And there’s Max too. You could almost forget the place was vegan he’s so beautiful.
We hug hello. He smells of fig even more today. I suddenly freak out that I have orange lipstick on my teeth and the fear of it is ruining my personality.
“I just need to use the bathroom.” I smile with my lips closed.
He smiles back but his teeth are lovely and big and white and open and broad and honest and natural. And he is familiar and new at the same time. Like spending Christmas abroad.
The toilets are shabby but it’s OK. I have amazing hovering skills. I undo my button for a second just to let my stomach hang out. Feels so good. MUSTN’T. GET. TOO. USED. TO. THE. RELIEF. Just as anticipated, a belt of prints from the elastic is embossed on my waist. I find imprints in skin really pretty. I always love it when I get prints in my face from sleeping on creased sheets. I prepare to suck myself back in again to my outfit—
Wait.
Why do I have so many missed calls from Mum? Dad too? And Camille?
And I know. Before I even call them back I know that something’s not right.
That something has happened.
Something bad.
IRON
I gulp.
I taste iron.
Breathe.
My hands shake a little.
I frown.
Click my tongue.
What could it be?
Did I leave the taps running again?
I’m scared to call back.
Another girl steps into the toilets. She has a beanie hat on and a piercing between her eyebrows. She says a small hi to me. She smells of tobacco.
I try Mum again. No answer.
I try Dad’s phone. And Dove’s and even the house phone—which nobody ever answers….It rings out.
OK. I check my makeup. I think I look nice. Like a snapshot of how I’d like to look in somebody’s mind if they thought of me.
Sometimes, with certain people that you love, I think it’s to do with magnets, something happens and even if it doesn’t happen to you physically, somehow, you feel it in your bones. A numbness, a rush of something missing, a blind slip in the darkness, a weightlessness, an alarm, a flashing sudden strike. Like a fuse popping. And you know. A synchronised crossing in the stars and you are in the right place at the right time…or completely the wrong one.
* * *
—
I just knew. My bones felt too light to move, too weak to use. So soft they bowed slack like loose strings on a violin.
The phone rings in my hands and makes me jump. It’s Mum.
She’s crying. Muffled tears.
“Mum?” I ask. My voice doesn’t sound like my own. “Mum? What’s going on? Where are you? Mum?”
“Dove.” She cries, and then her voice breaks again before she regains control of it. “Dove’s had an accident.”
I don’t even say goodbye to Max. I run out of the door and he is left behind and everything I know slips into darkness as my chest is filled with the concrete of the ground and I find it impossible to catch my breath and my fingers are too shaky to even reach for my inhaler, only thumb her headscarf tied to my wrist and tremble.
POWDERY HOT CHOCOLATE
Sleeping Dove is a wounded sock rolled in a drawer. A bird with a broken wing. A delicate spool of cotton. She isn’t wearing her own clothes. It’s a shock to see her. She flits between looking ancient and tiny. Her eyelids are puffy, yellow and shiny. Her lips look tender and sore, swollen, split, bloody. Her eyebrow is cut, her left ear is trickling with a sticky leak of wine-red blood from underneath the bandage. Her arms are whipped in a tie-dye bloom of bruises. Hands are bruised too, nails bloody. I can’t see her legs because she has a blanket over them. But I bet they’ll be bruised too. Under all that mummified wrapping. Her heart beats bu-boom. Bu-boom. It’s well boring in this place with her asleep. She would’ve loved to watch all the people.
Dad kicks the door ajar with his scuffed brown shoe and hands me a beige cup of something more beige. He dramatically tiptoes in to try and lighten the mood. Mum rolls her eyes at him and shakes her head.
“The coffee here is diabolical, almost as bad as yours!” he jokes in a whisper to me. I smile back. Dad secretly LOVES my coffee. It’s organic and farmhousey, that’s why.
