by Luan Goldie
They had first met at nursing college in Manila, where David lasted three months before quitting to peddle his Elvis Presley act around a small cluster of hotels in a nearby beach town. Before he left he put the idea of going to London in Mary’s head, presenting her with a newspaper article headed: Want to Nurse in the United Kingdom? She applied, got the job and eighteen months later found herself with that most coveted of documents – a visa.
The car stops and they sit in silence.
John checks the time. ‘It’ll already be late there. I’ll call Granny Lola in the morning.’
Mary looks forward to her ascent to the spare room, to take a sleeping pill and drift off while listening to the sounds of her grandbabies as they play and the washing machine as it whirs. She finds she can’t wait for the silence that comes with sleep. To be away from the sounds of John and Julia as they swing between arguing, crying and discussing what Mary was doing sitting on the wet pavement outside a bungalow in Vanbrugh Close the day after the crash.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Chapter Twenty-Nine ,Malachi
Post-traumatic stress disorder. A normal reaction to an abnormal event. Malachi folds the leaflet in half and puts it in the pocket of the unfamiliar trousers he was given at the relief centre. There had been a drive to gather items for those who lost their homes. Posters went up on the hoardings that surrounded Nightingale Point, shouting: ‘EMERGENCY APPEAL’, with a list of everything that was needed. Things you wouldn’t even think of: pillows, salt and pepper, irons, nappies.
When Malachi first asked for clothes, they pressed upon him two cardboard boxes, more than he had owned originally. Most of the clothes looked new too, and he began to believe they were. But small things would give away that they had a past life with another wearer: a button missing from a shirt, a one-day bus pass washed hard in the pocket of jeans.
He goes to Nightingale Point each morning. He’s not sure why but as soon as his eyes open he needs to see it, to confirm that it happened. It changes with each visit. Every day another area swept clear of debris, a different set of vehicles and machinery on-site. Last week a yellow crane arrived and he watched as it unrolled itself and began collecting huge pieces of the plane. The authorities said that now all human remains had been identified, the plane itself was being moved to a hangar on the outskirts of the city to be investigated. He never wondered where the Boeing 747-200 had gone, even after he read in the papers about its 195-foot wing span and 230-foot length. It was startling when the crane began to extract parts of the plane, as if sifting gold.
Today all the damaged cars have been removed; each of them leaves behind an oblong patch of ground a different colour from the rest. It reminds Malachi of the time their mum sold off all the furniture and the carpet underneath was a shade lighter than the rest of the room.
He walks close by and looks up at the same balconies he always does on the seventh floor. One is completely wrecked, its wire foundations sticking out wildly, a wall broken down. But then next door, a balcony intact, a line of dust-coated washing still pegged across it.
In front of the hoardings are pools of dried coloured wax, teddies and cards. The usual suspects are here. ‘Ambulance chasers’, Harris calls them – those who purposely gawp at the scene and throw around their conspiracy theories. For some reason they have jumped on the tragedy and day after day come to press their homemade leaflets – claiming: Flight GR-387 Contained Classified Cargo – into the palms of anyone who will listen. Malachi watches as one of them approaches a young-looking reporter from the depleting line of media. Three weeks on, the twice-daily press conferences have stopped. The public have grown tired of the tragedy of Nightingale Point, of tales of squatters being among the unaccounted for and accusations that the remains of the dead were improperly handled.
Many of the flats’ interiors are obscenely revealed. Wallpaper and bedrooms made public. It’s discomforting to see the homes of so many, ripped open and thrown about for all to gaze at. A toilet cistern dangles off one of the walls six floors up and Malachi tries to identify the layout of the visible rooms. Toilet, bathroom, living room to the left, two bedrooms to the right. Pamela had once said that Malachi’s flat on the ninth floor was a perfect reflection of her own – the location of the rooms, position of switches and plug sockets all opposite – but also that his flat was constantly flooded with light, while hers stayed in dingy darkness all day.
