‘Behind you,’ said Jamie.
They looked up. Paul had come into the cafe, his fringe stuck to his brow where he had been sweating beneath his crash helmet. He came over, bent down to kiss Heather on the lips, then said, ‘This is so excellent. I love it. It’s brilliant.’
‘We thought you were having a good time,’ said Jamie.
‘Too right. But now I want a go on the other track.’
Lucy said, ‘Well, here’s Chris. He’ll take you over to that track if you want.’ She looked up at Chris as he came over, swinging his crash helmet in his right hand. ‘Paul wants a go on the advanced track.’
‘Does he? The big boys’ track. Do you think you’re ready then, mate?’
Paul nodded. ‘Ready, willing and able.’
Chris looked at his watch. ‘Come on then. No time like the present.’
‘Aren’t you going to stop for a drink?’ asked Heather.
Paul kissed her quickly. ‘I won’t be long. I’ll just give Chris a quick thrashing, then I’ll be back.’
‘A quick thrashing? You’re hoping, mate. You might just catch a glimpse of me in the distance.’
They walked out together.
‘Boys,’ said Kirsty, sipping her tea.
‘He won’t beat Chris though,’ said Lucy, seriously. ‘Nobody ever does.’
Heather looked at her. ‘We’ll see.’
They stayed in the café for another half-hour, finishing their drinks and eating their chips. They stayed there until they heard the bang.
The bang was audible across the whole park, reverberating from the advanced track, above the heads of the spectators, over to the beginner’s track and the cashier’s booth. In the cafeteria, it made everyone turn their heads towards the door. A communal look of concern spread from face to face, and Jamie felt all the blood drain from his. He knew it in an instant: something terrible had happened to Paul.
He jumped to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go and see,’ he said in a tremulous voice.
Kirsty stood up and grabbed his arm. Around them, other people were standing up, drifting over to the windows and door to see if they could catch a glimpse of what was going on. ‘We’ll come with you.’
They headed towards the door. Jamie broke into a run as soon as they got outside, Kirsty, Heather and Lucy following close behind. He pushed through the maddening crowd, headed towards the advanced track. Further ahead, he could see half-a-dozen blue-overalled attendants running in the same direction. Two of them were carrying a stretcher.
The crowd thickened nearer the track, and as they got closer Jamie could smell smoke. He ran to the front of the crowd, stopping where the go-karts were lined up, ready to take people on the ride of their lives.
Somebody was lying on the track near the starting line, surrounded by medics and attendants. Two medics laid the stretcher on the ground and the process began of shifting the person onto the stretcher. As they lifted the person Kirsty, Heather and Lucy arrived by Jamie’s side and the person’s face became visible.
Jamie saw Chris standing there, looking down at Paul on the stretcher.
Heather cried out.
She ran towards the wall of tyres and tried to throw herself over it, panicking so much she didn’t realise that a few feet to the right was a gap which would have allowed her onto the track without this athletic display. She shouted, ‘Paul!’ and as she hurtled over the top of the tyres, she was caught by two of the attendants, who stopped her from throwing herself on her prone boyfriend.
Jamie, Kirsty and Lucy moved around the wall of tyres onto the track. Chris was standing over the other side. Jamie saw him look at Lucy, then look away.
Jamie caught hold of an attendant’s arm. ‘What happened? Is he dead? Tell me!’’
It was the same man who had advised them earlier. He wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘No, he’s not dead.’
Jamie exhaled with relief. He could see Heather, just a few feet away, kneeling beside Paul, tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘What happened?’
The man looked over at Chris – whose face was downcast, staring at the track – then back at Jamie.
‘Your friend and Chris had been bombing round the track, racing. Paul won by quite a big gap. He crossed the finishing line and came into the pits here. He took off his helmet, unfastened his seatbelt and stood up, ready to get out of his kart. I could see his face from here. He looked dead proud of himself.’
He shook his head. ‘Then it happened. Chris came up to the finishing line with another kart right on his tail. As Chris hit the finishing line he slowed right down, not realising, I guess, that the other guy was so close behind him. The other driver didn’t have a chance to brake – he swerved right into the pits and into the back of Paul’s go-kart. As he hit the kart the fuel tank exploded – Paul was thrown out. There was an explosion – a great ball of flame, I’m sure you must have heard the bang – and it was like he flew out of the flames. Landed right there, where you see him now. God, he hit his head hard.’ The attendant swallowed. He looked green.
