Frozen (2 page)

“YOU ALL RIGHT, HARRY?” Adam glanced over at me, frowning, and then turned his gaze back to the motorway. It was the fifth time he had asked me. But it's hard making conversation with someone in shock, and I was grateful for his attempts, however clumsy.

“Not really, Ads,” I mumbled. “Thanks for being here.”

“Anything. You know that.”

Thank goodness for friends.

I had rung Adam at seven-thirty that morning. There was no reply from his home, but I caught him on his mobile. He was in Manchester, partway through a complex, high-profile court case of the sort he normally killed for. Within five minutes of my call, he had cancelled several meetings and passed over his entire court brief to one of his juniors. He promised he would be with me before noon, and he was as good as his word. This was important: I should explain that Adam was ambitious, both as a barrister and as a politician—a day off work was a big sacrifice. He was even doing all the driving, although that might not have been charity, perhaps more to do with his preference for his huge BMW over my beaten-up Renault 5.

We were on our way to Eastbourne General Hospital, where Verity lay unconscious in intensive care.

Adam glanced over at me and smiled gently. He set his shoulders firmly, his hands square on the wheel, as though his grip could squeeze an extra few minutes from our journey.

I was numb. Horror takes time to sink in.

I was nervous too; I didn't know what to expect. It's not an experience I can easily describe. There was only one thing I could think of, but I knew nothing about it, so I couldn't really think, and my mind spun, round and round. I picked out strange rhythms in the ticks of the air-conditioning and the sighs of passing cars:
let it be over, let it not be, let it be over, let it not be
...

*

The telephone had woken me at seven-thirty. I had taken my time answering, because I knew who it was: Verity, ringing to apologise. The last person I had expected was Gabriel, her father. We only ever spoke when I went up to Oxford to see Mum, which was rare these days. He'd never phoned me before, which meant that it could only be bad news. Adrenaline lurched in the pit of my chest. I'm not sure I was shocked when he told me, though—not then. These things never seem to hit in one overwhelming blow. The information dribbles in, one tiny ripple at a time. It is only later that you realise you are lost and struggling. I had already known something was wrong; I had known the night before when Verity wasn't at Jim's. By the time he rang, all that remained were the details—and you know most of those already.

On Wednesday evening, between the hours of eight and nine, Verity Patience Charlotte Hadley fell two hundred and twenty-four feet from the clifftops near Beachy Head in Sussex, striking the cliffs once during her descent. She was discovered at nine-fifteen by David Curzon, an unmarried fifty-two-year-old sculptor who was out scouring the shingle beach for driftwood. He telephoned the police from the nearest phone box and had nothing further to do with it. Verity was airlifted to Eastbourne General, where her head and body injuries were assessed and she underwent emergency surgery, which she survived. At this point, the police rang Gabriel. They had found an organ donor card with him neatly marked as her next-of-kin. There had been no answer, so the local police were sent to wait for him. When he arrived home, at eleven at night, one of the policemen—in an amazingly kind gesture—had offered to drive him down to Eastbourne. They had arrived at three in the morning, and Gabriel had waited until a more civilised hour before ringing me. After all, he thought, why rush? What could
Harry
do?

I hadn't been there.

I was brisk, competent, efficient—and scared. Said I'd be there. Rang Adam. And here he was, and here I was.

Now the world whirled about me, unreal. The miles bled indistinctly past. Occasionally I let out a little groan, aimed at no one in particular. Mostly, though, the journey passed in silence, and the cars whined past us, each following its own obscure purpose, in transit, faceless.

*

The door to the Intensive Treatment Unit had a window. I peered through it.

Gabriel was in the reception area. He was standing in the corridor, staring blankly at a row of prints on the wall. The lighting in the corridor was subdued; beyond him, it faded completely and there was darkness until the nurses' station, which was lit in pools by Anglepoise lamps.

The door opened with a suck of air and a muffled click. He looked up, but stayed where he was. We stopped just inside, unsure what came next—and the door clicked closed behind us. Adam put his hands on both my shoulders and pushed me forwards with a squeeze.

