‘Come on, we’ve got to go inside, you’ve got to go …’ I say, grabbing his hand and pulling him up.
‘What’s wrong?’ he says. ‘Who was on the phone?’
The phone rings for a third time. ‘Bloody hell,’ I mutter, ‘why is he calling me again?’
‘Sorry, Terry, sorry, sorry, sorry … I’m just going back to the flat now … I won’t do it again …’ I say, as Daniel creeps up behind me and pinches my arse. I try not to giggle down the phone and turn to shoo him away.
‘You’d better come down,’ says Terry, sounding solemn.
His tone of voice feels like a glass of cold water poured over my head. Suddenly I feel stupid and silly and bad. I’ve broken Terry’s trust, but worse, I’ve given in to temptation with Daniel without putting up the slightest resistance at all.
‘Terry, I’m sorry,’ I say, remorse and guilt attacking from either side. ‘I’ll bring the keys back right away.’
‘Don’t worry about the keys,’ he says. ‘Just come quick. It’s Marjorie.’
I run downstairs, leaving Daniel the keys to my flat and strict instructions to stay put and wait for my call.
‘What happened, is she OK?’ I say, trying to catch my breath, as I catch up with Terry in the courtyard.
‘She’s had another fall,’ he says.
‘Where is she, is she in the flat?’ I look up at her window where the dark curtains, as ever, are drawn.
‘No, she’s been taken to UCH in an ambulance about a half hour ago.’
I suddenly feel sick with panic. ‘An ambulance? Is she going to be OK, what shall we do, is anyone with her? I should be with her …’
‘They wouldn’t let me in the ambulance,’ says Terry, ‘and besides, I can’t really leave this place for long. I’ve called her son, he’s driving up, should be at the hospital in about an hour … but yeah, I think if you can get down there now …’ he says. ‘If you’re OK to get away …’ He looks at me with an expression I can’t read properly.
‘That’s just a friend,’ I say, ‘it’s fine. I’ll get a cab right now … shit, my bag’s upstairs, shall I go and get it, what should I do?’
Terry’s already got his wallet out and stuffs thirty pounds into my hand. ‘That should get you there and back. Call me and tell me what’s going on as soon as you can.’
This is my fault, I think, as the taxi drives into town and I stare out the window, wishing I could go back in time to the point this afternoon where I decided it was a good idea to go up on the roof and get off with a married man.
If I hadn’t gone up on the roof, Daniel and I would have gone for a walk on the Heath, and when I returned I would have seen the ambulance downstairs and I could have gone to the hospital with Marjorie. Held her hand so she knew I was there, so she didn’t feel scared or alone. I hope she’s OK. How dare her son not live nearer to town, how irresponsible to move an hour outside of London when you have a frail mother. What is he thinking, selfish man?
Oh God, please let her be OK. I have been a terrible neighbour. All those times when I didn’t want to go round and listen to her moan, having to sit there and absorb her loneliness, putting my own needs above hers – when she can’t even leave her four walls. All those self-justifications of why I couldn’t go round there:
too busy, too tired, back too late from work, I’m not even a relative
. And the other day I should have insisted on tidying up her flat, clearing away some of those piles so that she wouldn’t have tripped – rather than secretly being relieved when she told me to go away.
The reception in A&E stinks of alcohol. There’s anxiety in the atmosphere, as contagious as a bug. The receptionist has a large handwritten sign in capital letters saying ‘POSITION CLOSED’ but he’s dealing with the couple in front of me – a boy of about seventeen, leaning heavily on his girlfriend. He’s done something bloody to his ankle. The receptionist tells them to sit and wait, then sits, refusing to make eye contact while I stand in front of him waiting for him to look up. After about a minute I say, ‘My neighbour, Marjorie Horstead … she’s just arrived in an ambulance … could you please tell me if she’s here?’
Eventually he looks up, points to the sign that says ‘POSITION CLOSED’ and says ‘Can you not read?’ then heads into a back office, muttering.
I want to shout through the glass:
You were helping the other guy just now! This is a hospital. I’m scared about Marjorie. Be less of a dickhead
. But I’m silenced by anxiety. The smell of this place alone makes me short of breath. Instead, I stand on the verge of tears and wait. After about two minutes, another woman comes out from the back office, and after I explain the situation, sends me through the heavy door into the main admissions area and tells me to head for the recovery room.