‘What happened to the other driver?’ Kirsty asked. ‘Is he alright?’
The attendant pointed towards a man sitting beside the track with a blanket around his shoulders and a smoke-blackened face. ‘He’ll be OK. I think he’s just in shock.’
An ambulance arrived, its siren wailing. It stopped next to Jamie and the others and the paramedics lifted the stretcher and carried Paul inside. Heather climbed in with him. The other driver was helped in by one of the attendants.
Kirsty spoke to the paramedics who told her they were taking Paul to the hospital in Bromley.
‘We’ll follow them in the car,’ said Jamie. ‘Come on, Kirsty. Oh, hang on.’ He’d remembered Chris and Lucy.
Lucy had crossed the track and was standing talking to her husband. Jamie was about to ask them if they were going to come to the hospital, then he felt a surge of anger and thought,
Fuck them
. If it wasn’t for Chris they wouldn’t be here. And Paul wouldn’t be in the back of an ambulance with his head all smashed up. He would talk to them later – but for now, he was only interested in his best friend.
‘Never mind. He followed Kirsty towards the car park, holding tightly onto her hand as they squeezed between rows of stationary cars to get to their own. ‘I
knew
something was going to happen,’ he said. ‘But I thought it was going to be me.’
Kirsty just looked at him, her expression unreadable. ‘Let’s get to the hospital.’
Jamie sat beside Paul’s bed and stared at his friend’s motionless face. Behind him he could hear the
bip bip bip
of the heart monitor. He had seen enough films and television dramas to know that if the line on the screen were to run flat – to flatline – he should shout for a doctor, and then panic would render him frantic and helpless as doctors and nurses would come running, their footfall heavy in the long corridors. They would bring out the defibrillator and Jamie would stand there and watch as they fired electricity into Paul’s chest, making his body buck, rising up and falling back onto the bed, the bed where he had lain since the accident, six weeks ago.
But nothing like that did happen.
Six weeks, and nothing had happened at all. Paul did nothing except lie motionless beneath NHS sheets, his eyes closed, his body continuing to function at the most fundamental of levels (his heart beating on, his chest continuing to rise and fall, his hair and fingernails growing, skin being shed) but his mind locked away in that body, doing nothing. Nothing but dreaming. If he did dream at all.
Paul was never alone. His family and friends took it in turn to sit beside his bed: his parents, his sister, his grandmother, Heather, Kirsty, Jamie. Most of them would sit and talk to him, chatting about life as it went on outside the hospital, pleading with him to wake up, expressing regret for things said or unsaid in the past. Sometimes Paul’s parents played recordings of his favourite football matches. Paul and his dad were both Arsenal fans – it was pretty much the only thing they had ever talked about – and Mr Garner would record matches off Radio 5 and play them back to his son, hoping a dramatic moment might reach into Paul’s sleeping brain and draw him back to the surface.
That’s what it seemed like to Jamie: that his friend had slipped deep beneath the surface of the world, into a deep lake of dreams or darkness, and although he was still there – still with them – he couldn’t communicate with them. He was too deep. He had been swallowed up, and all they could do was wait and see if the subterranean place in which he now dwelt would spit him back out. Or if he might float upwards, blinking with sleep-clogged eyes as he emerged into the light.
It was what he prayed for.
Jamie barely spoke to Paul when it was his turn to sit beside him. He didn’t tell stories or jokes or play music. He merely sat and watched. He didn’t believe that his friend needed chatter and prompts; no-one could pull him back to the surface with songs or football commentary. He believed that Paul needed to rest – he was sleeping off the results of the accident like a bad hangover. Jamie and Paul used to joke that after a night on the beer, Paul would slip into a coma, and that nothing could wake him but time. Of course, Jamie knew that this coma had nothing to do with alcohol or over-indulgence, but something told him that the same principle applied. All they had to do was wait.