He acts like a little boy, pretending to poke the wires and prod stuff in the room. Mum growls at him. He looks told off. Trying not to laugh. Winking at me, he picks up a stethoscope and wraps it around his neck and pretends to examine me in silence, to not annoy Mum. Scribbling down pretend information and scratching his head and frowning. He’s always so good at impromptu acting like this. When Mum looks at him he freezes up and holds his breath like one of those mime artists in Covent Garden. He’s so bad in awkward situations. But I’m so glad he’s here.
He sits down and sips his coffee. Cups it in his hands and begins to tap out a rhythm, probably something from Radio 2, and then realises that’s probably annoying too. Mum side-eyes him and he places a finger over his mouth.
“This really is my favourite coffee shop,” he says with sarcasm, again, unable to sit still and face Dove. “I take all my meetings in the local hospital, you can’t beat it. Nothing like a stiff plastic chair and a machine-made coffee to really get you pumped!” The gap in his teeth looks bigger than ever. He looks like a child. An awkward one. Suddenly not knowing where he fits in the world. Mum sighs. Deeply.
“Well then, Dove,” he whispers close in her ear in this funny naggy jobsworth voice he puts on when he’s pretending to be pedantic or taking the mick out of our neighbour Gerald. “That was your final warning. You really are making quite a racket with all that big heavy loud lying there and doing nothing! Can’t you keep it down? I’m trying to drink my coffee in peace!” He jabs her gently in the shoulder with his index finger. “I’m not used to seeing you so…still.”
And then in an instant his smile breaks upside down and looks really, really human. Not like an actor at all. He leans into her head and sniffs a grown-up sob into her hair. This makes both Mum and me cry a bit.
We clamber around the bed and hold hands. We can’t believe we nearly lost her.
Dove would hate to see us all over her like this.
* * *
—
Hospital hot chocolate is just brown water. Until you get to the end. Then there’s a heap of overly sugary powder at the bottom. Dove doesn’t wake up. But when she does, I’m sure she’ll have something to say about these terrible drinks.
Won’t you, Dove?
Won’t you?
Dove?
CAULIFLOWER CHEESE
“Hello, Alicia?”
“Trouper! You’re more than two hours late. You better have a good excuse or I’m blasting you back down to Planet Earth faster than you can shout cake!”
“Sorry…it’s my sister. I just wanted to let you know in case you were wondering where I was today. I’m at the hospital.”
“Crikey, chuck, what happened?”
“She fell. From a building.”
“WHOA! Bloody heck!”
“I know. I’m sorry, I should have called earlier but we didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“Oh bubba, this is terrible. Is she…gonna…Will she?…Is she…How is she?”
“She’s resting now. But we’re all just a bit shaken. It was quite a high window, where she fell from, so…her friends are quite shaken too.”
“I bet.”
“So if you don’t mind, is it all right with you if I just let you know when I’m able to come back in again?”
“Sure. Sure. Just keep us aliens posted. We can get cover; who knows, maybe even your little mate Camille will have to pull her stripy socks up and get to work! Ha! I’m just kidding; I’d NEVER let that girl work here again.” She sno
rts. “OK, just let us know if there’s anything we can do.”
“Will do. Thanks.”
“Oh, and give that Maxy a ding; he’s worried sick about you!”
“Yeah, just say hi.”
I hang up really quickly after that, a bit like how I imagine gangsters do when they never stay on the phone long enough to say a proper goodbye.
Least work’s off my back; one less thing to worry about. I think about calling Cam. And then Max. And then I decide not to. I know I can’t avoid them forever and I don’t want to worry them, but right now I don’t want to speak to anyone.
* * *
—
Mum and Dad go to talk to the doctor and I wait. Staring at Dove’s plastic tray of “in case she wakes up” creamy cauliflower cheese go from steaming and silky to developing a strange cellophane-like skin. The cheese, curdled, and the cauliflower itself looks square, like it’s manufactured, connecting pieces to a toy that you might try slotting together. If you were to eat it, it would be congealed and salty and heavy.