The corridors are lined with people in various states of worry. I head down to the recovery room, past half-drawn green curtains behind which lie various bodies in states of shock or distress. One man sits alone, head drooped forward like he’s just been pulled from an explosion. Two skinny, hairy legs stick out from beneath his blue gown and hang limply over the side of the bed. He sways forward a fraction, as if in slow motion.
I hover outside the open double doors of Recovery until a handsome male nurse comes and asks if he can help.
‘Ah yes, Mrs Horstead, bed three. Follow me,’ he says, leading me into a pale yellow fluorescent room with rows of beds and complicated floor-standing machines lined up. There are bins all over the place – brown bins with black bin liners, blue bins, white bins with orange bin liners, and all I can think is that Marjorie must be going mental – she hates the sight of a bin as much as anything.
Bed three is partially sealed off with a floor-standing screen, but I know Marjorie’s here because I can see her sheepskin slippers poking out from the end of the bed, the mid-brown suede dotted with large drops of blood. The sight of these drops of blood makes me want to cry again, but I tell myself to stop being so pathetic. This isn’t the morgue; she must at least be conscious if she’s in this room.
She’s talking quietly with a doctor, and I stick my head round the screen and give her a weak smile. She looks first confused, then a tiny bit moved by emotion, and then quite quickly, furious. Her lip is bloody and swollen, and there are flakes of dried blood under her chin. Her beige housedress has dark, almost brown blood stains on the chest, then a few longer trickles down the skirt and then the splotches that have spread out on her slippers. Her left wrist is bound in plaster and a drip feeds into the thin, pale blue flesh on her right hand. In this harsh, sickly yellow-green lighting her skin gleams, a chalky grey. She looks so small and weak and defeated I have to force my smile to stay up.
The doctor nods at me. She’s dressed in a pretty purple print dress, and looks at least five years younger than me, but has a calm gravitas I don’t think I’ll ever have, even when I’m fifty. ‘Are you Marjorie’s grand-daughter?’ she says.
‘Neighbour,’ I say. ‘Marjorie, your son’s on his way, he’ll be here very soon.’
She makes a low grunt of acknowledgement.
‘What happened?’ I ask the doctor.
‘She can’t remember, but from what the ambulance guys saw, it looks like she tripped on a rug, hit her head on a table on her way down and landed on her wrist.’
Marjorie lets out a moan of annoyance and pain.
‘It’s a compound fracture. It’s unstable. We’ve tried to set it but it’s slipping back. We might need to take her to theatre,’ she says.
Behind me a new patient is being wheeled in. She’s lying on a trolley with her head wedged between two large red stabilising blocks, and from this angle it looks like she has no head of her own other than a large red plastic square. She’s wheeled into place in the bay next to Marjorie, and all I can see now are the soles of her feet, soft and pale pink and so naked in this room. The noises coming out of her sound like they’re from a wounded beast – low, groaning sounds followed by deeper, more guttural wails.
‘Her white cell count’s normal and her chest is clear, but I’d like to x-ray her left hip,’ says the doctor, looking down at her clipboard. ‘Marjorie,’ she says softly. ‘This is the third fall you’ve had in three years, isn’t it?’
Marjorie ignores the question. She knows exactly where this is leading: the further removal of her independence.
‘It says in your notes that you broke your hip in a fall two years ago …’
Marjorie turns her head away from the doctor and stares sullenly at a trolley, pretending to study the red, green and blue boxes of latex gloves.
The noises from the patient next door are getting louder. She sounds like she’s being smothered with a pillow, then repeatedly stabbed, then smothered again. A low buzzing noise from a computer sounds every five seconds, like the noise on
Family Fortunes
when you guess the wrong answer to ‘Things You Might Find in a Rucksack’. The woman keeps making different noises, as if in the hope that the correct groan or scream will cause the buzzer to stop. A male doctor’s voice says ‘You’re doing really well’, in a soothing tone. Her response is a low but urgent, ‘Somebody, somebody help me please.’
‘Marjorie,’ says the doctor. ‘I’ve asked the bone specialist to come and see you. In the meantime, I’d like you to look at my finger. Up … Down … Up … Down …’ She moves her finger gracefully through the air as if through water.
