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- Herausgeber: Corvus
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Holly Seddon's first three thrillers in one fast-paced, dramatic collection 'Gripping... as addictive as the best box sets' Independent on Holly Seddon Try Not to Breathe Alex is sinking. Slowly but surely, she's cut herself off from everything but her one true love - drink. Until she's forced to write a piece about a coma ward, where she meets Amy. Amy is lost. When she was fifteen, she was attacked and left for dead in a park. Her attacker was never found. Since then, she has drifted in a lonely, timeless place. She's as good as dead, but not even her doctors are sure how much she understands. Alex and Amy grew up in the same suburbs, played the same music, flirted with the same boys. And as Alex begins to investigate the attack, she opens the door to the same danger that has left Amy in a coma... You won't be able to put it down. Just remember to breathe. Don't Close Your Eyes Robin and Sarah weren't the closest of twins, but they loved each other dearly. Until they were taken from one another. Robin now lives alone. Suffering from panic attacks, she spends her days house-bound, watching the world from the safety of her sitting room. Until one day, she sees something she shouldn't... And Sarah? Sarah got what she wanted - a wonderful, perfect family. Then a shocking event forces Sarah to leave her beloved home in search of her sister, Robin. But Sarah isn't the only person looking for Robin. As their paths intersect, something dangerous is set in motion, leading Robin and Sarah to fight for much more than their relationship... Two sisters. A lifetime of secrets. One terrible reckoning. Love Will Tear Us Apart Fearing eternal singledom, childhood friends Kate and Paul made a vow that if they didn't find love by thirty, they would marry each other. Years later, about to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, Kate and Paul start to wonder, will this be their last? Is friendship really enough to make a marriage? As Kate struggles with a secret that reaches far into their past, the couple's vow has become the very thing that threatens their future... Sometimes a promise becomes a prison.
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Holly Seddon is a full-time writer, living in the heart of Amsterdam with her family. Holly has written for newspapers, websites and magazines since her early 20s after growing up in the English countryside, obsessed with music and books. Holly became a national and international bestseller with her debut, Try Not to Breathe, in 2016 and followed it in 2017 with Don’t Close Your Eyes and in 2018, Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Published in ebook in Great Britain in 2019 Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Holly Seddon, 2016, 2017, 2018
The moral right of Holly Seddon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The novels in this anthology are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 880 9
CorvusAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ
www.corvus-books.co.uk
For Boo and the babies
Contents
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-six
chapter twenty-seven
chapter twenty-eight
chapter twenty-nine
chapter thirty
chapter thirty-one
chapter thirty-two
chapter thirty-three
chapter thirty-four
chapter thirty-five
chapter thirty-six
chapter thirty-seven
chapter thirty-eight
chapter thirty-nine
chapter forty
chapter forty-one
chapter forty-two
chapter forty-three
chapter forty-four
chapter forty-five
chapter forty-six
chapter forty-seven
chapter forty-eight
chapter forty-nine
chapter fifty
chapter fifty-one
chapter fifty-two
chapter fifty-three
chapter fifty-four
chapter fifty-five
chapter fifty-six
chapter fifty-seven
chapter fifty-eight
chapter fifty-nine
chapter sixty
chapter sixty-one
chapter sixty-two
chapter sixty-three
chapter sixty-four
chapter sixty-five
chapter sixty-six
chapter sixty-seven
chapter sixty-eight
chapter sixty-nine
chapter seventy
chapter seventy-one
chapter seventy-two
chapter seventy-three
chapter seventy-four
chapter seventy-five
chapter seventy-six
chapter seventy-seven
chapter seventy-eight
chapter seventy-nine
Acknowledgements
chapter one
Amy
18 July 1995
Music thudded through Amy’s body and seized her heart. Music so loud that her eardrums pounded in frenzy and her baby bird ribs rattled. Music was everything. Well, almost everything.
Later, the newspapers would call fifteen-year-old Amy Stevenson a ‘ray of sunshine’, with ‘everything to live for’. Her headphones buzzed with Britpop as she trudged the long way home, rucksack sagging.
Amy had a boyfriend, Jake. He loved her and she loved him. They had been together for nearly eight months, walking the romance route around the ‘top field’ at school during break time, hot hand in hot hand, fast hearts synchronized.
Amy had two best friends: Jenny and Becky. The trio danced in a perpetual whirlpool of backstories, competition and gossip. Dizzying trails of ‘she-said-he-said-she-said’ preceded remorseful, sobbing hugs at the end of every drunken Saturday night.
Nights out meant lemon Hooch in the Memorial park or Archers and lemonade at The Sleeper pub, where a five-year-old wouldn’t have been ID’d. School nights meant 6 p.m. phone calls once it hit the cheap rate. She would talk until her step-dad, Bob, came into the dining room and gave her that look: it’s dinner time, get off my phone. Thursday nights were Top of the Pops and Eastenders; Friday nights were Friends and The Word.
Amy’s Kickers bag grew heavier with every step. She shifted it awkwardly to the other shoulder, tangling her wires so that one earbud pinged out of her ear, the sounds of the real world rushing in.
She had taken the long way home. The previous day she’d got back early and startled Bob in the kitchen as he stirred Coffee Mate into his favourite mug. At first he’d smiled, opening his arms for a hug before realizing that she’d made it back in record time and must have gone across the field.
She’d had to sit through half an hour of Bob’s ranting and raving about walking the safe route home, along the roads: ‘I’m saying this because I love you, Ames, we both love you and we just want you to be safe.’
Amy had listened, shuffled in her seat and stifled yawns. When he’d finally stopped, she’d stomped upstairs, flopped onto her bed and smacked CD cases around as she made an angry mix tape. Rage Against the Machine, Hole and Faith No More.
As she’d surprised Bob the day before, Amy knew he was likely to be home already. Waiting to catch her and have another go at her. It wasn’t worth the hassle even though the longer walk was especially unwelcome on Tuesdays. Her bag was always really heavy as she had French and History and both had stupid, massive textbooks.
Amy hated learning French with a passion; the teacher was a dick and who needs to give a window a gender? But she liked the idea of knowing the language. French was a sexy language. She imagined she could seduce someone a bit more sophisticated than Jake by whispering something French in his ear. She could seduce someone older. Someone a lot older.
She loved Jake, of course, she meant it when she said it. She had his name carefully stencilled onto her bag with Tippex, and when she imagined the future, he was in it. But over the last few weeks she had begun to see the differences between them more and more.
