If the doctor hadn’t told me it was Geoff lying there, I wouldn’t have known him. His face was swollen and shiny with bruising. His eyelids were black, suffused with blood. An oxygen tube ran into his nose, while another tube pulled at the corner of his mouth. His head was heavily bandaged, with just a tuft of matted hair sticking up at the top. It was a horrible contrast to how he looked from the neck down: owing to Geoff’s obsession with the body beautiful, he was as healthy and lean as an athlete. His arms lay on top of the covers, palms down, unmoving. He was bare-chested, the blankets covering him up to the armpits.
I must have made a small sound, because Dr Holford looked around at me.
‘I warned you. Not looking too good, is he?’
I cleared my throat. ‘How is he? Is he … improving?’
‘No change.’ The doctor looked at me, and I saw his face soften. There was kindness in there along with the fierce intelligence. ‘Listen, why don’t you sit down and spend some time with him. Talk to him if you like.’
‘Will that help?’
‘It might help you.’ He stalked out of the room, mumbling something to the nurses as he went.
The ICU was hot, stifling. I slid my jacket off and put
it
over my arm. Somehow, I felt reluctant to sit down on the chair that was placed near the head of the bed. I was an impostor. That chair was there for those who fought the fight along with the doctors and nurses with prayers and whispered promises, bargaining to keep their loved ones from slipping away. This was the first time I had ever volunteered to spend time with Geoff. I couldn’t lie; it helped that he was comatose.
I stepped around carefully to the chair and put my bag and jacket down on the floor, watching to see if there was any reaction to the sound. Not a flicker.
I heard one of the nurses scolding the policeman outside. She had a strong West Indian accent. ‘No, darling. No mobiles in here. You know the rules.’
I sat down in the chair gingerly. From there I could see the policeman’s vast bulk draped over the edge of the nurses’ station, where he was leaning in to use the phone, one hand jammed to his ear. The leather of his jacket was puckered across the curve of his back, straining at the seams like a canvas sail in a high wind.
As I watched, the nurse padded into the bay, blocking my view. ‘You can hold his hand, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
Holding Geoff’s hand was approximately the last thing I wanted to do, but I couldn’t confess that to the nurse. She waited, smiling encouragement. I reached out tentatively and touched the back of the hand near me, covering it with my own. It was hot and dry, but tacky to the touch. Dirty. I turned his hand palm upwards, very gently, to see black dirt ingrained in the creases of his palm and his
fingertips
, highlighting the whorls and ridges of his fingerprints. There was dirt and there was dark dried blood. His nails were clotted with it. I shuddered and put his hand down again, feeling queasy.
This had happened outside my house. Perhaps this had happened because of me.
I sat back in the chair and folded my arms, squeezing the hand that had touched Geoff’s until my fingernails dug into my flesh, trying to erase the memory of his hot, slightly sticky skin against mine. I could still feel it, like an amputee with a phantom limb, a ghost irritant that was impossible to ignore. I stared at the wall opposite me and wished there was a window. I wondered who had chosen the precise shade of beige that most resembled baby poo to decorate the unit. I wondered why I was there. I wondered if Geoff would recover, if he would ever forgive me, if I would ever forgive myself.
I don’t know how long I had been sitting there when I heard Andy Blake’s voice – quite a while, but it was hard to keep track of time in the sensory deprivation of the ICU. He was talking to the policeman outside the door, speaking in a low voice so all I could catch was the tone, which was serious. I recognised his voice before I saw him, and when I leaned back to try to catch sight of him, I found the two policemen looking in at me. There was outright hostility on the battered face of the older man. Blake was frowning. Without acknowledging me, he nudged the other policeman and led the way out of the ICU. I felt nettled, childishly irritated, and wanted to run
after
them, shouting, ‘I wasn’t listening anyway! I don’t care what you have to say about me. I’m not
interested
.’