Pamela.
He can’t stop thinking about her. Of how she must have died in that flat, unable to save herself. Why didn’t she tell him she was back? They could have talked. He could have explained everything to her and told her how much he regretted doing what he did. She should have called him. How many days had she been back? Upstairs in that horrible dark flat with her nutty dad. Maybe she wanted to see him, call him or pass a message but was struggling to do anything with him watching her.
It took four days for Pamela’s name and photo to appear in the papers, four days of Malachi thinking: maybe, just maybe, her dad was wrong and she would be found alive. But then he saw the photo of her printed among the others from that day: Mary’s husband, David Tuazon; the elderly couple from Pamela’s floor; and a young mum who didn’t even live in the block but was visiting a friend.
Tristan and Mary are the only people who knew that Malachi was seeing Pamela. Their relationship was an easy secret to keep, she had so few friends at school and he spent all his time alone studying at home or in the library. It made sense at the time, how insular their relationship was, as they didn’t need anyone else.
The only other person in the world hurting for Pamela as much as Malachi is her dad, Jay Harrogate. His photo had also appeared in the paper, along with the headline: I LOST MY GIRL IN CRASH. Malachi couldn’t bring himself to take in the words of this man. If only he let her have a normal life, she would have been outside that day, running around the field or even sitting with Malachi in the café, safe, scooping up the pink milkshake powder at the bottom of her glass and declaring it the best part.
Malachi’s eyes feel dry, his lips cracked again. He’s had enough for today. He drags behind some teenagers who emerge from Barton Point, the only completely undamaged block on the estate. The residents beginning to move back in. Though there’s a rumour that if you claim post-traumatic stress, the council will rehouse you elsewhere.
The bus comes and Malachi crams on with the loud school kids who talk about a loose girl in year eleven and the burdens of homework. Their noise distracts him for the entire journey; it allows him to forget about Pamela and the thirty-eight others.
As he gets off the bus, the drizzle turns into something more solid and he pulls up his hood and breaks into a jog towards the rose-lined bungalows of Vanbrugh Close.
The odour of toasted cumin seeds hits him as he opens the front door. At the kitchenette he takes down his hood and pulls the leaflet from his pocket.
‘Smells good,’ he calls over Harris’s radio.
‘Soup? It’s winter food, I know, but I felt like it. Something warm and comforting.’
The cutlery drawer rattles and Malachi takes the spoons, grabs the pepper and they both slide their legs under the small table at the same time. They have fallen into such a quick rhythm with each other. The council offered Malachi a hostel room but it was two buses away from the hospital and Harris refused to let him go. Malachi suspects Harris is doing it out of some sort of obligation to Mary, to look after him while she’s dealing with losing her husband.
A few days after the accident Harris took Malachi to C&A and filled a plastic basket with five packs of underpants and socks. He felt like one of those pampered students going off to live in halls for the first time. It seemed unnecessary, but then, at that point, he still hadn’t realised how much he’d lost.
It was difficult at first, to return to the bare room at Harris’s bungalow, the room with the slatted blinds that didn’t quite sit correctly and the smell of potpourri that turned his stomach. The room w
here Malachi had woken up the morning after the crash. But within days the little house with the lifeless bedroom became exactly what he needed to return to after hours at the hospital, sitting outside the operating theatre.
The thunder claps and Malachi’s spoon clatters onto the floor.
‘Sorry.’ He jumps up and reaches for the cloth that hangs over the kitchen tap.
‘Leave it,’ Harris says.
‘No, I’ll clean it up.
‘It’s just a little soup. Not the end of the world.’
Malachi wipes the mess and returns to the sink to rinse the cloth. The skin between his fingers is dry and ashy, his appetite gone.
‘Quite a storm coming.’ Harris joins Malachi by the window, taking his cigarette box from a pocket. A cool gust of air comes in as the window is opened. ‘My goodness, I have neglected my garden, haven’t I?’