Jake, with his wide smile and deep-brown puppy-dog eyes, was so easy to spend time with, so gentle. But in the time they’d been going out, he’d barely plucked up the courage to put his hand inside her school shirt. They spent whole lunch hours kissing in the top field, and one time he’d climbed on top of her but she’d got a dead leg and had to move and he was so flustered he barely spoke for the rest of the day.
It had been months and months and she was still a virgin. It was getting embarrassing. She hated the idea of being last, hated losing at anything.
Frustrations aside, Amy hoped Jake had skipped judo club so he could come and meet her. Jake and his younger brother, Tom, were driven home from school every day because his snooty mum worked as the school secretary. His family lived in the double-fronted houses of Royal Avenue. He was always back before Amy reached the two-bedroom terrace house in Warlingham Road where she lived with Bob and her mum, Jo.
Jake’s mum, Sue, didn’t like Amy. It was like she saw her as someone who would corrupt her precious baby. Amy liked the idea that she was some kind of scarlet woman. She liked the idea of being any kind of woman.
Amy Stevenson had a secret. A secret that made her stomach lurch and her heart thump. None of Amy’s friends knew about her secret, and Jake certainly didn’t know. Jake could never know. Even Jake’s mum, with her disapproving looks, would never have guessed.
Amy’s secret was older. Absolutely, categorically a man. His shoulders were broader than Jake’s, his voice lower, and when he made rude remarks, they came from a mouth that had earned the right to make them. He was tall and walked with confidence, never in a rush.
Her secret wore aftershave, not Lynx, and he drove a car, not a bike. Unlike Jake’s sandy curtains, he had thick, dark hair. A man’s cut. She had seen through his shirts that there was dark hair in the shallow dip at the centre of his chest. Her secret had a tall, dark shadow.
When Amy thought about him, her nerves exploded and her head filled with a bright-white sound that shut out any sense.
Her secret touched her waist like a man touches a woman. He opened doors for her, unlike the boys in her class who bowled into corridors like silver balls in a pinball machine.
Her mum would call him ‘tall, dark and handsome’. He didn’t need to show off, didn’t need to boast. Not even the prettiest girls at school would have thought they stood a chance. None of them knew that Amy stood more than a chance. Way more.
Amy knew that he would have to stay a secret, and a short-lived one at that. A comma in her story, nothing more. She knew that she should keep it all locked in a box; perfect, complete, private, totally separate from the rest of her soundtrack. It was already a memory, really. Months from now she would still be snogging Jake at lunchtime; bickering with her friends; coming up with excuses for late homework; listening to Mark and Lard every night on Radio One. She knew that. She told herself she was cool with that.
The feeling Amy got when he touched her hip or brushed her hair out of her face was like an electric shock. Just the tips of his fingers made her flesh sing in a way that blocked out everything else in the world. She was both thrilled and terrified by thoughts of what he could do to her, what he would want her to do to him. Would they ever get the chance? Would she know what to do if they did?
That kiss in the kitchen, with the sounds of the others right outside. His hands on her face, a tickle of stubble that she’d never felt before. That one tiny kiss that kept her awake at night.
Amy turned into Warlingham Road and the ritual began. She put her bag down on the crumbly concrete wall. She unrolled the waistband of her skirt so it was no longer hitched up. She decanted her things, finding her Impulse ‘Chic’ body spray and cherry lip balm.
Amy shook the spray and let a short burst of sweet vapour fill the air. Then, after looking around self-consciously, she stepped into the perfumed cloud, like she’d seen her mum do before a night at the social club.
She ran the lip balm along her bottom lip, then the top, kissing them together and then dabbing them matt with her jumper. On the off-chance that Jake was waiting, she wanted to be ready, but not make it obvious that she’d tried.
Amy’s Walkman continued to flood her ears. ‘Do You Remember the First Time?’ by Pulp kicked in and Amy smiled. Jarvis Cocker smirked and winked in her ears as she set everything back in the bag, shifted it to the other shoulder and continued down the road.
She saw Bob’s van in the road. Amy was twelve doors away from home. As she squinted, she could make out a figure walking towards her.
She could tell from the way the figure walked ‒ confident, upright, deliberate ‒ that it wasn’t Jake. Jake scuttled around like a startled crab, half-running, half-walking. Amy could tell from the figure’s slim waist that it wasn’t Bob, who was shaped like a little potato.
When Amy realized who it was she felt a rush of nausea.
Had anyone seen him?
Had Bob seen him?
How could he risk coming to the house?
Above everything, Amy felt a burst of exhilaration and adrenaline thrusting her towards him like iron filings to a magnet.
Jarvis Cocker was still talking dirty in her ears; she wanted to make him stop but didn’t want to clumsily yank at her Walkman.
She held her secret’s gaze, biting her lip as she clicked every button until she crunched the right one down and the music stopped. They were toe to toe. He smiled and slowly reached forward. He took one earphone, then the other from the side of her head. His fingers brushed her ears. Amy swallowed hard, unsure of the rules.
‘Hello, Amy,’ he said, still smiling. His green eyes twinkled, the lashes so dark they looked wet. He reminded her of an old photo of John Travolta washing his face between takes on Saturday Night Fever. It had been printed in one of her music magazines, and while she thought John Travolta was a bit of a knobhead, it was a very cool picture. She’d stuck it in her hardback Art and Design sketchbook.
‘Hello...’ she replied, in a voice a shade above a whisper.
‘I have a surprise for you... get in.’ He gestured to his car ‒ a Ford Escort the colour of a fox ‒ and opened the door grandly like a chauffeur.
Amy looked around, ‘I don’t know if I should, my step-dad’s probably watching.’
As soon as her words were in the air, Amy heard a nearby front door, and ducked down behind the Escort.
A little way up the pavement, Bob set his tool bag down with a grunt. He exhaled heavily as he fumbled for his keys and opened his van. Unaware he was being watched, Bob lumped the tool bag into the passenger seat and slammed the door with his heavy, hairy hands. He waddled around to the driver’s seat, heaved himself up and drove away with a crunch of gears, the back of his van shaking like a wagging tail.
As excited as Amy was, as ready as she was, a huge part of her wanted to sprint off up the road and jump into the van, safe and young again, asking Bob if she could do the gears.
‘Was that your step-father?’
As she stood up and dusted herself down, Amy nodded, wordless.
‘Problem solved, then. Get in.’ He smiled an alligator smile. And that was that. Amy had no more excuses, and she climbed into the car.
chapter two
Alex
7 September 2010
The hospital ward was trapped in a stillborn pause. Nine wordless, noiseless bodies sat rigidly under neat pastel blankets.
Alex Dale had written about premature babies, their seconds-long lives as fragile as a pile of gold dust.