‘He’s suffered a serious head injury,’ said the doctor at Bromley Hospital, where the ambulance had taken Paul after the accident. ‘It’s very difficult to say at this point what the long-term outcome will be.’
After a day, Paul fell into a coma. The doctor told them that he might never come out of that coma, and if he did he might be brain damaged. He might not be able to talk. He might have lost the use of his limbs. On the other hand, he could make a full recovery, although it would not be quick. He could spend months or years in therapy.
‘All we can do,’ said the doctor, ‘is wait and hope. And pray, if you’re that way inclined.’
‘So there’s a possibility that he might never wake up?’ said Heather. She was trying to maintain her professional nurse’s stoicism, but was not succeeding. Her voice cracked as she spoke. Jamie’s parents had shuffled off to get coffee from the machine down the corridor.
The doctor spoke softly. ‘There is that chance, yes. He might slip into a vegetative state, in which case the family would have to make a decision. Or the coma could continue for a long time. If at any point his brain stopped functioning completely – if it died, in effect – we could keep him alive with machines, but as you know…well, is that really living?’
Heather, Kirsty and Jamie looked at each other. Heather started to cry, and Kirsty put her arms around her. Jamie stood there, wishing he was somewhere else, wishing life was like TiVo: that he could press rewind to change history, or even fast forward to find out what would happen.
He could still see the look of joy and cocky assuredness on Paul’s face when he first climbed into the go-kart. And then he saw Chris, standing on the other side of the track, not catching anyone’s eye.
After the accident, Chris and Lucy had driven straight home. They hadn’t visited the hospital, or even phoned to see how Paul was. Jamie hadn’t noticed at the time – he had been too preoccupied to worry about the actions of his neighbours – but afterwards, when he began to process what had happened, dwelling on it on sleepless nights, he began to feel outraged that the people who were responsible for Paul being at the track in the first place hadn’t bothered to find out how he was. They hadn’t even sent a card, or expressed any sort of regret. Chris, for God’s sake, had even been involved in the accident! And now he was hiding.
No, that wasn’t right. He was acting as if nothing had happened.
Three days after the accident, Chris came up to Jamie and Kirsty’s and asked them if they wanted their windows cleaned: he knew a window cleaner who could do it cheap.
‘I’ve noticed your back windows are looking a bit grubby.’
Jamie was speechless. He had only come home to take a bath and change his clothes. In ten minutes he would be heading back to Bromley to sit in a room with his comatose best mate.
‘I don’t give a toss about the windows,’ he said after a long pause, and Chris looked surprised.
‘There’s no need to be rude,’ he said, and he turned around and walked off, leaving Jamie, once again, speechless.
Jamie and Kirsty hadn’t spoken to their downstairs neighbours since. They saw them coming and going, but they didn’t even attempt smalltalk. Jamie was waiting for Chris to say something about the accident, or ask after Paul’s health. But it never happened. Most of the time he didn’t think about it. His annoyance and anger were there in the background, but that was all. He felt too weakened by what had happened to Paul to care much about anything else – work, his other friends, his family. Lucy and Chris were the least of his concerns.
Three weeks after the accident, Heather and Kirsty pulled some strings – calling in a few favours from consultants they knew – and got Paul transferred to St Thomas’s, which meant that they could see him every day. Heather usually spent her lunchbreak sitting with him. Now, when Jamie spent his shift beside Paul, he did so knowing that Kirsty was close by, working, dealing with her own patients. It made him feel comforted – and also gave him some perspective. Theirs was not the only unfortunate situation in the world. There were many people in the same boat. When Kirsty told him about the sick children she had to deal with, he remembered that there were a lot of people worse off. It didn’t make what had happened to Paul any less painful or easier to accept, but it made him feel less alone.
Paul’s condition continued. He was stable. There was no sign of a recovery, but nor did his condition worsen. As Paul slept on, Jamie and Kirsty’s life returned to a normal routine – normal but for the shadow of Paul hanging in the background. They started to cope. Jamie realised he was grieving, even though that grief was for somebody who wasn’t actually dead. Grief was another thing that only time could aid. By the time summer ended, he and Kirsty felt like they had re-entered the real world. Now all they wanted was for Paul to join them.