It’s wildly overgrown, the flowers bright and large. They look mockingly cheerful in such a dark time.
‘Of course most of it is wild vetch – weeds, really, but still beautiful. Sometimes those things are. Mary hates it, is always chucking her cigarette butts in them.’
‘I can’t believe I never knew,’ Malachi says.
‘Yes, well, she told me how proud both of you were when she quit smoking. But it was only a sneaky one here and there. A nurse and patient rebelling.’ He laughs. ‘We were terribly unsupportive of each other.’
‘No. I mean I can’t believe I didn’t know about you.’
Malachi finds it difficult to work out what their relationship is. ‘Friends from the hospital’ – that’s what Mary said, but for Harris to take Malachi in, it’s obvious their relationship was more than that. And then, the morning the newspaper came out with David’s photo, Harris went to his bedroom and stayed there for the whole day.
He takes a long pull on his cigarette. There’s a pleasure in his eyes and Malachi wishes he was a smoker, if not for the enjoyment then for something to occupy his shaking hands.
He thinks of all the times him and Tristan spent in Mary’s company, eating dinner while standing in her cluttered kitchen and listening to her complain about her lazy colleagues and ungrateful children. How could they have believed that this was all there was to her?
‘It’s like she had a second life. A secret life.’
‘Don’t say that. I had no secret Mary. It was the same Mary with me as with you, with your brother, with David, even.’
The name hangs in the air awkwardly. Harris should never say it.
Malachi pushes a stray piece of brown onion skin about. ‘You miss Mary, don’t you?’
Harris nods, then quickly shuts the conversation down. ‘Would you like me to make you something else? I can try and make some rice?’ He adds vaguely.
But the cumin soup is one of five in Harris’s rolling repertoire of recipes, each meal capable of filling his evenings with chopping, boiling and cleaning the small kitchen enough to keep the pests away, although Malachi swears he can hear the mice gnaw at the cupboards as he waits for the sleeping pills to take effect each night.
‘There’s no shame if you want to talk to someone professional.’ Harris indicates behind them, to the leaflet between the two abandoned bowls of soup.
Malachi is feeling worse today than yesterday. Maybe it was reading the leaflet that did it, seeing the description of PTSD symptoms: nightmares, flashbacks, feelings of isolation, guilt, difficulty sleeping.
‘I’m talking to you right now, aren’t I?’
Harris nods. ‘Yes, I guess you are.’
Malachi suddenly feels exhausted. He sighs and rubs his face.
‘How did the call with your nan go this morning?’
It’s still the most difficult part of his day, the brief calls Nan demands. After she was deemed too unwell to fly, Malachi promised he would keep her updated on everything, but he hates having to speak to her on the phone; between her hearing issues and the poor connection, it often feels like talking to someone down the bottom of a well.
‘It was the same as every other call. She cried. Prayed. Thinks it’s time I told Tris the whole truth about the plane crash.’
‘Maybe she’s right.’
As Malachi sits back at the table, the smell of soup reminds him of his hunger – he’s not eaten anything since last night.
‘I don’t know how to explain everything. He remembers an explosion, a fire, but even that he’s vague on. He’s not asked me any questions about anything either. He sleeps most of the time, and when he’s awake he’s so quiet. How do I drop in that he survived a plane crash?’ The absurdity of the event hits him again, the unlikeliness of it. ‘Also, I don’t know what he saw in there. I don’t want to start dragging stuff up he’s not ready to deal with.’
‘But what do you think he thinks happened?’
Malachi shrugs. It’s rare for him not to be able to read his little brother, but that’s how he feels as he sits by the bedside day after day, watching Tristan lie awake, silently staring at the ceiling.
‘When our mum passed away our nan never spoke about it. Even the day of the funeral, no tears, no words, just took us through the motions and never mentioned it again. I always hated that, that she wouldn’t acknowledge anything.’
