Authors: Debbie Johnson
It was a good speech. I meant every word. So I left before I messed it up.
I trudged back up the stairs. Every step I took was an effort. I felt weary, defeated, battle-scarred. I felt as old as the Earth.
There was a familiar thrum in my pocket, and I scooped out my phone. All the texts and messages that had been sent over the past few days were landing. One from the Dormice, thanking me for the review and inviting me to their Halloween gig. Ha. That seemed unlikely. One from Big Bill, asking if I was interested in interviewing the city’s most successful male Cher impersonator. ‘Most successful’ implying there was more than one, which was weird. And one from an unknown caller, asking me to phone the Liverpool General Hospital ‘at my earliest convenience’.
I may have led a limited life, but even I know missed calls from hospitals are never a good thing. I fumbled a couple of times, got through, gave my name, and suffered through a minute and a half of muzak while I was transferred. A nurse answered, sending a shiver down my spine as she said the words ‘Intensive Care Unit’.
I explained who I was, heard the tapping of buttons and the rustling of paper.
‘Yes. Right. Miss McCain, we have a Coleen McCain in here. Your grandmother, I believe? You were listed as next of kin.’
‘That’s me. Is she all right?’ I asked, feeling adrenaline zip through me. Of course she wasn’t all right. Nobody goes to Intensive Care if they’re all right. It’s not a fun place.
‘I’m afraid she’s not, no. She had a slight fall, at the bingo, I believe, and was brought in with two broken ribs. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be serious, but at her age, and in her poor health, it’s caused some severe complications. In fact, it would probably be best if you came in as soon as you can … I’m sorry, but we’re not sure there’s anything more we can do for her.’
‘What do you mean, her ill health?’ I asked, confused. OK, so Coleen was skinny as a whippet and smoked forty a day, but she’d always seemed fit. Strong. Scarily so, in fact. The kind of woman that could take on a Cortina-full of hoodie-wearing ASBOs and send them running for their mamas.
‘She hasn’t told you? Mrs McCain has advanced-stage lung cancer. She was diagnosed six months ago, but has refused all treatment. We assumed you knew.’
I held on tight to the phone, scared I was going to drop it. Coleen had cancer. She was dying. And she’d never even told me. Jesus. How much more fucked up could my life get?
‘OK. Thanks for letting me know. I’m away at the moment but I’ll hopefully be there later tonight,’ I said, closing down the call and leaning against the wall. I needed to catch my breath. I needed to think. To stay calm. To get the hell out of Dodge, and back to Coleen. She might be a nasty old bitch, but she was the only family I had, and she didn’t deserve to die alone. Nobody did.
I made it up the rest of the stairs without stumbling or sliding back down on my arse, which counted as a major victory, and tried to make my face as normal as possible before I went into the living room.
Carmel was standing with Connor, feigning interest in the Celtic tattoos that were traced around his arms, and blatantly using them as an excuse to feel up his biceps. Fionnula was, predictably, eyebrow-deep in a glass of something red. The vampires were awake, and Luca was lounging across a sofa, taking up the whole length of it, his bare feet propped over one armrest, silky dark-blond hair trailing over the other.
He gave me a smile as bright as the North Star, and patted his lap. Leather-clad, obviously.
‘Hello, beautiful lady!’ he said, gesturing to his knees. ‘Come sit with me – I promise not to bite!’
Any other time I might have been tempted. But not now. Right now, nothing would be tempting, apart from a real-life body swap with someone dull. Someone boring. Someone who wasn’t me, or anybody I knew.
‘Sorry, Luca. I’m all flirted out.’
‘You break my heart, Lily. Some other time, perhaps?’ he said, pretending he was crestfallen.
Maybe he was, but I doubted it, somehow. I nodded, tried to smile. He didn’t buy it, I could see. He raised one eyebrow at me, a question all on its own, but I turned away. Didn’t have time for that, or for anything, really.
‘Carmel,’ I said, interrupting her muscle patrol. ‘I need to go to the loo.’
‘Erm … fine. You know where it is,’ she said, looking confused.
‘But I’m a girl. And there are rules. I need another girl to go with me.’
Fionnula belched, and held up her hand. ‘Count me out – Switzerland is busy getting drunk.’
Carmel got the message, reluctantly let go of Connor and accompanied me to the bathroom.
