Before I Die (4 page)

‘Why do I feel as if I’m about to cry all the time?’

‘You’re taking it too seriously, Tess. Sex is a way of being with someone, that’s all. It’s just a way of keeping warm and feeling attractive.’

She sounds odd, as if she’s smiling.

‘Are you stoned again, Zoey?’

‘No!’

‘Where are you?’

‘Listen, I have to go in a minute. Tell me what’s next on your list and we’ll make a plan.’

‘I’ve cancelled the list. It was stupid.’

‘It was fun! Don’t give up on it. You were doing something with your life at last.’

When I hang up, I count to fifty-seven inside my head. Then I dial 999.

A woman says, ‘Emergency services. Which service do you require?’

I don’t say anything.

The woman says, ‘Is there an emergency?’

I say, ‘No.’

She says, ‘Can you confirm that there is no emergency? Can you confirm your address?’

I tell her where Mum lives. I confirm there’s no emergency. I wonder if Mum’ll get sent some kind of bill. I hope so.

I dial directory enquiries and get the number for the Samaritans. I dial it very slowly.

A woman says, ‘Hello.’ She has a soft voice, maybe Irish. ‘Hello,’ she says again.

Because I feel sorry for wasting her time, I say, ‘Everything’s a pile of crap.’

And she makes a little ‘Uh-huh’ sound in the back of her throat, which makes me think of Dad. He made exactly that sound six weeks ago, when the consultant at the hospital asked if we understood the implications of what he was telling us. I remember thinking how Dad couldn’t possibly have understood, because he was crying too much to listen.

‘I’m still here,’ the woman says.

I want to tell her. I press the receiver to my ear, because to talk about something as important as this you have to be hunched up close.

But I can’t find words that are good enough.

‘Are you still there?’ she says.

‘No,’ I say, and I put the phone down.

Six

Dad takes my hand. ‘Give me the pain,’ he says.

I’m lying on the edge of a hospital bed, in a knee-chest position with my head on a pillow. My spine is parallel to the side of the bed.

There are two doctors and a nurse in the room, although I can’t see them because they’re behind me. One of the doctors is a student. She doesn’t say much, but I guess she’s watching as the other one finds the right place on my spine and marks the spot with a pen. He prepares my skin with antiseptic solution. It’s very cold. He starts at the place where he’s going to put the needle in and works outwards in concentric circles, then he drapes towels across my back and puts sterile gloves on.

‘I’ll be using a twenty-five-gauge needle,’ he tells the student. ‘And a five-millilitre syringe.’

On the wall behind Dad’s shoulder is a painting. They change the paintings in the hospital a lot, and I’ve never seen this one before. I stare at it very hard. I’ve learned all sorts of distraction techniques in the last four years.

In the painting, it’s late afternoon in some English field and the sun is low in the sky. A man struggles with the weight of a plough. Birds swoop and dive.

Dad turns in his plastic chair to see what I’m looking at, lets go of my hand and gets up to inspect the picture.

Down at the bottom of the field, a woman runs. She holds her skirt with one hand so that she can run faster.

‘
The Great Plague Reaches Eyam
,’ Dad announces. ‘A cheery little picture for a hospital!’

The doctor chuckles. ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘there are still over three thousand cases of bubonic plague a year?’

‘No,’ Dad says, ‘I didn’t.’

‘Thank goodness for antibiotics, eh?’

Dad sits down and scoops my hand back into his. ‘Thank goodness.’

The woman scatters chickens as she runs, and it’s only now that I notice her eyes reaching out in panic towards the man.

The plague, the great fire and the war with the Dutch all happened in 1666. I remember it from school. Millions were hauled off in carts, bodies swept into lime pits and nameless graves. Over three hundred and forty years later, everyone who lived through it is gone. Of all the things in the picture, only the sun remains. And the earth. That thought makes me feel very small.

‘Brief stinging sensation coming up,’ the doctor says.

Dad strokes my hand with his thumb as waves of static heat push into my bones. It makes me think of the words ‘for ever’, of how there are more dead than living, of how we’re surrounded by ghosts. This should be comforting, but isn’t.

‘Squeeze my hand,’ Dad says.

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘When your mother was in labour with you, she held my hand for fourteen hours and didn’t dislocate any fingers! There’s no way you’re going to hurt me, Tess.’

