'I can't help it. I miss you.'
The words clutched at my stomach but there was nothing I could do. There was no solution and nothing honest I could say would make any difference. I murmured platitudes as he wept. And I am ashamed to say it but as I did so I realised that I had another feeling towards him: annoyance. Greg was upstairs in my room and I wanted to be up there with him, not sitting at the bottom of the stairs again listening to Lucas cry. I wouldn't let myself hurry him or try to chivvy him off the line, though. That would have been unforgivable. Instead I waited and listened. Above me, Greg went along the landing to the bathroom and there came the buzz of his electric toothbrush. It was his way, I knew, of telling me that he was there and waiting for me, without putting pressure on me. In the end, Lucas cried himself out and hung up and I was free.
There were further calls after that and they started to become more and more frequent. I answered two of them and was rewarded once with an earful of abuse, where, raving drunk, Lucas called me a slut, and then, the following night, with tearful apologies. The night after that Martha picked up for me and told him I was out. Eventually we started taking the phone off the hook after ten o'clock and, if the mobile rang, I checked the caller display before answering. It was a horrible way to treat someone who had once been one of your closest friends but it had come to feel like the only way to deal with it. Somehow it felt kinder than listening to him and letting him say things that I knew, if he was sober, he would bitterly regret.
I don't know if we could have predicted what happened next. Perhaps, if we hadn't been so wrapped up in our own lives. But we weren't looking; our attention - all of ours - was elsewhere. For my part, my relationship with Greg was making it hard for me to concentrate on anything else. So much of my time was spent either with him or thinking about him. I had developed a hitherto unknown domestic urge and spent hours poring over cookbooks and plotting what I was going to make for our suppers together. I brought him small gifts - Cadbury's Creme Eggs, for example, which he loved - and slipped them into his jacket pockets for him to find later in the day. It was a very basic desire, I supposed, to want to feed the man you were falling in love with. I couldn't tell Martha for fear that she would think me hideously unreconstructed but on the other hand I thought she might understand now. Although her relationship with Danny was still covert and she had begged me not even to tell Greg, I occasionally caught her smiling vacantly out of the window or humming along to ballads on the radio. The pair of us must have been fairly stomach-turning to witness.
My happiness also seemed to be radiating, sharing its warmth with other areas of my life. The news editor at
The
Times
had called and asked whether I could do a weekend, as she'd suggested she might. Although it would mean working twelve days without a break, I was thrilled. I worried Greg would be disappointed that we wouldn't be able to spend the days together but instead he told me that he had work to do as well and that we would reward ourselves for our industry with supper out, venue at his discretion.
I got an enormous kick out of walking into the offices of
The Times.
Of course, the
Gazette
was a real newspaper and the stories we reported there were news, too, but this felt like something else. Although the newsroom looked like any other slightly disorganised open-plan office I felt, finally, as if I were nearing the hub, getting close to my dream. Everything there seemed to matter. The famous staff writers whose by-lines I'd been seeing for all the years that this had been my ambition had desks there and trays with their names on. On Saturday I was shown the ropes but then I researched and wrote up a story of my own, which appeared in Monday's edition. I was outside the news agent at the end of Greg's road as it opened and I kept my security pass in my handbag all week, getting it out surreptitiously now and again in quiet moments at the
Gazette,
to remind me.
It happened on Thursday that week. I was spending the night at Greg's and we were knotted up together on the sofa in his bay window when I heard my phone ring in my bag. 'Ignore it,' he said, sliding my bra strap off my shoulder. Eventually it stopped. 'Good.' He smiled. I touched his eyelashes with my finger and he blinked and kissed me. The phone started ringing again. 'For God's sake,' he said. 'Can't we have a bit of peace and quiet?'
Reluctantly I disentangled myself and fished in my bag. 'It's the house.'
'Don't answer it. Please, Jo.'
I put it back in my bag but I couldn't bring myself to switch it off. Three seconds later it started ringing again. 'Give it to me.' He grabbed my bag and found it. 'Jo,' he said, looking at the screen. 'It's not the house now. It's Danny's mobile.'
'What?' I could count on one hand the times Danny had ever rung me.
'You'd better answer it,' he said resignedly. He stood up and started straightening himself out, doing up the buttons I'd undone.
Angrily I answered the call. 'Danny?'
I was completely unprepared for what followed. He was hysterical, almost unable to talk. His breathing was shallow and fast; he seemed to be gasping for breath. I could make no sense at all of the stream of sound that came down the line. 'Calm down. Calm down. I can't hear you,' I said. Greg, assuming that it was Lucas, wandered into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of wine. 'Calm down, Danny. Tell me what's the matter.'