“Go,” he said. I walked towards Gabriel, alone in a lake of watery bleak light. He shook my hand, and his deep-sunk eyes locked on mine, puzzled and a little desperate.

Gabriel. He was six-foot-three—or he had been; at seventy he was beginning to stoop. He did not seem quite to fill his clothes; they hung limply from him as though they were outsized. He had a great curling milk-and-steel shock of hair, all at strange and unruly angles. Beneath it, his face was thin and deeply creased. He had high cheekbones that stretched the skin beneath his eyes and made it seem as pale and weak as yellowed paper. His mouth was pulled into a wistful smile, or perhaps into a reflection of some profound inner sadness. You could never tell. His mouth and eyes gave you the feeling that you were looking at a man in the throes of the deepest emotion. Generally, he said little, and now was no exception. He took my hand briefly, bloodless and damp. He nodded, and turned away without words, shuffling ahead of me towards the nurse, who was waiting for us by lamplight.

The sister in charge ushered us into a waiting room and insisted that we see a doctor before we went in to Verity. He arrived quickly. He swept into the room and scanned us impassively. He was a young man, younger than me, with the brisk but slightly dazed manner that junior hospital doctors always seem to have. I wondered how many hours he had been working without sleep. Twenty? Thirty?

“Mr...” He glanced down at a clipboard. “... Hadley?” He looked up expectantly. Gabriel rose wearily from his plastic bucket seat.

“Excellent. Good, good,” said the doctor, leaning steeply forward to shake his hand. He was already looking at me before their hands had touched. “And you are Mr...?”

“Harry Waddell. Family friend,” I mumbled. He shook my hand too, so lightly that I was hardly sure it had happened.

“Excellent,” he said again. “I'm Mr Balasubmaranian.” (That's what he said, honest.) “I'm the senior house officer on duty for ITU and neuro on Mr. Oxley's team.”

That last bit slipped straight past me, partly because he was speaking incredibly fast—he'd obviously said the same thing to hundreds of people on hundreds of occasions—but mostly because I was gobsmacked by his name. Let's be honest, it's not a name your average white middle-class Londoner comes across all that often. He had a faintly northern nasal accent, which I couldn't quite place—Lancashire, maybe. There was no trace of Indian, Tamil, Malaysian, or whatever. I'm sure I have his name right, though, because I spent the rest of our brief chat trying to read it from the little badge on his lapel (well, quite a big badge, in his case). I learned it by heart. It was definitely Balasubmaranian. And he was definitely a reassuring, thoughtful, and exhausted man. I liked him. That was why I wanted to learn his name, so I could thank him by name when we were done. Hospitals always make me behave oddly. I feel as though I have to work that much harder at being human. Whatever; the name was so striking that it has stayed with me ever since.

What mattered, though, was what he told us. There had been minimal internal bleeding, which they had easily contained, he said. By some miracle, none of the fractures had punctured anything vital. Many of her organs were bruised and her whole body was in shock, but those symptoms would rapidly disappear. She had lost very little blood. The broken bones would heal with time; none of them were serious. With luck, none of these injuries would kill her.

But her skull had been partially crushed. There was damage to her brain, and brain damage, Balasubmaranian told us, can often kill for no reason that anyone understood. She might die, or she might survive. They might switch off her life support and find she could breathe for herself, that her heart kept pumping, that bags of liquid food alone were enough to keep her alive—or they might not. He didn't know, he couldn't say, it would be inappropriate to speculate... but he did tell us one thing: it was unlikely that she would ever recover consciousness, and even if she did, she would never again be the Verity we had known. In effect, he said, if she didn't die, she would either be unconscious with her eyes closed or with her eyes open. She would sit there, immobile, staring, blank. This was her future.

“Verity's tough,” I said. “She'll fight it. You'll see.”

Almost immediately I felt stupid. I don't know what I was thinking. That somehow she'd overcome the limits of her own shattered brain, I suppose. That sheer force of will could transform her prognosis. Not that she'd ever had much willpower.

I saw a film once where that happened—I don't remember its name. Come to think of it, films are full of it: people come back from the brink of death, or recover the use of their limbs. In movie land, miracles happen every day; people triumph over impossible adversity. But then, maybe films about people who suffer appalling accidents and then just survive, comatose, for years, don't have quite as much Hollywood appeal.

