Safe With Me

by K. L. Slater

  So long as I can do that, I can be sure of finding out the important information right away. I’ll have an indelible link to the driver so that she can’t escape, however hard she tries. Not now that the police are involved.

  Before I left the scene yesterday, a community support officer took my details. She said the police will be in touch very soon to take my statement, which will be my chance to put key evidence forward as an eyewitness.

  I cut out the article and lay it flat on the dining table before clearing away my breakfast dish and mug.

  Outside, in the car, I’ve just belted up when I remember I haven’t checked the cooker. You can’t be too careful when it comes to electrical appliances. It is always best to be safe rather than sorry.

  I unlock the kitchen door again and stick my head round but I see right away that I have turned off the cooker and put the smiley-face sticker over the switch.

  I lock up again and set off for the hospital, mulling the newspaper article over in my mind.

  They gave the motorbike driver’s full name, Liam Bradbury, stating he is in a stable condition, despite a head injury, and is currently receiving treatment at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre, known locally as the QMC.

  This morning, when I rang the QMC, the receptionist sounded surprised when I told her I was the person who’d sat in the road and held Liam’s hand until the ambulance arrived. She had given me his ward number quite happily after that.

  There is not much traffic on the road and it takes me just under fifteen minutes to get to the hospital.

  I drive by tired retail parks peppered with retired couples ambling from their cars. Young women stride along the pavements, absorbed with talking on their phones and pushing their ignored, sticky toddlers towards town in gaudy buggies.

  I park up and stop by a small, overpriced shop in the hospital foyer to pick up a small basket of fruit and then head towards the lift.

  Up on Ward Eight, they buzz me straight in without asking who I am, which I have to say, rather makes a mockery of the security system.

  I ask a nurse at the desk where Liam’s bed is.

  ‘Are you a relative?’ She peers at me over the counter. ‘It’s just that he’s resting now and you’re out of visiting hours.’

  I explain who I am. ‘I just want to make sure he’s okay,’ I say.

  I follow her down the ward to a small, private room at the end. It almost takes my breath away when I see him.

  Even though he is bruised, dotted with narrow, plastic tubes and an oxygen mask that covers most of his face, I can’t help thinking he’s quite an attractive man. That full head of brown hair shot through with sun-lightened gold, even dull and matted, promises to shine.

  And he looks like Danny. Which sounds odd: putting the words ‘brother’ and ‘attractive’ together, but Danny was a beautiful person, inside and out, and Liam’s square jaw and wide-set eyes makes me feel even more certain that this whole thing was meant to be.

  I place the basket of fruit on a small table next to him.

  ‘He suffered blunt trauma to the head but they’ve got him fairly stable now,’ the nurse says, tugging the creases out of his bed covers. ‘But how his poor gran is going to cope once she gets him home, I don’t know.’

  It occurs to me that he’s a bit old to be living with his gran, but I suppose the price of property these days prohibits lots of people from getting a foothold on the housing ladder so I shouldn’t judge.

  I think about my own humble little terraced house. It is certainly nothing special but at least it’s all mine. Been mine since. . . well, for the last thirteen years anyhow.

  I wish the nurse would just leave us alone so I can replay yesterday’s events in my mind.

  Liam’s flaccid hand lies pale against the powder-blue of the hospital blanket, and his eyelids are perfectly still now, not flickering the way they had been in the road.

  When the nurse steps outside to speak to someone, I get my chance. I reach for my bag and pull out my phone. It doesn’t take me long to get what I need, and it’s a good job, because, in no time at all, I hear the nurse shuffling around behind me again.

  ‘I suppose I’ve got to go now,’ I say.

  ‘Sorry, we have to treat everyone the same when it comes to visiting.’ She looks at me and her face softens a little. ‘Why don’t you come back later, around six? His gran will be here then and I’m sure she’ll be very keen to thank you for everything you did for him.’

  I look down at Liam’s hand.

  ‘It’s no more than anyone else would have done,’ I say.

  * * *

  I walk back to the car in the cold, grey drizzle.

  Usually, if I’m at a loose end, for whatever reason, I go for a walk around Colwick Park, which is just a stone’s throw away from where I live in Sneinton.

  I like to sit watching the ducks bobbing around on one of the lakes; their lives seem so simple and unrushed. I used to take bread out on to the grassy bank most days but they’d all crowd in and go crazy for it, so I stopped doing that.

  To keep things functioning properly, you have to keep a firm control. There’s nothing else for it.

  Today it is far too cold and wet for visiting the park, so I drive back home to wait until the official hospital visiting time starts at six. Before going inside the house, I pop next door to Mrs Peat’s.

  I tap at the small side window, and she looks up from her cross-stitch.

  ‘Everything alright, Mrs Peat?’ I call through the glass.

  She smiles and nods, giving me a little wave with a fleshy hand.

  We have a code: I tap on the window, and if she needs me to pop in she’ll beckon, and then I go round the back and let myself in with the spare key which is hidden under the rusty milk-bottle stand by the door.

