Henry Hoey Hobson

by Christine Bongers

  Instead I took the dish from his hand and started wiping it dry. ‘Not always,’ I said. ‘It can be good too, if you let it.’

  He turned and nodded slowly, as if trying to work out what he wanted to say next. ‘Caleb and Vee and Manny are good people to have on your side. Good people to have living next door–’

  I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, but I had to agree with him. ‘Yeah, I guess it was lucky you found them this house.’

  He hesitated, as if about to say something more, then looked over my shoulder, his face changing as he focused on the doorway behind me.

  It was Manny, with Caleb and Vee in tow.

  Caleb’s face was even paler than usual, his eyes troubled. There was no trace of Vee’s usual amused look. Manny’s crooked face had sagged into haggard lines. He walked over, cupped a heavy hand on the back of my neck, and gently squeezed.

  He took a deep breath and that’s when I knew.

  ‘What’s wrong? Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

  He hesitated, opening up a huge gaping hole in my gut.

  ‘It’s Mum, isn’t it? That phone call – Where is she? What’s happened?’

  I grabbed the grinning devil’s face on the front of his ridiculous shirt.

  ‘Tell me,’ I demanded wildly. ‘What’s happened to my mum?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Vee stepped forward and put an arm around me, unknotting my hand from the front of Manny’s shirt. Her voice was so gentle it took a moment for her words to strike home, a direct hit to the heart.

  ‘She has been in an accident, Henry. She is in the hospital–’

  The world tilted and its bottom fell out. I grabbed the edge of the bench to steady myself against a dizzying rush of vertigo. Another voice cut in.

  ‘Manny has spoken to her and she is going to be all right–’

  ‘–But she has to go into surgery, Henry–’

  Faces spun and blurred, their voices washing over me. Telling me stuff I didn’t want to know, that I needed to know, that I was afraid to know. I lost track of who was talking, their words merging and whirling around in my head.

  A freak accident ... A red light ... An old bloke and a heart attack ... Mum’s little Hyundai smashed and spinning ... hitting a pole.

  Hands gripped my arms. Manny’s face swam into focus, his usually booming voice rumbling soft and low. ‘Henry, she’s going to be all right. I spoke to her, and to the Emergency doctor in at Royal Brisbane and–’

  ‘Why are they operating on her?’ I interrupted, my voice cracking. ‘You said she had to go into surgery–’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Her leg is broken. They have to pin it. And maybe her arm too, they’re not sure–’

  Something shrivelled and died in my chest at the thought of my tiny mum, broken and alone in the hospital. And of my last text to her, missing the x’s.

  ‘I have to see her.’ The uncertainty that flitted across their faces made me feel like shouting. ‘You have to take me to her. I can’t leave her in there on her own.’

  Caleb put a hand on my shoulder, his voice gentle, but firm. ‘They said to leave it till tomorrow, Henry. They’re not sure what time they’ll be able to operate, and it’ll be a while after that before she wakes up–’

  I shook his hand off. ‘I don’t care. I’ll wait. I have to see her.’

  Manny shook his head helplessly. ‘Henry, they’ve given her something for the pain. She was woozy from the drugs when I spoke to her, and wasn’t making much sense. Maybe it’s better if you wait–’

  ‘I’ll take you,’ said Anders. He stepped forward and stood next to me, facing up to the other three adults in the room. ‘She’s his mum. If he wants to see her tonight, then I’ll take him tonight.’

  It was the longest speech I had ever heard from his lips.

  Manny’s furrowed brow showed his indecision. But after a brief pause, Vee rubbed my arm and nodded. ‘It is right that you should go. Anders knows his way around the Royal; he will take you to your mum.’

  Caleb said nothing. His eyes had been tracking a path between Anders and me. They flared with a sudden recognition, then narrowed. His gaze stayed fixed on Anders as though he needed an answer to a question that hadn’t yet been asked.

  I didn’t know or care what any of them thought. ‘I just want to see my mum. And I want to go now.’