And there's another lie in the movies too: that there is always hope, that we are in control, that we can make things better if we only believe we can.

“She may regain some function over time, Mr. Waddell, but really, her injuries are very severe,” Balasubmaranian said carefully. “I wouldn't hold out too much hope. More than likely she'll need round-the-clock nursing for the rest of her life. I'm sorry.”

And I suddenly felt like I needed to justify myself to him, to explain why I'd said something so idiotic.

“Well, it's just—” I stopped, because I became conscious of Gabriel next to me. Why do I always shut up when it's just too late?

“I am sorry, Mr. Hadley, Mr. Waddell,” Balasubmaranian said gently. “There really is nothing we can do. It was a very big fall. Most people don't survive it.”

Most people.
I wondered how many people fell from the cliffs here each year, perhaps each week. Verity was just another among hundreds, nothing special—except that she had reached the hospital alive.

Gabriel let out a heavy breath and sat down, staring at nothing. The doctor looked at him for a moment, and then nodded briefly, muttering, “If you need me...” and left, white coattails cracking and flapping in his wake. I never did get the chance to show off my mastery of his name.

I sat down next to Gabriel and stared at the same nothing as him. Perhaps it was the future we were looking at. Whatever it was, it was blank and uninviting.

“Gone,” he said flatly. His voice was weak and breathy. There was no room for emotion, just horror. So I sat wordlessly with him, wondering which memories of her were haunting him, what he might be hiding behind those fierce, unblinking eyes. Eventually he slapped his knees softly, and stood.

“Well, then. Best get it over with,” he muttered.

In a darkened room beyond a glass wall, shrouded in linen and pale white light, Verity was motionless and silent except for the slow sighs of the machines holding vigil at her side, waiting for us.

“ARE YOU OUR new neighbour?” A head was poking through the hedge near the bottom of the garden.

I didn't know how long she'd been watching, but it didn't really matter. All I'd been doing for the past half an hour was try to hook my old half-inflated football high enough for it to catch in a three-pronged niche in the upper reaches of the apple tree.

I was bored and lethargic, not wanting to settle to anything. I had nobody to play with, and I knew that what my mother kept telling me was true: that it was my own fault. The village was full of children. I knew several of them from school. If I wanted company, all I had to do was go out to the front of the house and kick the ball around there. Sooner or later someone would come along. I didn't want that. I felt awkward. The prospect of making the effort to have friends and be sociable made me uncomfortable. I preferred solitude.

(These days, I'm not at all bad with people. Most people think I'm charming and confident—at least that's what Mum says, and Verity, of course; but when you're thirteen the world's a more complicated place. I had only lived in the village for a few months, two school terms. Settling in had not been an easy process. Neither had my parents' almost immediate separation. Just being a thirteen-year-old wasn't much fun either. I didn't know quite who I was supposed to be, or to whom. So I played out roles in my head, notions of who I might be. This particular day, the character I'd chosen for myself was First Victim. It wasn't much of a speaking part.)

“Huh,” I said.

It was disturbing to know that this girl had been watching me, just blank-minded me, kicking a ball in a high arc towards an apple tree over and over and over again, saying nothing, thinking nothing. She must have thought I was more than a little strange.

“Depends who you are,” I added, and hooked my toe under the deflated ball. I hoisted it up, hoping that this would be the time it stuck. Instead, it hit the trunk about three feet too low, and fell with a soft smack. Not a good start, when you thought about it: surly replies and a display of inept footwork. And she obviously
was
my neighbour. After all, she was poking her head through the fence from next-door's back garden. And in any case I'd watched them move in the day before, a tall gaunt man and a young girl. I had hung around at the window hoping for another sight of the girl, and the more glimpses I caught the more I thought that for once something good had happened to me. Now, in person, she was as pretty as I'd hoped, with big brown eyes and a face like an elf who was about to get into trouble and was looking forward to it. All in all, not the best time to start behaving like a prat. Mercifully, she giggled.

“Oh, I'm your neighbour,” she said merrily. “No doubt about it. Only I was asking if
you
were
my
neighbour.”

