Frozen (19 page)

Gabriel put his hands on his knees and pressed himself upright. His eyes seemed almost as dead as Verity's. A purple vein throbbed on his temple, under skin as dry and fragile as old paper.

Verity had a room of her own, by some quirk of the NHS' mysterious workings. Perhaps they were concerned that other patients on the ward shouldn't see what brain damage could do, or perhaps it was out of respect for visitors. More likely it was luck, or a cock-up in the system. Either way, my immediate reaction was that she'd been fortunate, and that was instantly followed by despair. She would be alone, isolated from the comings and goings of the ward. The laughter of the nurses would always be somewhere else, in another room, in a corridor, not with her.

The room was nice enough. There was a standard metal bed, a standard bedside unit, standard plastic armchair, a window with a view of a large aluminium duct that leaked a thin trickle of steam. A plastic tube with earphones at the end was twined in with all the other tubes—oxygen, drips, nasal feeding tube.

She lay under a single clean sheet, which was slightly ripped. She was on her side, set neatly in position by the nurses, one hand reaching towards the rail along the side of the bed. Her empty gaze was fixed on a blank wall. Her new home.

Sam nudged past me, zoetrope still in hand, and squatted next to the bars on the bedside. “Hey, doll,” she said. “Guess who's here?” The eyes did not move. Nothing moved. “Harry's here, I'm here, and your dad.” She had the happy inflections of a mother talking to a baby, so soft, so gentle. So hopeless. “We've got all your things. And look.”

As I had earlier, she held up the zoetrope in Verity's line of sight and spun it. Two blank brown eyes, sagging in their sockets, did nothing at all; there was not a flicker. Her tongue moved briefly, pushing more spittle from her mouth, and then it, too, dropped slackly back.

“D'you remember it?” Sam chirped. “Remember the photos? It was your idea, wasn't it?” Another spin. Nothing. “Hey, d'you... do you...” Sam let the zoetrope settle to the floor, and her hand drifted to her face, stroked her cheek ineffectually.

I put my arms round her, and she turned and crushed herself on to me, her body shaking with hard, slow sobs. I stared at Verity's slack face and tried to make it mean something, but there was nothing left. Nothing at all.

“Be four o'clock soon,” said Gabriel. Meaning, we were doing no good here. He was right.

Sam mopped at her face and sniffed a lot, while I turned back to Verity and held her unresponsive hand for a wordless minute. Then we trooped out, thanking the nurse in over-cheerful voices. She looked over her glasses at us, smiled efficiently, and bent back to her paperwork.

I HADN'T BEEN back to Wolvercote for several months, and it didn't feel right. We parked, and stood uneasily while we said goodbye to Gabriel and watched him prowl the five or so yards to his own front door.

I had packed one bag for both of us, and I was feeling uneasy about it. How would Mum react? Sam had pointed out that it was only one night, so two bags would be daft; and arguing with her had seemed less appealing than brazening it out with Mum. Besides, this was my home too. The door opened when we were a few paces away from it—Mum must have been watching from the living room—and there she was, all nervous smiles, brushing down the front of her dress with hands that wouldn't stay still. She hugged me and pretty much ignored Sam until I broke away and introduced them. She shook hands uncertainly and invited us in.

“I've made up the spare bed,” she said over her shoulder, as she scuttled indoors. So she expected us to sleep separately. I pulled a face at Sam. She blew me a kiss. Relieved, I dumped the bag and headed after Mum towards the kitchen.

“So, how are you?” I called. That would keep me from questions for the next half an hour or so. I paused long enough to let Sam bump into me as she followed, and reached behind me with both arms to squeeze her. She pressed back, and held my hand as we filed into the kitchen.

Mum's habitual tale began. There was never enough money, but you found ways, cut down on what you wanted from life; she never saw enough of me, she understood and she didn't want to impose but surely a weekend now and then; Mr. Winston was dead, Mrs. Winston was carrying on with old Mr. Thompson, but of course that was hardly news, they'd been at it for ages. It was a stream of consciousness: there was rarely any need to interject. She moved around the kitchen, drying already dry mugs from the draining-board, pausing to elucidate some point of village politics, vaguely putting the mug back on the draining-board and fiddling with the stacks of glasses in a cupboard, picking up the same mug, polishing it some more. I glazed over, and Sam stared out bleakly at the wizened apple tree at the end of the garden.