Finally he managed a complete sentence. 'Lucas has taken an overdose.'
'Jesus. Are you sure? What's happening? Where is he?'
Danny spun off into another reel of panicky rubbish.
'Is he conscious? OK, Danny - you need to get off the phone now and call an ambulance. Do you hear me? You need to call an ambulance. Of course you can. For fuck's sake, pull yourself together.'
'I can't. I can't. You need to come here. Help me. Please help me.'
'I'm coming but you need to get him to a hospital before then. I'll call an ambulance from here and I'll come as soon as I can. Until it reaches you I want you to sit with him and make sure he doesn't go to sleep. Do you understand me? We'll have to hope he's sick but if he is, I want you to make sure that he can breathe. Do not let him choke. Don't let him lie down.'
I called emergency services, then rang Danny back. The ambulance would take some time to reach them as far out as they were. I only hoped that Lucas hung in there and that Danny was competent enough to help him if it turned critical. I wouldn't have put any money on it.
'I'll drive,' said Greg, picking up his keys. 'You can call Danny from the car.'
For the first part of the journey I felt schizophrenic. The rational part of me was talking to Danny, calming him and telling him to try getting Lucas to drink some water. The rest of my brain was running wild. I just couldn't believe that Lucas had done this. I knew he was distressed by the way things were, of course I did, but this was something else. Actually to try to kill himself. I prayed and prayed that he would be all right; I clenched my fists so hard that I cut my palms with my nails. Lucas was still conscious, Danny told me, but he had had a bottle and a half of Scotch as well as the contents of numerous packets of pills. He'd found packs and packs of painkillers in Lucas's room, the blister sheets popped, the pills gone. I tried to get him to count how many but it was beyond him. Then, about twenty minutes after I'd called it, the ambulance arrived. I heard Danny running down the stairs and opening the front door, the rush of his frightened voice, the cool control of the paramedics.
'Where are they taking him, Danny? Ask them.'
'The John Radcliffe.'
Danny was in the waiting room in Accident and Emergency when we got there. He was frantic, flitting like a panicky bird and unable to settle on the rows of vinyl chairs. He had picked up a leaflet from one of the boxes on the shelf and was tearing it into fine ribbons that fluttered behind him as he paced up and down. His trainers squeaked on the linoleum and the strip lighting made his skin an eerie green. When he saw us, he ran up the corridor to meet us, earning a disapproving look from one of the nurses. 'Thank God,' he said. 'Thank God you're here.'
'Where is he?' I asked.
'They've taken him off to get that stuff out of him. Jesus, what if I hadn't found him? He might have died.'
I didn't like to tell him that he still might, if they couldn't get rid of the aspirin and paracetamol quickly. The realisation of what he had done hit me suddenly and I sat down abruptly on one of the chairs. Greg sat down next to me and took my hand.
'I couldn't stand it if anything happened to him,' said Danny, taking a new leaflet and crushing it in his hand. 'I couldn't stand it.'
'It won't come to that, Danny,' said Greg. 'Look, come and sit down here and I'll go and get us some tea.' He went to find the machine, leaving Danny and me on our own together. There was silence for a moment or two and I watched his hands folding the paper back and forth on itself, making a concertina.
'He's the only person who has ever been there for me in my entire fucking life,' he said. 'The only person who has ever given a shit about me. The only person who has ever helped me out or wanted me around for anything other than the parties I could take them to or the people I knew or the drugs I could get them. Do you know what that's like? Do you have any concept of what that means? Do you?'
'No,' I said.
'Lucas is my family. He's my brother. You're not going to take him away from me, do you understand?'
I could see in his eyes that he blamed me but at that point he needed me enough not to be able to unleash the torrent of hatred he was damming up inside. But without saying anything he let me know that if Lucas died then he would make sure my life wasn't worth living.
He turned away and we fell silent again until Greg reappeared carrying three plastic cups of tea in a triangle between his fingers. It was too hot and I sipped it more for something to do than because I wanted it. I was shaky and my stomach felt hollow with fear and guilt. Was this my fault? I had left Lucas for someone else, ignored his calls when he was in obvious emotional pain. I had switched my phone off when he had needed me. It seemed unbelievable now that I could have done that. What sort of person was I? I looked round at the others in the waiting room, talking in low voices or distractedly picking up the outdated magazines and putting them down. Danny was up and pacing again.
