“Right,” he says briskly. “Lead on, Nurse. Next victim please.”
Down in the hospital car park all three of us wait for a taxi. We are not going to share one because despite the very odd bond we developed in that small hospital room, out here, back in the real world and waiting in the cold, it feels way too weird.
Hospital car parks are strange places. On the one hand there are new babies being placed in cars by proud, protective fathers, watched adoringly by the tired mothers. On the other hand there are confused, disorientated people pacing around making urgent calls on mobile phones relaying hideous news that will make someone, somewhere, drop what they are doing and scramble to find their car keys and shoes.
Tom, who seems anxious to leave—probably wants to get there and back again as soon as he can—asks if he can take the first taxi, and as it pulls up plonks an absent kiss somewhere in the region of my left temple and says, “See you later then,” before getting into it and disappearing up the road.
That leaves me and Bailey. Bailey watches Tom’s taxi turn left and vanish out of view. “He’s such a funny bloke.” He shakes his head. “So straight up and down. What you see is what you get.”
Another taxi arrives. “Your turn,” he says and smiles happily, so clearly on top of a wave of overtiredness and relief it looks like he’s king of the castle. “You go, honestly. I’ll see you back here in a bit.”
“What are you going to do now then?” I say, hand on the car door.
He yawns. “Collapse, shower, sleep—that sort of thing.”
“Come back with me to mine,” I say suddenly, recklessly.
He looks confused at first and then smiles. “Sweet of you, Al, but I’ll be OK. Now she’s back on the road to recovery I’ll be all right on my own, promise. See you in a bit.” He blows me a kiss.
I force a smile and get into the taxi. It’s got a gross, wrinkled, brown faux suede cover over the backseat and smells strongly of stale fags and the spinning Christmas tree air freshener dangling from the mirror. I blink back tears. That wasn’t what I meant, Bailey.
“Where to, then?” the taxi driver asks, although I don’t see his lips move, just his reflected eyes looking at me inquiringly. I give him the address and he silently turns the wheel, pulling us away from the hospital. I don’t look back at Bailey, although out of the corner of my eye I see him wave.
I have just today left with him and Tom, that’s all. Tomorrow she will be awake, able to write, maybe able to speak, certainly able to tell everyone that I deliberately didn’t help her. Tom and Bailey will believe I wanted her to die. Today is all I have left.
All last night, as we sat there waiting and it became apparent that the worst was over, when they lowered her oxygen levels and everyone cheered when her eyes flickered, all I was thinking was: I’ve got no choice—I’ll have to just leave. Just pack up and go. Tomorrow will arrive and she will wake up. I am sick with relief that she isn’t going to die, but now I’m frightened for myself.
I feel stripped away, terrified that I can have done something so dreadful to someone whose hand I held—while assuring her there was nothing she could do that would stop me being her friend. I have to go.
What is there to stay for anyway? I have a rented flat, a studio I hire on a job-by-job basis, no boyfriend, no ties. Fran now has her own little family, Mum and Dad are desperate to clear Phil out of the nest so the rest of their lives can begin, and it won’t be long before Phil, bored with nothing to do, will decide that he wants to start building a more exciting life for himself anyway. I love them all very much, and I know they love me, but I’m not sure they really know me any more than I seem to know myself. Everyone has such hectic lives. We are the typical geographically fragmented and frantically busy modern-day family. Would it really make that much difference to them if I took some time out for me? I have been forced to face some very uncomfortable truths—maybe that’s no bad thing. I could just take my camera and go. Make choices, stop letting things happen to me. I never wanted to hurt anyone, least of all people I love. I could start again? Build a new life … somewhere far away from Gretchen.
“Can we stop at a bank on the way?” I say to the taxi driver. “I need to get some cash out.”
I’ll leave a month’s rent for Paolo. He can just throw away what stuff of mine I don’t take. That’s the least he can do. Maybe I’ll do what I should have done in the first place and go to Vic’s for a week and see what happens from there. She’s been so amazing: listening, advising, comforting. But how can I tell her about this? For the first time ever, there is something she must never know. I can’t tell anyone. I am now utterly alone.
