The Brilliant Light of Amber Sunrise (3 page)

The teachers sprang to their feet and began ­running toward them. The only time our school ever really pulled together as one was in such situations, when we formed the Human Barrier, like demonstrators at an antiwar protest. As soon as the teachers stood up and began running toward the eye of the storm, everyone in the dining room pushed their chairs back a foot, so that each adjacent seat at the long rows of tables was touching, creating an ­impenetrable ­obstruction that, try as they might, nobody could pass. Eventually they gave up, red in the face and ranting like madmen, and took the long route to the scene of the crime, all the way around
the perimeter of the dining tables, by which point the girls were back on the floor, pulling each other's hair.

Mr. Thompson was the first to get to them. His fierce grasp on their arms immediately caused them to stop the fight and slump back, panting, glaring daggers at one another.

“You two are so bloody expelled,” he whispered to them as he yanked them through the dining room and out the door nearest to his office.

As the girls were dragged from view the sounds of the fight were still ringing in my ears. I felt myself become distant from them, as though I was observing my own body from up above, like Peter Pan trying to claw back his own shadow.

“Whoah, you're hemorrhaging!” I heard Jacob say, but couldn't see him anymore. My vision became narrower, like a black lens tightening around an image, until there was nothing but darkness.

I went to touch my face, and beneath my nose felt warm and damp.

“Oi, dinner lady, brother down!” Jacob yelled from what seemed like a great distance.

I felt myself grow lighter and lighter, until all I remember feeling was the welcome slap of the floor against the side of my face.

“OH MY GOD, HE'S KILLED HIM!” someone shouted
as more and more footsteps echoed around my head.

After that it all went dark.

I woke up three hours later in hospital.

They took blood samples, which I barely noticed, and also some bone-marrow tests, which weren't quite so easygoing.

Along the hospital corridor they had a chipped mural of tigers and elephants. In the waiting room there were posters of fund-raisers, and photographs of bald kids in head scarves smiling as soap opera actors handed over giant checks with plenty of zeroes.

Mum was silent the whole time. She just stared at the pile of magazines on the table beside us.

I walked over to the vending machine and pressed for a hot chocolate, watching carefully as the jet spat brown dregs all the way to the rim of the cup, and then wincing as the lavalike liquid scalded my fingers through the too-thin plastic. I had no intention of drinking it; I just wanted something to do. The literature was the same as it had been in every other waiting room. There were two pamphlets on osteoporosis, a doodled-on leaflet about antibiotics, untouched puzzle books, a well-thumbed copy of a fishing magazine, and three back issues of
Woman's Own
. I spent a moment pitying the unfortunate who met the National Health Service's intended demographic, but my ­sympathies would only stretch so far and eventually all I had to ­entertain me was Mum, whose
banter was thin on the ground that day, and the hot chocolate, whose retrieval had been a short-lived thrill. So I sat and watched as the steam moved from thick plumes to sinewy wisps, and eventually cooled to nothing.

At one point I could see Mum's body shaking a bit like she had hiccups, even though I knew she didn't, so I put my hand in hers. She flinched but didn't look at me. Just gripped my palm tightly as a fat tear formed and then rolled down her cheek, taking a dark line of mascara with it like debris in a landslide.

“Can we have takeout tonight?” I asked.

She told me I could have whatever I liked, but her voice was hoarse and she had to keep clearing her throat. I knew how she felt. Trying not to cry: an art in itself. Once, in primary school, Mum let me have some friends around to watch videos. She made popcorn and everything, so some of the hardest boys in school came, more for the promised refreshments than the joy of my company. But the whole way through
E.T.
, I had to concentrate on not bursting into tears. When they found him face down in the river, I had to pretend to go to the toilet and sneak into Chris's room so I could wail. Mum says I'm sensitive. Chris says I'm soft. Overall I think I prefer Mum's diagnosis.

