Nightingale Point

by Luan Goldie

  ‘Morning.’ It’s Malachi. The voice Tristan hears the most.

  This time Tristan will ask him, find out what happened for real. He’s ready to hear all the gory details of his attack. A chair is pulled up beside the bed. Tristan can feel Mal sit close but the smell is unfamiliar, like Indian food. Is that what Mal is doing with his time? Hanging out in curry houses? Probably back with Blondie.

  A trolley rolls by and stops at the end of the bed. Water is poured. Papers rustled.

  Tristan opens his eyes. Well, eye. The left one is still strapped down. Everything looks a bit blurry at first and he hopes his sight isn’t messed up because glasses are not a look he will be able to pull off. It’s all a bit hazy, but slowly the ceiling come into focus: white, grey piping, strip light. He manages to roll his head to one side. But shit. Mal’s face. Huge dark bags under his eyes, his hair grown out of the carefully shaved lines Tristan put in for him the day before the attack. He looks like a proper hobo. This is exactly why he struggles to hook up with hotter girls, despite being allright-looking. The hair on his face has grown too, more than Tristan has ever known it to. For a moment Tristan freaks out that he’s waking from some sort of long coma and Mal is now an old man.

  Mal squints at a clipboard, then returns it to the edge of the bed. He wipes his face in that stressed way he always does, sniffs, and then looks at something in the distance. He’s got on a bright blue T-shirt, which looks terrible, because for some reason Mal just can’t pull off wearing colours. He looks uncomfortable in it too, like when middle-aged women wear short skirts because they feel young inside and still have good legs but it looks wrong.

  Tristan hears the words he wants to say in his head, but when he speaks his voice is someone else’s. Husky. Dry. Quiet. But at least it doesn’t sound that mashed up, not like Rocky or anything.

  He tries again. Mal doesn’t even respond.

  Then, ‘You still heartbroken, Romeo?’

  Mal turns and looks at Tristan like he’s seen a ghost. His head drops to the bed and he begins to cry onto the sheets.

  Another set of feet walk close by and stop, but Tristan can’t see who it is. Please keep walking. He doesn’t want them to see his brother’s tears. Crying is private. It’s between the two of them, in their own rooms at night before falling asleep. Or for those Sunday afternoons when the distraction of TV or football or computer games isn’t enough and their mum’s absence feels like a weight that can only be acknowledged with tears. Crying is private. But what Mal is doing now is full-on, no-shame, snot-bubble crying in front of everyone. What’s his problem? Nan had asked Tristan recently if Mal ever cried, her curiosity about her oldest grandchild’s mental state pressed in between questions about if they were eating a diet more varied than fish fingers and baked beans, and if they were getting their correct benefits.

  Tristan wants to put his hand on Mal’s big tuft of hair and tell him it will be okay, but he can’t because Mal’s got his bony, but surprisingly heavy, arm on the bed and it’s too weighty to move.

  A woman in a bright purple dress comes over. She starts to speak but Tristan’s too confused to understand what she’s saying. Then he realises it’s the doctor. Like a real doctor dressed as a Parma Violet. Since when do they not wear white coats?

  ‘Malachi, please,’ she says, and he gets out the way for her. He stands by the curtain, eyes and nose running freely, no shame, no attempt to sort himself out. What the hell is wrong with him?

  Then two nurses come over. Tristan recognises the perfume of the Nigerian nurse, Olisa, as she leans over him. She’s way younger than he imagined and definitely flirting with him.

  ‘Did they get them, Mal?’ he asks.

  Malachi smiles, then shakes his head questioningly. ‘Tris? You’re all right. Don’t talk, take it easy.’

  ‘But did they get them? The police? Did they catch who attacked me?’

  He shakes his head again and says, ‘Just get some rest.’

  Tristan’s been awake for days now and no matter how many times he hears it, he still can’t remember the doctor’s name. He keeps wanting to say Dr Gonorrhoea, but there’s no way that’s right.

  ‘It’s common. How you’re feeling.’ She leans over the bed and flicks some switches behind his head.

