The Brilliant Light of Amber Sunrise (23 page)

The taxi dropped me off outside the hospital and I made my way to the unit where Jackie was at the nurses' station.

I told her I was there to see Amber, trying to crane my neck to see if she was inside.

Jackie nodded and gave me a hug, and I took the opportunity to peek over her shoulder to see if I could spot Amber. Her bed was empty. Kelly was asleep and a stranger was in the bed that had once been mine.

“She's not on the unit anymore,” Jackie said. “Does your mam know you're here?”

“Yes,” I said. “She dropped me off.”

“All right then,” Jackie said, “follow me.”

Amber's room was square and empty. The walls were white, and chipped toward the ceiling. There were no posters or photographs, no keepsakes or mementos. There wasn't even a bedside table, just one machine that beeped and hissed, attached to her thin arm by a tube.

Colette didn't say anything when I walked in. I think she knew I was coming. She took Olivia by the hand, kissed Amber on the forehead, and walked slowly past me into the corridor.

“There's a button by the bed, if you need anything,” Jackie said, closing the door behind her.

Amber's skin hung from her like a sheet thrown over a coat rack, and her chest heaved up and down with each tiny breath she took.

“Where's my dad?” she asked weakly as I sat down beside the bed, terrified to touch her.

I said I didn't know, because that was the truth. Amber seemed to recognize my voice. She rolled her head and looked straight into my eyes, before turning her gaze back toward the ceiling and scrunching up her face tightly as she drew in one long, high-pitched breath.

I said her name out loud, and her face relaxed a little. I said it again.

“Amber, I need you to get up,” I said, stretching my hand toward her arm. I stroked my fingers across her cool skin, trying to warm her up without pressing too hard, like an apple straight from the fridge. I ran my fingers up her arms and down toward her hand that was so pale it was virtually camouflaged against the bedspread.

“Amber, I know you're tired,” I whispered, “and that you're unwell. But if you could just get up, just for a bit, I think you'd see things differently.”

She turned to look at me and tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.

“I want my hair back,” she said, with utter conviction.
“I don't want to go anywhere without my hair.”

“It grows back when you're better. Look,” I said, bending down and passing her hand across the crown of my head, letting her limp palm rest against my proud new patch of hair.

I sat up again and Amber turned her face back toward the ceiling, tears cutting down the sides of her face like condensation on a bus window.

I took a tissue from my back pocket and wiped away each one.

“The thing is, Amber, I need you to get better because I'm getting better, and the problem is I can't really remember what I ever did before I knew you. Before we were us. I know you must feel scared about being ill, but I'm starting to feel scared about getting better . . . about having to do anything without you.”

Amber closed her eyes gently and breathed in deeply while I spoke.

“And even if you don't always love me, even if we don't always know each other, I think the world will always be a more interesting place with you in it . . . so with that in mind I think what you're doing is really irresponsible,” I said, trying to claw back my breath as Amber's image became blurred by my own tears, like a firework squinted at through watering eyes.

“Please, Amber,” I whispered in her ear, “please just get up. Prove everyone wrong one more time.”

I felt her breath on my neck, soft and uncertain like a baby's.

Amber's chest began to move in steadier, shorter bursts, like rippling tide.

Amber was designed for life. She was designed for color and movement. She was not a girl born for the click of the camera's lens. No device could capture her, the way she was, the way she was meant to be. She was not born to be still or stationary. Without her color she was broken, a faulty image that could never be fixed. Without her voice she was nothing. Amber was gone. At that moment it was all clear to me. Everything to come was just a formality.

When I realized there would be no answer from her, I stood up and kissed her gently on the forehead.

I whispered something in her ear and, from my back pocket, took out the lock of her hair, and slid it beneath the palm of her right hand.

Mum found me in the entrance hall on the way out of the hospital. I was half blinded by tears and light-headed from sobbing so hard. I saw her coming toward me down the corridor and tried to avoid her. I speeded up, edging my way toward the farthest wall as best I could, and nearly made it.

