Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: Stella
The First Night
Chapter One: Hope
Chapter Two: Stella
Chapter Three: Hope
Chapter Four: Stella
The Second Night
Chapter Five: Hugh
Chapter Six: Hope
Chapter Seven: Stella
The Third Night
Chapter Eight: Hugh
Chapter Nine: Hope
Chapter Ten: Stella
Chapter Eleven: Stella
The Fourth Night
Chapter Twelve: Hope
Chapter Thirteen: Hope
Chapter Fourteen: Hugh
Chapter Fifteen: Stella
Chapter Sixteen: Stella
The Fifth Night
Chapter Seventeen: Hope
Chapter Eighteen: Hugh
Chapter Nineteen: Stella
Chapter Twenty: Hugh
Chapter Twenty-One: Stella
Chapter Twenty-Two: Stella
The Sixth Night
Chapter Twenty-Three: Hope
Chapter Twenty-Four: Stella
Chapter Twenty-Five: Stella
Chapter Twenty-Six: Hope
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Vincent
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Stella
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Hugh
The Seventh Night
Chapter Thirty: Hope
Chapter Thirty-One: Hugh
Chapter Thirty-Two: Hope
Chapter Thirty-Three: Stella
Chapter Thirty-Four: Hope
Chapter Thirty-Five: Hugh
Chapter Thirty-Six: Hope
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Stella
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Read on
Copyright
For my dear friend, Tamsyn,
one of the brightest stars in the sky
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781448175130
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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © Rowan Coleman, 2015
Copyright © Rowan Coleman, 2017
Rowan Coleman has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published in the UK in 2015 by Ebury Press
www.eburypublishing.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 9780091951382
Trade paperback ISBN 9781785030727
Dear Len,
Well, if you are reading this, it’s happened. And I suppose that I ought to be glad, and so should you. We’ve both spent such a long time waiting, and I could see how much it was wearing you down, as much as you tried to hide it.
Now, the life insurance policy is in the shoebox in the bedroom, on top of the wardrobe, under that hat I wore to our Dominic’s wedding – remember? The one with the veil you said made me look like a femme fatale? You might not; you drank too much beer, and four of Dominic’s friends had to carry you upstairs, you great oaf. It’s not much of a payout, I don’t think, but it will be enough for the funeral at least. I don’t have any wishes concerning that matter. You know me better than anyone else will. I trust you to get it right.
The washing machine. It’s easy, really: you turn the round knob clockwise to the temperature you want to wash at, but don’t worry about that. Just wash everything at forty degrees. It mostly works out all right. And you put the liquid in the plastic thing in the drum, not in the drawer. I don’t even really know why they have those drawers any more.
You need to eat – and not stuff you can microwave. You need to at least shake hands with a vegetable once a week, promise me. You always made the Sunday night tea – cheese on toast and baked beans on the side – so I’m sure you’ll be able to keep body and soul together if you put some effort in. I expect at first lots of people will feed you, but you’ll need to get a cookbook. I think there’s a Delia under the bed. I got it for Christmas last year from Susan, and I thought, what a cheek!
Len, do you remember the night we met? Do you remember how you led me on to the dance floor? You didn’t talk, didn’t ask me or anything, you rogue. Just took my hand and led me out there. And how we twirled and laughed – the room became a blur. And when the song stopped, you kissed me. Still hadn’t said a word to me, mind you, and you kissed me right off my feet. The first thing you said to me was, ‘You’d better tell me your name, as you’re the girl I’m going to marry.’ Cheeky beggar, I thought, but you were right.
It’s been a good life, Len, full of love and happiness. Just as much – more than – the sadness and the bad times, if you think about it, and I have had a lot of time to think about it, lately. A person can’t really ask for more. Don’t stop because I’ve stopped; keep going, Len. Keep dancing, dancing with our grandchildren, for me. Make them laugh, and spoil them rotten.
And when you think of me, don’t think of me in these last few days: think of me twirling and laughing and dancing in your arms.
Remember me this way.
Your loving wife,
Dorothy
He was a runner. That was the first thing I knew about Vincent.
One hot July, four years ago, I saw him early each morning, running past me as I walked to work, for almost three weeks in a row.
That summer I’d decided to get up before seven, to enjoy the relative quiet of an early north London morning on my way to start a shift at the hospital. I was a trauma nurse back then, and there was something about the near stillness of the streets, the quiet of the roads, that gave me just a little space to exhale before a full eight hours of holding my breath. So I walked to work, sauntered more like, kicking empty coffee cups out of my way, flirting with street sweepers, dropping a strong cup of tea off to the homeless guy who was always crammed up against the railings by the park, working on his never-ending novel. It was my rest time, my respite.
