by Eva Woods
‘You watch too much CSI.’
‘It’s all they ever have on in the doctors’ lounge.’
Yes, she could hear, but nothing helpful. Pushed how? Down something or under something? She tried hard to speak. ‘Hello, can you tell me why I’m here?’ Nothing. ‘You can hear me, Grandma, can’t you?’
‘If you say so, dear.’ She’d gone back to her knitting now, holding it up to the light. ‘What do you think? Will he like it?’
‘Who?’
‘Filou, of course. Who d’you think it was for, a four-legged baby?’
‘No,’ said Rosie quickly. Filou was … ‘Your dog!’ She had him in her mind, suddenly, a yappy little pug. Filou had come back to her memory, slotting into place like a jigsaw piece. Surely the rest would come back too. It would all be fine. No need to panic just because right now she couldn’t remember who she was.
‘That’s right. See, you’ll get there, love. You just need to give yourself time to heal. It was a nasty accident, by the sounds of it.’
‘A bus hit me.’ She frowned, remembering the moment she’d been awake before. The lights, the pain, the man with his chest open and his green eyes looking right at her. Had that been real?
Grandma sucked her teeth. ‘A bus! How did that happen, then?’
Rosie tried to take stock of her body, searching for clues. There was something on her mouth, tape of some kind, a tube in her throat and going down the back of her nose. There were so many sore places she had to move through them, cataloguing. Head. Left ankle. Right knee. Bum. Back. Shoulder. Both hands burning like fire. Arm. Ribs. And her nose felt wrong too. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said, frustrated. ‘I don’t know what happened!’ Questions crowded her head. How had she got here? Who was she? Why had she said the name Luke?
‘Look, here’s Daisy. Maybe she’ll know more.’
Who was Daisy? How had her grandma got here first? And why was she wearing slippers and a cardigan? Wasn’t she in a care home somewhere? Devon? Yes, Devon. Had she busted out of her home and ridden here on a sit-on lawnmower, like that man in that film?
When had Rosie seen that film? No idea. She realised there was a noise in the room. A sort of dry, rasping sound, like when you tried to squeeze the last bit of shampoo from the bottle in the shower. The noise was coming from a young woman who stood in the doorway, with sensible shoes, A-line skirt, and an old-lady handbag. There was something weird about her feet that Rosie couldn’t quite put her finger on. A diamond engagement ring, too big for her, sparkled on one hand. The woman was sobbing, leaning against the doorway of the room for support. The girl doctor was speaking to her in low, cool tones, hands in the pocket of her white coat. She strained to listen. ‘… sustained massive head trauma. There was an intracranial bleed which we’ve managed to stop for now, and we’ve put in a drain, which explains the shaved hair.’
They shaved my hair! Dammit, didn’t someone tell them my ears are too big to pull off a crop?
The woman in the doorway was still crying, gasping for breath. ‘But how did it happen? How could she walk in front of a bus? Oh God.’
Rosie had a bad feeling. ‘Grandma? Who’s that? Why do I feel …? Why does it make me feel terrible that she’s crying?’
‘That’s Daisy, love. Your sister.’
I have a sister? But as Grandma said the word it all came flooding back, Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. Daisy a tiny baby in a cheesecloth blanket, so light on Rosie’s knee. Daisy in a graduation robe, refusing to throw her mortarboard in case it hit someone. Daisy climbing into Rosie’s bed with a nightmare, a small child, scratching her with toenails and hogging the covers. Daisy, a teenager, stealing Rosie’s Rimmel Heather Shimmer lipstick but feeling so guilty she bought her a new one. A million index cards slamming into place in the filing cabinets of her brain, making her wince. Every memory stamped with Daisy. Daisy laughing, Daisy crying, Daisy screaming, ‘God, Rosie, you’re so selfish …’
Oh. ‘We had some kind of fight? I … I can’t remember why.’
‘You will. You have to. Anyway, look, she’s here, she’s crying. She still cares.’
What did that mean, you have to? She looked up and saw Grandma was starting to recede, fade and grow smaller somehow. ‘Wait! Please don’t leave me. There’re so many things I don’t understand!’