As soon as we were alone and the door shut, I started running both taps and flushed the toilet.
‘What gives?’ she said, watching as I created waterfalls all around the room.
‘Gabriel. He has ears like Dumbo, and I don’t want him listening in. Carmel, look, I’ve got to leave. And I need you to help me.’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Whatever you need. Mind if I ask why? And I take it your chat with lover boy didn’t go well?’
I felt my face slide into misery, and couldn’t stop it. I must be a heck of a shallow person. Coleen was lying almost dead in a hospital bed, and I was still playing wounded damsel about Gabriel. All together now: Gerra Grip, Girl.
‘It went as well as it could, considering he’s a lying, conniving piece of shit.’
‘Oh,’ she said, which was fair enough. Not much she could add, really.
‘Anyway, I’ve just had a call from the hospital. It’s Coleen. She’s been in an accident. And she has cancer. And she’s … well, she’s dying, Carmel. I need to get back to her. Back to Liverpool.’
‘Without the aforementioned lying, conniving piece of shit, you mean?’
I nodded.
‘Will you be safe?’ she asked, Champion instinct kicking in.
‘Yes. Fintan promised he wouldn’t send anyone after me, and so far he’s been true to his word. Just stop Gabriel from following me. Stop all of them.’
‘O-kay … but how do you propose I do that? They’re all, like, superheroes and witches and mind-readers. I don’t know how long I can hold them off.’
‘Just try, enough to give me a head start. Buy me the time to get to the airport and get out of this place. Please. I need not to have to deal with too many barrels of shite at the same time. I need to get to Coleen, and not be distracted. I owe it to her to be there.’
Carmel frowned, and I could tell she was battling her inner demons, and trying to keep her trap shut. She hated Coleen with a passion. She wouldn’t think I owed her anything. In fact, she’d probably go and do the Macarena on her grave.
‘All right. I’ll do my best. But be careful, and call me. If you don’t, I’ll dob you in.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I mean it.’ I did. It felt good to have someone on my side. Someone without a bigger agenda. Someone who put me first. Gratitude spread through me like warm coffee on a cold day, and I didn’t know what else to say.
There was a pause, and she looked embarrassed, awkward. As though she’d caught me in the loo with a pregnancy test in my hands.
‘Can I give you a hug?’ she asked. ‘You look like you need one. I know Coleen’s all you’ve got. If that were my mum lying in there, I’d be in pieces.’
There was no comparison to be made between Coleen and Carmel’s adoptive mum, Mrs O’Grady. Mrs O’Grady was fat and smiley and made soda bread and called all her kids ‘feckin’ idiots’ as she whacked them round the head with a rolled-up copy of the
Gazette
. She was wonderful. Coleen was none of those things, but as Carmel said, she was all I had.
I drew myself up, deep breaths, white space, willpower on max … and hugged her. Briefly, and without a great deal of enthusiasm. But I did it. And nothing bad happened. A day for small triumphs to be savoured.
Carmel beamed at me.
‘Now go,’ she said. ‘Crawl out the window, whatever. I’m going to tell them all you’re so pissed off at Gabriel that you’ve gone to that male strip club in Temple Bar.’
‘They won’t believe that!’ I said.
‘OK, I’ll tell them you’ve gone to the park to sit on the swings in the rain and sulk.’
Tragically, I had to admit they were far more likely to swallow that one. God, I really needed to get a life.
‘Now scoot,’ she said, turning off the taps.
I scooted.
Hospitals have a smell all of their own. A smell nowhere else would ever want.
I’d pushed my way through the cloud of smokers at the front of the building, some of them sitting in wheelchairs or hoisting around drip stands or puffing away with oxygen tanks on their laps. It was enough to put you off cigarettes for life, and I say that as an occasional indulger. They should take pictures of people like that and stick them on the back of fag packets.
Inside, and on the ward, it hit me: that mix of bulk-produced cleaning products, overcooked vegetables and human misery. People wandered the corridors, phones glued to their ears, hollow-eyed and tired. It was all so fragile, so depressing. But I suppose you’re never going to see the best of life on the ICU.
The nurse was über-glam, über-Scouse, all pointy black eyebrows and midnight hair and spray tan. She probably needed something to cheer her up, doing her job. She smiled and chatted as she showed me to Coleen’s side room, her tone becoming hushed and respectful as we walked through the door.
