‘Honestly?’ I say. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if that is weird. I thought I was thinking about death every second, but I don’t think I can be, because I’ve never thought about that.’
‘Anyway, I’m just fighting the pain. I don’t even mind it – I want to feel it. I want to be in it, right up until that moment when I am not.’ She looks suddenly anxious. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that, will you?’
‘No,’ I promise her, taking a few steps into the room. ‘Of course not. You can tell me all your batshit-crazy, sick-girl stuff, and I will keep it secret for you. I swear.’ I pick up the book I lent her. ‘Did you manage to read any of this?’
‘Mum’s reading it to me. I was feeling better, but now that’s gone again and it hurts a lot. But I’m afraid to sleep. Afraid not to open my eyes again; afraid of what will happen to Mum and Katy if I don’t. I wish there were things I could do, things I could know so that I didn’t have to worry about them.’
‘What sort of things?’ Tentatively, I sit on the edge of her chair, and I am ashamed to admit that I am nervous, frightened about being so close to her. Frightened that with Death so close by – it couldn’t help but see me there too. But if it did, I would fight the bastard off again, and for me at least there was a chance I’d win. No such chance for Issy.
‘Well, Mum needs a boyfriend,’ she says a little crossly. ‘She says she doesn’t, but she does. She’s not old at all, and I think a boyfriend would be a good thing. Dad, our dad, left us when we were really little, and she’s been alone ever since. She needs to think about herself a bit more. And they should get a dog. I’m a cat person, but Katy’s been begging for a dog practically her whole life, and I read somewhere that dogs make you get out the house and meet people. I think Mum could easily meet someone dog walking, and Katy would be happy too. She used to sleep in my bed, before I got sick, if she was scared or something. If she had a dog to sleep in bed with her … If I knew that these things were going to happen, then … I’d really feel more ready. I don’t feel ready.’
She stops talking, exhausted, and her eyes close for a long moment, her brow furrowed in concentration as a wave of pain hits her. After a long moment she opens her eyes again.
‘Issy.’ I sit down next to her. ‘This fucking sucks.’
I’d hoped the swearing might make her smile again, but her face is set with frustration.
‘It fucking does,’ she agrees. ‘But I am glad, for what it’s worth. I’m glad that you get to go home. Maybe, would you just keep in touch with Mum? She’s spent all of the last few years looking after me and my little sister, and there is no one else. Maybe after I’m gone, you could Facebook her sometimes, ask her how she’s doing? I wouldn’t ask but … I don’t know who else to ask.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Sure, I’ll Facebook your mum, I’ll check in on her. Make sure she’s OK.’
‘You will do it, and not just say you’ll do it to make a dying kid feel better?’
‘I remember when you used to be shy,’ I say. ‘Yes, I promise. I’ll do it. And now how about, until your mum gets back, I read a bit of this book to you? I can do all the voices and everything.’
‘Hope,’ she says, ‘don’t read me the book. Tell about you, and everything you’ve done from the age of fourteen to twenty-one. Tell me about the boys you’ve been out with, what was it like when you had sex. What was the first time you got drunk? Tell me that instead of the story.’
‘My first kiss …’ I take a breath. ‘Well, I was old. I was eighteen, and it was at a free festival in Regent’s Park that we all went to, the girls in my class, after our A levels. It’s one of the few times I’ve done something without Ben. My group of girls got chatting to another group of boys, and once they’d all paired up it was just me, the lame chick, and this guy, the lame bloke. I was a crap flirt but luckily he didn’t care much for flirting – he just snogged the face off me. It was sort of damp and intense, and I was worried about germs, but I liked it more than I didn’t. That was also my first breast-squeezing experience, which I think was better for him than me.
‘Sex. Well, look, this might disappoint you, but the one time I had sex, it was kind of boring and awkward and over really quickly, and I didn’t know much about it, and afterwards it was sticky. But I was pleased I’d done it,’ I refrain from telling her it was that same boy, the boy I met at the concert, and that for about three months after that first kiss, we’d gone out and kissed intently, mostly with his hand up my top. The sex had been a mistake, really; soon afterwards we stopped seeing each other, and my poor breasts were quite grateful. I don’t tell her about the Ben kiss; it’s hard to explain a kiss that you don’t understand yourself.