At almost exactly the same time every morning, Vincent ran past me at full pelt, like he was racing some unseen opponent. I’d catch a glimpse of a water bottle, closely cropped dark hair, a tan, nice legs – long and muscular. Every day, at almost exactly the same time, for nearly three weeks. He’d whip by, and I’d think, there’s the runner guy, another moment ticked off on my journey. I liked the predictability. The flirty street sweeper, the cup of tea drop, the runner. Sort of like having your favourite song stuck in your head.
Then one morning he slowed down, just a hair’s breadth, and turned his head. For the briefest moment I looked into his eyes – such a bright blue, like mirrors reflecting the sky. And then he was gone again, but it was already too late: my routine was disturbed, along with my peace of mind. All day that day, in the middle of some life-and-death drama or in the quiet of the locker room, I found the image of those eyes returning to me again and again. And each time it gave me butterflies.
The next morning, I waited for him to run past me again, and for normality to be restored. Except he stopped, so abruptly, a few feet in front of me and then bent over for a moment, his hands on his knees, catching his breath. I hesitated, sidestepped and decided to keep walking.
‘Wait … please.’ He took a breath between words, holding up a hand that halted me. ‘I thought I wasn’t going to stop, and then I thought, sod it, so I did.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘I thought you might like to come for a coffee with me?’ He smiled – it was full of charm; it was a smile that was used to winning.
‘Did you?’ I asked him. ‘Why?’
‘Well, hoped, more like,’ he said, the smile faltering a little. ‘My name is Vincent. Vincent Carey. I’m a squaddie, Coldstream Guards. I’m on leave, going back to the desert soon. And you never know, do you? So I thought … well, you’ve got lovely hair – all curls, all down your back. And eyes like amber.’
He had noticed my eyes – perhaps in that same second that I noticed his.
‘I’m a very lazy person,’ I told him. ‘I never go anywhere fast.’
‘Is that a weird way of saying no to coffee?’ I liked his frown as much as his smile.
‘It’s a warning,’ I said. ‘A warning that I might not be your kind of person.’
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you just know when someone is your sort of person.’
‘From their hair?’ I laughed.
‘From their eyes.’
I couldn’t argue with that.
‘Mind if I walk part of the way with you?’ he’d asked.
‘OK.’ I smiled to myself as he fell in step next to me, and we walked in silence for a while.
‘You weren’t kidding about being slow,’ he said, eventually.
The second thing I knew about Vincent was that one day I was going to marry him. But the first thing I knew was that he was a runner.
Which makes it so hard to look at him now: his damaged face turned to the wall as he sleeps, and the space where his leg used to be.
I can’t sleep. I can never sleep these days – not in here, anyway, where they don’t let it be truly dark, not ever. But it’s not only that; it’s because I can’t stop thinking about how I came to be here. I know, of course: I caught something – a bug, bacterial, which is dangerous news when you live with cystic fibrosis. I almost died, and now I’m here, in this place where they never really turn the lights out on the long and painful road to recuperation. I know that, but what I don’t know, what I want to know, is how. I want to know precisely the second that little cluster of bacteria drifted like falling blossom into my bloodstream. I can’t know, of course, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to or that I can stop thinking about it. The frustrating thing about my condition is that I have a lot of time on my hands to think, but not a lot of time on the clock to live. Time moves slowly and quickly at the very same time – racing and stretching, boring and terrifying. And you can live your whole life with the idea of mortality – that one day it will be the last day – and still never really know or care what that means. Not until the last day arrives, that is.
I was at a party, when Death came to find me.
I hate parties, but my best friend Ben made me go.
‘You can’t stay in all your life,’ he said, dragging me out of my room and down the stairs. ‘You are twenty-one years old, nearly twenty-two. You should be out every night, enjoying the prime of your life!’
‘You are in your prime of your life; I’m most likely middle aged,’ I told him, even though I knew he hated me referring to my short life expectancy this way. ‘And anyway, I could. I could stay in all my life and listen to Joni Mitchell and read books, and design book covers, try and work out the solo of “Beat It” on my guitar, and I’d be perfectly fine.’
‘Mrs K.?’ Ben dragged me into the living room, where my parents were watching the same old same old on TV – some police detective, who drinks too much and lost his wife in a bitter divorce, chasing down some psycho-killer. ‘Tell your daughter: she’s a twenty-one-year-old woman. She needs to go out and have fun! Remind her that life is for living, and not for sitting alone in her room reading about how other people do it! Plus it’s all the old crew from school, back from uni now. We haven’t been together in ages, and they are all dying to see her.’
Mum turned in her chair, and I could see the worry in her eyes, despite her smile. But there was nothing new there: she’d been worried for every moment of my twenty-one years, constantly. Sometimes I wonder if she’d wished she could change my name, after I was diagnosed as a baby and the situation was officially hope-less, but it was too late by then; it was a name that already belonged to me – a cruel irony that we both have to live with now. My poor darling mum, she had enough on her plate. It wasn’t fair to make her decide if I went out or not, because she’d spend the rest of the evening worrying either way, and later she would have torn herself to pieces with blame. So, making my own decision, that was one of the things I did right that night. It was just the choice that was wrong.
