by Adam Croft
Slowly, I try to open my eyes. The light burns at first, searing the backs of my eyeballs like a roaring hot flame. I hear bleeping, and the faint sound of a television on the other side of the room. I recognise the programme as Bargain Hunt before I realise where I am and what’s going on.
I move my right hand out to the side and feel the metal frame of the bed rising up, keeping me in. I roll my head to the left, feeling and hearing my neck cricking and cracking as it moves. I hear someone stand up and rush out of the room, leaving a breeze of cold air that sweeps across my chest and face.
Moments later, I hear the door open again.
‘How long ago?’ a male voice says.
‘Literally just now. I came straight out,’ says a female voice — one I recognise.
The man speaks again. ‘It’s okay, Megan. You lie back and relax. I’m just going to check a couple of things and we’ll be right with you.’
I hear him pressing buttons next to me.
‘Is everything okay?’ the woman asks.
‘Seems to be fine. Can you hear me, Megan?’
I try to say yes, but the thing in my mouth stops me from saying anything. I nod my head, but I don’t know if they see it. My skull feels so heavy, as if it’s been filled with concrete.
‘You’re in hospital, Megan. Nothing to worry about. We’re looking after you just fine. My name’s Mr Grilby. I’m the senior consultant here. Do you have any pain anywhere? You can point, if that helps.’
Slowly, I point to my head, and to my jaw.
‘The headache’s understandable. Is the pain in your jaw because of the breathing apparatus?’
So that’s what it is. I nod my head slowly.
‘I see. I’m just going to have a listen to your breathing, if that’s okay. My stethoscope might be a little cold.’ He goes quiet for a couple of seconds before I feel the stethoscope on my chest. ‘The fluid seems to be clearing very nicely, actually. Shall we have a go at sitting you up slowly and seeing how you get on with the finest natural air the city has to offer?’
I groan something that’s meant to sound like ‘Yes please’, and my bed begins to rise, accompanied by an electronic whirring.
‘Let me know if anything hurts, Megan. You might feel a little stiff.’ Understatement of the century, that. ‘Okay. Now I’m just going to take this out of your mouth. You might cough a little, but don’t worry. I’ll take your hand. If you struggle to catch your breath, just squeeze and I’ll pop this straight back in, alright?’
I nod, and he takes the piece of plastic out of my mouth.
He’s right — I do start to cough, and it feels as though my lungs are on fire. It’s almost as if it’s clearing them out, and I battle through, desperate not to squeeze his hand. A few seconds later, I catch my breath, look at him and nod.
‘Good. Good. Don’t worry if you feel a little woozy. That was quite some sleep. Even my fourteen-year-old would be pushed to compete with you on that front. Just so you know and don’t get alarmed, you’ve got a couple of cannulas in your hand, here. They’ve been feeding and watering you while you’ve been snoozing. Much better than trying to cook dinner, eh?’
I can’t say I agree with him, but I appreciate his attempts at light-hearted humour.
‘Right. I’ll get a nurse in to keep an eye on you and to do a couple of post-wakeywakey checks. I’ll leave you with her for a few moments. Shout if you need anything,’ he says, but not to me.
The door closes behind him and it’s just the two of us left in the room.
I roll my head to the side and look at Lauren. I can’t quite decipher the look on her face. It seems to show every emotion rolled into one. Lauren’s not usually the sort of person to show any emotion at all, so it surprises me a little.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, my voice like sandpaper on a chalkboard.
‘Looking after you,’ she says. ‘Chris was in earlier. Now it’s my turn. Mum’s popping in this evening.’
‘How long?’ I say, trying to keep the words to a minimum.
‘In here? Two days so far. They’ll want to keep you in for further observation. They’ll probably want to have a chat with you, too.’
The meaning of what she says is clear to me. The doctors will want me to speak to a counsellor or psychologist of some sort.
Lauren’s silent for a good thirty seconds or so before she speaks again. There’s a sharp pain in my abdomen, which I presume is from the stomach pumping.
‘I was at Mum’s for a bit when she was looking after Evie. I didn’t know she was going to be there, I promise. Mum tried calling you to see when you wanted to pick her up, but you didn’t answer. She called Chris but his mobile was off, so we went over to the house with Mum’s key and let ourselves in. I went through to the kitchen first.’
The blood.
‘Don’t worry. Mum didn’t see anything. The police knocked at the door a few seconds after we got in, to say a dog walker had found you in the stream and recognised you. They said you were unconscious but alive. I took the note. Mum hasn’t seen it. No-one’s seen it.’
I ask her with my eyes whether she read it. She avoids my gaze, and I know I have my answer.
‘I don’t know how cryptic you were trying to be, but I read between the lines,’ she says, not making eye contact with me. ‘It’s now a small pile of ashes in my fireplace.’
I’m unsure how to respond to this. What does she mean when she says she read between the lines? A large part of me doesn’t want to know.
‘I haven’t told anyone about the note,’ she says, her voice lowered. ‘As far as I’m concerned, no-one needs to know. And I thought you should know that things are completely finished with Chris, too. That won’t be happening again. I know it doesn’t change what happened in the past, but I thought it was important that you knew.’
I really don’t know what to make of what she’s saying. Is this some sort of power play? A case of ‘I know something about you that no-one else does’? I wouldn’t put it past her. I say nothing in return.
‘Listen, Megan, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry for what happened.’ I hear her voice cracking, and in that moment I know she’s being truthful. ‘I never meant for any of it. We’ve all just been so… distant. Life got in the way, and we let it. I can’t change what happened, and I know you might never be able to forgive me, but I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry.’