  Sometimes, I just go in anyway whether she needs me or not. I’ll often have a cup of tea with her to break the monotony of her day. I owe her that much.

  ‘I wish you’d call me Joan,’ she always scolds me, but I can’t do it. I have lived next door to her all my life and some things, well, they stay sacred, don’t they?

  Mrs Peat will always be Mrs Peat in my eyes.

  Between the two of us, me and her care assistant, Linda, we make sure she is well looked after. She isn’t any trouble really.

  Her useless daughter, Janet-Mae, lives over fifty miles away and visits once a month if Mrs Peat is lucky. But I’m guessing she will be over fast enough, though, the day one of us finds her poor mother stiff as a board in her armchair and it’s time to sell the house.

  Of course, I’ve never said as much.

  When I get back home, Albert is sitting by the back door, waiting patiently. I always try to go straight home at the end of my shift so I can feed him at the same time each day. Albert seems to understand the value of routine.

  People tend to think cats aren’t social animals but they’re wrong. Albert depends on me in every way. Naturally, I never let him go out at night; the thought of him wandering the streets is enough to stop me sleeping. I know how horrible people can be, and it’s not always strangers that will hurt your animals.

  I close my eyes and squeeze the painful memories back inside the imaginary box at the back of my head, like my therapist taught me. Now is not the time for dwelling in the past.

  After I’ve fed Albert, I flick through the other local newspapers I bought to see if I can find anything else about the accident. There are a couple of mentions, just one or two lines, nothing like the Nottingham Post did. I cut them out anyway and file them with the other report.

  I open a new folder on my laptop and make the first entries, noting down the time of my visit to the hospital that morning and Liam’s condition. I make doubly sure to record the comments the nurse made about him living with his gran.

  I’m not leaving anything to chance.

  I put Albert out into the hallway so he won’t disturb me. I open up the photograph on my phone; it has turned out much better th
an I expected.

  I’d snapped it in a hurry when the nurse popped outside the room, and I couldn’t even be sure the camera had focused properly. But the image is very clear and shows Liam lying pale and broken in his hospital bed, covered with tubes and monitoring pads.

  I create a second file on my laptop and save the photo in there, once I’ve emailed it to myself.

  It’s such a shame I didn’t think to take one of him as he lay injured in the road yesterday. I imagine Liam will probably be annoyed with me about that when he’s feeling better.

  Things haven’t really turned out as I’d hoped or expected today.

  I imagined getting to the hospital this morning and finding Liam sitting up in bed, ready to tell me everything the police have found out about the woman who mowed him down.

  I look at the photo I took of him again and my heart feels heavy. He is still unconscious from the drugs they gave him.

  He doesn’t even know I exist.

  I listen to the clock ticking and Albert scratching at the sitting room door to be let in again.

  I’m beginning to regret ringing in sick this morning. What if the management gets someone else to do my round and that person does a better job?

  I should have gone in. I can’t risk them finding out the real reason I’m managing to get my round finished without putting in any overtime.

  When I move from the table and sit down in the armchair, I glance down at the threadbare tweedy material where, for years, Mother’s own forearms rested.

  There is an intermittent low hum from the refrigerator but otherwise the house is silent. The air hangs thick and heavy, seeming to wrap itself around me like a cloak dripping with unpleasant memories.

  When we were kids, no one was allowed to sit in Mother’s chair. She knew if her cushion had been moved even an inch.

  She liked things to stay just the way she left them, you see.

  I close my eyes and feel the rough fabric pressing against the thin, pale skin of my wrists.

  She can’t do anything about me sitting here now.

  None of them can.

  Four

  Joan Peat

  She always stayed in the middle room until after Anna had left for work.

  It wasn’t necessary for Joan to sit by the window watching, though: listening was usually enough.

  Their little side street was quiet. There weren’t many cars that actually used it, particularly very early in the morning when her neighbour went to work.

  Today, Anna had broken her routine and had left the house later than she usually would to go to work and returned way before her shift finished. And now Joan had just heard the back door slam – she was off out again.

  Anna had parked her car at the front of the house. Joan watched her as she approached the driver’s door.

  She’d piled on weight over the last couple of years, Joan had noticed. She seemed to live in either her Royal Mail uniform, or jeans, boots and a grey oversized sweatshirt which made her look rather slovenly.

  Joan had rarely seen Anna in make-up, and in recent weeks she had taken to wearing a rather unflattering dark brown baseball cap that only highlighted her pasty, slightly bloated complexion.

  Still, Joan firmly believed that the Anna she used to know was in there somewhere; she was just hiding away, too afraid to come out. She lived in hope that someday there would be a glimmer of that enthusiasm for life that the young Anna had.

  As soon as her neighbour drove away, Joan hoisted herself up from the armchair and walked into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.

  Both Anna and Linda, her care assistant, were under the impression Joan was unable to move of her own accord. Joan didn’t consider the fact that she could move was a full-blown fib; it was just that Joan hadn’t furnished them with the truth. There was a difference.

  Anyway, she often did have difficulty, and even on a good day she wasn’t exactly sprinting around the house like Mo Farah.

  So Joan preferred to think of it as a little white lie.