‘Oh, fine, I’m coming out, I’ll get changed.’
Ben grinned at me and sat down on the bottom stair, and I thought of him there, in his skinny jeans, an outsize jumper sloping off one shoulder, jet black hair and eyes lined with smudges of Kohl, as I rifled through my wardrobe, looking for something, anything, that might even nearly equal his effortless cool. It wasn’t fair, really – that little odd duckling, the boy that the other kids left out or pushed around, had suddenly grown into a sexy, hip swan. We had used to be lame kids together. That was how we came to be best friends; it was part of the natural process of banding together, like circling our wagons – greater safety, even in our meagre number of two, than being alone. Him: the skinny, shy kid with the grey collars and worn-down shoes; and me: the sick girl.
I don’t think it was then that Death entered, when Ben came into the house, though it could have been. He could have left a trace of a germ on the bannister or the damp towel in the downstairs loo. It could have been then, but I don’t think it was, because near-death by hand towel isn’t even nearly fitting enough.
I dressed all in black, trying to hide my skinny frame with a skater skirt and a long top, and wondered how many other girls my age longed to put weight on. I rimmed my eyes with dark eye shadow and hoped that would do the trick.
The moment we walked in through the door, and the wave of heat and sweat and molecules of saliva, which I know are in every breath I take, hit us, I wanted to go home. I almost turned around right then, but Ben had his hand on the small of my back. There was something protective about it, something comforting. And these were my friends, after all. The people I grew up with, who were always nice to me and did fun runs in my name. Who I could sit and have a coffee and a laugh with; who would always find something for us to talk about, while carefully avoiding those potentially awkward questions like, ‘How’s it going? Still think you’ll be dead soon?’
‘Hopey!’ Sally Morse, my sort-of best female friend from school, ran the length of the hallway to engulf me in a hug. ‘Oh shit, it’s so good to see you. You look great! How’s it going? What’s new? You’re like an entrepreneur or something, aren’t you?’ She hooked her arm through mine, briefly resting her head on my shoulder as she led me into the kitchen, and I noticed the slight pinkness around her nostrils: the remnants of a cold.
‘I’m OK,’ I told her, accepting a beer. ‘I started designing book covers for people, and it’s going quite well.’
‘That’s so cool,’ she said happily. ‘That’s so totally cool because, you know, really university is a huge waste of time; there are no jobs out there, and you end up in loads of debt – it’s a very expensive way to get laid and drunk. I emailed you loads, but you’re shit at replying. Too busy, I suppose, being a businesswoman.’
She paused for a moment, scanning my face, and then dragged me into a hug, filling my face with a curious combination of lemon- and smoke-scented hair, and I hugged her back. I’d thought I didn’t miss any of that: the people I once saw almost every day for most of life. I’d told myself that, anyway, but it turned out that I did. I was happy to see her in that moment, happy I had come. Perhaps it was then, perhaps in that little moment of optimism and nostalgia, in the midst of that hug, I’d inhaled my own assassin. I hope not. Although it would be just like the universe to try and undo you when you are happy, because in my experience the universe is an arse.
But the good thing about being amongst my old friends was that there was no need to explain – no need to have the eternal prologue of a conversation when I tell them about the CF, and they look sad and awkward in turn. It was a relief to be amongst the people who have been preparing for my exit, almost since the very first moment I made my entrance into their lives.
It wasn’t long before Sally was tonsils-deep in some guy who I thought she’d most likely brought with her, because I didn’t know him, so I made my way through the mass of people, looking for Ben.
‘Hope!’ Clara Clayton shrieked, planting a glossy kiss on my cheek. ‘It’s so good to see you! If you’re here, that means Ben is here, and I want to see him. Bloody hell, he’s grown up hot … Hey, are you two …?’
‘Hello, Hope,’ said Tom Green, the school heartthrob for so many years, and now no less sweet, blonde, or strappingly broad-chested. ‘How are things? How are you doing?’ He was still awkward, polite, kind, tall – all of the things about him that used to make me swoon when I was thirteen years old, though not anymore, I was interested to notice; now I thought he was lovely but sort of dull.
‘I like your look,’ he said, with some effort. ‘Really… cool.’
As I made my way through the party, cigarettes being hastily put out as I approached, I relaxed. I felt at home here, amongst friends. I felt like a twenty-one-year-old woman at a party. I relaxed, and that was probably my mistake.