I love Mum. How could I not? She has been the one constant element of my life. For three and a half decades she has been there, always the same. When she split with Dad there was talk of change, new opportunities, but it never came right for her. She took her nervousness with her into every new venture, her self-fulfilling conviction that it would all turn sour and that the fault would be hers. She also took her generosity, and her willingness to let others take credit, while she backed quietly away from the light. She would come home and cry, and then tell me she was sorry, she was just being stupid, it would pass. I knew that it wouldn't. It was just how life was for her. For me to leave home was the cruellest blow of all, but what could I do? She had kept herself busy, and therefore contented. When I came up to see her we had fun. We'd get drunk and gossip and laugh about things from years before, and she'd lecture me about the future, and women, and about how she was right to worry; it was only natural for a mother. She wanted, always, above all, to know that I was happy. Well, life's more complicated than that, isn't it? But, yes, I'd say, life is good for me, all of it good. And she'd pinch my cheek and her eyes would mist over, and she'd busy herself for ten minutes making a single cup of coffee. She wasn't without friends or support. She wasn't even without a son. But we both knew that she was without something. Perhaps it was a future.

Sam, bless her, fitted straight in and made all the right noises. After ten minutes, it wasn't me prompting, “And what did
he
say?” It was her; and ten minutes after that, Mum stopped ignoring her and the two of them began to talk. After half an hour, I was surplus to requirements. They had settled at the table, elbow to elbow, and were complaining about the inadequacies of men—including, I might add, me. When I protested, Sam told me, accompanied by a huge wink, that I might as well push off, they were only just getting started. I grumbled my way out of the room. Behind me, I heard Sam say something in a low voice, and the two of them erupted into coarse laughter.

I found my old football in the back of the shed at the garden's end, now a shapeless, deflated lump of sun-bleached plastic. It was on top of an ancient ripped-out kitchen unit, alongside a pair of broken shears and a bundle of sticks and twine. I peered inside the cupboard: age-blackened wrenches, a rusting saw—Dad's old tools, part of the past which Mum swore she no longer clung to, but which she couldn't bear to throw away. I carried the ball into the garden. There was no chance of toe-flipping it into the tree; the fork was covered in new growth, and the old familiar shapes were gone. I slung it back into the undergrowth.

*

The path to Gabriel's door was lined with weeds and dry moss. Just as when we'd arrived at Mum's, the door opened before I got there. It must be something about villages: not enough to do.

Gabriel shuffled ahead of me along the hall towards the living room. There was a bottle of whisky by his chair, and a glass. He was hitting the hard stuff and it was barely five o'clock—although, to give him credit, the bottle was less than a third empty. He trudged to a sideboard and bent painfully to peer inside for a second glass. He scooped up the bottle, and poured as he walked, filling the tumbler to the brim and handing it to me. He headed back to his chair, bent at the hips, head bowed, his bushy frown directed at the age-stained floorboards.

I settled into the tattered chair opposite. The whisky fumes did their usual thing, acid vapour penetrating the back of my nose, my eyes starting. It tasted foul; this wasn't your single malt, this was the stuff they use to run generators in Africa. He contemplated me for a moment before raising his glass and an eyebrow, and then downing a generous slug. If he'd drunk a third of a bottle at that rate, the whisky wasn't going to last more than an hour. From the look on his face, he intended me to help him finish it off.

He waved his tumbler in a vague toast—“Verity”—and sank his face into his drink again.

I couldn't reply. Verity
what
? Verity, goodbye? I didn't want to say that with cheap whisky and a sad old man in a dingy room. Actually, I didn't want to say it at all. Verity, come back? Verity, why—why Adam? Why didn't you call me? What I heard in his toast wasn't goodbye, come back, or anything: it was self-pity. Somewhere behind those shrewd eyes, he had given up. Gabriel was mourning himself.

He attacked his glass with savage conviction, refilled it with a haphazard wave. He held out the bottle to me to top up my glass. When the bottle ran out, he found another—mercifully only half full. There were sounds in the silence between us. There was a clock, there were birds and a breeze outside, sometimes a car would whisper past; and there was us. I fancied I heard Sam and Mum laughing next door, but it was distant and then it faded.

Time passed. The clock ticked.

“What will you do?” I asked, at about six.

He sniffed. He pursed his lips and shook his head. Ten minutes later he answered, slowly and indistinctly, “Nothing. Can't look after her, can I? She should have died.” He was breathing heavily, his lips pressed together, black eyes fixed on the floor and glistening. He fought the tears for a minute, and then seemed to crumple. The tension left him, his shoulders folded, and another small piece of him seemed to vanish. It was unsettling.

What must it be like to lose a daughter? I don't have children, but I can imagine the loss. All that long history gone, all that potential, the hope, the certainty of a future. All vanished. I'm in my thirties, but Mum still treats me like a child. She seems to think she has the right to criticise, question, cut me down to size—and I let her. In a funny way, as well as being patronising and irritating as hell, it's proof that she loves me, and that she always did. It's a familiar old pattern, clinging to something that, in truth, evaporated with childhood. Mum needed the illusion, so I collaborated. Looking at Gabriel, I knew that it must have been the same with Verity and him. What must it be like to lose a child? You lose all the meaning of all the love you ever gave.

And what
do
you do?