But the old woman was gone, and so was her knitting for Filou. Who, now that Rosie had remembered him, she seemed to recall had been around when she was small and scared of him. How long did pugs live? How old was she now, for that matter? A grown-up, surely. Daisy, who was apparently her sister, looked to be about thirty, despite being dressed like a sixty-something librarian.
Something else had been bothering her too, hovering around the edge of her vision like a bothersome fly. ‘The thing is, Grandma,’ she said, out loud – although the doctors and her sister didn’t seem to hear – ‘didn’t you die too? Like, years ago?’ And as she thought about it the memory was there – Grandma waxy and cold in her coffin, Rosie crying in a church pew wearing a too-tight grey dress from Jane Norman. Yes, she was almost sure that her grandmother, who had just been here chatting to her and knitting a jumper for a long-gone dog, was dead.
What the hell is going on?
Daisy
Deep breaths, deep breaths. She tried to remember Maura’s advice from the time she’d cried in her annual appraisal. Daisy lacks confidence and that killer instinct we require in our partners. Perhaps she would be more suited to a support post. Her boss had watched her coolly across the desk as Daisy sniffed and hiccupped. ‘Put your emotions aside, Daisy. Just bury them deep down.’
She tried to picture an empty pit, a spade beside it and a pile of soil, somewhere to shove these feelings in and forget about them, but it just made her think of gravesides, which brought up a lot of memories she really didn’t want to relive, and panic seized her once again, squeezing her insides in an iron fist. Rosie had been hit by a bus. A bus. One of those gigantic red double-decker ones, tall as a building.
She tried to make sense of what the doctor was saying, that composed young woman who was likely younger than Daisy herself. Rosie had been thrown up in the air, and landed and hit her head on the road, but luckily – luckily! – the accident had happened only metres from the hospital, and she’d been whisked into A&E as soon as was humanly possible. ‘She suffered a cardiac arrest on the way,’ the doctor recited, as calm as a cold-caller trying to sell mobile phone insurance. ‘We were able to restart her heart and stabilise her, for now at least.’
Daisy grasped at the words, which seemed to slide out of her hands like bars of soap. ‘You mean … her heart stopped? She died?’
‘Well, only technically.’
Daisy was stunned into silence. Dying, even if it was just for a few seconds and only technical, still seemed quite bad. A lot to deal with on a Tuesday morning when she’d been making her breakfast smoothie. Christ, she hadn’t washed the blender, Gary would do his nut, and …
You sound just like Mum. That’s what Rosie would say. Daisy was obsessing over small details, unable to take in the huge ones. The blender, and its washed or unwashed state, was not important right now. She hadn’t even told Gary yet, just run out of the house with her shoes on the wrong feet. He’d left at six, as always, to get into the office and pick off the best clients before anyone else did. He had no idea Rosie was lying here, broken into bits with deep red scrapes all over her pale skin, her hair matted with dirt and blood and a patch of it shaved off, her leg in a cast. The machines around her, the tubes trailing out of her body. She was in a coma, the doctor had said. ‘Will she wake up?’ Daisy asked. ‘Can she hear us?’
She saw the momentary pucker on the doctor’s smooth face. ‘We can’t be sure. I’m sorry.’
‘So … what will happen?’
The doctor hesitated. ‘We have about three days before we have to take out the nasal and breathing tubes and put in something more permanent. Hopefully she’ll wake up in that time. If she does
n’t … Well, there will be decisions to make.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You should discuss it with your parents, Miss Cooke. Excuse me now. Dr Agarwal?’ And she went, ponytail swinging, accompanied by the more sympathetic-looking male doctor, who at least had a kind smile. Daisy was left alone with her comatose sister. Slowly, she approached her. Rosie’s face was blank, a tube hanging out of her mouth. Daisy reached out to touch her hand – it was cold and limp.
‘Rosie?’ she tried. ‘Can you hear me?’ Nothing. Her sister seemed gone somehow. Not asleep, just not there any more. The last words she’d said to her weighed heavy in Daisy’s mouth. You’re so selfish …
This was all crazy. It was almost ten, a time when she’d normally be crouched at her desk inputting numbers, or drinking her fifth coffee of the morning, or meeting with clients. Instead, she was at her sister’s bedside, while outside other relatives sat around in various states of worry or boredom or fear, and across the screen of a silent TV, the gibberish-like subtitles on a property show informed them whether Gareth and Gwen from Swansea had made a profit on the four-bed semi they’d bought at auction. Nothing made sense.