It could have been in any one of those miniature reunions that Death made its move, during that long hour of leaning in too close to people while they told me what degree they got, and what they were going to do next. It might have been then, or it could have been when the taxi driver coughed all over the change he gave me on the way over. But I don’t think it was.
I think it happened when Ben kissed me.
Because, let’s get this straight, I spend most of my time in my bedroom in my parents’ house pretending that designing a few book covers is a proper grown-up career, and reading books, lots of books. And a man kissing me would definitely be the cause of my demise in a Victorian novel.
I’m prone to dwelling. I’m a dweller.
Ben was drunk, in the way that only he gets drunk, which is not at all, then all at once. And he’d gone from being uber-cool to dancing and laughing and spinning, and hugging, and playing air guitar, and chatting up girls, who lapped up his nonsense, while I stood in the corner of the room, watching him, smiling despite myself. He loves to think he’s cool – the guy in the rock band, the ‘I don’t give a toss about you’ rock star – but it doesn’t take very much for him to be his great big dorky self: the boy I used to know. The one who’d fill his pockets with worms to save them from other boys stomping on them; the guy who might look like he could snack on bats’ heads by night but who is an assistant manager in Carphone Warehouse by day.
Suddenly, he careered into me, grabbing hold of my shoulders, and we both fell back onto the sofa laughing – him a little too hard, and me a little too politely.
‘You are such a dick,’ I told him, reasonably fondly, though.
‘Then why am I your best mate?’ he asked me, winding his arm around my shoulder and pulling me even closer to him, fluttering his ridiculously long brown lashes.
‘Oh, shut up,’ I said, screwing my face up as he rubbed his cheek against mine, like an over-friendly dog. I made my move to protect him from himself, which was to make him think he was protecting me, which meant he’d stop drinking quite so much, so fast. ‘You know what? This party, it’s not really doing it for me. I think I’m going to go home. Will you take me home?’
‘No, don’t go!’ Ben grabbed my face in his hands and made me look into his eyes, squeezing my mouth into a frankly ridiculous pout. ‘You’re always leaving places early. Stop leaving me, Hope. When are you going to get that I hate you leaving me behind? I want you around all the time.’
‘Don’t be a twat,’ I’d said, although hesitantly, because the way he was looking at me just then was angry and hurt all at once. It was hard to read, and I am not a fan of ambiguity. Just for a moment, for the briefest of seconds, I glimpsed that perhaps something about the way he was acting tonight had to do with me.
‘Just don’t go,’ he said.
‘But Ben, I …’
Which was when he kissed me.
I mean really kissed me. Ben, who I had known since I was five years old. Ben, who once waded into a patch of nettles to carry me out. Ben, who’d held my hair and made small talk while I hawked up globules of mucus, during my nightly coughing rituals. Ben kissed me, and it was a real kiss, urgent and hard, and with his tongue. It was physical, and awkward, and it took me by surprise, because I’d never been kissed like that before, with this kind of force or, well, need. As he pressed me back hard into the sofa, suddenly I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I panicked and I pushed him away.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m really drunk. Sorry. Sorry, shit.’
I got up and went to the bathroom. Flounced is probably a better word – I flounced off to cover my confusion, feigned fury and offence. I spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror, looking at my kiss-stained mouth. Somehow I knew that everything had changed, and that it wasn’t going to be for the better.
When I came back, Ben had passed out on the sofa, his head lolling back in the cushions, his mouth wide open.
I got a taxi home alone and was in bed before midnight.
When I saw Ben the next day, he said he hardly remembered anything and told me to never let him drink again. He didn’t mention the kiss, and I still have no idea if he has forgotten, or if he’d rather just not talk about it.
A week after that, I was admitted to hospital with a bacterial lung infection.
The pain, the pain, and the gasping for air, and the desperate need all the time for there to be more of it, took up most of my energy, but not all of it. There was a moment, just one, of perfect clarity, when I heard the doctor say to my mother, ‘It’s touch and go, I’m afraid.’
And I thought, I am not ready. I am not ready yet.
I made it, I’m still here, still alive, almost ready to go back to life. I won this round. But I can’t sleep, you see, because even though I can’t know, I want to know. I need to know the exact moment that I let Death in, and I can’t sleep – because what if I’m not ready the next time it finds me?
Dear Maeve,
Kip and me, we always promised we’d write to the other’s wife if it came to it. And well, Maeve, it came to it, didn’t it? I am only sorry that it’s taken me this long to write the letter I never wanted you to have to read. I wish, I wish I was good with words, that I knew how to say what I have to say. I wish I’d never made this promise to Kip, but I did. And he was the closest thing to a brother I ever had.
We did it all together. We were green new recruits together. Trained together. Kip was the worst recruit the sergeant had ever seen. But we all loved him. He knew how to make us laugh on days when everything could have been so dark. By the time we went on our first tour in Afghanistan, Kip was the best soldier.