I sniggered at the joke despite myself. I hoicked the ball up again, and once again missed. That made her laugh too. She slipped through a narrow gap between two spindly trunks in the threadbare hedge, and stood next to me. I swaggered off to collect the ball.

“It would work if you used a sling,” she said. Neither of us looked at each other, only at the ball and the tree: rules of engagement.

“I don't think you can control it well enough with your feet.”

I snorted a sarcastic thanks.

“I don't mean like that.” She giggled. “I mean you're never doing it the same twice, so you don't get any better. You're just starting again.”

Which was true enough. I hadn't been thinking of it that way because, of course, perfecting the result wasn't the point. I was just passing time. I hadn't yet succeeded with the ball that day—in fact, I could remember only ever having done it once. I ambled back with the ball.

“What do you mean, a sling?”

“Like the Romans used in sieges.” She waved her delicate hands about airily. “A catapult. A lever, with the ball on one end and a weight on the other. Or a spring in the middle; doesn't really matter. And you'd need some kind of release thing so you wound it up to the same tension every time. Otherwise it'd go all over the place.”

I kicked the ball twice more in silence. She stood with her hands behind her back, twirling idly from side to side. Her yellow print skirt was slightly translucent because the light was behind her. Her shadowy legs were long and lean, and where they appeared from under her skirt, her knees bulged slightly. Her thin brown calves had a haze of transparent hairs. Her sandalled pigeon toes scuffed at the tussocky grass with every sway. She kept her head still as she swung her shoulders back and forth, and the yellow light reflected from her dress cupped her chin, first on one side and then the other. She was almost as tall as me—but then, I was short and stocky. I was lumpen and graceless; my growth spurt had all been sideways while everyone else had gone up. She was long and supple as a willow. She didn't seem to notice the contrast. Mostly she seemed to be eyeing the tree. The thin fabric pulled gently at the two small bumps on her chest with every twist of her scrawny arms. I decided I liked her. Sort of.

“Won't work,” I said surlily.

“Rubbish,” she pouted. “Anyway, why not?”

“Well, have you got a spring and a ratchet and a lever and all that other stuff?” I asked petulantly. “’Cause I haven't.”

I kicked at the over-long grass around the football (did I mention that it was my job to mow the lawn?). I kicked the heads off a couple of dandelions. Then I said, “Look, I've got to go for tea and stuff. See you around.” And I slouched away, feeling her gaze upon me, knowing that my ears were going red. I wasn't trying to push her away, but that was exactly how it sounded, and I knew it.

''Bye, then,” she called softly. I pretended I hadn't heard. I didn't turn round. A moment or two later I heard the leaves rustling as she pushed back through the hedge.

When I was inside I buried my head in my hands. I was stuck inside for the rest of the afternoon now. Tea wasn't for two hours and I couldn't go out again before then without looking utterly stupid. I congratulated myself on having blown it on the first day.

I spent most of the afternoon at the window, but I didn't see her again.

*

The next morning it was eleven o'clock before I went out into the garden. It was a bright day, already hot, with a few small clouds moving so slowly that they could form or evaporate in the time it took them to pass behind the tree. The sky was full of unhurried birdsong and the eager screams of swifts. The smell of grass and summer tightened my chest; each breath was slow and heavy.

I had woken late. Mum had already gone to work but she had left me breakfast. I ate, and then dumped my plate and bowl in the sink. She always hated it if I left stuff hanging around; it was one of the things that was guaranteed to get me shouted at. She was more uptight than ever now that Dad wasn't around.

But who cared? It was a Friday.

I hated Fridays. Not every Friday, just every other Friday, and this was one of them. After tea I'd have to go upstairs, get my things packed, and then sit around waiting until Dad turned up after work some time. Generally when he arrived Mum would kick me out into the garden for half an hour while she and Dad screamed at each other, as though I couldn't hear, as though the neighbours couldn't, or the whole village, come to that. Then Mum would come bustling outside, all sniffles and sharp words, and tell me to hurry up because I was going now—“
now
, Harry, chop-chop.” And while I struggled with one too many bags in the hall, Dad would snarl, “For goodness' sake,” from the car. Then we'd drive off, too fast, saying not a thing. It was all right once we got there; it was just that I didn't look forward to it. Fridays were spoiled in advance.