It’s like electricity, as if my spine got jammed in a toaster and the doctor’s digging it out with a blunt knife.

‘What do you reckon Mum’s doing today?’ I ask. My voice sounds different. Held in. Tight.

‘No idea.’

‘I asked her to come.’

‘Did you?’ Dad sounds surprised.

‘I thought you could hang out in the café together afterwards.’

He frowns. ‘That’s a strange thing to think.’

I close my eyes and imagine I’m a tree drenched in sunlight, that I have no desire beyond the rain. I think of silver water splashing my leaves, soaking my roots, travelling up my veins.

The doctor reels off statistics to the student. He says, ‘Approximately one in a thousand people who have this test suffer some minor nerve injury. There’s also a slight risk of infection, bleeding, or damage to the cartilage.’ Then he pulls out the needle. ‘Good girl,’ he says. ‘All done.’

I half expect him to slap me on the rump, as if I’m an obedient horse. He doesn’t. Instead, he waves three sterile tubes at me. ‘Off to the lab with these.’ He doesn’t even say goodbye, just slides quietly out of the room, student in tow. It’s as if he’s suddenly embarrassed that any of this intimacy happened between us.

But the nurse is lovely. She talks to us as she dresses my back with gauze, then comes round the side of the bed and smiles down at me.

‘You need to lie still for a while now, sweetheart.’

‘I know.’

‘Been here before, eh?’ She turns to Dad. ‘What’re you going to do with yourself?’

‘I’ll sit here and read my book.’

She nods. ‘I’m right outside. You know what to look for when you get home?’

He reels it off like a professional. ‘Chill, fever, stiff neck or headache. Drainage or bleeding, any numbness or loss of strength below the puncture site.’

The nurse is impressed. ‘You’re good!’

When she goes out, Dad smiles at me. ‘Well done, Tess. All over now, eh?’

‘Unless the lab results are bad.’

‘They won’t be.’

‘I’ll be back to having lumbar punctures every week.’

‘Shush! Try and sleep now, baby. It’ll make the time go more quickly.’

He picks up his book, settles back in his chair.

Pinpricks of light like fireflies bat against my eyelids. I can hear my own blood coursing, like hooves pounding the street. The grey light outside the hospital window thickens.

He turns a page.

Behind his shoulder, in the painting, smoke innocently rises from a farmhouse chimney and a woman runs – her face tilted upwards in terror.

Seven

‘Get up! Get up!’ Cal shouts. I pull the duvet over my head, but he yanks it straight off again. ‘Dad says if you don’t get up right now, he’s coming upstairs with a wet flannel!’

I roll over, away from him, but he skips round the bed and stands over me, grinning. ‘Dad says you should get up every morning and do something with yourself.’

I kick him hard and pull the duvet back over my head. ‘I don’t give a shit, Cal! Now piss off out of my room.’

I’m surprised at how little I care when he goes.

Noise invades – the thunder of his feet on the stair, the clatter of dishes from the kitchen as he opens the door and doesn’t shut it behind him. Even the smallest sounds reach me – the slosh of milk onto cereal, a spoon spinning in air. Dad tutting as he wipes Cal’s school shirt with a cloth. The cat lapping the floor.

The hall closet opens and Dad gets Cal’s coat for him. I hear the zip, the button at the top to keep his neck warm. I hear the kiss, then the sigh – a great wave of despair washing over the house.

‘Go and say goodbye,’ Dad says.

Cal bounds up the stairs, pauses a moment outside my door, then comes in, right over to the bed.

‘I hope you die while I’m at school!’ he hisses. ‘And I hope it bloody hurts! And I hope they bury you somewhere horrible like the fish shop or the dentist’s!’

Goodbye, little brother, I think. Goodbye, goodbye.

Dad’ll be left in the messy kitchen in his dressing gown and slippers, needing a shave and rubbing his eyes as if surprised to find himself alone. In the last few weeks he’s established a little morning routine. After Cal leaves, he makes himself a coffee, then he tidies the kitchen table, rinses the dishes and puts the washing machine on. This takes approximately twenty minutes. After that he comes and asks me if I slept well, if I’m hungry and what time I’m going to get up. In that order.