  Caleb finally nodded, his voice curt. ‘All right. Anders, you take Henry. Let him see Lydia, then bring him back here to sleep. We’ll make a bed up for him in the studio. I’ll talk to you then.’

  Even I heard the warning note in his voice, but Anders’ only response was to pull a jangle of keys out of the pocket of his jeans and raise an eyebrow in my direction.

  I nodded. I didn’t care where I spent the night or who was going to take me to the hospital. The only thing that I cared about was seeing my mum. Nothing else mattered.

  The three of them parted to let us through and together we walked out into the black night.

  Anders pulled open the front passenger door of a late-model Mazda station wagon and leaned in, shifting a wooden drawing box and a pile of sketchbooks off the seat and onto the floor.

  The back seats were folded down and stacked with canvasses, an easel and more boxes of paints. The only clear space in the entire car was the driver’s seat. It looked like Anders hadn’t shared his personal space with anyone in a long, long time.

  I got in, careful to keep my feet away from his drawing books. I buckled up, the solid lump of my old mobile phone bulging from the side pocket of my shorts. I fished it out as Anders slid into the driver’s seat.

  I should have thought of it before. With shaking hands, I called Mum’s number. Anders barely spared me a glance as he pulled away from the kerb, his hands sure and steady on the wheel.

  The flat brrt, brrrtseemed to go on forever.

  Pick up. Please, just pick up.

  Mum hated missing calls and had set her phone to maximum ring time before it diverted to message bank. I had almost given up, when a voice cut in.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mum? Are you OK? I’m on my way–’

  ‘Sorry, I’m one of the night nurses in Emergency. I heard the phone ringing. Who are you after?’

  ‘My mum. Lydia Hoey Hobson. She had a car accident–’ My voice broke and finished in a choked whisper. ‘Can I talk to her, please?’

  There was a brief hesitation and her voice softened. ‘Hang on a sec, love. I’ll see what I can find out.’

  She must have put the mobile down. I could hear phones ringing in the background, muffled voices, the whoompof something heavy landing on something soft.

  I stared blindly out the car window.

  Royal Brisbane was only a few minutes up the road and the evening peak hour had fizzled to a light stream of traffic; we were almost there.

  The hospital loomed like a fortress against the night sky. Lights shining on all floors, across huge interlinked buildings, thousands of patients, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and somewhere in there, one tiny bird-like mum with a broken leg and a broken wing, waiting and hurting–

  My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t know where to go, how to find her. The place was a maze, I wasn’t even sure where to start looking–

  ‘Hello? Are you still there? Hello?’

  ‘Yes–’ My voice was thick, hardly able to squeeze past the lump in my throat. ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Your mum’s getting another X-ray; she’s listed for surgery tonight.’ The voice sounded sympathetic, but busy. ‘Listen, love, she could go into Pre-Op any time, so if you’d like to call back in the morning–’

  ‘No, we’re already here–’ Anders had pulled into the high-rise parking station and was winding his way up the ramp. ‘We’re at the hospital, and we’re on our way in now. Where is she? Where should we go?’

  There was a long pause on the line, then a sigh. ‘All right, love. Go into the main reception area on the
Ground Floor. They’ll direct you where to go from there.’

  For once I was glad for Anders’ silence. I didn’t trust myself to speak and didn’t want to start blubbering like a baby in front of him.

  He led the way in from the car park as though he’d been there a million times. No wrong turns, no asking for directions, straight to the reception area where we lined up at the enquiry counter, behind a lady with a screaming baby on her hip.

  It seemed to take forever for the frazzled mother to explain what she needed to know, and an age more for the wooden-faced receptionist to retrieve the answers from the hospital system. Around me, people waited in a stupor of boredom and resignation, while I fidgeted, drumming my fingers against the sides of my shorts, shifting from one foot to the other, jiggling one leg, then the other, and still it wasn’t our turn.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer and turned to Anders, impassive at my side. I was desperate to fill the endless wait with something, anything, even a conversation. ‘How come you know your way around in here?’