  ‘So you keep telling me.’ He studies her closely but she doesn’t even wear an ID badge on her red and yellow blouse. She starts rattling on about allowing things to come back to him slowly and he wishes she would go and put on a white coat so he could take her seriously. It’s like going to McDonalds and someone in a tracksuit makes your quarter pounder – it just don’t look right.

  ‘There’s no rush to try and remember everything at once,’ she says.

  He nods. ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Take your time, you’re doing great. It’s a process, Tristan.’

  She keeps giving him the same lecture as Malachi. Allow your memory to come back in its own time. Don’t push yourself. Blah blah blah. But Tristan knows himself. He knows that once he wraps his head around what happened, he will be able to get himself back on track. It’s not amnesia or anything; he’s just a bit blurry on the details. Ten days is a lot of time to lose. And the reason he can’t remember the doctor’s name is because it has like fifteen letters.

  ‘You have my stuff?’ he asks her.

  She picks up a carrier bag from the floor. ‘Your clothes were damaged in A&E. This was all we had left.’

  The bag is small – definitely no Nikes in there. So it was a robbery then. Someone fucked him up this much for a pair of trainers. He sighs heavily.

  ‘Those trainers, man, fresh on last month and now gone. You think I’m shallow, don’t you?’

  ‘No, not at all. You’d be surprised by how fiercely patients demand their things back.’ She leans closer and stage whispers, ‘Especially the bikers.’ She thrusts the bag forward. ‘I know you think seeing your things will help you piece together the incident, but know there’s a chance it may not.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No problem, Tristan. I will be right over there if you need me. Take your time.’

  He opens it up and, surprisingly, there’s one of his trainers, but in a real state. There’s a smaller bag with his cubic zirconia stud earring and a long white piece of paper, crusted and hard, like it’s been through a washing machine. It says Malachi on the front in faded blue pen, the i dotted with a loop. Typical girl’s handwriting. Pamela’s handwriting.

  Then, clear as anything, he sees blue ice pole on a white T-shirt, smells toilet bleach in a sink and hears the phone in his flat ringing. He leans back on the bed. His ribs hurt. He swallows the thin saliva that has gathered in his mouth. He feels dizzy as the memories start coming back, a bunch of jumbled up images, sounds and smells, all hitting him, one after another. The letter falls onto his lap as pins and needles run down his arms and into his fingertips.

  He had spoken to Pamela on the phone about something, then saw David and gave him the keys to the flat. But then he remembers being in the stairwell. Why? It was something to do with Pamela. He’d gone up to the eleventh floor to see her, for some reason. The flat was dark. The carpets were kind of brown and tattered. He didn’t go inside. She had no keys or was in trouble or something.

  He looks at his trainer again, spotted with dirt and blood. It’s for the right foot. Tristan looks down his hospital bed at his left leg raised high and rolled in bandages. He wasn’t attacked. There was an explosion. There was an explosion near Pamela’s flat. Or in Pamela’s flat. Did she escape? Did the guy in the Elvis T-shirt help her too? He was so strong. Tristan remembers being picked up and thrown over the guy’s shoulder. But why would he have done that? Tristan was a dick to him earlier. It doesn’t make sense at all. But there definitely was some kind of explosion. It must have burst his eardrum and something fucked up his eye too.

  Tristan lifts the letter to his face; it smells of smoke and damp washing. He promised he would never read it. He didn’
t read it. Or did he? It doesn’t look sealed. But it’s in such a state, yellow and all dried up, it’s hard to tell if it was ever opened. But if he didn’t read it then how come he knows what it says? And where is Pamela now? Something happened in the flats, something really bad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Chapter Twenty-Eight ,Mary

  A tense group line the wooden benches in the hallway of the town hall. They are the mums and dads, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours, the bereaved and waiting. There are several doors along the hallway, each one labelled with a handwritten sign: Housing, Counselling, Financial Advice. Each one hopes to offer a solution to a different problem brought on by the accident. But the door Mary and her children wait outside is simply identified with a number two.