What will I tell Tom and Bailey? That I’m going on holiday? That I’ve been offered a too-good-to-turn-down shoot? I think they’d buy it if I said I had to go to Pluto right now, especially now that she’s out of danger. All they are thinking about is her.
And as for her, if she wakes up and discovers that I’m not there, maybe she won’t say anything at first—maybe she’ll bide her time, waiting for me to return so her account of what really happened will carry maximum currency. But I just won’t come back. The moment will pass and we will all just get on with our lives, as best we can.
The taxi goes over a speed bump and the suspension creaks. Then we turn right on to a busier main road and pull up to a set of traffic lights. To my left is a bus stop. A woman is standing there, hands in pockets, a carrier bag slung around her wrist. She’s staring into space with a look of dead resignation that shows me she has waited by this bus stop every day for as long as she can remember. Behind her is a CREDIT PROBLEMS? WE CASH
CHECKS
! shop front, next to a closed kebab shop called Big Joe’s, which in turn is beside a launderette that announces DUVETS WASHED
HERE
! Where will I be when they are cashing their cheques, carving their greasy meat and cleaning their clothes next week and next month, even next year?
We drive past a closed flower shop, the window is already full of hearts in preparation for Valentine’s Day.
DON’T FORGET
FEBRUARY THE 14
TH!
reads a banner that is being held up by a cut-out dove on either side.
Forget? How could I possibly do that?
Bailey’s not so much the one that got away, because I can see now that he was never mine in the first place, much as I love him. But he is certainly the one that I could waste years of my life hoping and waiting for. He’s the one that makes me behave recklessly—if he’d understood what I meant this morning, perhaps we’d be in this taxi now together heading back to my bed, and where would that have left me when he left? Because he would have done.
I’m not sure it’s ever possible to get over someone like him. Perhaps you don’t, perhaps you just have to not be around them, until your mind kindly allows you to forget how addictive they are and it hurts a little less and then a little less still. It’s not been good for me, seeing him again at such close quarters when he is still so unobtainable, at least to me anyway. I know I lied when Tom asked me who I would choose—him or Bailey. It would be Bailey every time. I hope one day I’ll experience a kiss again like the one we had in Leicester Square, but with someone who loves me too.
And as for Tom … There are men and then there is Tom. I hold him alone in my mind as an example of how good a human being ought to be. God loves a trier and, like me, I’m sure God loves Tom. He stands up to be counted, he squares his shoulders and always turns his face to the sun, but he is gentle, kind and true.
If my world were ending, I would want Tom there … and I do, so very much. I don’t know in what way—I can see he will never be my happy ever after—but I think I would settle for anything; even him being with her, as long as I could somehow keep him in my life.
But of course she will not allow that and now it’s almost time to say good-bye to them both.
I won’t miss Gretchen. Just what I thought she was.
B
ailey has been on the phone to his mother for over an hour and a half, trying to persuade her to come to the hospital. She is by turns hysterical with relief and calm with anger. She can’t come tonight, she insists, she’s exhausted from appearing as the lead in
Whoops There Go My Bloomers!
and anyway, Gretchen won’t be awake until tomorrow.
Which is entirely the point, thinks Bailey wearily. Come and see her—do your crying and shouting while she can’t hear you. But she stubbornly refuses and Bailey gives up the fight. When he gets off the phone, he checks his watch: 2
P.M
. He should go back to the hospital. He feels better for having slept, but to get rid of the last bit of stress and tension lurking in his shoulders, he decides to have a quick joint and, on finding his gear in the tin on his chest of drawers, he decides also to call Annalisa, from whose bed he reluctantly dragged himself yesterday morning. Shit, was it only yesterday he woke up in Spain? Mental—absolutely mental. Thank you God, he thinks. I fucking owe you one.