Harris sits down opposite him. ‘I can imagine. It must have been difficult.’
‘But it’s all I know. I don’t know how to talk about these things. Even to Tristan.’
He remembers when Nan first moved back into the flat after Mum died. How she continuously talked about the mess and dirt of the place, the mould around the edges of the bath, the smell of the unwashed bedding, the grease coating the hob. On and on she would go, about all these tiny things, but she never once raised the issue of why their mum was no longer with them.
A week after she arrived it was time to clear out Mum’s room. Nan went to the market and came back with a bag of net curtains, pristinely white. She ordered Malachi to pull down the sheets that hung from the windows and replace them with the nets. As he hung them Tristan came in, confused, and said, ‘But Mum doesn’t like it when it’s too bright.’
Nan’s face wavered and Malachi, who up to that point prayed for her to give him some clues about how to feel or behave, suddenly was terrified by the idea of seeing his nan break down.
She took a breath and said, ‘You can’t live in the dark, not anymore.’
It was always like that: each time she noticed something not up to her standard, it felt like she was pointing out how Mum fell short of it.
‘You both need to learn how to help,’ she told them. ‘Just because you’re boys doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a cloth.’
Tristan loved having Nan in the flat; the order she brought in suited him and he responded to being kept busy after months of trying to play card games silently and avoiding Mum’s dark moods. Also, Mum never trusted him to do anything right, so when Nan started giving him responsibility for things, like hoovering the carpets or standing on a stool at the kitchen worktop and peeling potatoes, he flourished. He’d never been recognized by an adult for doing the right thing before, so it didn’t matter to him that Nan took away the photos of Mum or stood off to the side when they went to visit the grave.
But the silence didn’t work for Malachi. He can’t be like Nan. He knows he has to start talking.
‘I don’t know where to start, Harris.’
Harris leans across the table and puts one of his thin, tanned hands on Malachi’s. ‘It doesn’t matter; you just need to talk to him. The worst thing that can happen now is that he hears it from someone else.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
Chapter Thirty ,Tristan
He pushes open the door of the day room with his arm and wheels himself in. After a week in the wheelchair he’s definitely getting the hang of using it; the biggest problem is getting in and out of the damn thing, especially with his hand still in bandages and his ribs aching.
The room is empty and he wonders where the old biddies ar
e. They usually sit in here after lunch to watch the soaps and bitch about their visitors. A man with a comical moustache stands on the other side of the glass with a squeegee in his hand. He gives Tristan a smile before going back to methodically wiping down the bubbles in straight lines. That’s another thing Tristan enjoys about hospital: the reliable cleanliness of the place.
A youngish bloke – a biker, for sure – hobbles into the room and waves at the window cleaner, then he turns to Tristan. ‘All right, mate? Good to see you getting about.’
Tristan looks down at his legs in the chair and shrugs.
‘How you feeling? Is Olisa taking care of you?’
‘Ha.’ Tristan knows there’s something wrong about fancying a woman in a nurse’s uniform but he can’t help it. ‘She makes me not wanna get better. She’s the world’s hottest nurse.’
‘Mate, I’d come off my bike a hundred times over if she’d give me a sponge bath.’
They laugh together and the man sits down in the chair next to Tristan’s wheelchair.
‘Look, I don’t wanna pry or anything but I’ll kick myself if I don’t ask. It’s you, ain’t it?’ He pushes a copy of The Sun under Tristan’s nose. A photo of the retard smiling brightly in front of an ice-cream van at the seaside takes up quarter of a page.
‘What?’ But as Tristan says it he spots an image of himself, smaller, down the bottom, looking deceptively studious in his blazer and striped blue and yellow school tie. He’s never even owned any of his school photos, only ever seen them with the word SAMPLE stamped across in bold red type.
‘I knew it was you.’ The biker smiles, as if he’s just bumped into a celebrity.