My phone rings straight after that. It’s Cam. I can see the texts from her and Max building in my phone. It’s not that I’m deliberately ignoring them, I just don’t have anything to say. And I just tried speaking on the phone and it turns out I didn’t really like it.
I use this time to talk to Dove a bit, but I’m not even sure she can hear me, and then I write in here. Dove has sun freckles speckled over her nose. I knew she wouldn’t use sunscreen. Her forehead’s got a red line where she was obviously wearing her stupid GoPro camera strap thing. Idiot.
Open your eyes. Idiot. Cough, cough. WAKE UP!
Dove always laughs at how I can always stomach all food, and that goes for service food too. I actually really enjoy service food. Like aeroplane food and school dinners. And if I was in prison, I’d probably go ahead and enjoy that grub too. I love those little foil trays you get on an aeroplane, stuffed with something that’s always really squidgey and hot with teardrops of condensation and always-terrible salty cheese and soggy vegetables. I like the silver triangle of Dairylea soft cheese that when you unwrap reveals a block that resembles ice-cold moisturiser, perfect slathered onto a wheaty, salty cracker with the ridge of a plastic knife. It fills the mouth like paint. The claggy press is cloying against the teeth. And school dinners…yum. Especially chocolate cake and gloopy skin-on chocolate custard. Jerk chicken and rice’n’peas. I even like the savoury squareness of a dense spongy cheese flan. Where you can’t even taste the cheese and it’s just a bland plain egg square.
Here, they stuff as many calories as they can into everything. I guess it’s because when people are sick they might only be able to manage a mouthful here and there, so every bite has to be jammed with calories.
* * *
—
I press my hands up to the glass like binoculars and see Mum chewing her lip outside, talking to a couple of Dove’s friends. They are using their hands to demonstrate Dove’s fall. One of them reaches up scarily high. I shudder. The boys look washed-out, like Quentin Blake illustrations: wiry, spotty boys with greasy fringes. I keep meaning to stand up and go say hi but my body is heavy and numb. My big bones feel extra big today, playing up. I always feel extra huge in front of Dove’s mates, like I’m the actual BIG sister they use as the butt of their jokes, accusing each other of fancying me. Not in front of Dove, though; she’d never stand for that. I consider them some more. Maybe it’s because they are all so weedy. I could crush them. To them, I am a terror of a woman. A King Kong.
Mum holds her face in her hands and then brings the boys in for a hug. I watch them in silence. And then steal my eyes away to look at Dove some more and this little quiet room. My phone rings in my bag. Cam. Again. I let it ring out.
The room is light blue. The sheets are white. There are some children’s books in the corner and one of those games where you slide the wooden coloured beads over the twirly metal rods. There are also a few badly painted pictures of Disney characters on the walls. They all look like evil-twin versions of the real thing. Scary. It occurs to me that Dove is still a “child.” Dove’s body, still not finished. So fragile. And how I am growing so fast. Would I be on the other ward on the other side of this giant hospital? Next to grown-ups who have to do all of scary life on their own…
I realise I’ve been sitting on my hand for ages. It’s gone numb and there are creases all over it. I don’t like seeing the creases today. I should have just watched Snow White like a normal, unselfish big sister.
“Can I tell you a secret?” I ask her. But she says nothing. Just lies there with those closed shiny veiny eyes. “When I was younger…,” I begin, “I used to steal the good bits out of people’s lunch boxes at school. I’m not even a thief. But I used to do it. They always had such good treats in their lunch boxes, stuff Mum would never buy, like Fruit Winders and Crunch Corner yoghurts and mini chocolate chip cookies and animal crackers. We never had all that, did we? I mean, I didn’t even really like cheese strings but they tasted like the best thing ever when they were stolen from some poor kid’s Winnie-the-Pooh lunch box. Why is that? Do stolen things always taste better?”
Dove says nothing.
“Course, I’m not a thief.” Her silence makes me cry. “But you can call me one if you want to. I won’t mind. I really won’t.” A tear plops onto Dove’s cheek.
“Please call me a thief.” I press against her. “Please say something horrible to me.”