She had written about degenerative diseases and machine-dependents whose futures lay in the idle flick of a button. She had even detailed every knife-twist of her own mother’s demise, but these patients in front of her were experiencing a very different living death.
The slack faces in the Neuro-disability ward at the Tunbridge Wells Royal Infirmary had known a life before. They were unlike the premature babies, who had known nothing but the womb, the intrusion of tubes and the warmth of their parents’ anxious, desperate hands.
The patients weren’t like the dementia sufferers whose childlike stases were punctuated by the terror of memories.
These rigid people on Bramble Ward were different. They had lived their lives with no slow decline, just an emergency stop. And they were still in there, somewhere.
Some blinked slowly, turning their heads slightly to the light and changing expression fluidly. Others were freeze-framed; mid-celebration, at rest or in the eye of a trauma. All of them were now trapped in a silent scream.
‘For years patients like this were all written off,’ said the auburn-haired ward manager with the deepest crow’s feet Alex had ever seen. ‘They used to be called vegetables.’ She paused and sighed. ‘A lot of people still call them that.’
Alex nodded, using scrappy shorthand to record the conversation in her Moleskine pad.
The ward manager continued. ‘But the thing is, they’re not all the same and they shouldn’t be written off. They’re individuals. Some of them are completely lacking awareness, but others are actually minimally conscious, and that’s a world apart from being brain dead.’
‘How long do they tend to stay here before they recover?’ Alex asked, poising her pen above the paper.
‘Well, very few of them recover. This summer we had one lad go home for round-the-clock care from his parents and sister, but that was the first one in years.’
Alex raised her eyebrows.
‘Most of them have been here for a long time,’ the manager added. ‘And most of them will die here too.’
‘Do they get many visitors?’
‘Oh yes. Some of them have families that put themselves through it every single week for years and years.’ She stopped and surveyed the beds.
‘I’m not sure I could do that. Can you imagine showing up week in, week out and getting nothing back?’
Alex tried to shake images of her own knotty-haired mother, staring blankly into her only daughter’s face and asking for a bedtime story.
The ward manager had lowered her voice; there were visitors sitting at several beds.
‘It’s only recently that we’ve realized there are some signs of life below the surface. Some patients like these ones,’ she gestured to the beds behind Alex, ‘and I’m talking a handful across the world, have even started to communicate.’
She stopped walking. Both women were standing in the centre of the ward, curtains and beds surrounding them. Alex raised her eyebrows, encouraging her to continue.
‘That’s not quite right, actually. Those patients had been communicating all along, the doctors just didn’t know how to hear them before. I don’t know how much you’ve read, but after a year, the courts can end life support if they’re being kept alive by machines. And now with the cuts...’ the manager trailed off.
‘How terrible to have no voice,’ said Alex, as she took scribbled notes and swayed, nauseated, amongst the electric hum of the hospital ward.
Alex was writing a profile piece for a weekend supplement on the work of Dr Haynes, the elusive scientist researching brain scans that picked up signs of communication in patients like these. She hadn’t met the doctor yet and was skidding towards her deadline. A far cry from her best work.
There was one empty bed in the ward, the other nine quietly filled. All ten had identical baby-blue blankets within their lilac-curtained cubicles.
Inside those pastel walls, nurses and orderlies could hump and huff the patients into a seated position, wipe their wet mouths and dress them in the clothes brought in from home and donated by arms-length well-wishers.
A radio fizzed from behind the reception area, as chatter and ‘golden oldies’ alternated with each other. The barely audible music jostled with the sighing breaths of patients and the beeps and whooshes of machinery.
In the furthest corner of the ward, a poster caught Alex’s eye. It was Jarvis Cocker from Pulp, limp-wristed and swathed in tweed. She strained to see the name of the magazine from which it had been carefully removed.
Select magazine. Long-dead, long-forgotten, it had been the magazine of choice throughout Alex’s teens. She’d deluged the editor with unanswered letters begging for work experience, back when music seemed to be the only love anyone could possibly want to read or write about.
The dark-blue uniformed manager who’d been showing Alex around had been snagged. Alex spotted her talking quietly and seriously with the watery-eyed male visitor of a patient in a stiff pink house-coat.
Alex soft-shoe shuffled closer to the corner cubicle. Her shins seared with pain from her morning run, and she winced as she quickened her steps. The thin soles of her ballet pumps ground into her blisters like grit.
Most of the patients were at least middle-aged, but the cubicle in the corner had a queasy sense of youth.
The curtains had been half-pulled across haphazardly, and Alex stepped silently through the large gap. Even in the dark of the cubicle, Alex could see that Jarvis Cocker was not alone. Next to him, a young Damon Albarn from Blur mugged uncomfortably at the camera. Both had been carefully removed from Select some years ago, dust tickling their thumbtacks.
The scene was motionless. The bed’s blanket covering a peak of knees. Two skinny arms lay skew-whiff on top of the starched bedclothes, tinged purple, goose-pimpled, framed by a worn-in blue T-shirt.
Alex had avoided looking directly at any of the patients so far. It seemed too rude to just stare into the frozen faces like a Victorian at a freak show. Even now, Alex hovered slightly to the side of the Britpop bed like a nervous child. She gazed at the bright-white equipment that loomed over the bed and scribbled needlessly in her notepad for a bit, stalling until she could finally let her eyes fall on the top of the young woman’s head.
Her hair was a deep, dark chestnut, but it had been cut roughly around the fringe and left long and tangled everywhere else. Her striking blue eyes were half-open and marble-bright. With Alex’s long, pony-tailed dark hair and seaside eyes, the two women almost mirrored one another.
As soon as Alex let her eyes fall on the full flesh of the woman’s face, she recoiled.
Alex knew this woman.
She was sure of a connection, but it was a flicker of recollection with nothing concrete to call upon.
As her temples boomed with a panicked pulse, Alex built up the courage to look again, mentally peeping through her fingers. Yes, she knew this face, she knew this woman.
It wasn’t that long ago that Alex’s powers of recall would have been razor sharp, a name would have sparkled to light in a blink. A mental Rolodex gone to rust.
Alex heard thick flat soles and heavy legs coming towards her apace. The penny dropped.
‘So sorry about that,’ the ward manager was saying as she puffed over. ‘Where were we?’
Alex span to look at her guide. ‘Is this..?’
‘Yes it is. I wondered if you’d recognize her. You must have been very young.’
‘I was the same age. I mean, I am the same age.’
Alex’s heart was thumping; she knew the woman in the bed couldn’t touch her, but she felt haunted all the same.