  Generally, it was true that she could still get around without any assistance. Some days, she even made it upstairs, if she was careful not to push herself too hard and took the odd breather on the way up.

  It was so nice seeing Anna and Linda regularly. If they thought Joan could manage, they’d probably stop coming round as often, and that was the last thing she wanted.

  It was surprisingly easy to fool other people: even the district nurse, Jasminda, who called on her every couple of months to check her swollen, ulcered legs.

  They were all so trusting of Joan and took her completely at her word. After all, why would she mislead them over something like that?

  Well, loneliness was the reason why.

  Joan thought it got used a lot, that word: ‘lonely’. It got used by people who hadn’t a clue of its true meaning. People who had no experience of the suffocating sheet of silence that attached itself to you like cling film from the moment you woke up.

  It got used by people who had no concept of what it felt like to have to put the radio on in the other room in order to pretend family or friends were over to visit.

  But, in Anna and Linda, Joan knew she still had real people to talk to most days and that helped her to breathe. It helped her to get through each long week, a day at a time.

  All of the people who Joan saw on a regular basis came here because they thought she couldn’t move and couldn’t manage without their help. And, in a way, they were right.

  The truth was, she really couldn’t manage without them.

  Joan felt lucky to have such caring souls around her.

  And after all, she had always tried to do her bit in the past, helping others by doing what she could to ease their burden.

  Take Anna.

  They had been neighbours for nearly thirty years now, and Joan had virtually fostered her when she first came out of the hospital. Until she turned eighteen, anyhow.

  Anna had no one else left in the world to turn to.

  The way Joan looked at it, her legs might be on their way out but there was nothing wrong with her memory or her hearing, even if she was well on the wrong side of her seventies now.

  Unfortunately, that also meant she was able to recall every detail of what happened next door thirteen years ago.

  What a terrible business it had been.

  She could remember just as clearly the day that the Clarkes first became her neighbours.

  There had been a light dusting of snow overnight on the morning that Monica and Jack Clarke arrived next door with their little girl, Anna.

  Joan and her husband, Arthur, had heard that Jack Clarke had been a faceworker at Annesley Colliery but he’d been trapped in a piece of machinery on a shift and lost his arm.

  The Clarkes used the compensation to buy the little terrace next door to Joan and Arthur, to be nearer to the city so that Monica could look for some part-time employment there, apparently.

  Arthur had still been alive then, of course. Fit as a fiddle he was, cycling a thirty-mile round trip to the factory every day. That was two years before the pancreatic cancer got him, six weeks from the diagnosis to his death.

  Joan placed her cup and saucer down gently on the coffee table and looked out onto the road.

  Monica Clarke had been snooty and unfriendly from the start; although quite where her airs and graces came from, Joan couldn’t imagine.

  ‘A bottle blonde with no manners and far too much cleavage on show,’ was how Arthur had described Monica when she first emerged from the removal van Jack had hired.

  Monica had ignored them waving hello from this very window. Arthur had always been such a good judge of character.

  Little Anna, though: she’d turned right around and given them the biggest smile.

  Sweet little thing, she was. All fair curls and blue eyes, like a china doll.

  Joan and Arthur’s daughter, Janet-Mae, was at university by this time, studying for her business degree at Manchester.
She came home when she could but that wasn’t very often.

  When Joan had set eyes on little Anna, her heart swelled with memories of when Janet-Mae was small and still needed her. It had been too long.

  Joan stared out now at the space where the Clarkes had parked their van all those years ago. It had rained overnight and the gutter was filthy, scudded with mud and leaves and clusters of grit that stuck to the edge of the kerb like tumours.

  She averted her eyes and recalled how Anna had stood out the front waving away at them until Monica came out and grabbed her arm, yanking her roughly away.

  It wasn’t long, of course, before they discovered Monica’s penchant for alcohol and men.

  As a regular churchgoer, Joan made a concerted effort to avoid joining in with the neighbours’ whispered tales of Monica’s colourful nightlife, whispered over garden walls and at the corner shop. But it wasn’t easy.

  From her upstairs window, late at night, Joan saw Monica on more than one occasion in the arms of a man who most definitely wasn’t her husband. Far more likely someone else’s.

  The Clarkes had only lived next door for a year when Monica fell pregnant with Daniel.

  Dear Lord, the arguments had gone on for weeks. With the help of an upturned glass against the joining wall, Joan could often hear what was being said virtually word for word.

  Suffice to say, Jack Clarke seemed to be utterly convinced the child wasn’t his, and within the month he’d left home. Leaving behind a pregnant Monica and his daughter Anna.

  That was the last time the Peats saw him.

  Six months later Jack Clarke was dead. They heard he’d had a drunken argument with an HGV in town and, predictably, had come off worst.

  That was when little Anna first started visiting Joan and Arthur regularly.

  Five

  It always amazes me how it is so easy to appear one way to the people around you but to live inside as someone else entirely.

  You have to put the years of practise in first, of course. But in the long run, it is all worth it when you see someone unravel and you can stand back and think, ‘I did that’.