Beside me, Geoff slept on. Permission had come from his parents to operate, and Dr Holford had been in with the surgeon to assess him. I had removed myself, standing out in the corridor alone. All I could think was that Geoff wouldn’t have been lying there if I had handled things differently. If I was better at saying no. If I had let him come in and talk. If he had found someone else to pursue. If I had taught in a different school. If I had never even become a teacher in the first place. The guilt was a physical weight on me. Conversation was impossible. I had leaned against the wall while the nurses pattered about their business without fuss, without troubling me. In the next bay, there was a fall from high up on some unsafe scaffolding; he was hanging between life and death. A massive stroke that had happened at the dinner table was now safely under control on the other side of the unit. Visitors thronged both rooms, ashen with terror or pinkly grateful. There was no one there for Geoff apart from me. I didn’t know his friends. His parents were too frail to come to see him, the nurses had said. I didn’t know if he had brothers or sisters. I didn’t know anything about him at all, except that he had liked me, and wanted to make me like him, and we had both handled it badly. I was beginning to accept that I had overreacted. I played back all of the things he had said to me – all of the things he had done – and saw them in a new light. He had meant well, I thought. He had meant to do no harm.
A soft tap on the door behind me made me jump.
‘Sorry to interrupt – can I have a word?’ Blake, looking serious.
I stood up slowly, stretching out limbs stiff from sitting. His choice of words annoyed me straightaway. What did he think he was interrupting? And what did he want with me anyway? I could feel bad temper starting to build inside me like a thundercloud as I followed him through the unit to a door labelled ‘Relatives’ Room’. Someone had added the apostrophe in Tippex. The glass panel let into the door was carefully covered with a dull green curtain to allow for privacy. The room was small and overcrowded with furniture, but at least had a window, although the view was of the incinerator chimney, currently wheezing dark grey smoke into the clear blue day.
Blake waited by the door, shutting it firmly behind me. I stepped carefully through the chairs, around a coffee table, heading for the window so I could look out.
‘Bit of a surprise to see you here.’
I didn’t turn around. ‘Why are you surprised?’
‘I didn’t think you liked him,’ he said easily.
‘I don’t.’
‘Do you mind turning around, please?’
It might have been couched as a question, but it was definitely an order. I turned, leaning against the windowsill. Blake was sitting down on one side of the coffee table. I suddenly realised that the furniture had been rearranged to make an impromptu interview space. That was why the chairs were jostling for space and the layout in the room was so confused.
‘Come and sit down,’ Blake said, indicating the chair opposite him.
Mulishly, I resisted. ‘I’d rather stand. I’ve been sitting for a while.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ I said stiffly. ‘I wanted to come and see how Geoff was doing. He – he doesn’t have anyone else.’
Blake leaned back in the low chair and put his hands behind his head. ‘Oh, I see. He’s someone else you can take responsibility for now, isn’t he? No wonder you’re here doing the Florence Nightingale bit.’
‘What do you mean?’ I was glad my back was to the light; the blood had rushed to my face.
‘This is your pattern, isn’t it? Something bad happens to someone you know, and you have to make it better.’
I frowned at Blake. ‘Like what?’
‘Like the little business with your brother?’ He reached under the chair and pulled out the newspaper his colleague had been reading. It was a tabloid with thick black headlines. From where I was standing, I could read the banner that ran across a double-page spread: T
RAGIC
T
EACHER
: I F
OUND
J
ENNY
B
UT
I C
OULDN’T
F
IND
M
Y
B
ROTHER
. And a picture underneath, a close-up of me outside the school, looking away from the camera, my brow furrowed.
‘When were you going to tell us about that?’ Blake asked, holding it out to me.
I came away from the window and went across the room to pick up the paper without consciously ordering my limbs to move. Fucking Carol Shapley. She must have worked
very
fast indeed to go from our interview to the printed page so quickly. So much for a sympathetic story.