I stopped, dead still. Coleen lay in her bed wearing a hospital gown that had been washed so many times the floral pattern had faded to a dull grey. It matched her hair, which was plastered to the sides of her thin face, trailing cobwebs over the pillowcase.
She had blankets tucked in at the top of her chest, and she lay perfectly still. There was a tube up her nose, and an oxygen supply hissed in the background. A drip flowed into one arm, the sticky tape puckering her skin, and the machines next to her beeped loud and red as they monitored her heartbeat. A swing table was pushed to one side, an untouched jug of water sitting on top of it with a dented plastic cup.
I knew all of this without even looking. I knew because I’d seen it all before. As a child at my parents’ funeral, in my vision – the one I’d never forgotten.
There was a loud crash from outside, and both the nurse and I turned to see what was going on. Staff ran round in a commotion, a male nurse waving a broom handle and running backwards and forwards. He clattered into tables and chairs, swinging the brush like a staff, and I caught a glimpse of what looked like black wings beating and swooping in the air around his head.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s just the crow.’
She said it like it was normal, instead of freakily surreal.
‘It’s been hanging round all day. Must have got in through an open window. We can’t seem to catch it, and the poor thing keeps flying into this door and crash-landing.’
She patted me on the arm, left, and closed the door quietly behind her. It was weird, but then again, I was getting used to that.
A doctor had met me on the way in, corralling me into his tiny, cluttered office before I was allowed to see Coleen. He’d looked young, harassed and empty, his mousey-brown hair straggling across his head, which was going prematurely bald. Maybe he should consider getting a job stacking supermarket shelves. Maybe I should, too.
‘I’m afraid the outlook isn’t good,’ he’d said, rifling through Coleen’s file as he talked, as though reminding himself which patient he was talking about. ‘Mrs McCain’s cancer is at terminal stage, and one of the broken ribs nicked her left lung as well. She’s having extreme difficulty breathing, and unless we take drastic measures, she won’t be able to breathe at all.’
‘What does that mean – drastic?’ I’d asked.
‘It means putting her on a ventilator, which can breathe for her. I realise you are next of kin, and that Mrs McCain has no living will. But she has been very insistent, throughout her illness, that she is to receive no treatment. In all honesty, the prognosis was gloomy even if she had accepted it, but she has always refused. I suppose the question we have to ask ourselves is whether she would want us to put her on a ventilator at all, or to let nature take its course.’
I almost smiled at the way he said ‘we’. As though it were anything at all to do with him. As though he wouldn’t end his shift, go home, and have a beer in front of the women’s beach volleyball on Sky Sports. I’m not stupid – not all of the time, at least. I knew the decision was mine. That the decision I had to make was whether to keep Coleen alive, or let her die.
‘Will she ever recover?’ I’d said, already knowing the answer. I felt like he expected me to go through the motions.
‘There’s always a chance, but it’s ninety-nine per cent certain she won’t ever regain consciousness. Then it’s just a matter of waiting. We can keep her on the machines, certainly, for as long as it takes. We can keep her out of pain. But no, she won’t be able to communicate. She won’t be the grandmother you knew.’
The grandmother I knew. Funny, that. He’d said it as though I’d miss her … and against the odds, I probably would.
‘Anyway,’ he’d said, tidying up his papers and straightening his specs. ‘Maybe you should go and see her first. But before you leave, we should talk again. See what you decide.’
I’d nodded, played the good little girl, and been led here. To this small room, besieged by a crow, looking down at the only parent I’ve ever really known.
She looked tiny, shrivelled. Like one of those shrunken heads I’ve seen at a museum in Oxford. Her hands had been placed on top of the blankets, in a mockery of peaceful sleep. The skin was wrinkled, furrowed, so very, very old. Her fingers were yellowed with nicotine, and her nails cut short, stubby, clean.
I sat down on the hard plastic chair next to her. I’d had my whole life to prepare for this moment, and now it was here, I had no idea what to say, or what to do.
The only sound was the beeping of the machines, and the gentle ooze of oxygen. That, and Coleen’s laboured breath, coming in slow, ragged bursts, like each one could be her last. There was a slight rattle in her chest each time, as though it was forcing its way through blocked drainpipes.