Tom wakes up at 3:14 in the afternoon, face down on his and Gretchen’s bed, completely disoriented. It takes him at least a minute of blinking and wondering before he can get his brain to work out that he closed his eyes for a minute over four hours ago. He swears and jumps to his feet. He was just so tired when he got back and discovered the flat stinking to high heaven of booze, shattered glass everywhere. By the time he’d carefully cleaned it all up, gathered the pieces of the whisky bottle and wrapped them in newspaper, then scrubbed the rug and collected the scattered pills, picked up the bottles in the bathroom and wiped up the remnants of vomit, he had to lie down, he had no choice in the matter.
Ten minutes later he has showered, changed and is ready to go. He gathers up his keys and then spies the rubbish bag, neatly tied up by the front door. He might as well take the rest of it out if he’s taking that one down. He shoves his keys and wallet in his back pocket and marches into the kitchen.
He lifts the bag from the bin, only the bloody thing catches as he yanks it out, which slices it open as neatly as would a surgeon’s scalpel. The rubbish bulges out through the slit like an escaping intestine and Tom, by now wishing he hadn’t bothered, nearly slides the bag back in and shuts the lid—but then grits his teeth, thinking, if a job’s worth doing … and reaches for another bin bag, pulling open the drawer where they keep them. He holds the torn one up and tries to lower it into the gaping second bag, without it touching his trousers or spilling anything. Unfortunately, it spins in midair and spits out an empty loo roll wedged either end with tissue, a soup can and—Tom nearly gags—some chicken bones and a polystyrene tray that once contained two fresh trout. It smells far from fresh now. He grimaces and picks the bones up first. Then he turns to the loo roll and sees that the tissue has come out of one end as it landed and there is something white tucked in the tube.
At first he assumes it is a used tampon applicator—but it is too long and plastic for that. Then he realizes that he is looking at a pregnancy test.
Stunned, he picks it up and inspects it carefully.
“Oh my God!” he says out loud. And then he runs for the door.
I get out of my second taxi of the day, back outside the hospital at just gone quarter past three. I’ve packed everything I plan to take with me tonight and it’s all waiting back at the flat. I have called Vic, I’ve spoken to my dad, there is nothing left to do … except say my good-byes to Bailey and Tom. I’m sure they will be here by now and will already be sitting watch over Gretchen’s silent but rapidly recovering body.
I walk past the signs to the chapel, past the café, past X-ray, up around the flight of stairs and through the heavy double doors of the intensive care unit for the last time. There is no one at the nurses’ station. The corridor looks just as it did this morning. I can see the door is open to Gretchen’s room. I walk up, turn the corner into the room and jerk immediately to a stop, frozen with horror.
Gretchen is sitting up in bed. Conscious and looking right at me, like all of my nightmare imaginings—only this time it’s real.
“Surprise,” she says, in a painful rasp. She is not smiling.
I
just stare at her. I am unable to speak. I can’t feel my feet and my bag just slips from my shoulder and crashes to the ground. My fingers clumsily half move to stop it, but I am horrified and transfixed by her expressionless face looking back at me, her eyes roaming around my features as if she’s reminding herself of me.
“How … why are you even here?” she says, forcing each word, and with that one sentence I know that she remembers everything.
Before I can say anything, a new nurse pops her head around the door and asks, “All OK?” She smiles brightly, so she can’t know anything. Gretchen nods heavily. “Don’t overdo it,” the nurse says. “You’re really tired. Try and keep it brief and make your friend do the talking.” She winks at me and disappears, pulling the door to gently.
“Good idea,” Gretchen whispers with effort, when she’s gone.But still I don’t say anything. I can’t. How can this be? They said tomorrow at the earliest …
“You left me,” Gretchen says eventually. “You didn’t call them.” She shifts position uncomfortably and then waits.
My heart starts to thump.
“I asked you to call me an ambulance and you didn’t.”
“I did call them,” I insist. “I was in the ambulance with you. I’ve been here ever since!”
She frowns, confused. “I saw you deliberately,” she says the word carefully, “not calling them.” Her voice trails off completely at the end and she tries to sit up a little taller and reach for the glass of water next to her. Instinctively I take a step forward to help her and she gives me a look of “You must be joking,” so I back off.
“How long did you wait?” She swallows painfully and flops back on to the pillow.