  John stands flat against the wall, as if he feels the need to anchor himself to something solid, while Julia taps her heavy foot continuously against the floor.

  Mary wonders who would have come here to hear if Tristan had died in the building? Who was there, other than Malachi, to witness the news? Their nan must be in pieces about everything, but Mary can’t bear to call her, just like she can’t bear to see Tristan wired up to machines in a hospital bed.

  Malachi had called Julia’s house the other night but Mary was too distraught to talk to him. Her guilt won’t allow it. She knew something was going to happen that day, she had felt it ever since she woke up, yet she didn’t stop them from getting hurt.

  ‘It’s almost three,’ John whispers. The strip light casts dark shadows under his eyes. He went to work this morning, put on his suit and too much aftershave, and drove in for a half day at the office. Said he needed a distraction.

  Julia leans forward to confirm the time against the slow ticking clock at the end of the hall, before she huffs and stretches out her gangly arms. Mary has never truly understood what made her children, who were both born frighteningly underweight, so much larger than the rest of the family. David blamed it on all the white bread Mary fed them. Bread with chocolate spread, with jam, with peanut butter, and after long shifts on the ward, bread topped with a fried egg and ketchup for dinner. ‘The kids back home don’t look like this,’ David told her once when he returned home to find that thirteen-year-old John was taller than him. But David wasn’t there; he didn’t have to put up with the children turning their noses up at the foods from back home, while begging Mary to buy potato waffles and turkey drummers.

  ‘I can hear movement inside,’ Julia says. Her face is covered in a heavy layer of make-up, but underneath it she looks tired. ‘They’re coming out.’ Tiny lines crack the powder around her mouth.

  The door opens and a lady with a long fringe and big glasses steps out. She looks down the hallway and nods at Mary. ‘Mrs Tuazon? Would you please come through?’

  Mary places her small hands either side of her thighs to grip the bench. She’s floating, it’s like she’s not really here at all. It’s time to enter room number two and get the news she came to hear.

  John puts a hand on her back. ‘We’re going in together.’

  If only she could go in alone, and hear the cold and official declaration of David’s death without her children listening in. She doesn’t want them to hear it like this, she wants to tell them herself, to package up the news and present it back softly to them. Your father has passed away. Your father didn’t make it. Your father is in a better place.

  ‘This way,’ the woman says. Her eyes are amplified by her glasses and Mary feels they can see straight through her, that she has no right to mourn this man she was betraying right up until the moment of his death. ‘Please take a seat.’

  The people around the table introduce themselves. There is a police officer; a nodding wrinkled woman, from family support; someone from the council, an officiator of some sort. So many faces. Mary does not understand why they all need to be here, why this exchange has to be made so social.

  ‘Mrs Tuazon,’ the big-eyed woman begins, ‘you know why we are here.’

  But it’s not true. Mary still can’t understand why her husband, who spends so much time on the other side of the world, has been killed on her doorstep. Even after family back in Manila confirmed driving him to the airport and Air China confirmed that David Tuazon was one of their passengers to London that morning, it was still difficult to believe.

  Mary tries to take herself away, to somewhere else, somewhere silent where the woman’s words can’t reach her. She places herself back home, in the yard of her childhood, and listens for the laugh of the cicadas and snap of branches as her neighbours make fires. But the smell of coffee and her son’s sharp aftershave pull her back into the room. The others around the table begin to talk, and phrases manage to sink through Mary’s resolve. ‘What they have found is a certain match for your husband.’ ‘Now you can start the process.’ ‘We are here to support you in all areas.’ The woman with the glasses leads the chorus; she talks with her hands and moves a white mug of coffee about as part of her gestures. The coffee looks cold; she must have been sitting in this room for hours, giving out the same news. Death after death.

  ‘In cases like this, even the smallest amount of remains can be enough to get a positive identification. Your husband had dental records here, blood samples.’