Her phone buzzed – she was squeezing it tight in her hand, leaving smeary fingerprints on the screen. Mum. Arriving Paddington now. She would be here soon. It was a terrible thing, but for a moment Daisy was actually glad Rosie was in a coma. At least that way Rosie and their mother couldn’t get into yet another fight.
Rosie
She missed oblivion. Letting her dry eyes close, getting sucked into the darkness. No name, no aching body, no million questions battering her head like moths around a porch light. What was going on? She was seeing dead people now? How? Rosie didn’t believe in ghosts, or in life after death. Ever since Petey, she’d decided there couldn’t be a God who would be as cruel as that.
Wait. Who was Petey? Rosie prodded that area of her memory, like an empty socket in a gum. The name brought a flood of feelings – sadness, fear, deep, deep love – and two clear images. A blue wall with yellow ducklings painted on. And a woman crying hysterically, her head in her hands. Nothing else.
You’re hallucinating, she told herself firmly. They said you had massive head trauma. Your brain is probably in a right state. You’re imagining things – like your dead grandma, for a start. Yes, that made sense. Her synapses were just a bit … scrambled. Either that or she’d been wrong about the whole afterlife thing. It was probably too late to hedge her bets now, if so. She had to just hope that the massive-fight-with-sister thing was a blip and she was actually an OK person.
Rosie looked around the now-empty room. Daisy had gone out, wiping her face and clutching her phone, and Rosie was still trying to make sense of what the doctors had said. Three days to wake up, or she might never come back. But she was awake, wasn’t she? Couldn’t they see that? She couldn’t move her neck, which seemed to be in some kind of brace, and could only lift her eyelids a crack, so all she could see was the stained ceiling, some old pipes hanging from it, and the door out into the corridor, where people passed like swooping birds, flashes of navy and green and white, efficient voices and footsteps and clipboards and stethoscopes and trolleys. Everything moving while she lay, unable to lift a finger.
‘What do I do?’ she said, though no sound came out. ‘Am I going to wake up?’ She wondered if her grandma was still about. Her dead grandma. What was going on? ‘Is anyone there?’
‘Hello!’ said an irritating shrill voice. ‘It’s me, Rosie!’
Rosie knew that voice. She had a thorough rummage through her brain to try to find it. It was filed somewhere under ‘voices, irritating’ and cross-referenced with ‘friends, primary school’. But … it couldn’t be. ‘Melissa?’
Sure enough, a teenage girl was standing at the end of her bed, dressed in a too-big maroon school uniform, frizzy dark hair sticking out in all directions, smeary glasses. ‘Hi! It’s me! Gosh, we haven’t seen each other, since, what, 1994?’
Melissa had highlighter pen on the collar of her pale pink shirt. Rosie was trying hard to recall facts about her. ‘We were at primary school together? We were friends?’ Yes, that was right. The files in her head marked ‘Melissa’, though incomplete, gave her a warm feeling. Painting their faces green with her watercolour set, only to find it wouldn’t wash off; recording themselves singing 2 Unlimited songs into a Casio tape recorder; rearranging Rosie’s living room into a Gladiators-style assault course … and then, like a pocket of cold water in the sea, a bad feeling took over. Had they stopped being friends? If they were the same age, why was she seeing Melissa as a teenager?
There was an obvious reason for that, but her mind shied away from it.
‘We were friends, yeah, but then I moved away. My mum made me go to private school, because of all the bullying.’ She said it matter-of-factly, as if Rosie would know what it meant. Another nasty sinkhole of feeling had opened up in her stomach, a twinge like a bad tooth that told her, You don’t want to remember this. Her whole memory was like walking through quicksand. ‘Didn’t help, though, in the long run. I mean, duh.’ Melissa indicated her spectral body. If she was still a teenager, and Rosie was grown-up, that must mean …
‘What … Um, Melissa, the thing is, my memory’s a bit mixed up right now, and I can’t really … Are you?’