He talked about you and little Casey all the time. You were the lights of his life. We used to hear what Casey had been up to, how she is more beautiful, funny, clever than any other kids, all day long. Kip was a soldier, but he was a family man first. I know he tried to be the best husband and dad he could be.
The day it happened started out like any other day. Routine patrol, defending the province against the Taliban. No intel or chatter to suggest we had anything more to worry about than normal. Not that normal wasn’t enough to worry about. We all knew it wouldn’t be long before we were allowed home on leave, but command told us: ears and eyes, stay alert, right up until the last second of our tour, and we knew that.
When the missile hit, it was …
Whenever there is a moment of quiet, of stillness, I stop and I listen, and I wait for it to pass. It’s hardly ever silent at Marie Francis Hospice and Rehabilitation Centre, even at night. Quiet chat, murmurs in the half-dark, laughter sometimes, sometimes singing. Sometimes a dream lived out loud. But it’s hardly ever quiet. So I listen in those moments, and I wait for the noise again. And then I breathe out.
I feel a warm body wind itself around my legs and look down to see that Shadow, the very unofficial hospice cat, has emerged out of nowhere again. Pitch black with no markings and huge emerald-green eyes. No one knows where he comes from, or when he will come; he just appears when he pleases, knowing that when he does, he will be made a huge fuss of by everyone who meets him. He’s large, clearly looked after by someone – someone who probably has no idea of the humanitarian mission he goes on through the day. He’s young, I think, and kittenish still, despite his size. He sees a shadow from a flickering light and pounces on it, twisting and turning 180 degrees with every lunge in a bid to catch his prey. I reach out to him, and he bats at my hand playfully until I catch behind his ears with my nails and scratch. Suddenly mesmerised, and softly lambent, he lets me lift him onto my lap and hold him for a moment. I feel his small heart rapidly beating against my skin, and the rise and fall of his chest. This is the reason that the administration turns a blind eye to Shadow, and lets us keep a pack of Dreamies in the nurse’s station drawer for him, because it’s well known that contact with animals is therapeutic, soothing, comforting. And Shadow can do what most of our doctors, and us nurses and Albie, our chaplain’s daft Labrador, can’t, which is take himself from room to room, always seeming to know which patient needs his attention the most. Smiling, I smooth down his black silky fur in the long firm strokes that he likes, listening to the satisfying rattle of his purr. Lucky me, to have a few moments of his attention tonight.
‘Tea, Stella?’ Thea nods at my empty mug. ‘You’re due a break, surely – Shadow seems to think so. He was sitting with Issy till she dropped off.’
‘No, I’m full to the brim,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve got my obs to do, and I’ve promised to sit with Maggie for a bit. She likes a chat and I said I’d write her a letter.’
‘She could chat for England, that one,’ Thea says, but without malice. There’s a sort of inevitable closeness amongst the patients and their families here, a solidarity. It eases the journey, I think, for them just to know they aren’t in this alone.
‘How are you doing?’ I ask her. Thea’s answering smile is small and almost worn through, but steady. It’s an expression I’ve become familiar with, a kind of all-defying hope in the face of certain disappointment. I’ve known Thea for eighteen months now. A single mother, she’s been bringing her fourteen-year-old daughter Issy to the hospice since she was first diagnosed with a final stage case of a rare bone cancer, Ewing’s sarcoma. At first it was for a brief burst of respite care, to allow Thea to have a little more time for her younger daughter, and for herself, but now after years of treatment, it’s because it is almost time.
We aren’t supposed to form bonds, or relationships, with the families that we care for, but sometimes it’s impossible not to. Not when they are here every day, when they are living out the defining moments of their lives right in front of you, looking to you for reassurance and certainty where there is none. So she and I have become not friends exactly but companions in the midst of an endless succession of sleepless nights. And Thea keeps smiling, keeps hoping. If there’s one thing I’ve learned while I’ve been working the night shift at Marie Francis it’s that this is the one thing that sets us apart from other animals, the one thing that makes us human. Hope.
‘I’m OK,’ Thea says. ‘Issy is smiling in her sleep. I like to try and guess what she’s dreaming about. There was this holiday a couple of years back – we went to a water park with a huge great big slide. She shrieked like a banshee all the way down and then went back for more. Maybe she’s dreaming about that.’
‘I’ll be in after I’ve seen Maggie,’ I promise her.
On an average night here, there are maybe fourteen patients at any one time, plus two nurses, three health-care assistants and one doctor sleeping in the on-call room – all of us engaged in this kind of ballet, this dance that is something like a rain dance. Except, if we get it right, we’re not calling down the rain but keeping pain at bay. This world, this night world, is the one we small crew inhabit alone, in between the busy, sunny days of outpatients, and counselling, therapy groups, music, dances and fundraisers. Family time, healing time, breathing time. Here during the night, no more than twenty of us are negotiating the path that at some point each of us will have to travel. But never alone if we can help it, that’s the promise we make on the night watch. Although we can’t come with you, you will never be alone when you take that final step.