  It has been thirteen days since the plane crash. Thirteen days of fluctuating death counts and now the final toll as detectives cross-checked the list of those registered as missing with DNA, dental records and family accounts of the last known whereabouts of everyone that afternoon. Most of the bodies were brought out fast, plunging their relatives into grief as parts of bone and flesh were discovered among the metal of the plane and debris of the building. Each time remains were found the whole clearing operation would stop. The press and crowds, in which Mary stood herself one day, could only look on in fascination as the identification experts clambered on to do their work.

  Each day the death count got further and further away from the original figure of 250, which was thrown around by the media.

  Julia sniffs loudly and dives into her bag to rummage about. From somewhere unseen the family support woman produces a white flash of tissue, like a magic trick she had not wanted to reveal earlier.

  ‘Thank you,’ Julia says. ‘So how can we do a funeral if we have no body to bury?’

  ‘There are remains,’ the big-eyed woman says. ‘But as your father was at the point of impact—’

  The point of impact. Why do people keep using this phrase? Mary purposely stops listening. She does not want to hear that David’s body no longer exists. That he is gone. That he simply vanished.

  ‘Mum?’ Julia asks. Mary has missed the conversation. ‘We’re going to have the funeral here, right?’

  Funeral? There has to be a funeral? How can they keep up with this? How do they know what to do next? How can their heads not spin, confused and bewildered by these events?

  Everyone stands. It’s over already and Mary did not get to ask her questions. She was sure she had some. John takes an envelope of papers from the big-eyed woman, who nods vigorously at him.

  They walk back out into the marbled hallway. The bench where they sat moments before has been refilled with another family, red-eyed and anxious. Mary feels their faces tune into hers, as if for a glimpse of how they will feel once they have received a confirmation of death.

  John and Julia argue as they walk to the car, they snap lines back and forth at each other.

  ‘We need to say goodbye to him in his own country,’ John says. ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’

  The idea fills Mary with a fresh dread. She has not returned back in so long. She hates the gossipy old-fashioned village she and David grew up in just outside the city. Mary will be obliged to stay at David’s family home, with the mother-in-law who detests her. There she will have to endure countless visits from extended family members she knows little of and can’t relate to, the aunties and uncles who will cry for her loss and ask if this means she is final
ly coming ‘home’.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Julia says. ‘Dad was a British citizen; he’d want to be buried here. Plus I’m not dragging my kids all the way to the Philippines.’ She wipes the creamy lines of make-up from her face.

  The smell of the bubblegum-scented magic tree, which Mary had bought to amuse her grandbabies, nauseates her as they step into the car. ‘My passport,’ she says suddenly. ‘My passport is in the bedside cabinet.’

  The twins turn to face each other for a few seconds, as if formulating their response, before they turn back to Mary.

  ‘It is …’ Mary stalls, conscious of the tense. ‘It was in the folder with your birth certificates, our marriage certificate.’

  ‘We can sort it out. Get copies,’ John says.

  ‘No we won’t,’ Julia says, ‘because we’re not going to the Philippines.’

  It has always been the three of them. Mary and her children. So why does it feel as if there is a giant hole, a substantial space that previously had some kind of warmth in it?

  John looks over at his sister in the passenger seat. ‘Julia, we’ll get through this, okay? We’ll get through it.’ He starts the car and the radio comes on automatically, a newsreader’s voice announcing: ‘Authorities today have released the final death count for the tragedy in which—’

  Julia hits the off button.

  Mary never wanted this life of drama, she never wanted the estranged husband who had floozies all over the world, and she never wanted to fall in love again or have an affair. And she certainly never wanted to be a widow. These were all things that happened to others, the kinds of women who sat across from Oprah and told their stories of survival against all odds and rising up again. Mary did not want to be a survivor; she did not want to have to rise up. What would her life have been like had she married one of the earnest local boys that used to court her? The kind of boy who would come knocking in his shorts and rubber shoes, promising to build her a modest sturdy house and life. David had offered no such thing. She should have steered clear of him, she should have predicted that marrying a man like him would only bring her drama and heartache.