Sad Sarah Finch choked as she talked to me about finding her favourite student’s body. Touched by tragedy herself, she knows all about loss. ‘I know how Jenny’s family must feel,’ she wept. ‘But at least they have a body to bury.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ I muttered, mostly to myself, skimming through the paragraphs at top speed. It was all there: Charlie’s disappearance, Mum’s nervous breakdown, Dad’s death, Jenny’s death – but the story was almost unrecognisable, slickly told, broken into easily digestible chunks for a greedy readership. I read on to a third page where the story trailed off into speculation about what might have happened to Jenny, and what Carol alleged were my pious hopes for the future for Jenny’s parents. (‘I hope they stay together and support each other. They’ll get through it but they’ll never forget.’) After reading the last lines, I closed my eyes for a second. I didn’t need to read it again – I could probably have recited it line by line – but I flicked back to the start and looked at it without seeing the words. I was hugely reluctant to put the paper down and meet the steady gaze I knew was trained on me.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t say anything about my brother, but I didn’t think it was relevant,’ I said at last, sitting down and wrapping my hands around my knees for comfort.
His eyebrows shot up. ‘Really? I would have liked to
know
about it before the media. How did they find out about it, anyway?’
In a dull voice, I told him about Carol and her perseverance. I explained that I hadn’t felt I had any choice but to cooperate with her.
‘She lied to me,’ I said, flicking the open newspaper with my nail. ‘She told me they wouldn’t use my new surname, or anything that would enable anyone to recognise me. That’s why there isn’t a posed photograph. I don’t know when they took that one. Probably that day when they were all lined up outside the school – the day after Jenny was found.’
‘The day after
you
found her,’ Blake said pointedly.
I looked up. ‘So what?’
He didn’t answer me directly, just looked past me, an exasperated expression on his face.
‘Listen,’ I said, getting heated again, ‘don’t be fooled into thinking that there’s anything more than a coincidence at work here. I didn’t tell anyone about Charlie. I don’t speak about him, ever. It’s not the kind of thing that’s easy to work into a conversation, is it? And I can’t expect other people to care about the fact that my brother disappeared and I’ve never been able to get over it. It happened. I had to live with it growing up, I have to live with it now, but the difference is that most people don’t remember or care. So at least I can feel what I feel in private.’ And I was so used to keeping it suppressed that I didn’t even know how to start being open about it. Hiding things came naturally to me now.
He shrugged. ‘So why stick around? It must be horrible, living in the same house.’
‘Mum,’ I said simply, and explained her need to stay in the place where we had always lived, just in case Charlie miraculously reappeared.
He shook his head. ‘This is what I’m talking about, Sarah. If she won’t move, fine. Leave her to it. Why do you have to live there with her? She’s a grown-up. Just because she’s ruined her own life, that doesn’t mean that you have to ruin yours.’
‘I can’t abandon her.’ I ran the edge of my nail along the seam of my jeans repeatedly, mindlessly. ‘Everyone else did. I can’t do that to her.’
‘Just like you can’t leave Geoff lying in a coma on his own,’ Blake said heavily. ‘I can’t say I was surprised to find you here.’ He leaned forward. ‘You do realise that if things had been different, if you’d told me about how he was behaving, he might have been in line for a charge of harassment?’
I didn’t look up.
‘This isn’t someone who you should feel bad about,’ Blake said, sounding half irritated, half compassionate. ‘You might even say he got what was coming to him.’
‘You don’t really think that.’
Blake sighed. ‘He was a cocky little shit, Sarah, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. You get taken advantage of, left, right and centre. You’ve got to start standing up for yourself.’
As I tried to sniff back the tears that were stinging the back of my nose, Blake reached over and grabbed a box of tissues from a side table, handing it to me.
‘Is that your professional opinion?’ I didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
‘I apologise,’ he said stiffly. ‘I seem to find it hard to be professional when I’m talking to you.’
There was a brief, awkward silence as we both thought about the last time he had been completely unprofessional in my presence. I didn’t dare look at him.
‘I promised myself I wouldn’t do this,’ Blake said, almost to himself, ‘but the fact is, I just don’t get you. I don’t know where you got that limp, or that bruise on your face – I saw it this morning, so there’s no point in trying to hide it now. I don’t understand how this –’ and he waved a hand at the room ‘– fits in with you turning up at my flat the other night.’
I blew my nose before I answered, choosing to deal with the second part first. ‘I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have done it. It was just – I needed to do something impulsive. Feel something, for a change. That night, I felt as if I was sinking in quicksand. You were something to hold on to.’ I risked a look at him. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’