‘I’ve hurt my wrist, not my brain, you silly girl,’ says Marjorie, her voice sluggish from the sedatives but still with an edge of anger unquelled by the drugs.
‘Up … Down … Up … Down,’ says the doctor, and Marjorie eventually rolls her eyes upwards, then downwards, then closes them in protest.
‘Are you left or right handed, Marjorie?’ asks the doctor.
‘Right,’ she says in a low voice flat and heavy with misery.
The doctor looks at me and shakes her head.
‘Just go away,’ murmurs Marjorie. ‘I don’t want you here.’ I don’t know if she’s talking to me or the doctor – both, I suspect. ‘Go away!’ she says now, summoning as much force as she can.
‘We’ll give you a moment to rest, shall we?’ says the doctor, pulling the screen across, taking my arm and leading me over to the x-ray monitor on the side.
‘What’s going to happen, are you going to keep her in?’ I say. There’s no way she can go home like this on her own. ‘I can stay with her tonight? And for a couple of nights …’
The doctor shakes her head. ‘We’ll move her to a ward for at least a couple of days. I suspect she’ll need more surgery. And she won’t be able to manage a walking frame with her wrist in plaster like that on her own …’
‘Her son might be able to look after her,’ I say, doubtfully. She wouldn’t want that any more than he would, I’m sure.
‘No. We’ll look for an interim bed. The main issue is her longer term care. With her osteoporosis and history of falls she’s probably too high risk to live alone any more. Her notes say she was offered a place in a facility the last time she was admitted but refused on the basis that she’d agree to work with a physiotherapist to improve her mobility. It seems that hasn’t been happening with any sort of regularity …’
A middle-aged, balding man in a dark grey sports jacket has walked into the room and is hovering to my left, his gaze switching nervously between the doctor and me. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, breaking into our conversation, ‘but I’m looking for my mother, Marjorie Horstead? She was brought in this afternoon with a broken wrist.’
‘Your mother’s just having a little rest,’ says the doctor, turning to him.
‘Is she OK, what happened?’ he says, his face clouded by panic.
‘I should go …’ I say, suddenly feeling like I’m in everyone’s way and that I have no right be here.
The doctor and Marjorie’s son have already moved to the x-ray monitor and are examining the photo of Marjorie’s bones. They look so spindly and thin. Strange, how we forget that we’re all just a collection of the same joined up bones. I move slowly away, then poke my head around the screen to see how Marjorie’s doing. Her eyes are closed and she’s snoring gently, a whistling noise coming from her nose as her chest moves heavily up and down.
I turn and head quickly out of the ward. As soon as I’m back out on the street I call Terry to update him, and ask him to check in on Fitzgerald. It is a beautiful evening, cooler now but with some heat lingering. I decide to walk home in the fresh air – air that doesn’t smell of bleach and blood. And then I suddenly remember that Daniel is waiting for me in my flat and that I had forgotten entirely about what happened a few hours ago.
I can’t see him. I can’t lean on him. He belongs to someone else.
I send him a text saying I won’t be home for a while and to let himself out. He immediately calls but I let it go to voicemail, then switch off my phone.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
I don’t know what happened today but I know that it feels like the start of something.
I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep at all. I feel rotten about Daniel, and worse about Marjorie.
I must doze in the end because I wake with a jolt at 6.23 a.m.
The only people who are up at this time on a Sunday morning are people with young kids. I ring Polly.
‘Polly, can you meet me at Maidenhead station in a couple of hours?’
She’s sitting in the car waiting for me when I arrive, armed with a box of tissues.
‘I don’t need tissues, Poll, I just need advice.’
‘He’s the one who’s married, not you,’ she says. ‘You’re not doing anything wrong.’
‘How can you say that after what Spencer did?’
‘Because ultimately Spencer wasn’t right for me. And Brooke isn’t right for Daniel. And I’ve always thought you and Daniel would be much more compatible long term.’
‘But I know it’s wrong. I wouldn’t want it done to me. It’s bad karma … look what happened with Marjorie, it’s a sign.’
‘Oh Suze, that’s not how the universe works. Marjorie fell over because her flat is a mess and she’s old and she’s stubborn and she won’t accept help.’
Those things are true. I turn my head and gaze out of the window at a group of ramblers who are just setting off from the station car park, rucksacks on backs, chatting animatedly as they charge up the road.