And I always work the night shift. I asked if I could when I was offered the job. After some hesitation they let me, as long as I take enough days off in between, because no board ever wants their nurses only to work the difficult night-shift slots, even someone as experienced as me. No one ever asks me why I only do the night shift – because it’s not like I have childcare to worry about. But, anyway, I only half understand the reason myself. I think it was a gradual thing. I think so, although it may have happened all at once. In the months since Vincent left the army, it’s been hard to get a clear sense of anything very much, except that somehow the strands of our lives that were so closely woven together began unravelling into two separate threads – quickly enough for it to feel like I have no control over it. Perhaps taking the night shifts has been about holding up a white flag and declaring surrender, because if our house is the battlefield, then it’s easier, less painful, less dangerous, if only one of us is in it at a time. It’s my house during the day, and at night it belongs to Vincent.
Thea hesitates still, and I sense there is something she wants to ask me.
‘How’s Vincent doing?’ she asks, and Shadow, suddenly tired of my affection, leaps onto the desk and nudges her hand up from where it is resting and onto his head. He has trained us all very well.
‘Great.’ I smile, nodding. ‘He’s doing really great. Never still since he got the new prosthetic fitted. State of the art it is, apparently. He got back from the sponsored bicycle ride last week, and he’s already talking about training for the Marathon … He’s doing great. He’s barely ever still.’
‘OK, good.’ She stands there for a moment, and takes a breath. ‘So you’re writing a letter for Maggie?’
I nod.
I began it one night for a patient who could no longer hold a pen, and who wanted to make sure her husband would know how to work the washing machine after she’d gone. That’s when the letter writing started, and it grew from there – each letter another story, another life, another legacy. Not every patient wants to put their final thoughts on paper, not every patient has to, but there is something comforting about leaving a physical relic of your mind in this world, something reassuring.
‘Do they ask you, just before, you know … Is it like they know? They know it’s time for a letter?’
And suddenly I know what it is that is terrifying her, what it is that she can’t quite bring herself to articulate.
‘Issy hasn’t asked me to write a letter,’ I say.
‘Well.’ She nods, dropping her gaze from mine as she holds up her empty mug. ‘OK, I’d better get back to her.’
It seems like Shadow agrees: he drops down from the high desk with easy grace and trots off towards Issy’s room, his tail high and purposeful.
‘I’ll be in soon,’ I reassure Thea, with a smile. And I watch her go back to Issy’s room, thoughts of a cup of tea forgotten as she quietly shuts the door behind her.
I take my pad of plain writing paper out of the desk drawer, and root around in my bag for my favourite pen: blue ink, ballpoint, smooth flow, looks like it could be a fountain pen, but doesn’t smudge. I love the feel of it, gliding over the slight texture of the paper, filling it with swirls and loops that always, no matter what words they go towards forming, mean so much more than simply what they say.
Dear Franco,
I don’t suppose you remember me. Why would you? It’s sixty years since we met, and we didn’t know each other for long. I have no idea if you still live in Monte Bernardi or if you are even still alive, though those spread adverts on the telly seem to say that Italians lives for ever, so I hope so.
It was 1954. I was twenty years old, and me and Margaret Harris from the bank where I worked had a day trip to Brighton. Down on the train, best dresses and hats. Mine was primrose yellow and had flowers embroidered on the pockets.
We were walking along the front when we saw you, although you didn’t notice us. We thought you had to be a movie star or something: the way you stood there, with your sunglasses on – hair all slicked back, black T-shirt, white trousers. We went round the corner to peep at you, and then we put on some lipstick and walked past you again, swinging our skirts and giggling like we were ever so fascinating. You said hello in Italian. We ran away, screaming with laughter; what a pair we were.
I didn’t see you for the rest of the day, not until the dance at the end of the pier. And there you were, in a pale blue suit. When you came over to talk to me I thought I might die, maybe from the excitement. Your English wasn’t very good; my Italian was non-existent. But, oh, your accent.
We kissed all night, never stopped for a breather, or a drink. You whispered strange words in my ear, might have been a shopping list, for all I knew. I didn’t care, because it sounded like music.
That’s when I found out that Margaret had got the last train home without me – in a pique, I expect, because it was me you had eyes for. You walked me back to your bedsit and snuck me up the stairs without the landlady noticing. I’d never been with a boy before – I thought something dreadful would happen, that I’d get pregnant or catch some disease, but I was stupid and young and it didn’t seem to matter more than that moment.