When I tell him, ‘No, no and never,’ he gets dressed, then goes back downstairs to his computer, where he taps away for hours, surfing the web for information to keep me alive. I’ve been told there are five stages of grief, and if that’s true, then he’s stuck in stage one: denial.

Strangely, his knock at my door is early today. He hasn’t had his coffee or tidied up. What’s going on? I lie very still as he comes in, shuts the door quietly behind him and kicks his slippers off.

‘Shove up,’ he says. He lifts a corner of the duvet.

‘Dad! What’re you doing?’

‘Getting into bed with you.’

‘I don’t want you to!’

He puts his arm around me and pins me there. His bones are hard. His socks rub against my bare feet.

‘Dad! Get out of my bed!’

‘No.’

I push his arm off and sit up to look at him. He smells of stale smoke and beer and looks older than I remember. I can hear his heart too, which I don’t think is supposed to happen.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘You never talk to me, Tess.’

‘And you think this’ll help?’

He shrugs. ‘Maybe.’

‘Would you like it if I came into your bed when you were asleep?’

‘You used to when you were small. You said it was unfair that you had to sleep by yourself. Every night me and Mum let you in because you were lonely.’

I’m sure this isn’t true because I don’t remember it. He may have gone mad.

‘Well, if you’re not getting out of my bed, then I will.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘I want you to.’

‘And you’re just going to stay there, are you?’

He grins and snuggles down under the duvet. ‘It’s lovely and warm.’

My legs feel weak. I didn’t eat much yesterday and it seems to have made me transparent. I clutch the bedpost, hobble over to the window and look out. It’s still early: the moon’s fading into a pale grey sky.

Dad says, ‘You haven’t seen Zoey for a while.’

‘No.’

‘What happened that night you went clubbing? Did you two fall out?’

Down in the garden, Cal’s orange football looks like a deflated planet on the grass, and next door, that boy is out there again. I press my palms against the window. Every morning he’s outside doing something – raking or digging or fiddling about. Right now he’s hacking brambles from the fence and chucking them in a pile to make a bonfire.

‘Did you hear me, Tess?’

‘Yes, but I’m ignoring you.’

‘Perhaps you should think about going back to school. You’d see some of your other friends then.’

I turn to look at him. ‘I don’t have any other friends – and before you suggest it, I don’t want to make any. I’m not interested in rubberneckers wanting to get to know me so they’ll get sympathy at my funeral.’

He sighs, pulls the duvet close under his chin and shakes his head at me. ‘You shouldn’t talk that way. Cynicism is bad for you.’

‘Did you read that somewhere?’

‘Being positive strengthens the immune system.’

‘So it’s my fault I’m sick then, is it?’

‘You know I don’t think that.’

‘Well, you’re always acting as if everything I do is wrong.’

He struggles to sit up. ‘I don’t!’

‘Yeah, you do. It’s like I’m not dying properly. You’re always coming in my room telling me to get out of bed or pull myself together. Now you’re telling me to go back to school. It’s ridiculous!’

I stomp across the room, grab his slippers and shove my feet into them. They’re way too big, but I don’t care. Dad leans on his elbows to look at me. He looks as if I hit him.

‘Don’t go. Where are you going?’

‘Away from you.’

I enjoy slamming the door. He can have my bed. Let him. He can lie there and rot.

Eight

The boy looks surprised when I stick my head over the fence and call him. He’s older than I thought, perhaps eighteen, with dark hair and the shadow of a beard.

‘Yeah?’

‘Can I burn some things on your fire?’

He shambles up the path towards me, wiping a hand across his forehead as if he’s hot. His fingernails are dirty and he has bits of leaf in his hair. He doesn’t smile.

I lift up the two shoeboxes so he can see them. Zoey’s dress is draped across my shoulder like a flag.

‘What’s in them?’

‘Paper mostly. Can I bring them round?’

He shrugs as if he doesn’t care either way, so I walk through our side gate and step over the low wall that separates the two houses, across his front garden and down the side of his house. He’s already there, holding the gate open for me. I hesitate.

‘I’m Tessa.’

‘Adam.’

We walk in silence down his garden path. I bet he thinks I’ve just been chucked by my boyfriend, that these are love letters. I bet he thinks, No wonder she got dumped, with that skeleton face and bald head.

The fire is disappointing when we get there, just a smouldering pile of leaves and twigs, with a few hopeful flames licking at the edges.