He didn't answer, and I knew it was a crass question, casual conversation in the midst of a crisis. Verity needed constant medical attention. There were decisions that he would have to make. If she got pneumonia, should they treat it? If her lungs gave out, should they put her on a ventilator? Decisions made in the absence of hope. He couldn't bring her home. He couldn't live at the hospital, and care for a girl whose mind had gone forever.
What do you do
? It didn't matter to her where she was; the people who loved her didn't matter to her, even her own survival meant nothing. She hadn't died, but he had lost her anyway, as he had lost his wife all those years before. All the love he had ever given was wasted.

“You mustn't blame yourself, Gabriel,” I mumbled, because I thought it might help, because I was drunk, because I couldn't bear the silence—and because I meant it. He looked sharply at me.

“Seriously,” I went on. “It's not your fault. It's not mine. It's... it happens. You know.” My hands were waving expressively, always a bad sign. It hit me that maybe it would be a good plan to shut up. I ignored the bit of me that was doing the nagging, and continued, “She was unhappy. Dunno why. She didn't tell me. Seeing a psychiatrist and stuff.” I spilled a little drink as I gestured, and rose unsteadily to fetch myself a refill. I had collapsed back into my own chair and taken a swig before I noticed Gabriel's stare, and gradually realised that I was being more than a little insensitive. “Oh... shit. Look, Gabriel, I didn't mean—you know... she loved you. Honest.”

Not that
he
had ever shown much sign of loving
her
. I'd always thought of him more as watching Verity than as sharing his life with her. My memories were of him staring out of a window while she played in the garden. I remembered the dark light that flickered in his eyes as she kissed him goodbye in the mornings, the sharp, unmoving lines of his face, his tongue wetting his thin lips before he spoke.

She doesn't want to play with you, Harry. Not with you.

A child sees as normal things that would horrify an adult. I was used to Gabriel's ways and manner, used to him being taciturn, familiar with the strangely fearful jealousy with which he watched over his daughter. He had lost his wife; he and Verity were alone in the world. She was precious to him, and he was afraid.

“Gabriel, listen...it's just the whisky,” I mumbled. “I'm... confused. Sorry. Look, she never even told me she was sad. She isn't normally. It's not you. Not anyone. No one's fault. Seriously.”

Gabriel flicked me the kind of look that kills plants. I shut up for a while. My head felt detached from the rest of me; it was shooting round the room in random directions, I didn't dare move. I was overcome by memories, and even those were making me feel queasy. Playing on the swing in Verity's garden. The day they moved in. Gabriel's face the day he told me Verity didn't want to see me any more. When she was older, waiting for her with him, where was she, who was she with, didn't she realise? The clock, dividing up the night into tiny parcels.

“What happened, Gabriel?” I blurted. “What was it? One day we were fine and the next day she wouldn't see me anymore. You drove off with her somewhere. I saw you. It was like she hated me suddenly. We were so nearly... it was all brilliant. Then—bang, she wouldn't even talk to me.”

I risked waving an arm again, and regretted it. So I stayed very still. I was scared by my own daring, and scared of what he might say. Twenty years, and only now had I found the courage to ask.

Gabriel didn't answer. He gazed at me for a while, sucking thoughtfully on a mouthful of whisky. Then he poured the last of the bottle into his own glass, downed it, and stalked out of the room.

It took me a while to grasp that he wasn't coming back. I stood uncertainly, with my own words still bouncing around my head, an echo of humiliation, and wove my way down the hall to the front door. I didn't call goodbye. There wasn't any point.

*

Back at Mum's, the rest of the evening passed in a haze. I didn't talk about what had just happened, I couldn't bear to. Instead I brooded—about Gabriel, about psychiatry, about She Doesn't Want to See You—and let Mum and Sam's exuberance wash over and past me.

We had supper at half-past seven or so—and a couple of bottles of wine to sluice it down, heaven help me. (Mum and Sam were two or three bottles gone by the time I got back from Gabriel's, so maybe I didn't stand out as much as memory tells me I should have.) There was laughter, a lot of it, from Sam and Mum, mostly about men. There was me, silent and heavily drunk. Me announcing that I really needed to go to bed (it must have been all of nine o'clock), and Sam saying to Mum that she ought to go up to say goodnight, and Mum saying, “Go on,” while I was still negotiating the first few stairs. I remember Sam helping me into bed and—how much later?—her talking to Mum on the landing and Mum saying something about it was fine whichever room Sam ended up in, and Sam saying okay, not that Harry'd be up for anything anyway. There was a cackle of laughter, and then there was Sam, naked next to me.

She slipped under the duvet into the narrow bed, cold body, prickly skin, murmuring something. I rolled towards her, murmured something too, flopped a heavy arm over her, and slept again. I remember her easing herself out from under me, whispering something about snoring and sharing the duvet, saying that she'd see me in the morning. And I remember that she bent over and kissed my forehead before she left, and that she whispered something to me briefly in the moonlight.