The next morning, you wrote your address in pencil in my address book and kissed me goodbye. I never heard from you again. I didn’t catch anything or get pregnant. I wasn’t brave enough to write. I married a good man a few years later, and I’ve been happy. It’s been a good life. But every time I’ve changed address books, I’ve copied your address into the new one, once again. Monte Bernardi; a reminder of one night when I risked it all for a little excitement. So it would seem an awful shame not to use it just once.
Thank you for the dance,
Susan Wilks
‘You still awake?’ Stella checks her watch, as if I might not know that it is nearly 3 a.m. Why she’s concerned, I don’t know, as her sole purpose for being here is to wake me up.
‘Looks like it,’ I say.
‘I just need to know …’
‘Yes, I know, I know the drill.’ I tuck a knotted strand of hair behind my ear and let Stella take my temperature, my guitar cradled in my lap, as it often is. There’s half a song in my head, and it won’t go away, so I’m trying to write it – exorcise it, that would be a better term. It’s a bloody stupid song, about as edgy as a kitten, about love and rainbows and all sorts of bollocks – not at all the kind of song I want to write, which is about … Oh, I don’t know, something profound. ‘You need to know my temp, my oxygen saturation, my pulse rate, my blood pressure, blah, blah, blah. And then in another couple of hours you are going to watch as I take my hypertonic saline and then cough up the contents of my lungs in my ritual humiliation. You own me, basically. I’m your bitch.’
She raises an eyebrow and almost smiles.
‘You might find it boring, but these are the ticks and measures that are going to get you out of here quicker,’ she assures me, in this careful, quiet way that she has, gentle and soft, as if someone has found her volume control and turned it right down.
‘I think I’m ready to get out now,’ I say. ‘I’m not dying any more, or at least, I’m not dying very quickly. It feels wrong to be here, taking up a room that someone else needs more than me, and I’ve got things to do.’
Before the weird kind of limbo that is Marie Francis, there were several weeks in hospital, and a lot of drugs and pain and fear. My fear, my parents’ fear, my friends’ fear, even Ben, who’d come to see me and tell me funny stories about the latest customers in his shop, but I could tell even he was afraid that this was it, because he wasn’t nearly as annoying as he usually is.
Mum cried quite a lot and Dad brought me things: magazines that I would never read, junk food that I didn’t want, soft toys holding stuffed love hearts proclaiming a series of increasingly inappropriate messages, not to mention the fact that they were soft toys and I am a grown woman, even if I am one who can sometimes wear a bunny-rabbit onesie all day. The last one said ‘You Are My Sweet Heart’ – an on-sale remnant of Valentine’s Day, I presume. I appreciated the sentiment, but still, I tucked the bear right at the back of my growing pile of plush bodies, underneath the blue rabbit that assured me: ‘It’s a boy!’
Finally I was transferred to the Marie Francis Hospice and Rehabilitation Centre for the final part of my recuperation before they will let me go home. I should have been in the specialist CF unit, but my local hospital had seen a ream of cutbacks that meant cutting two beds, and the other four were full. So, not well enough to go home, and the next CF specialist bed half a country away, they found me a bed here, close to my parents, for my final phase of close-care recuperation. I’ve ended up here, but at least I am not ending up here. The drugs worked, my body fought back. I am on the mend, or as mended as I will ever be, considering that I was born faulty.
I mean, every breath hurts. It’s still a gargantuan effort to suck air and push it out again – a sort of crazy catch-22 where breathing exhausts me so much that I only breathe harder, desperate for more air. But I’m past the worst: the part where my lungs each had less capacity than a can of coke. And, although acid still swirls up my throat and into my mouth from my inefficient gut, and it’s hard to pretend it’s not me giving off noxious gasses when there is no one else around to blame it on, I feel better, a lot better.
I said no thank you, Death, I’m not ready and I am still alive. And bored out of my mind.
Stella glances at the notebooks open on my bed, and I hope she can’t read my sappy lyrics upside down; if she can, she’d probably change her stance on euthanasia.
‘You should try to get some sleep. It’s late,’ she says. It’s like her mantra – she says it almost every time she sees me, even though she looks like she never sleeps: she is pale and wraith-like, like what she needs most in the world is a good sunbed.
‘Is it?’ I glance out of the window, but only the reflection of my room bounces back at me out of the dark. ‘It’s hard to tell in here. It’s like time stands still, or the seconds move very, very … slow-ly.’ Stella watches as I stretch the last word out for a long, long time, benignly tolerant of my show of immaturity – because I am, after all, only twenty-one.
‘If you need stuff to do, you could join in with any of the activities in the daytime.’ Stella completes her notes carefully. ‘Or take a look in the library. We may rely on donated books, but we get lots and we always seem to have the latest bestsellers … There’s some good stuff in there, I’ve heard.’