On this particular Friday, though, things were different. Spread neatly on a patch of flattened grass in the garden were some lengths of old wood, a much-repaired bicycle inner tube, and a seaside spade with a long shank, a slotted plastic T for a handle, and a metal blade with red paint peeling from it. I'd never seen any of the objects before.

The undergrowth crackled and swished, and I heard a voice.

“You got up, then.” She grinned at me. Her slim hips swung subtly as she walked. She was wearing yesterday's dress (now a little rumpled), but today her feet were bare and already grass-stained. She dropped an armful of assorted ironmongery on to the ground, then stood back and dusted off her arms. She frowned at the pile in front of us, hands on hips, her forehead creased into delicate bumps.

“Tools,” she said decisively. “Saw, hammer, nails. Then we're ready.” She turned to look at me, and then stepped a pace closer. “I don't know where my dad's tools are. We haven't unpacked yet. Does yours have any?”

She was standing so close that she had to look up at me. She seemed so innocent and trusting suddenly, as though I was the only one in the world who could help her, as though she was lost and she needed me more than anything.

Luckily for me, Dad hadn't yet collected his tools. They were all still in his shed, where he had spent so much of his time in the few months we had been together here before Mum sent him packing. Me and Mum had never been allowed in the shed. That had always puzzled me, because it was really dull in there—nothing thrilling, no secrets. I knew, because of course I'd broken Dad's rule the first time I had the chance. But dull or not, there was a saw, a hammer; there would be nails. When I came back bearing them, she clapped her hands and her large eyes glowed with excitement, as though I had just slain a mammoth single-handed and dragged it to our cave. For a moment I preened, and then she turned to the pile and started muttering directions. Which I followed.

The Great Sling took shape.

We went straight through lunch and didn't miss it. Mum was still at work, and I assumed her dad was too. The first I really noticed of time passing was when Mum called me in for tea at six and yelled down the garden—had I packed yet? She didn't come to find me, just poked her head out and shouted, and she didn't talk to the girl, even though she was squatting next to me. I called that I'd be in in a minute, and turned back to the sling.

We had been trying to decide how many twists to put in the inner tube, which stretched across the middle of the frame. It was doubled over so that the lever (the spade) could be pushed between the two strands. When you “wound up” the spade, the doubled inner tube would twist. It was a good idea—hers, of course—but we were having problems getting the tension right, and we couldn't afford to nail on the inner tube too many times at the wrong strength because the rubber would rip.

Two minutes later Mum came back out and screamed down the garden, “Harry! Tea. Now!” She waved a fishwifely arm at us. “And you, young lady, scram!”

We both stood and looked at each other. I could see my own excitement reflected back in her sharp face, all angled bones and warm plump lips. Her teeth were white and broad.

“You're called Harry, then. Finish it later, Harry?”

“Can't. Got to go to Dad's for the weekend. Split up. Yours?” I heard Mum's shrill voice—“
Harry
!”—a million miles away.

“Mum's dead,” the girl said idly, not as though it mattered, just as though it was true.

“Oh. Right,” I mumbled, suddenly my old familiar clumsy self.

She shrugged. “When d'you get back?”

“Sunday. Late, though. After dark.”

“Finish it Monday, then, Harry?”

“Yeah. All right.” I knew I sounded unenthusiastic, but I felt my heart speed up and the blood rush dizzily about my head. ''Bye, then.” I turned and headed towards the house.

“Don't you want to know who
I
am, Harry?” she called after me. I twisted back to look at her. The light was behind her again: her teeth and the big round whites of her eyes glowed in the shadow beneath her sunlit hair. I said nothing, and she giggled. “Verity,” she said, with a little mock-curtsy. “My name's Verity.”

She whirled and vanished through the gap in the hedge, leaving the long grass nodding and confused, and a half-finished tangle of wood, rubber, and metal lying incongruously beneath the apple tree.

Somehow the journey to Dad's didn't seem to take as long as normal.