“Francis sweetheart,” she said, taking hold of my arm.

“Don't,” I said, pulling away, but she held on tight and dragged me toward her. I felt her wrap her arms around me, tightly, like a safety belt.

“I know . . .” she said as both of us felt our knees give way beneath us until we were sitting on the floor. “I know.”

We ended up huddled together in the hospital corridor, where we sat until I couldn't cry anymore.

When we did get home Mum followed me upstairs and sat with me in silence on my bed.

“I have something to give you, Francis,” she said eventually, “but if you think it'll upset you too much I can keep it for as long as you need me to, okay?” I nodded. “It's from Colette,” she said, taking a thin white envelope from her handbag. “Amber asked her to give you it. I'll leave it on your bed. But if you don't want to open it, you just remember what I said.”

Once she had gone I stood up and opened the letter. I picked along the seal with the sharpest edge of my nail scissors, so that none of the paper ripped, and carefully removed the folded white sheet from inside.

When I opened the letter hundreds of gold stars, tiny like glitter, tumbled down from the folded page onto my lap.

The handwriting was Amber's, each letter pressed hard into the page like she was shouting.

Dear Francis,

. . . Shut up and deal.

Always,

Amber

That night I slept in Mum's bed. I didn't ask. I just crawled in sometime after nine and let her wrap her arms around me from behind, drawing me toward her until our breathing became synchronized and I fell asleep, slowly but steadily, like a film fading to black.

At thirteen minutes past one in the morning our phone rang. Mum picked up, even though she didn't have to.

When someone phones that late it can only mean bad things.

And it did.

AFTER

It's six years later and
we are traipsing toward a wedding.

Can you guess whose?

I'll give you a clue. It's not actually a wedding; it's an interfaith blessing of a lifetime's commitment. The priest is actually a member of a folk band, and two of the bridesmaids (the ones who aren't Mum) are wearing tie-dyed ­kaftans.

Also, it's not in a church. The whole ceremony is being held in a forest.

It seems Christian wasn't as soppy as Amber always said he was, because after it happened he and Colette became acquainted in all sorts of ways that wouldn't have been legal were he any sort of doctor. They were an item by the following Christmas, and got engaged during my gap year.

Mum's voice went shrill when she found out.

Much to her pleasure, she was made responsible for the bachelorette party. After nixing a night on the town, Colette
had agreed to a civilized meal at our house with some of her closest friends.

When Colette's clique arrived Mum sat them all down, then locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of rosé.

“Oh, love, it looks like a therapy group in there,” she hissed down the line at me. “These aren't my people, ­Francis . . . they won't even watch
Pretty Woman
because of sexism or something.”

Things started to pick up later on and Mum must eventually have found the merits of both Colette's friends and the homemade wine they had all brought. I know this because at half past one in the morning she rang me to sing “Come on Eileen” with her New Best Friends for Life (her words).

On the day of the wedding Mum was manic before I'd even had time for breakfast. Chris and Fiona had got blind drunk the night before with Christian, and Mum couldn't get either of them out of bed.

Colette and Olivia had stayed at our house before the ceremony, at Mum's insistence. Olivia was now a year older than Amber was when I met her, a year older than Amber ever would be, and had turned into a young woman of such alarming beauty that Chris would no longer let his friends come to our house when she was there, as they spent all their time ogling her and trying to persuade her to marry them.

Fortunately she had also inherited Amber's sharpness, but in a gentler way, like a loving pastiche of the sister she sometimes worried she would one day forget.

Colette screamed blue murder when Mum tried to sneak out her makeup bag, and eventually the subject was laid to rest.

Mum got her own way about the leave-in conditioner, though, and even Colette was amazed when her hair—once wiry and unkempt, like a mop after it has been pushed under a kitchen cupboard—started to resemble something vaguely human.