  His eyes rested on me for a moment and then flitted back to the receptionist.

  ‘Manny,’ was all he said.

  A whole unspoken story ballooned out from that single spoken word. His broken face rose up before me. The huge scars twisting down his neck and disappearing under his shirt. The winces when he straightened that he covered with a booming laugh and a wink–

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Anders answered for both of us. ‘Lydia Hoey Hobson. Road accident. Admitted tonight.’

  He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but he knew how to get the essentials across. After the last inquiry, the receptionist was probably grateful. She tapped rapidly onto a keyboard, eyes searching the screen in front of her.

  ‘She’s still in Emergency. There’re no beds available, so she’ll stay there till she goes into surgery. She’s on the list for tonight.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Anders put an arm round my shoulders and walked me away from the desk.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I pushed at him, but his arm had no give; if anything it clamped tighter. ‘You didn’t even ask if we could see her–’

  ‘I know where she is.’ He stopped and forced me to face him. ‘I can take you down there, but be prepared–’

  His mouth worked as though he was trying to find his way through the unfamiliar landscape of words. ‘Your mother will be drugged and–’ He hesitated. ‘Pain strips everything away. Seeing her like that will be hard for you–’

  ‘I don’t care. She needs me to be there. She doesn’t have anybody else.’

  As soon as the words left my lips, I knew they were true. She had no-one else. No other family. No real friends she could rely on. We’d never stayed anywhere long enough – she’d never been free of work, and of me, long enough – to make any.

  There was just me.

  An almost-teenage boy who was more afraid than he had ever been in his life.

  ‘She needs me,’ I repeated, forcing a stubborn note into my voice to cover the fear. To cover the truth that I couldn’t bear to say out loud.

  That I was the one who needed to see her.

  Because she was all that I had too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  He led me down to the emergency department on the lower ground floor.

  It was like all those hospital shows on TV. Patients lying on trolleys in corridors, streams of people and activity flowing around them. Old people with drips coming out of their arms, oxygen masks on their faces, young people, dazed and bloodied, from a fight, an accident. Doctors with stethoscopes, nurses with charts, wardsmen ferrying more trolleys into and out of lifts.

  Anders had told me to prepare myself, but I wasn’t prepared. Not even a little bit.

  The sight of her hit me like a fist in the chest. Tiny and helpless on a trolley at the end of the corridor. Tubes running out of one arm, the other strapped against her body. Bags of clear liquid hooked onto a stand attached to the side of her bed. The rigid outline of something running the length of her leg under the sheet that covered her tiny frame.

  Her face was turned towards me, her eyes closed. The pain had stripped away all her defences. She looked like a little kid, exhausted, tossed onto a mattress and abandoned.

  I ran towards her, but there were so many tubes and bandages, I didn’t know which bit was safe to touch.

  ‘Mum–’ I whispered.

  Her eyes fluttered open, and focused with an effort on my face.

  ‘Honey-bun...’ Tubes swayed as one hand reached up and traced the outline of my face. ‘What are you doing here?’ I leaned closer to catch the wispy words as they drifted from her lips. ‘I told Manny to keep you with him tonight–’

  ‘I had to see you, Mum. I couldn’t leave you here on your own–’

  She pressed cold fingers to my mouth, her pale lips stretching in an awful attempt at a smile. ‘Didn’t wear my lucky shoes, honey-bun.’ Her eyelids trembled with the effort to stay open. ‘They’ve given me something – for the pain ... you don’t need to worry, honey ... I’ve got room service here, they change the sheets every day...’

  Her eyes closed and then snapped open, as though something from the back of her mind had clicked through to the front. Her hand slipped down and latched onto the neck of my T-shirt. She pulled me towards her, a note of panic rising in her voice. ‘Where’s my bag? What have they done with my things?’

  I looked around and could see nothing that looked like the shoulder bag she took to work with her every day.

  ‘Some nurse answered your mobile phone when I rang, so your bag must be here somewhere.’