When we were leaving the hospital Mum went and sat down on a seat beside the main entrance. She still hadn't
said anything and neither had I. We were never that chatty in the first place.

She lit a cigarette and put her lighter back in her handbag, where she found a half-eaten bar of chocolate that she handed to me.

I sat chomping and Mum sat smoking, both of us thinking our own thoughts, until the crackling sound of static snapped us back into the moment.

“This is a reminder . . .” said a man's voice, as if God had finally chosen to reveal Himself, and had done so in a slight Lancastrian twang, “. . . that there is no smoking anywhere on hospital premises. Once again, this is a reminder: There is no smoking allowed anywhere on hospital premises.”

“He'll be lucky,” said Mum, quietly, and carried on puffing away.

I suspect Mum might have been a Punk in her youth.

“We could be fined up to fifty pounds,” I said, pointing to a bright red sign, which stated as much.

“Then we'll flee the country and start new lives in Benidorm,” she said, taking one last drag.

She looked around and found the little camera that they must have been watching us on, then held up the tail end of her cigarette and raised her eyebrows before dropping it into a pot of shrubs.

“Odious little drone,” she said while she hunted through her bag for her keys.

“Will I lose my hair?” I asked in the car. Mum started the engine and closed her eyes.

“Not now, sweetheart, eh? Let's just keep it together until we get home.”

As she reversed out of the parking space she slid Chris's glum CD into the player and pressed play.

The only person I'd ever known before who had cancer was Miss Patton, our English teacher. During eighth grade she started getting thinner and thinner, and kept nodding off during lessons. Then one day she didn't turn up, and instead we had Mr. Bryers, who just used to wheel in the big TV and put on a
Romeo and Juliet
video every lesson, the one where if you watch really carefully you can see Olivia Hussey's boob pop out.

None of the teachers ever told us what was wrong. Sometimes they could be crueler than the children. I thought Miss Patton knew this as she never used to eat her lunch in the staff room. She'd just take her sensible sandwiches to her sensible car, and eat them behind the driving seat with the radio playing a sensible lunchtime play inside.

Word got around, though, because Michelle ­Harman's aunty was a nurse and told Michelle's mum that one of our teachers had been in hospital and hadn't had a single visitor.

For some reason I couldn't stop thinking about her,
so Jacob and I organized a collection. We got over sixteen pounds for a card and a bunch of flowers, only Mr. Hall said we weren't allowed the time off to deliver them, so Mum had to drive us to the hospital one evening. By the time we got there Miss Patton had been discharged.

She came back for a while, but seemed even more distant than usual. It was as though she'd seen something she couldn't forget, no matter how hard she tried. Then Callum Roberts made a joke about semicolons and she quietly collected her things and never came back. We had two hours to ourselves that day. Or we would have if Callum hadn't attempted to assassinate David White with a fire extinguisher. Mr. Bennett came in to find David curled up on the floor, drowning in a mass of white foam like someone had popped the Pillsbury Doughboy.

The entire class was put on a month's lunchtime detention, so everyone stopped speaking to Callum for nearly a week.

All I could think about was who Miss Patton would tell about her awful day.

Back home Mum did stick to her word and got us takeout, so the day wasn't entirely without perks.

We ate it in silence as neither of us really knew how to behave. It felt like the strange week between Christmas and New Year where something has happened and something
is going to happen, but until then all you can do is sit, and wait, and think about it all.

I suppose you do try to imagine things like this happening, but when they do they never pan out the way you expect. When you imagine them there's always music playing in the background, and a camera pans around and catches each emotion on your face as you move from hysterics to terror to verbose “moments” with your loved ones. But life isn't really like that. Because that would make life a feature-length BBC drama that wins awards. Real life is ­quieter, more understated. No one is backlit and nothing has a soundtrack and no one has someone cleverer than them writing their lines. And so they just say nothing and get on with it. More's the pity, if you ask me. I quite like the idea of my own soundtrack.