‘I kissed Jack Fletcher at our year-eight school disco,’ she tells me, with a tiny little smile. ‘It was like magic, like butterflies and rainbows, and there was music, and he was really sweet. We went out for a bit, but I chucked him when he went to Canada for the summer holidays.’
‘Well, what are you asking me for, then?’ I joke. ‘You’ve had more experience than me.’
‘Because I wondered what it’s like to be in love,’ she said. ‘I thought you might have been. I read about it in books, of course, but I just wonder what it’s like.’
‘Like butterflies and rainbows, I think,’ I say. ‘And feeling crazy and exhilarated and high, and sometimes terrible and sad. But mostly feeling like you and the person you love are part of your own little universe that just the two of you have made, and everyone else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s probably like that.’
‘Yes.’ She reaches out and I hold her hand in mine, holding on tight to her, knowing that somehow all she wanted was an anchor to keep her in this life for a few minutes more, until her mother could hold her again. ‘I think it’s like that too. Hope, would you make me one other promise too? Before you start reading?’
‘You don’t want me to do all the voices?’ I ask.
‘When you get out of here,’ she says, ‘kiss as many boys as you can. Kiss them all, until you get butterflies and rainbows … Kiss them all for me.’
‘Yes,’ I say, simply, because no other words will come.
‘And read something from the end, I really want to know what happens in the end.’ I open the book at a random page near the back, and start to read.
Ben arrives at dinner time.
Ben likes arriving at meal times, because the nurses all fancy him, he says. I say they want to mother him, and that’s why they sneak him pudding, which today is sticky toffee pudding. We don’t worry about healthy eating in here; we are the condemned – we just get to eat what is delicious, even those of us who’ve had our sentences temporarily commuted. Whenever we can, we are encouraged to eat together. There’s a long table in the dining room that we can sit at. There’s not many of us here at the moment. Just me and Ben, and this bloke called Clive, who seems pretty chipper even though he is entirely yellow.
‘Caravans, huh?’ Ben has found out that Clive’s passion in life is his mobile home. ‘So you can just hit the open road, whenever you like? Wherever you lay your hat is your home?’
‘Well, yes, but mostly we go to Margate,’ Clive says. ‘I’m trying to get Cilla to sell it now, while I’m still around to deal with chancers, but she won’t do it; just keeps crying every time I mention it.’
‘Well, maybe she wants to keep on caravanning,’ Ben suggests, which is such a gigantic lapse of tact that I want to bury my head in my butternut squash mash.
‘She can’t drive,’ Clive tells him thoughtfully, without turning a hair. ‘I’m just in here while she goes to her sister’s for the weekend. I could book her some lessons. Do you think she’d like driving lessons?’
‘No,’ I say out loud, when I really don’t mean to.
‘No?’ Clive looks crestfallen, and I curse my mouth and its determination to talk.
‘Well, I mean, I can’t drive either, and the idea of trying, especially around here, in London, makes me feel
a bit sick. And maybe your wife, maybe she wouldn’t want something else to take on when she already has a lot on her plate.’
Clive and Ben watch me for a long moment.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Well, you know: learn to drive and stop being such a girl?’ Ben suggests.
‘This from the only one of us in this room that moisturises,’ I retort.
‘I think she might have a point, you know,’ Clive says.
‘Or,’ Ben interjects, as I knew he would, ‘or, maybe it would be something just for Cilla, you know, to take her mind off everything. Time for her, and also setting her for a little bit of independence. I actually think that’s a very lovely and thoughtful idea, Clive.’
I watch Clive brighten and smile again, and look at Ben, who shrugs and steals the end of one of my sausages. ‘Come on, eat up. Pud – it’s pud time!’
It’s an effort not to fork him in the eye.
‘We can go out again,’ he says just after shift change.
I’ve pulled up the blind on the inside window to my room, and I was watching the corridor for any signs of activity around Issy’s room. Her mum came back less than fifteen minutes after I started reading, her face scrubbed and shining, a smile pinned on.