‘How long has she been in?’
The manager looked at the woman in the bed and sat down lightly on the sheets near the crook of an elbow.
‘Almost since,’ she said quietly.
‘God, poor thing. Anyway,’ Alex shook her head a little. ‘Yes, sorry, I have a couple more questions for you, if that’s okay?’
‘Of course,’ the nurse smiled.
Alex took a deep breath, gathered herself. ‘This might sound like a silly question, but is sleepwalking ever a problem?’
‘No, it’s not a problem. They’re not capable of moving around.’
‘Oh, of course.’ said Alex, pushing strands of hair away from her eyes with the dry end of her pen. ‘I guess I was surprised by the security on the ward – is that standard?’
‘We don’t sit guard on the door like that all the time, just when it’s busy. Other than that, we tend to stay in the office as we have a lot of paperwork. We do take security very seriously though.’
‘Is that why I had to sign in?’
‘Yes, we keep a record of all the visitors,’ said the manager. ‘When you think about it, anyone could do anything with this lot, if they were that way inclined.’
Alex drove slowly into orange sunlight, blinking heavily. Amy Stevenson. The woman in the bed. Still fifteen, with her Britpop posters, ragged hair and girlish eyes.
As Alex slowed for a zebra crossing, a canoodling teenage couple in dark-blue uniforms almost stumbled onto the bonnet of her black Volkswagen Polo, intertwined like a three-legged race team.
Alex couldn’t shake the thought of Amy. Amy Stevenson who left school one day and never made it home. Missing Amy. TV-friendly tragic teen in her school uniform; smiling school photo beaming out from every national news programme; Amy’s sobbing mother and anxious father, or was it step-father? Huddles of her school friends having a ‘special assembly’ at school, captured for the evening news.
From what Alex could remember, Amy’s body was found a few days later. The manhunt had dominated the news for months, or was it weeks? Alex had been the same age as Amy, and remembered the shock of realizing she wasn’t invincible.
She’d grown up thirty minutes away from Amy. She could have been plucked from the street at any time, by anyone, in broad daylight.
Amy Stevenson: the biggest news story of 1995, lying in a human archive.
It was 12.01 p.m. The sun was over the yardarm; it was acceptable to begin.
In the quiet cool of her galley kitchen, Alex set down a tall glass beaker and a delicate wine glass. Carefully, she poured mineral water (room temperature) into the tall glass until it kissed the rim. She poured chilled white wine, a good Reisling, to the exact measure line of the wine glass and put the bottle back in the fridge door, where it clinked against five identical bottles.
Water was important. Anything stronger than a weak beer or lager would deplete the body of more moisture than the drink provided, and dehydration was dangerous. Alex started and finished every afternoon with a tall glass of room-temperature water. For the last two years, she had wet the bed several times a week, but she had rarely suffered serious dehydration.
Two bottles, sometimes three. Mostly white, but red on chilly afternoons, at home. It had to be at home.
As Matt had stood in the doorway of their home for the last time, carrying his summer jacket and winter coat with pitch-perfect finality, he had told Alex that she ‘managed’ her drinking like a diabetic manages their condition.
Alex’s rituals and routines had become all-encompassing. Staying in control and attempting to maintain a career took everything. There was nothing left for managing a marriage, much less enjoying it.
Alex hadn’t expected to be divorced at twenty-eight. To most people that age, marriage itself was only just creeping onto the horizon.
She could see why Matt left her. He’d waited and waited for some inkling that she would get better, that she would choose him and a life together over booze, but it had never really crossed her mind to change. Even when she had ‘every reason’ to stop. It was just who she was and what she did.
They had met during Freshers’ Week at Southampton University, though neither of them could tell the story. Their collective memory kicked in a few weeks into the first term, by which time they were firmly girlfriend and boyfriend and waking up in each other’s hangovers every day.
Drinking had cemented their relationship, but it wasn’t everything, and it became less important to Matt over time. They talked and laughed and did ferociously well throughout their courses, (his Criminology, hers English Literature) partly through frenzied discussion, partly through competitiveness. From the very first month, it was them. Not he or she, always them.
It had been nearly two years since the decree absolute, and she still defaulted to ‘we’, her phantom limb.
Every afternoon, before the first glass touched her lips, Alex turned off her phone. She had long closed her Facebook account, cleaned the web of any digital footprints that could allow drunken messages to Matt, his brothers, his friends, her ex-colleagues, anyone.
Alex had a few rules come the afternoon: no phone calls, no emails, no purchases. In the dark space between serious drinker and functioning alcoholic, there had been no rules. Cheerful, wobbly pitches had been sent to bemused editors; sensitive telephone interviews had taken disastrous, offensive paths; Alex had vaporized friendships with capitalized, tell-all emails and blown whole overdrafts on spontaneous spending sprees. And far worse.
Things were better now. She was getting semi-regular work, she owned her own home. She’d even taken up running.
At least once a week she planned her own death, and drafted an indulgent farewell letter to Matt and the child she’d never planned, the child they would now never have.
She sat down at her desk and opened her Moleskine notepad.
‘Amy Stevenson’.
Alex had a story, and it was far more interesting than the one she had been sent to write.
chapter three
Jacob
8 September 2010
Jacob loved his wife, he was sure of that most of the time, but when she talked for forty-five unbroken minutes about an extension they didn’t need and couldn’t afford, the lies felt slightly softer on his conscience.
He watched Fiona’s mouth moving, forming the words so resolutely. There were just so many of them, so many bloody words, that they blended into one, ceaseless noise.
Her pink mouth was now entirely for talking. How long had it been since those lips had softened for a kiss? Or whispered something sweet in his ear?
‘Are you even listening to me?’ Her fierce brown eyes filled with salt water, ready to burst their banks without notice. How long had it been since they’d made each other laugh until tears squeezed from the corners of their eyes?
‘Of course I’m listening.’ Jacob pushed his half-finished cereal bowl away, trying desperately not to be outwardly aggressive, or passively aggressive, or break any other unwritten golden rule.
When Jacob and Fiona had first met, they talked about everything. Well, almost everything. She had fascinated him, she always had so much to say and he liked to hear it.
As boyfriend and girlfriend they had sparred, joked, talked into the next morning. On their wedding night, they had failed to consummate the marriage, wrapped in each other’s words until they realized it was the next day; Fiona’s legs tangled in her ivory dress train, faces sore from smiling and laughing, sobering with the sun.
But Fiona had stopped asking about his work, stopped expecting to be told anything. Now they wrangled over inane household topics, and not much else.