Before I can say anything, the pain in my stomach returns again, this time building in a crescendo of agony. I can’t catch my breath. I start to see black spots and stars around the edges of my vision. I roll onto my side to try and stem the pain, but I can’t.
It won’t go.
Won’t go.
50
Chris. One year later
I pause as I walk past the microwave and catch sight of the time. 16:42. Exactly one year. To the minute.
The past year has been a rollercoaster of emotion. Watching Evie grow up more quickly than I could ever have imagined, and doing it all without her mum. Sometimes I sit and watch her sleeping, wondering how on earth such a tiny brain can process everything that’s happened. She seems beautifully oblivious to most of it. I hope she is, anyway.
After pausing for a moment, I realise I need to occupy my mind. I sit at the kitchen table and sort through the post that arrived this morning. There’s a bill for the new soffits, gutters and fascias I had replaced when we moved into the new house. The old ones were wooden and rotten, and desperately needed replacing. The new house is smaller than the old one, so there was some money left over for a few renovations. There’s also a letter I’ve been waiting for for a long time. That it should arrive today is either a blessing or an insult.
I open it, scanning my eyes down past the NHS logo and letterhead, before reading the content of the letter itself.
In short, it’s a grovelling apology. They’ve agreed to settle out of court for their failings a year ago. The sum is substantial, but I won’t see a penny of it
. I’ll be putting it straight into a trust fund for Evie. A nest egg for when she’s older. A legacy from her mum.
There’s still no explanation as to how it happened. There’s no paragraph telling us how they managed to not even suspect gastrointestinal perforation in a patient who’d taken a massive drug overdose, nor how they failed to notice the symptoms in time to avoid the development of peritonitis — the lone, empty word that was eventually written in brackets on her death certificate, right next to ‘multiple organ failure’.
It’s a word devoid of all meaning. Her whole life ended by a fuck-up, a word that can only be expanded upon by reaching for the dictionary. Even then, Inflammation of the peritoneum, typically caused by bacterial infection either via the blood or after rupture of an abdominal organ is hardly a fitting description for the agonising death she had to endure.
The most painful thing for me is that I don’t know if that was what she wanted. Only two days earlier she had tried to end her own life. Was she thankful when she woke up in the hospital bed that day, or was she disappointed that her attempts had failed? Was she happy when she finally realised she was dying? She would have been in an incredible amount of pain, that much we know. That’s what makes it harder. If she’d gone relatively peacefully under her own terms, that would have been much easier to take.
I don’t know what I’ll tell Evie. One day she’s going to ask. She’ll want to know what happened. And I really don’t know what I’m going to say.
It would be fair to say I feel guilty. Of course I do. Megan would never have attempted to end her own life if I hadn’t had an affair. I knew my actions could potentially devastate the family, but I never saw this coming in a million years. How am I going to explain that to Evie?
These are all things I need to get straight in my head sooner or later. She’s already an inquisitive little child, and that’s not going to stop any time soon. It’s only a matter of time before she starts asking the difficult questions, and there’s no-one else I can palm her off onto.
Megan’s family have been a tower of strength. Even Lauren seems to have been changed by what happened. Part of me wonders whether she feels guilty too. She certainly seems to be under some sort of emotional burden. Maybe one day she’ll be able to free herself of it.
I don’t know if it was Megan’s death that did it, but she and James decided they were going to try and put everything behind them and move forward together. I hope for their sake that they can. James barely speaks to me, but that’s understandable. In time, we’ll be able to move on. There is more that unites us than divides us, especially after the events of a year ago. Evie’s growing up fast, and I’m pleased at how we are able to come together for her. The poor little mite’s lost more than she knows, and there’s not one of us that’s going to do anything other than give her all the love in the world.
The village held a memorial service for Riley and Kai recently, between the first anniversaries of their deaths. The police took the opportunity to make a statement about the crimes still being unsolved — a completely pointless exercise which did nothing but stir up the local sense of anger which had since subsided. I’m sure they were trying to be helpful and remind the public that they still needed their help, but people round here have long since given up on that idea.
A week after Megan passed away, news broke that an old fella had died in the next village. Turns out he’d been a convicted sex offender with a string of crimes committed against children. There was nothing to link him to Riley and Kai — the police said as much themselves — but the guy had originally asked to be housed in our village. It was only the fact that it would have put him within a couple of hundred yards of a primary school which meant the authorities rejected the request and housed him in the next village instead. Perhaps it was just a coincidence. But as far as people round here are concerned, he is the most likely candidate. Now that he’s dead and buried, we’ll never know.
I flick the switch on the kettle just as Evie comes toddling into the kitchen, holding her toy rabbit by its long, floppy ear.
‘Daddy, not working,’ she says, with a pout I definitely recognise but haven’t seen in at least a year.
‘What’s not working? The TV?’
She nods.
‘Alright, sweetie. I’ll come through and fix it in a minute. I’m just making a cup of tea.’
‘No, now,’ she says, as she screws up her face and forces a tear to run down her cheek.
I scoop her up in my arms and rub her back as she cries on my shoulder.
‘Are you tired?’
‘No,’ she says, rubbing her eyes and yawning.
‘Alright. Shall we sit and watch TV together? Have a cuddle?’
She nods, so I finish making my tea before we head through to the living room.
I start to tune out the excitable sounds and flashing colours on the screen as I feel the warmth of Evie sitting across my lap, her head resting on my chest as she sucks her thumb.
In moments like this, I’m happy. I can forget everything, if only for a minute or two. When the fog has temporarily lifted, I can see further. The horizon seems brighter. And that’s when I know.
We’ll be alright.
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