DS Bradshaw, whom I now call Dennis after conceding that he may not in fact be the Antichrist, had been waiting downstairs for over forty-five minutes while Mum yelled through the door of the spare room where Chris and Fiona sprawled, while she simultaneously removed the curlers from her hair.

“How's university going?” he asked me. I had got the last train home the night before, and arrived when everyone else was in bed.

“Fine,” I said.

Only it was more than fine. It was the best time of my life. School had been a necessary evil, something to tolerate, something to survive. But everything that came after had been worth the effort, worth the misery and the panic and the Sunday Night Nausea of Doom. Everything was
how I'd always imagined it would be, but better. I spent my nights talking to interesting strangers about interesting things. I discovered friends who made me a better person. I read books that changed my life and watched films that left me so breathless that I would still be stuck to the seat long after the credits had finished rolling. I saw parts of the country, parts of the world, that at one point I couldn't even spell. I fell in and out of love on an almost daily basis, and said yes to any opportunity that came my way.

I lived.

I am now in my third year. I will graduate in the summer. I am twenty-one. It is six years since Amber.

I knocked on Mum's door as she was putting the final touches to Colette's attire. She'd made her own wedding dress out of lengths of white lace. Mum had agreed to this on the understanding that she would get to pick her own bridesmaid's outfit come the big day.

“If it's a choice between wearing a shapeless hemp dress and death, then I choose death,” she had said when Colette voiced her initial suggestion.

Mum was painting Colette's nails when she said I could come in. With a steady hand she dragged across the same shade of purple she had once given Amber, and Colette looked tearful in a happy sort of way.

“How's it going?” I asked.

Mum didn't turn around. When it came to matters
of grooming she had the steely concentration of a bomb-­disposal expert. Makeovers are her
Hurt Locker
.

Colette looked at me and smiled. It struck me in that moment that Amber's mouth had been just like her mother's, and suddenly I was fifteen again, and in love again, and devastated.

It took me a minute to catch my breath.

“Almost done,” Colette said.

“You look beautiful.”

“Thank you, Francis,” she said warmly.

“She's worried Christian will be too hungover to stand up at the altar,” Mum said.

She keeps pretending it's a normal wedding, even though it isn't. There isn't an altar, for a start. The ceremony is not a religious one. It probably isn't even legal. One of Christian's friends is doing a reading, and then they are going to walk over hot coals to demonstrate their love for each other. Mum took to her bed when she first discovered it was an outdoor wedding. Grandma said she couldn't go on account of her arthritis, which was a lie, but she was going to take a taxi to the reception. In preparation for this Mum had packed three slices of ham and a Scotch egg into her bag, on the off chance Grandma made a scene when she discovered it was a vegan spread.

“Open that fizz for me, love,” Mum said, painting the last of Colette's nails.

“Only a small one for me,” Colette said with a nervous giggle.

I popped the cork and handed them both a glass.

“I've got something for you but I don't know if I should give you it now,” I said, teasing the lump through the pocket of my posh jacket.

“Oh,” Colette said, “don't worry about me. We're tougher than we look, us Spratts. Amber didn't get it from nowhere,” she said with a laugh. Even though her nails were drying I saw Mum carefully give her hand a tight squeeze.

From my pocket I pulled out a small laminated card. On it five petals of a pansy—darkly purple, like a fresh bruise—had been pressed and roughly arranged into the shape of the flower itself.

“It was part of Amber's Christmas present to me,” I said, handing Colette the card. “Your garden was her favorite place in the world. She told me once. I just thought it might be something nice for you to have today.”

“You're a good lad,” Mum said, giving me a hug from the footstool where she was sitting.

“Oh, Francis, what a lovely gesture!”

“I suppose it can be your something old and new, and it's near enough to blue. If you wanted to give it back it can be borrowed as well, so we're covering every base.”