I clamber up next to her and try to shuffle onto the bed beside her. I feel too tall and too big. The bed squeaks and the wheels judder beneath me. I feel the bed tilt from the weight of me. We never could play on the seesaw together in the playground; it used to have to take Dove plus two of her friends to balance a seesaw with me. “It’s because I’m older,” I would say. It wasn’t. It was because I was fat. And my bones are big. I clasp my arms around her so tight.
“What did you do, little bird?” I ask her. “Why did you have to go flying around the city like that?”
She has little calluses on her palms. Rough. Like verrucas. Her head is bruised. Ouch. Blood still in her hair, cuts on her brow, her cheek grazed. It makes my knees turn to jelly.
There is still some glitter and mascara on my hands from where I wiped my makeup tears away. I think about when she was a little girl and was still able to fit into the baby chairs in shopping trolleys. I would stumble alongside with undone shoelaces, desperate to clamber on up beside her while she was babied, and how Mum and Dad let her play that game. I think about all the grown-ups that never minded carrying her home from stuff, letting her creep up onto their shoulders to get better views at concerts and the fair, sitting on their laps on the train or bus. I’d cling to the pole, knowing nobody would ever want me on their lap. Knowing I’d squash them. Give them cramp. Nobody called me “cute.” Or let me balance on their toes while they danced me around the living room, or swung me up or tossed me in the air at the park or piggybacked me or launched me across the swimming pool in a fit of giggles. I was big-boned. She was the little bird made for flying. It should have been me that was broken. I wrap my arms around Dove and sink my face into her neck and I don’t recognise her smell today. And I just love her so much. I just love her so much. And my heart is cracking. And I was wrong about what I said before….I can’t eat when I’m sad.
I can’t even write.
READY BREK
Ready Brek is the first food Dove manages to swallow. She has a big dollop of jam in the middle AND chocolate chips. She eats every mouthful. I love watching her eat. I’m so grateful to see her chewing, moving.
“I’m sorry,” she tells Mum. “I didn’t mean to—you know?”
“We’re just happy to see you awake,” Mum reassures her. Mum’s doing well not to be mad at her because I would be ONE MAD MUM!
“I’m an idiot. I lost my balance; I got scared.” She sighs.<
br />
“We know, darling.”
“I ruined your date, didn’t I?” she asks me.
“Just a bit!” I joke. “I don’t care. I had a peppercorn in my tooth the whole time anyway, so it’s a good thing probably.”
Dove manages to laugh at my lie but then winces in pain. The sound is contagious. It’s like she’s been hit with a tuning fork and we all feel the vibration of her pain tingle through us.
Ready Brek smells so nostalgic and familiar. Oaty and sweet and comfortable, like a blanket. Like being a baby again.
I don’t hear the words the first time. When Mum says them.
“Dove. You’re going to have to get used to living in a chair for a little while.”
“A chair?” Dove’s face nearly slides off. She wasn’t expecting it and her shock smacks Mum round the face. Mum wants to cry but holds the tears back. It’s like having a horrible coughing fit in the theatre when you’re squeezed in between rows of people and you’re sweating and panicking and wishing you just had the guts to let rip and cough and cough and cough until you threw up. She sucks the tears back again. “A wheelchair, sweetheart, just for a little bit…” And then she says it again, this time without dressing it up; this time she says it hard and loud so she can hear it said too, clears her throat: “A wheelchair.”
Dove is motionless. Her face screws up in anger. She looks down, afraid of looking at us. She shakes her head. I reach for her hand but it’s limp in my palm like a dead mouse.
“It’ll only be for a short time, Dove, but you’ve broken your legs. The bones are—”
I butt in; I can’t help but interrupt. “Mum, hold on, you haven’t even let her have a chance to walk yet. Let her walk, why can’t you just see how she gets on first? Get her out of that bed and you’ll see.”
“Bluebelle,” Mum snaps. But I keep pushing.
My Ideal Boyfriend Is a Croissant Page 16