‘Yes, I had a look,’ I say, thinking it would be churlish to mention that I’d already read anything worth reading, and everything else was twaddle, because that would make me seem like a snob. Stella probably wouldn’t guess the large percentage of the limited hours of my life that I have devoted so far to reading; she couldn’t know that while other girls my age are partying all night in Ibiza, engaging in wild no-strings sex with virtual strangers, training to be track stars or packing for Bali for some kind of sponsored adventure, I am sitting at home, living in another world that exists only between the pages of a book and on the internet – the only place where I am really allowed to talk to other CF people, as we can’t meet in person. You put two CF people together and there’s a chance that one of the bugs they carry around all day might just kill you off, and vice versa, so we stay apart from each other.
There are chat rooms and blogs, and support groups, but I’ve started to stay away from them, ever since this girl whose blog I loved to read started to blog about planning her marriage at an insanely young age, to a man she barely knew. Although no one mentioned that, of course, because, you know, she probably wouldn’t have time to find out they were deeply incompatible. I’d check for a new post every night; I loved it. I loved her endless bubbles of enthusiasm, and how getting married made her just so happy. I loved how she’d made a little bridesmaid dress for her wheely oxygen tank, and how she talked about wanting to honeymoon in Australia and see Ayers Rock, like William and Kate.
I loved her endless debates on nail varnish and tiaras, and how long she could wear high heels for without needing a sit down. She talked about how her health was declining, how she’d been moved to the top of the transplant list, but that somehow even that just filled her full of hope. Because a transplant meant so many more years to be with her husband, and if they had to put the honeymoon off for a year, it didn’t matter. She posted about how the wedding wasn’t going to be in a church after all, or in the summer, but in a hospital chapel, in the next month, and how she was so certain that when a person was as loved as she was, and who loved life as much as she did, that fate would bring her the life-saving operation that she needed. And then, about a week before her wedding was due to take place, she stopped posting. And she never started again. And I don’t need to google her name to find out what happened, or even read the hundreds of comments under her last blog post. So anyway, since then, I’ve started to stay away a little. One sad ending is about all I can take.
‘Anyway, I’m sure they’ll check you out soon enough. We just need to be sure that you’re stable and OK to go home. We don’t want the infection taking hold again, and the doctors will want to see that your lung capacity has come back up to safe levels.’ She pauses. ‘You were very ill, you know. Your body has been seriously weakened. We don’t want all our good work to go to waste because you can’t sit still long enough.’
‘I do know that,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not a child, plus all this pain I’m in is a pretty good reminder.’
Stella tips her head to one side and looks at me.
‘You’re very grumpy – are you always like this? Like a teenager who’s been grounded?’
I want to be offended, and for a split second I am, but I find myself blurting out a guffaw instead.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I am. Look, I’m sorry. I have a way of dealing with it all, and it’s mainly this. I’m not a chirpy sort of a person. Sorry.’
This time she laughs.
‘Ha, well, then, we have that in common. But I do always try to be polite. As my mum says: good manners cost nothing.’
‘I am sorry,’ and for a moment I do feel as awkward as a teen. ‘It’s the word “hospice”,’ I say, picking up my guitar. ‘People die in hospices.’
‘People die everywhere, and not especially here. You aren’t our only recuperation patient, you know. Or even our youngest. And “hospice” is really just another word for hospital. It is about offering hospitality to the needy – just in these modern times we think it has to be about death, but it doesn’t, it isn’t. It’s about life.’
‘You’ve read the fundraising material, then,’ I say, and she smiles a little, perching on the edge of the armchair my room comes equipped with. It’s blue, with a white cushion covered in tiny little blue flowers – homely, see? Comforting. Not at all like somewhere you are most likely about to pop your clogs.
‘You’re very … cynical, aren’t you?’ she says, examining me with these crazy, huge, bush-baby eyes that look like they could see in the dark without any trouble at all. ‘Most people that pass through here, they are so …’
‘Much less annoying?’ I make a joke of it, but I know it’s true. Sometimes, trying very hard to appear that you don’t care, exhausting as it is, can make you rather tiresome for all the people whose lives revolve around caring for you.
‘Happy to still be breathing,’ she says.
‘I am happy,’ I say. ‘I just hide it really, really well under this veneer of endless misery.’
‘That song you were playing when I came in was chirpy,’ Stella observes, and she’s right, damn her.
‘Yeah, I don’t know how that happened,’ I say with a small smile.
‘Maybe the hospice is inspiring you,’ she says. ‘Our chaplain would love that; he’s in a band, you know. Prog rock. He played at our last Christmas party. I mean, you’d think that it would be impossible to bring down a Christmas party. But you’d be wrong.’
‘If I was ever going to be religious, I’d want my chaplain to be in a terrible prog rock band,’ I say, crossing the room and resting my forehead against the window to see past my own reflection and out into the dense night.