‘Your mum’s here,’ I said to Issy, who had allowed her eyes to close. ‘She can read the last few pages to you.’
It had been quiet ever since – no more than routine activity in and out – but I can’t take my mind off it. I can’t stop thinking about Issy, and about how she will never know the ending of her own story.
‘You are days away from being released.’ Ben interrupts my thoughts. ‘And the nice nurse, the one that fancies me, says I can take you out for a stroll down the market.’
The nice nurse who fancies him is how he refers to all of them, but I think it would probably be Stella.
‘The market. Oh God, the market is full of people,’ I say. ‘And noise. And muggers. It’s for tourists, not real people.’
‘Hey, tourists are real people too.’ Ben laughs. ‘Come on, get your glad rags on.’
Stella arrives in the doorway before I can protest further.
‘Tell him it’s not good for me to go out,’ I plead.
‘Except it is quite good for you to go out,’ she says, a little apologetically.
‘But it’s winter. I mean, what if I catch something else, right now, tonight? From a tourist? Ebola, anything. I nearly collapsed going to get a tea earlier!’
‘It’s more like autumn, and it’s pretty mild out,’ Stella says. ‘And you did go to the pub the other night, and it brought the roses out in your cheeks.’
I give her my best ‘don’t you remember how we cried together’ look, but she doesn’t seem to want to see it.
She looks at Ben. ‘Could we have a moment?’
‘Oh sure, yeah. You have to do medical stuff, right?’ I’ll go hang out and wait for you on the comfy chairs.’
Once he is gone, Stella closes the door to my room.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she says. ‘It was unprofessional of me to cry on your shoulder. I hope you accept my apology. You caught me at a … very tired moment.’
A long moment of silence dwindles between us.
‘It’s OK,’ I say, eventually. ‘I suppose when you’re in somewhere like this, all the patients are so caught up in their own struggles … And to be honest, it made a sort of change, me feeling sorry for someone else, other than myself. I thought being in here was the worst kind of punishment, but … it put things in perspective. I mean, even the nurses are depressed.’
That wasn’t quite how I meant it to come out, but, luckily, I don’t seem to have offended her.
‘Well, I shouldn’t be bringing my problems to work,’ Stella says, choosing her words carefully. ‘And I shouldn’t be letting them get to me, in front of you. It’s not fair. You could make a complaint, if you like, and you would be completely within your rights.’
‘That would also make me basically evil. I mean, what sort of person reports a nurse in a hospice for crying?’
Stella rewards me with a small smile. ‘Thank you.’
I don’t think our chat helped her at all. If anything, she looks worse – worn out with sadness, like it’s rubbing away at the surface of her skin, blurring her features.
‘Do you want to talk about it? The reason why you cried? You can talk to me … I talk to you. I mean, we can be friends, even though you’re one of the nurses here, can’t we?’
Stella thinks for a moment, and I see the shadows of secrets playing out in her expression.
‘I can’t burden you,’ she says simply. ‘It wouldn’t be right. But you can. You can talk about whatever you like to me, anytime, OK?’
‘It might not be allowed,’ I say, ‘but that doesn’t mean it’s not right. I mean … we all need someone. I’ve got my mum, who worries too much, but she loves me and I love her, and my dad, who is the only person left alive in the world who doesn’t know the meaning of irony, and Ben, who is an idiot, but I can talk to him about things, when he lets me get a word in … I thought I didn’t have anyone, but I do. And I am quite good at listening. I’ve learned to be.’
There it is again, that promise of a smile, just hovering there around the corners of her lips.
‘I mean, probably you’ve got loads of friends and you don’t need to be talking to some random sick girl in a cardigan, but just in case you don’t have a person, you can talk to me. I don’t mind.’ I shrug. ‘I like you. Even though you are full of bad ideas.’
‘Bad ideas?’ She half laughs. ‘Like what?’
‘Like saying it’s OK for me to go for a walk with Ben. It’s like someone gave me an enthusiastic puppy in human form as a guardian angel.’