When had it happened? At the start of the pregnancy? Before?
She had certainly been myopic about ovulation dates and optimum positions, but she had still been Fiona, they had still laughed and talked.
It went beyond disinterest.
Fiona used to grill him, question the who, where, when of meetings and social activities, cross-referencing what she was told with diary dates, previous conversations, outfits he’d chosen, throwaway remarks.
‘So exactly who is going to this Christmas party then? How come it’s not wives and girlfriends? It’s normally wives and girlfriends...are any wives and girlfriends going?’
Maybe she didn’t care now. Fiona had her little nugget growing in her belly, and nothing else mattered. If so, that flew in the face of the Fiona he had fallen in love with, the Fiona he had married. And for all the pressure that had led to it, he had been over the moon when the second blue line appeared on that fated stick many months ago. Terrified, but over the moon.
Now, sitting at the tired breakfast bar, he watched his wife unsteady on her feet. Her sense of balance had been eroded over the last few weeks as her belly had ballooned with a new urgency.
Jacob sighed. Every conversation nowadays led to this topic: the small, hellish kitchen.
The new kitchen extension would fix everything: the storage problem, the tricky access to the garden, where to keep the pram, tension in the Middle East.
The new extension was everything. And if Fiona didn’t get it, however impossible the sums were, the world would explode. He couldn’t be entirely sure that it was his baby in that cartoon belly, and not a ticking time bomb.
The 1930s semi in Wallington Grove, Tunbridge Wells, had seemed like a palace when they moved in, just two years ago. It had taken prudence, abstinence and overtime to save a deposit, and the newly-weds had agreed that work and salary had to be the main focus for at least three years; they had to feed the machine. Fiona had agreed wholeheartedly, absolutely, that the mortgage was a stretch; it would take two full-time salaries to service it, and they both must do their bit.
Some eighteen months later, after a concentrated campaign veering from the subtle to the tearful, they had started to try for a baby and conceived almost instantly. And now the baby needed an extension.
‘Fi, look, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be shitty but I really have to go. I’ve got some really awful meetings today and my head’s all over the place.’
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘whatever.’
She didn’t ask for more than that. Why didn’t she ask for more than that now?
They both needed to leave. Fiona for work as a graphic designer, Jacob for the hospital, where he did not work.
chapter four
Amy
18 July 1995
Amy buckled into the passenger seat and looked across at him. He caught her looking and smiled, just briefly, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked back to the road. As he changed gear, he brushed her skirt further up her thigh with the palm of his hand, sending a shiver across her shoulders.
Amy wasn’t used to such direct attention. Jake would skirt around while he built up courage until the frustration became so loud in her head that she had to make the move instead. What she really wanted, what she was pretty sure she wanted, was for someone to desire her, to really want her. Someone to just take charge.
She looked at his hand clamped on her knee as he stared dead ahead at the road. Dark hairs were peeking out from the end of his shirt cuff, and his fingernails were clipped into perfect straight lines.
He had been her knight in shining armour just weeks before. Appearing around the corner and whisking her away from that bloody man. Jake had already zipped past in the back seat of his mum’s car, strapped in tightly. Her friends had gone off cackling about something and she’d been left to run the gauntlet of that creep and his pleas. Again. Amy had sworn at him and told him to leave her alone. Eventually he’d slunk away, hissing under his breath and kicking loose pieces of grit into the road. Her shoulders had sagged with a mixture of relief and regret, tears falling hot.
And then her secret had appeared, right there in the street near her school, bold and tall and striding towards her. He’d swept an arm around her waist and led her into a gateway, brushed the hair out of her eyes and asked, ‘What’s wrong? Can I help?’
‘It’s my dad,’ she’d said, and started to cry.
‘What about your dad?’ he’d asked, gently lifting her chin so her wet eyes were gazing up at his frown.
‘Does he hurt you?’
‘No,’ she’d sobbed, ‘no, it’s nothing like that. It’s not my dad I live with.’ She’d wiped her eyes with her fingertips. ‘Bob’s my step-dad. I’m talking about my real dad.’
‘Listen, fathers are complex beasts. It’s not your fault, okay? Let me give you a lift home and you can tell me all about it. Alright, Amy?’
‘Alright.’
He’d opened the passenger door for her, and she’d melted into the seat.
He hadn’t laid a finger on her that day and she’d not stopped wishing he had.
chapter five
Alex
8 September 2010
Alex Dale woke up with dead legs and a clammy forehead. She didn’t remember throwing her duvet off the bed, but it was discarded between the mattress and the wall.
She was lying on the side nearest the door. ‘Matt’s side’.
In the abandoned space next to her was a dark, wet oval, sharp to the nose. She was wearing her pyjama top, not her bottoms, which lay further down the sheet in a wrinkled, dank pile. She had absolutely no recollection of putting them on, or taking them off.
Alex didn’t feel ashamed any more, it was too commonplace to keep reacting. As long as she was correctly ‘managing’ herself, no-one would be in her bed so there were no reflections of disgrace to worry about.
The morning routine of stripping the bed, binning the Dry-Nites pad, bundling everything into the washing machine, double-dosing the fabric conditioner, padding naked back up to the bathroom to flannel wash her legs... it was normal now. Autopilot.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she pulled her running things over still-damp skin, grabbed her water bottle, tucked her key into her bra and ran out the door.
Putting one leg in front of the other, then the other leg in front of that. If she could do it once then she could do it for half an hour.
As the morning grew in front of her, she jogged slowly and steadily along the narrow pavements of her quiet corner of Tunbridge Wells. Little dogs skittered out of her way and she jumped into the road to avoid pushchairs dangling with changing bags and other weaponry.
She’d done them all: 5Ks, 10Ks, half-marathons. Never a marathon, though. Marathons deserved respect. Sobriety. On jogs and races she ran slowly and steadily, competing against no-one but the desire to stop. Her name was listed on hundreds of race results. Alexandra Dale, unaffiliated senior woman.
Back home and showered, Alex made poached eggs on toast for breakfast. Lunch would be liquid, and dinner would be light. Sometimes, dinner was whatever she could tear with her hands and shove into her mouth, swaying in the kitchen.
At 10.20 a.m., Alex pulled her Polo into the Tunbridge Wells Royal Infirmary car park and found a space in the furthest corner, under the shadow of an old oak tree. Still seated, she dug around in her bag, enjoying the smell of rich leather that rushed to greet her.
She controlled her condition fairly successfully now, but the divorce two years ago had thrown her from the wagon and straight onto the centre of the tracks, where she stayed for three or four weeks.