'Come on, Danny, let's go out for a cigarette. I think we both need one,' said Greg, standing.
'I can't. What if there's news?'
'Jo will come and get us.'
Danny shot me a bitter look and then followed him. When they returned, I went out and stood on the tarmac outside the department. It was a clear night and from the hospital's vantage point on the hill I could see the lights of North Oxford sprinkled out below and their corresponding numbers in the sky above me, far enough from the city centre to be pin-point bright in the indigo sky. I smoked a cigarette, then another. Lucas, you idiot, I thought. You poor idiot. I remembered Patrick then. Of course. He had taken pills, too. I had been so caught up in our own immediate situation that I had almost forgotten about the other sources of Lucas's grief.
I went back in and we had another cup of scalding tea. At last a junior doctor came to tell us that they'd pumped Lucas's stomach and that, all being well, he would be OK, although he would have to stay in for observation. Danny put his head in his hands and stared at his shoes for at least a minute.
'I won't come in,' said Greg. 'I'll wait out here in case you need me.'
Lucas was in a bed in a side room, leaning back against a bank of pillows as if he had lost a fight. His face and the hands that lay palm down on the waffle blanket were bloodless but his eyes were rimmed with red. Walking in, I felt the awful embarrassment that I always do when faced with those in hospital, as if their status as ill people makes them strange, simultaneously lesser than those still walking around and at the same time more important, the data of their bodies monitored and analysed with a respect normally reserved for cultic auguries.
I let Danny go to him first but it was my eyes he sought out. 'You came,' he said. His voice was as cracked as if he hadn't spoken in years.
'Lucas.' Danny sat down on the chair by the side of the bed and rested his forehead on the blanket. 'Promise me you will never do that again. Do you hear me?'
'Yes.' He looked at me over Danny's head.
I approached the bed cautiously and stood at the edge of it. He was attached to a drip and, where the line had gone into his forearm, it had made a small bruise in vivid purple.
'Why did you do it?' said Danny. 'What was so wrong that you couldn't talk to me about it?'
'I don't know, I can't explain.' His hand stroked the cover. 'I felt very sad.' Tears came into his eyes and fell down his cheeks in two straight lines. He made no move to brush them away.
'You can always talk to me. About anything. If there's anything wrong, if I'm doing anything wrong, all you have to do is tell me. Just never, ever do that again.'
Lucas said nothing but nodded slowly and dislodged another pair of tears.
I still hadn't said anything. I didn't trust myself to.
A nurse came in and poured a beaker of water from a scratched plastic jug. She put it on the table that crossed the bed over Lucas's knees. 'Are you all right?' she asked. 'You should try and drink as much as possible. I know it'll hurt.' She went out again and left us to it.
'Danny, you look terrible,' Lucas croaked.
'You won't be winning any beauty contests either, believe me,' he said, smiling.
'Why don't you go and have a cigarette?'
He looked as if he were about to protest but he respected Lucas's request and got up. He skirted me very carefully, as if the thought of touching me even for a second was repulsive to him. As soon as he was out of the room, Lucas reached out and took hold of my arm. We looked at each other.
'Why did you do it?' I said. 'Did you mean to kill yourself? You nearly managed it.'
'I don't want to live my life like this,' he said. 'I've got no one left. I need you to be my friend again.'
'All you had to do was say. You didn't have to ...' I looked around us.
'I did say. You didn't hear me.'
The realisation of how badly I had let him down flooded me again and brought tears into my eyes, too. Lucas pulled on my hand and made me sit on the edge of the bed. I couldn't look at his poor face. Instead, my eyes kept finding their way back to the bruise on his arm.
'I know you're going out with Greg now and that's not going to change,' he said. 'I have to accept it. Jo, you remember Elizabeth said that when Patrick and my mother split up he didn't let it spoil everything? Patrick was always friends with my parents. He could have lost them but he didn't.'
'You're not going to lose me.'
'I nearly did. I couldn't let it happen.'
'You wouldn't have lost me in the long term. It was a question of letting some time pass. Rachel won't ever talk to me again but our friendship is stronger than that. We both know it.' I felt as though I were in a film, delivering lines written for me by someone else. I wanted to mean them - I did mean them - but the pull of the old was now meeting a strong counter-force. My magnetic north had moved.
He squeezed my hand. 'The summer's coming and it's beautiful at the house. You should see it. I'm going to restart my novel and I'll need your editorial opinion.'