  I ducked down and checked under the bed. A plastic bag was tucked onto a shelf below the mattress. ‘I think your stuff ’s in here.’

  She tried to prop herself onto her good arm for a better look. ‘Is there a big yellow envelope in there?’ Pain rippled across her face. ‘Oh God, tell me it’s there–’

  ‘Calm down, I’m looking.’ I pulled out her shoulder bag and emptied its contents onto her bed.

  Wallet. Keys. Brochures of houses for sale. Pens. Notebook. Mobile phone.

  No yellow envelope.

  ‘It’s not here, Mum. What’s in it?’

  ‘Oh God.’ She collapsed back onto her pillow with a moan. ‘It must still be in the car.’

  ‘What? What’s still in the car?’

  ‘The contract.’ She took a breath. ‘Henry, you have to find it. It’s a contract on that house on the river.’

  Her tiny fist knotted in my shirt, a desperate note entering her voice. ‘They signed. They both signed. For one-point-nine-five million dollars. That’s nearly fifty thousanddollars in commission. But without that contract, there’s no sale. I can’t get them to sign another one while I’m stuck in here. We need that money, honey-bun. Especially now.’

  Her breath came in short gasps as she struggled to sit up. ‘You have to find that contract, Henry. Get Manny to help you. Caleb. Anybody. But you have to find it or somebody else will make the sale while I’m laid up in here–’

  ‘OK, OK, I will. Just stop, you’ll hurt yourself.’ I helped her settle back onto her pillow, her face ashen. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll find it and take it into your work in the morning. I promise.’

  ‘Lydia Hoey Hobson?’

  A giant of a wardsman checked the chart at the foot of the bed. A huge job-stopper of a tattoo, a double strand of barbed wire, coiled around his neck. ‘Time to go get you ready for surgery, Ma’am.’

  He leaned down and helped me pack everything back into the bag. ‘You might want to keep your mobile in here so your boy can talk to you. But that wallet should go somewhere safe–’

  ‘Take it, honey-bun. You’ll need it more than I will–’ She forced a smile. ‘Got room service here, remember?’

  I took the wallet and stepped back as he unlocked the trolley’s brakes. Her hand fell away from my shirt, but her eyes never left me. Not even when the tattooed orderly wheeled
the bed around and trundled my mother away.

  ‘You all right, love?’

  The voice was familiar; the night nurse I’d spoken to on the phone. She was neither young nor old, but something in between. She looked like someone’s mum. Someone else’s, not mine.

  I sucked in a deep shuddering breath. ‘Where are they taking her?’

  ‘Fourth floor. Pre-Op, then surgery.’ She looked at her watch. ‘There’s no point sticking around here. It could be hours and she’ll be groggy after the general anaesthetic. Not to mention exhausted, after all she’s been through.’

  She looked past me and smiled at someone behind me. ‘You should take your boy home. I can give you a number to call, to see how the surgery goes. But better you come back tomorrow after his mum’s had a chance to get some sleep.’

  Anders nodded politely. My cheeks burned, but it was easier to let it ride than to try to explain that he was practically a stranger.

  I didn’t want to share the story of my life, the story of my mum’s life, with a night nurse at Royal Brisbane. I didn’t want to admit that our family was stretched so thin that we had to rely on the kindness of strangers in a crisis.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked. It sounded abrupt, even a bit rude. But he didn’t react.

  ‘Talking to the doctor,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  He led the way back out to the car park. I found myself telling him about the lost contract, Mum’s desperate need to get it back.

  ‘She thinks it must still be in the car. They would have towed it, wouldn’t they? Where would it be now? Do the police take it? Do they have a smashed-car yard somewhere that the cars go to until their owners get out of hospital? Do you think Manny or Caleb would take me there tomorrow?’

  He stopped so suddenly, I rammed right into the back of him.

  ‘No. I’ll get it.’ Something in his face warned me not to pursue it, and we walked the rest of the way to the car in silence.

  It wasn’t until we’d wound our way back down car park ramps and slipped into the traffic flow of Herston Road that I broached the topic again.