Several spending sprees had ripped through the last of her savings before she finally grabbed the reins back, although the Chloé Paddington handbag was one drunken Net-a-Porter purchase she didn’t regret so much; it was beautiful.
Alex blanched as she flicked the driver’s mirror down to reflect her grey face. She rubbed a palm’s worth of moisturiser into her sallow skin and painted on a complexion. She added a rosy blusher glow along her sharp cheekbones and used a pink and brown eyeshadow palette to fool the mirror that she had warm, sparkly eyes rather than black holes.
Lip gloss, powder and paint; she was ready to do her job.
‘Alex, thank you so much for your patience, I’m sorry we’ve had to break arrangements the last couple of times.’
More like five times, thought Alex, as she smiled warmly and shook Dr Haynes’s hand.
His hands were perfect doctor’s hands: cool and soft.
‘No problem, I know you’re very busy.’
Dr Haynes, the leading expert on vegetative states, closed the door softly and gestured to a battered leather chair in front of his paper-strewn desk.
Alex sat down, jumping as a rush of air trumpeted its way out of a hole in the upholstery.
Dr Haynes’s office was the professional equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom. On a sagging office chair in the corner lay a pile of abandoned, crumpled clothes. A CD player perched precariously on a shelf, its drive drawer open like a yapping mouth. Various certificates and awards were dotted around the walls, the skewiff frames taking the edge off any gloating.
On the dark wooden desk sat a dusty laptop with a tangled cable and a photo frame with its back to Alex. Piles upon piles of paper teetered like jerry-built skyscrapers.
Aware that she had been staring while Dr Haynes sat waiting, Alex hurtled into her prepared spiel.
‘Dr Haynes—’
‘Call me Peter.’
She smiled. ‘Peter, the hospital were kind enough to send your biography over and, of course, I’ve read up about your work. But I’d love to know what drives you to explore this area of medicine?’
Peter Haynes exhaled and leaned back in his own battered leather chair. He looked Alex in the eyes, breathing deeply before raising both his elbows and cupping the back of his head.
Alex knew that the doctor was forty-one, but he looked older. He had deep ridges under his bloodshot eyes and his eyelids were a translucent dove-grey. His sort-of-curly, sort-of-straight hair resembled a guinea pig sitting on his head, digging its paws into his face.
‘The thing is, Alex, I don’t really think about my work as an area of medicine to be explored. I think it’s more about exploring people. It’s important because people are important and you don’t become a doctor if you don’t value human life.’
Alex nodded and gestured for him to carry on.
‘The stuff I’m doing now fascinates me because it challenges our understanding of the line between consciousness and death.’
When he spoke, the twitching and awkward grimaces that had punctuated his small talk disappeared. Peter Haynes lowered his hands again and flexed his fingers on the scratched desk.
Alex wondered if this was a rehearsed monologue. She didn’t care if it was, so long as she got the quotes she needed and could push on to asking about Amy Stevenson.
‘When it comes to our understanding of the mind, we’re doing a poor job. I don’t mean psychology, I mean the nuts and bolts biology of the brain and how that governs behaviour, thought and communication. There’s so much we don’t know, but as soon as someone loses the ability to communicate in the ways that we’re prepared to accept, they’re lost to us.’
The fire in Peter’s eyes cooled, he slumped back in his chair and seemed to look through Alex to the door.
‘Is it true that about forty percent of diagnoses of vegetative states are incorrect?’ Alex asked, hoping to show that she had done her research.
‘Oh, numbers, you journalists are obsessed with headline numbers.’ He waved his hand dismissively through the air.
‘We don’t know. But we do know that a large chunk of people who used to be called “vegetables” actually have functioning minds. Maybe a fifth, maybe more; for every scientist you find that thinks it’s a fifth, you’ll find another who dismisses the whole damn idea.’
‘I’d love to understand how you actually recognize communication. You say they can communicate, but not in the way we’re accustomed to, so what does their communication look like?’
‘Well, they have the capacity to think and to want to project those thoughts. It’s a little like a computer intranet – do you know what I mean by an intranet?’
‘Yes,’ Alex said, hoping the explanation only required a very basic understanding.
‘Okay, so within an intranet you have information moving around and you can interact with that data – or memories, thoughts – but you can’t share that data outside of the intranet. It’s a closed loop, if you will.’
‘Got it,’ Alex said.
The doctor paused. ‘Have you? Yes, well, these patients have data in there, they have memories, and they have a network of thoughts whizzing around, they just can’t share them outside of that closed loop. So it’s down to us, if you’ll pardon the stretched analogy, to hack into that network and see it working for ourselves.’
‘And how do you do that?’
‘Brain scans – MRIs mainly. We take a look at the patients’ brains at rest and we capture which of the parts of the brain are lighting up. Very few of them, generally. So then we start to ask things of the brain. We ask it to imagine and to remember. We ask simple things that will be easy for even a mildly functioning brain with some everyday memories to work from. Sometimes, especially in the younger patients who were active more recently, we’ll ask them to imagine playing a sport such as tennis.’
‘And can all the patients do this?’
‘No, and it’s really sad when you see that all the lights are out. But on the other hand, you can’t imagine the sheer joy of seeing a supposedly vegetative brain light up and show imagination, memory and willingness to take part. And you see, Alex, that’s what I’m in this for.’
‘So can you tap into any of their original ideas and memories or just watch them reacting to stimuli?’
‘Well, here is the really exciting stuff, especially for the patients’ families. Once we identify a number of different parts of the brain and how to generate a response in those, we can start to ask questions and tell them to imagine playing tennis for ‘yes’ or lying in warm water for ‘no’. Essentially, they can have a conversation with us, albeit a simple one.’
‘That’s incredible. So can all the patients that show this cognitive function communicate like this?’
‘Sadly not, in fact very few can, but the more we understand about the process, the more we can help the others.’
Alex bit her lip and the tingle of blood helped to focus her mind. ‘Peter, I’d like to ask about a specific patient of yours. When I was last in the ward, I noticed that you were treating Amy Stevenson.’
She glanced at his face for signs of a reaction, but he remained impassive.
‘I’m the same age as Amy,’ Alex continued, ‘and I grew up here, so I remember her abduction really vividly now. I feel bad admitting it, but I had forgotten all about her.’
‘That’s perfectly normal,’ the doctor interrupted. ‘All life can possibly do is move on around these patients.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose... But when I left here the other day, I couldn’t stop thinking about Amy and her situation. I’d really like to write a follow-up piece on her case and I’d love to ask you or your staff some questions about her story.’
Alex held her breath.