‘Sounds completely delightful,’ Stella says. ‘And I’m sorry, but you do need to get out and about. Build up your strength. A short walk will be a good start.’
I think for a moment, about how much a fourteen-year-old girl would like to knock around Camden market with a somewhat sexy guitar player, and what a kick she would get out of it. I suppose if you are going to start keeping promises, you have to start somewhere.
Dear Malcolm Sedgewick,
We’ve been neighbours for sixteen years, and I just wanted to tell you: you are a maddening, pompous, stupid, bigoted old fool. I’ve hated every polite conversation I’ve had to have with you over your ridiculous attempt at a topiary hedge, which looks more like a penis than a train, by the way.
Yours sincerely,
Mr David Davidson (from number 22)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOPE
‘I think the song is really getting there, don’t you?’ Ben says, his arm looped loosely through mine as we head towards the noise and throng of Camden market. Even now, at eight on a November evening, it’s still wide open and full to the brim with a teaming mass of life. Considering I grew up down the road, I’ve never really liked it – never liked the press of people and the sort of underlying fakeness to it all. It’s like a girl that tries too hard to be popular. You know the one – laughs even when nothing is funny. That’s Camden all over.
Ben is wearing an ankle-length wool coat that flairs out behind him. His black hair is newly shaved around the back, long on top, and sweeps into his eyes. It’s not just girls who watch him pass, but men too, straight and otherwise. He always looks so confident in his own skin, with me trailing behind. His old familiar.
‘I think the song is actually really good,’ I concede.
‘And today, once you got over yourself, your vocals were really coming on.’
‘Well, I can sing you under a table, any day of the week,’ I remind him, and he chuckles. Damn, I fell into his trap.
‘Of course you can. I can barely sing at all,’ he says. ‘It’s all about attitude, dude.’
He picks up a bowler hat and drops it onto his head, waggling his eyebrows at me. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think
it will flatten your hair,’ I tell him, laughing as he whips it off again, speedily running his fingers through his carefully crafted do. My lungs creak when I laugh, and the pain is still there, but Stella and, yes, Ben were right. I feel better for being outside, under the lights and amongst the people.
‘You need an outfit, for our debut at open mic,’ he says. ‘Maybe something PVC, lace-up? And thigh-length boots? And one of those corsets …’
I ignore him and run my fingers down a rail of poorly made, overpriced dresses. Somehow I let him lead me deep into the labyrinth of the market, where the scent of patchouli hangs heavy in the air. Languages mingle all around me – peoples of the world looking to buy a little bit of hip in exactly the wrong place.
‘Nothing here,’ I say. ‘Here is horrible.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Ben picks up a sort of orange chiffon number. ‘What about this, huh?’
Before I can reply, I am suddenly jerked back, and I realise that someone has pulled my bag off of my shoulder and down to my wrist. Looking up, I see a hooded figure tearing through the crowd. Hastily, I check my bag. My purse is there but my phone is gone.
‘Oh God, my phone. It’s not even worth anything,’ I say, showing Ben my empty bag. ‘It’s ancient, but it’s got all my music on it – it’s got our recording of song … Ben! Ben, wait!’
Ben is off at full pelt, before I even finish saying his name, running somehow through the mass of people, leaving a small shocked furrow, parting in his wake, which I hurriedly thread my way through. ‘Ben! Leave it, it doesn’t matter … Ben!’
But he isn’t slowing down, and I mutter curses out loud, keeping my eyes on him as I follow him down some steps and onto the canal towpath. I can see him running away from the noise and the lights of the lock, and into the darkness.
‘God, bloody damn you, Ben, it’s just a fucking phone,’ I say, and I notice how lonely and loud my voice seems. I’m hurrying. I can feel my sore and exhausted lungs rub and scrape with every breath, and I can no longer see any sign of Ben ahead, or the guy that took my phone. No lights, no nothing. I stop and wait for a moment. I’m on my own on a canal towpath in north London in the dark. The only way to tell where the city ends and the sky starts is a few fiercely burning stars, bright enough to pierce the city’s glare. Fuck.
We Are All Made of Stars Page 10