“It's the perfect present,” Colette said, teasing her thumb across the fragile petals.

Mum jokingly cleared her throat and pointed to the two airline tickets on her bed. For a wedding gift she had paid for the honeymoon.

Colette laughed and so did Mum.

“I don't know what I'd have done these last few years without you. You're very dear to me, Julie Wootton.”

“Here,” Mum said, topping up her glass, “get this down you and sort yourself out. No one wants a maudlin bride. Miss Havisham was jilted for a reason.”

I bent down and kissed Colette on the cheek.

“You do look lovely,” I said again, and left them to their drinks.

In the months after Amber's death I seemed to exist in a space there isn't yet a word for. I carried on each day, waking up, getting dressed. But I was suspended somewhere between life and death. Everything that mattered was gone, and I had been left a husk.

Colette started coming around more often. Mum would cook dinner for her and Olivia, and make sure they had plenty of food in the cupboard when she dropped them back home. Chris would sit with me for hours, sometimes talking, sometimes not.

Nothing made much difference.

Nothing made much sense.

I became half mad.

One day in the conservatory when I was looking for a dropped fifty-pence piece I found a pair of socks that Amber had kicked off while we'd spent the evening curled on the sofa.

I carried them to my room and left them on the radiator for three months, because if I had her socks, then she would have to come back and collect them, and they would be warm when she did.

I stayed up all night the next New Year's Eve. I wanted to claw at the year before, to catch it in my hands and drag myself back into it. I knew that once the New Year came Amber's death would no longer be something that was happening. It would be something that had happened. Soon she would enter the past tense, as we skipped over firsts—Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries—until eventually she was someone I had to try hard to remember, like I was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope.

I cried as the sun rose on January the first. Amber's death felt like the last thing we could ever do together. Of course her bit of it was over. But grieving for her, loving her, missing her . . . they were all things that I still had to do. And the farther away we moved from the event, the less time I would need to devote to each one.

Life goes on.

Before long there were nights when I'd wake with a start, frantic that I had forgotten something, and eventually
realize that what I hadn't done was think about Amber all day long. Days when I'd live my life without the tinnitus hum of grief acting as the screen saver to my every move.

Before long these days became weeks.

Before long these weeks became months.

Before long Amber became nothing but a memory, and a happy one at that.

“Oh, I am
hungover,
” Chris said, pulling at the collar of his suit, as everyone made their way downstairs.

“All right, people, we've got ten minutes before the cars get here,” Mum said, stomping down the stairs like an army corporal. “Well, aren't you a sight?” she said to Dennis, picking a ball of fluff from the shoulder of his suit and kissing him on the cheek.

“Fiona, so help me God, if you get garlic sauce on that dress I will knock you daft,” Mum said as Fiona picked somberly at a slice of the night before's pizza.

Everyone congregated in the front room.

“FIVE MINUTES UNTIL CARS!” Mum screamed from the top of the stairs while she hunted out her camera.

When she came down her face was clouded.

“Where in God's name is Colette?”

It appeared that in the frantic climax to the wedding preparations the whereabouts of the bride had slipped our minds completely.

“I think she went for some air,” Olivia said. “Do you want me to go and get her?”

“No, love, your dress cost more than Chris's car. You stay put. Francis, deal with this . . . now.”

The front door had been left open. I went into the garden but couldn't see anyone there.

I walked down the street in my suit, the way I had once walked to school, and felt a phantom terror at the thought of missing the bus.

Across the road, on the benches overlooking the beach, I saw Colette sitting peacefully, alone.

“Mum says if you're a runaway bride she's having your honeymoon,” I said, sitting down next to her.

“Oh,” Colette laughed. “Just having a moment to think.”

I asked if she wanted to be left alone and she said no.

“Do you miss her all the time?” I asked.

Colette nodded her head and smiled, staring out at the yawning sea that lay flat, like a sheet of gold, beneath the chilly glow of the sun.