‘That wouldn’t be a problem in theory,’ he paused, looking briefly at the door. ‘There are lots of limitations on what my staff could tell you about Amy though, as she’s protected by confidentiality like any other patient.’
‘I’m not interested in muckraking or upsetting her family. In fact, if you’ve got contact details for her parents, I’d really like to talk with them too.’
Dr Haynes fixed his eyes on Alex. Tilting his head slightly quizzically, he said: ‘Amy doesn’t have any family.’
Alex sat back in her chair. She had hoped the hospital staff would act as a go-between and give her a leg up with the relatives.
‘I remember her mother on the news though. What happened to her?’
Peter stood up suddenly so that the wheels of his chair squawked sharply.
‘Her mother died some years ago, not long after Amy was attacked. Maybe a year...’
‘Oh... Oh, I’m sorry,’ Alex said, offering condolences to no-one, ‘what about the step-father?’
‘I have no idea. But if you’d been accused of trying to kill your step-daughter, would you stick around?’
The doctor was blunt, but he was absolutely right; precious few families could survive having a child torn from them, much less like that.
‘Would you be able to pass my details to her next-of-kin?’ Alex asked, reaching into her bag for a business card.
‘Amy doesn’t really have a next-of-kin. She’s the responsibility of the hospital trust and, ultimately, the local authority.’
The more Alex learned, the more crushed she felt. Amy had been a normal, healthy teenage girl, walking back from school to her family home.
‘God, this is just so sad,’ Alex blurted. ‘I suppose you become desensitized to these sorts of details in your job?’
Peter Haynes was edging closer to his door, work clearly on his mind, but he seemed affronted. ‘I don’t think you become desensitized. I haven’t, anyway. There are weeks I want to lock myself in my office and not face them.’
‘You keep things in boxes though. You have to or you couldn’t do your job properly. I suspect being a reporter is much the same, psychologically speaking...’
Alex wanted to make it clear that she really wasn’t a reporter, but thought better of it.
‘What I can tell you about Amy,’ continued Dr Haynes, ‘is that she breathes by herself, she has awake time and she sleeps, she is off the feeding tube and we’ve registered a degree of brain activity that shows she is not “brain dead” as the papers used to love calling her.’
Alex scribbled on her notepad. ‘So has she done the yes and no tennis experiments?’
Peter Haynes frowned a little. ‘We’ve tried. We registered an ability to imagine, but the brain responses were somewhat haywire, and she became extremely distressed. You certainly couldn’t interview her via an MRI scan, if that’s what you were getting at. Not in her current condition.’
‘No, I hadn’t even thought of that at all. I mean, it would be amazing if it could happen but I understand if it can’t.’
‘It can’t,’ he said emphatically. ‘Now we have visitors who come and sit with the patients and talk to them and that seems to have a slight effect on Amy, but having gone through such a high level of trauma, we haven’t run many more tests on her. We’re still taking things slowly as she’s prone to shock. Having no next-of-kin slows things down too.’
Something buzzed sharply on the doctor’s belt.
‘Sorry, Alex, but I’m wanted in another part of the hospital.’
‘I really appreciate you giving me your time. I’ll let you know when the article is published.’
As Alex shook Peter’s perfectly dry, smooth hand again, she wondered if he ever read his own press, if he would read her piece on Amy Stevenson. If she managed to get it published. If she managed to get it written.
The doctor had bolted in the opposite direction, and Alex headed to Amy’s ward before she could talk herself out of it.
The doctor’s office lay at the heart of a coil of corridors, which eventually opened out into a main walkway. The shiny floors squeaked under every footstep, and the smell of chemical hand cleanser prickled Alex’s nose. She couldn’t begin to calculate how many ill people there were right now, all coughing and complaining into this same block of warm air.
As she came to the thick double doors of Bramble Ward, Alex dropped a big gloop of disinfectant hand gel so it sat like ketchup in her palm. She rubbed it slowly and carefully into her skin.
Alex pushed the doors open, passed the empty reception desk and tiptoed quietly up to the open office door. Giving a gentle knock, she waited for the nurses inside to finish their conversation. Inside, the radio was burbling with mid-morning local news updates. A breezy voice announced the arrest of a wanted rapist, the results of a successful school fundraising event and the timescale for extended roadworks on the A21.
After a minute or so, she knocked again. Eventually one of the nurses came out as Alex had made a fist to knock one last time.
‘Oh, sorry, you should have knocked,’ said the nurse, despite looking straight at Alex’s unfurling fist.
Alex tried to peer into the office to see if the ward manager she’d met last time was in there, but she was nowhere to be seen.
‘I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Alex Dale, I’m a journalist. I visited before because I’m writing about Dr Haynes’s work.’
‘I’m Gillian Radson, and I wasn’t aware there’d be journalists on my ward today,’ replied the nurse, pursing her lips.
‘I’ve just been interviewing Dr Haynes and he’s agreed that I can write a piece on one of your patients, Amy Stevenson.’
‘I’ll have to check that with him,’ replied the nurse.
‘Sure,’ said Alex, ‘but while I’m here I wondered if I could sit with Amy?’
‘She has someone with her at the moment.’
Alex tried to see into the corner cubicle but there were pillars in all the wrong places. ‘I didn’t think she had any relatives?’
Nurse Radson crossed her cardigan over her chest, folding her thick flat arms. ‘He’s not a relative. He’s one of our sitters.’
She sighed at Alex’s blank expression. ‘Volunteers. They come and spend time with the patients.’
‘Oh, okay. Maybe I could speak with him?’ Alex suggested, opening her bloodshot eyes as widely and innocently as she could manage.
Alex sensed the answer was no, and that if the nurse could speak freely, the answer would be more like ‘fuck off.’
‘Wait there,’ she sighed, ‘I’ll go and ask’.
Nurse Radson, with her apple tummy upholstering the tight, sexless striped blue uniform, marched off towards Amy’s cubicle. Inches at a time, Alex shuffled along so that could see Amy’s curtains clearly, noticing the man’s foot tapping under the gap.
The nurse pulled the curtain back sharply and Alex could see that a tall, sandy-haired guy was sitting on the bed, holding Amy’s hand. He was wearing a blue hoodie with a hospital-issued visitor’s badge dangling from his neck. As the sitter dropped Amy’s hand, Alex could see the nurse stooping to talk in his ear. The man and the nurse both shot Alex a look at the same time. After a minute, the nurse came back over to where Alex was trying to look nonchalant.
Perhaps weighing up whether to complain about Alex moving from her original spot, the nurse shook her head and said, ‘I’m sorry but he says the volunteering he does here is personal and he’d rather not talk to you.’