‘Dead? Oh yes. As a doornail.’
Rosie had so many questions, starting with: how had she died? Was that a rude question? Cautiously, she asked, ‘Um, how long have you been … like this?’
‘Oh, almost twenty years now. Time flies when you’re dead.’
So Melissa had died in her teens. ‘That’s horrific. I’m so sorry. Melissa … do you … could you help me figure out what’s happened to me? I know I’ve been in an accident, but I can’t remember who I am or how it might have happened.’
‘That’s totally normal. I remember when it was me. Brains get a bit upset when they’re dying, or nearly dying, and they go into a panic. Plus, if you hit your head, all the information has sort of got jumbled up, like …’
‘Sort of like knocked-over filing cabinets?’ She was picturing her head strewn with scattered memories. A man with fair hair leaning in to kiss her … the same man smashing into her on the dodgems, the two of them laughing hysterically, Rosie’s red hair streaming around her … Who was he?
‘Filing cabinets, yeah. Oh, that is good. I’m going to steal that.’ Melissa rolled up her ghostly shirtsleeve and produced a sparkly gel ghost pen from her ghost pocket, which she used to scribble a note on her ghost arm. Rosie felt faint. What the hell is going on? ‘Here’s the thing, Rosie. It happened to me as well. When you’re in a coma, and your brain’s been injured, it has to kind of reboot itself before you can wake up. Like a computer reset. I’m told computers really caught on after I died, who knew?’
Rosie was struggling to understand, on top of struggling with the whole fact that she was talking to a ghost/hallucination/whatever. ‘But I am awake. I mean, I can hear things and see things – well, sometimes. I just can’t speak, or move.’ But that would come back, surely. Wouldn’t it?
‘I know. You’re sort of … in-between. Like, everyone’s life flashes before them when they die, right? That’s happening to you too. You just … have the chance to still come back.’
‘So what can I do? How do I wake up properly? The doctor said something about three days?’
‘That’s how long it takes for your brain to reset. So all you can do is try to remember why you’re here. If your brain can make sense of things, it might start responding again and let you wake up. Now, sit back – well, you don’t have a lot of choice about that, I’m afraid, hello, neck brace – and watch what your mind throws up.’
‘What do you mean, what my mind throws up?’
Melissa looked sympathetic. ‘Your memories are about to start coming back to you, Rosie. It’s just what happens.’
‘But that’s good! That’s what I need!’
&nb
sp; ‘Well. They might not, like, come back in the right order. It might be a bit … confusing. And the memories that come – they might not be the ones you’d expect. Or that you really want to remember. But you need to look through them and remember who you are. Why this happened. Anyway, you’ll see what I mean in a minute. Are you ready?’
‘Wait! Ready for what?’ Something was happening. The hospital room was fading, receding again, as if the real world was the ghostly one and Melissa the only real thing.
‘It’s starting,’ said Melissa calmly. ‘Just breathe, Rosie. Keep all hands inside the vehicle and restore tray tables to their upright position.’
‘What?’
‘Just a thing I’m trying. The first memory is coming now.’
But I don’t understand! Rosie wanted to scream but her mouth was stopped up in this reality, and everything was spinning and blurring, and it made her want to puke, and was this death? Was she dying? Oh God.
There was light, a bright grey light. In front of her eyes, blurred like a distant memory, she saw what looked like a dial. Numbers, and the words: day month year. What was this? Was she … travelling in time? No. It wasn’t possible. It was another hallucination, it had to be. The numbers flipped around, in a seemingly haphazard fashion, beyond her control, and then settled on the combination 17 10 2017. A date? Which was … crap, what year was it now? She remembered a glimpse of a calendar she’d caught in A&E, when they were wheeling her in from the ambulance. 2017. That was this year. That was a week ago. OK. This was going to help her make sense of what was going on. She took a deep breath and the world fell away.
17 October 2017 (One week ago)
When Rosie opened her eyes, she was somewhere else. A small, cramped room, with cheap IKEA furniture. What was IKEA? She waited for the gap in her brain that seemed to pop up when she thought of a word but couldn’t remember its meaning. Instead, it was there waiting for her, all her associations for that word – meatballs, row with Jack that time, allen keys, stress.
