifts away from this room with the beeps and gasps of the machinery, from the coughs and footsteps of the staff, the hushed discussions of blood pressure being too high, of higher dosages, of let’s see over the next forty-eight hours, of the distant ping of the lift arriving; instead, happiness floods through my veins as I let my dulled senses take me to Sophie.
Week Twelve
Sophie
Gale-force winds are battering the house. I know that this house can take the beating Mother Nature is giving it – after all, it’s been empty for all this time and it’s still standing – but the howling and the shadows outside have unsettled me. A stray piece of TV cable is complaining outside my window, tapping at the pane; I imagine Cathy on the moor asking Heathcliff to let her in. My cold fingers reach out of my bed and click on the bedside lamp. Soft light gently touches the corners of the room; shadows that had been scowling and hiding from view are caressed and cajoled into a yawn and a stretch.
I shift into a sitting position and put my hand to my chest where I can feel the scrape of heartburn.
‘So, Bean, you’ve stopped making me sick and replaced it with this instead? That hardly seems fair.’ I poke my stomach. The Book says that if I poke my tummy, Bean will wriggle about in response. I grin down at my pink fleecy pyjama top, imagining Bean frowning and fidgeting into a more comfortable position. I burp and shift again. ‘I get to see you tomorrow.’ My voice resonates and meanders through the air, peeks under the furniture and strokes the walls, awakening the house and giving it life. I rub my chest again and wonder if I have any Gaviscon downstairs. The mattress flexes beneath my weight as I shift and pull my dressing gown around me, noticing the belt ties don’t hang as loosely as they once did.
The smell of fresh paint and treated wood greets me as I open the new kitchen door, made of heavy oak, and step into the room. Gone are the cracks and the mismatched furniture, and instead a creamy-white Aga stands proud like a parent amongst the family of oak cupboard doors. The wall behind it holds an old beam which had been hidden behind plasterboard, and it arches above it like a puzzled eyebrow. Outside, Cathy is still screeching through the hills, whispering her way through chimneys and hissing in the ears of hidden cracks, but in here, the new double-glazed windows are keeping Cathy away, making her presence feel distant. Warmth radiates inside this room, like a heartbeat pulsing inside what was once a cold, dead space.
Reaching for the kettle, I fill it, add a tea bag to the cup and then sit down at the table which I found in town. It’s been ‘up-cycled’ and still has scratches and stories beneath the varnish. I run my finger along one of the cracks. It feels smooth, the texture of the original scrape now healed and treated; hidden almost. I think of Helen and how hard she has tried to hide her scars; how my asking her about the past has made her begin to pick at the varnish.
I’m going to see her next week. The few conversations we’ve had since the night of the pornstar martinis have been brief and formulaic: I ask how the kids are, she asks how my pregnancy is going, I mention the weather, she agrees it is too wet or too windy. Neither of us mention her phone call; I wonder now if she even remembers it.