‘Can I have a quick word and explain that I can interview him anonymously?’ Alex tried.
‘No, look…’ The nurse took a deep breath, her irritation barely concealed. ‘I’m sorry but that won’t be possible. He gives his time out of the goodness of his heart and he’s a nice man.’ She rolled the words around her mouth slowly. ‘I’m not going to risk his goodwill by letting people bother him when he’s already said no.’
Knowing when to call it quits, Alex passed the nurse her card to give to the sitter, just in case, and slinked back out of the ward. It was almost noon now anyway, and she needed to get home.
chapter six
Jacob
8 September 2010
Jacob’s heart raced. He had been sitting with Amy for too long, he knew that. Nonetheless, he hadn’t expected that nosy nurse to yank the curtains back so suddenly.
He hoped it wasn’t obvious that he was holding Amy’s tiny hand, something he didn’t do with most of the patients he sat with.
As casually as possible, Jacob uncurled their fingers and dropped her hand, palm facing up, fingers bent.
Gillian Radson was full of her usual bluster: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt but there’s a journalist over there and she wants to talk to you,’ she puffed.
Jacob was still recovering from the interruption. ‘A journalist wants to talk to me? Why would a journalist want to talk to me?’
‘Don’t worry,’ soothed the nurse, ‘she’s writing an article about one of the doctors and she’s interested in this one’s story. She wanted to sit with Amy but I explained that you were with her so she asked to speak to you.’
In unrehearsed synergy, Jacob and the nurse both shot the journalist a look.
Jacob had been thoroughly unprepared for this. He stared at the nurse, waiting for her to tell him what to do.
‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to her, I can get rid.’ Nurse Radson smiled.
‘No-one knows I come here,’ he faltered. ‘Volunteering is a private thing and, to be honest, I come here in work hours and I could get in a bit of bother if it got back to my boss.’
The corners of Nurse Radson’s mouth twitched.
As he watched her thick buttocks heave up and down like piston engines, marching back to the visitor, Jacob finally exhaled. He stood up, and slowly and quietly tugged the curtains to a close again. Then he sat back down, picked up Amy’s skinny hand and pressed its cold skin to his face.
He said nothing because there was nothing new to say, but he closed his eyes and drank in her almost vanished smell. With the lightest touch he kissed her paper-thin skin and slowly laid her hand palm-down on her stomach.
After stroking her newly brushed hair and coughing away the lump in his throat, Jacob backed out and took a long blink.
He was ready to leave, but Jacob couldn’t let Amy be his last patient. There were currently nine patients, so he let Amy be his seventh and chose the two nearest the door as penultimate and final.
There was an extra incentive to do it this way, as patient number eight – Claude Johnson, sixty-two – had an incredibly devoted wife. Nine times out of ten she would be there, holding Claude’s red-raw hands, talking to him about last night’s Coronation Street or rolling her eyes about the neighbours. Jacob would offer to sit with Claude, to give Julie Johnson a break, but she never accepted.
Patient nine, Natasha Carroll, was a happy ending. She was forty-two, and still striking. Her hair was a light gold, with delicate greying strands that sparkled silver in the sunlight.
Natasha had been in this ward for a few years and before that she had been in intensive care. Jacob remembered the day she was transferred in. At the time, he had been sitting with Joan Reeves, since deceased. It wasn’t long after he and Fiona had returned from their honeymoon and the fading tan on his hands had looked ridiculous against Joan’s lilac-white skin.
Today, Jacob sat down on the chair next to Natasha’s bed. He placed his vending machine Dr Pepper bottle – its inch of brown liquid now warm and unwanted – on the small beech bedside cabinet.
Natasha had been propped on her side slightly, her eyes open and peaceful. Her knees pointed towards Jacob’s chair. Golden hair lay slightly matted at the back but curled in waves around her neck and mouth. With the sunlight oozing through the nearby window, she looked like a stained-glass Madonna.
‘Hello, Natasha,’ Jacob said in hushed tones. He pulled the curtains casually, leaving them askew so that the nurses could see him going about his business, behaving breezily.
He knew more details than he wanted about some of the patients’ backgrounds, mainly from their abandoned partners. About others, like Natasha, he knew very little.
She looked so peaceful bathed in the pastels and whites of the hospital. She wore a dressing gown that looked like cashmere or something similar, and silk pyjamas from a collection of similar pyjamas that he knew was several pairs deep.
Some of the patients Jacob had sat with over the years had faces filled with trauma. Gargoyles bearing the weight of witness. Not Natasha, who looked like a contented house cat, totally assured of comfort and safety.
Over the years, Jacob hadn’t seen anyone else visit Natasha, but every once in a while a new vase of incredibly expensive-looking flowers would appear at her bedside, and birthday cards would tumble over themselves annually.
He talked in his hushed but sing-song hospital voice, telling Natasha all about Fiona’s baby bump, and his job. Talking to her about things he never broached with Amy.
Natasha lay coiled, silently purring while Jacob listed the names Fiona was currently favouring for the baby (Archie and Harry for a boy, May and Elvie for a girl). Time passed easily, and the steady flow of one-way conversation and the simplicity of Natasha’s expression helped take the strain out of the overall hospital experience.
It was past noon and his time was up. Smiling at Natasha a final time, Jacob swept up his Dr Pepper bottle and breezed to the clunky yellow bin, swinging its lid up and dropping the bottle inside with a thud.
Attracted by the noise, Gillian Radson bustled over, cardigan flapping.
‘Jacob,’ she puffed. ‘I’m glad I caught you.’
She smiled knowingly into Jacob’s frown, waiting just a few seconds too long.
‘The journalist left this card for you. She seemed quite insistent that you might change your mind about talking to her.’ The nurse pressed the sharp corners of the business card into Jacob’s sweating hand.
‘Well, okay. I’ll see you next week then.’
As Jacob paced out, pushing the double doors of the ward with some force, he looked down into his palm. The card was thick with slightly embossed lettering in a thick black typeface.
ALEX DALE
Freelance journalist
Tel: 07876 070866
Email: [email protected]
15 Axminster Road, Tunbridge Wells TN2 2YD
chapter seven
Amy
18 July 1995
Amy bit her lip, tasting the tiniest trace of cherries. She stared up at him from under her hair. Still wearing her uniform, she could feel her knickers cutting into her leg where they’d been pulled out of shape, a new sting between her thighs, the smell of rubber and sweat on her fingers. Under her legs she felt a baby-soft duvet.
This was without a doubt the worst thing she’d ever done. The meanest, the most secret.
