Our duties finished, my mother drove us down to the Rainbow, a one-storey snooker club on scrubland about a mile out of the village that had a disco every Friday and Saturday night.
‘Have fun, be good,’ she said as we got out of the car.
We headed to the bar and Matty bought us drinks. He was doing paid work experience at Drax power station with Fairclough Engineering and was flush with cash. He was getting £120 a week, which seemed like riches, and he was also being paid, as I was, for working in our pub. He bought a pint of lager for himself and a red witch – Pernod, cider and blackcurrant – for me. We were legally underage, of course, but no one was bothered about that. It was generally accepted in the area that everyone over sixteen would drink in pubs.
I wish I could remember more – who we talked to, whether or not we danced. The music that would have lured me onto the dance floor then would have been the Cure, Soft Cell, the Smiths, the Pogues. If ‘Love Cats’ or ‘Tainted Love’ had come on while we were there, I doubt I would have resisted. We might have danced together. Matty standing tall, not moving much, me twirling around him.
We didn’t stay together the whole time. We knew everyone – many of them drank in our pub – and we peeled off from each other to talk to various friends before circling back again. I would have been cuddling him because I always was. People often thought we were girlfriend and boyfriend, which amused us both. ‘No,’ I’d laugh, ‘he’s my brother.’
At some point one of our customers offered me a lift home. I asked Matty if he wanted to come. He said no.
This is the moment. If I could go back in time and force him to come with me then everything would be different. Of course I know that’s impossible. I just wish I could tell her, the girl with the henna-red hair in charity-shop clothes, to write down everything that happened. Write it down, I’d say. You won’t want to – you’ll think every detail will be burnt onto your brain forever. You don’t know this, but you’ll forget. You’ll forget what you talked about, who you chatted to, whether you danced. For some years you’ll remember what Matty said as he turned down the lift, you’ll be able to see his lopsided grin, the last time you saw his handsome face animated like that, but then you’ll forget. You won’t be able to see him. You won’t be able to remember him. You’ll start to doubt that you did go and offer him a lift. You’ll start to worry that his response was so perfectly ironic that you made it up, that you dreamt it afterwards, that you never bothered to find him to offer him the lift, or that you looked for him but didn’t try very hard. So maybe it was all your fault, and even though you won’t really think this could be true, it will worry you down the years that you can’t remember it, or rather that you have overremembered it, overplayed it to the point where it has jumped out of reality and become a fiction.
When Matty and I were little we had a Christmas record we danced around to on which most of the songs had lyrics but ‘Frosty the Snowman’ was instrumental.
‘Why doesn’t Frosty have any words?’ we had asked our father, who, never one to resist a tease, told us that it was because we had played it so much that we had rubbed the words off. For years we thought this was true and feared that the words in the other songs we liked would disappear with overuse. We kept a strict ear out to detect if they were getting fainter.
Now I know that words don’t rub off songs through overuse, but I also know that memory is altered to the point of destruction by overplaying.
We were at the Rainbow. I was offered a lift. I went to find Matty and asked him if he wanted to come with us. He was leaning against the pool table, his long fingers wrapped around a pint glass. He was wearing jeans, a brown leather jacket and his favourite T-shirt of the moment, white with The The in big red letters.
‘No,’ he said, grinning, ‘I’ll hang around here. I might get lucky.’
And I threw him a half-smile, an eyebrow raise, a ‘what an arrogant fucker you are’ head-tilt, and I walked out of the Rainbow and into the car.
The next time I saw Matty he was lying in the road. And he never, in any sense of the expression, got lucky again.
IN TROUBLE
It was about one in the morning when I got home from the Rainbow. The pub was dark and my parents were in bed. I climbed the back stairs, walked past Matty’s room and on to my own. I undressed, pulling the ribbons from my hair, looking around at the sage and lilac walls. I got into bed. What did I do? What did I think about before the events of that night shunted everything else out of the way? Maybe I listened to a mix tape or played a record on my record player, which was black with green and purple buttons. Matty had the same one, presents from our parents the previous Christmas. Did I read? It seems likely. I read everything from Jane Austen to Jilly Cooper. I had recently discovered Julian Barnes at college and wanted to study French so that I could live in an attic in Paris and read Flaubert in his own language. I loved the thought of myself as someone who read novels in French.
Of course, back then reading was still a pleasure and not a defence. This was the last night I wouldn’t fear closing my eyes for what I might see. The last night I wasn’t in terror of what might happen by the time I woke up.
I was drifting off to sleep when I heard someone shouting outside in the car park. Nothing unusual about that. Customers often pitched up in the middle of the night looking for their wallets or keys or wives. I opened my window to see what was going on. The man below didn’t look mad or drunk. He was standing next to his car. The headlights were on and I could see a woman in the passenger seat.
‘Is this where Matthew Mintern lives?’
‘Yes. I’m his sister.’
‘You’d better come then, he’s in trouble.’
Trouble. It was a worrying word, but a small one. I pulled on all the clothes I’d just taken off and felt a rush of adrenaline that was not unpleasant. No need to wake my parents. I could sort out whatever it was. Some prank. Some schoolboy silliness. Nothing that couldn’t be smoothed over by a sympathetic older sister. Matty would be grateful. I’d be a little bit cross with him but then we’d have a laugh about it. Maybe tell the parents, maybe not.
I picked up my keys, grabbed my handbag and flew down the back stairs and out into the car park. The man started driving as soon as I climbed into the back seat. He told me that Matty had been knocked over by a driver who did not stop. The man and his girlfriend had been in the car behind. They’d stopped, found out Matty’s name from the girls he was walking with, called an ambulance from the phone box at the edge of the village and then headed on to the pub.
I knew immediately that this was bigger than anything I could have imagined. I wished I’d woken my parents, but it was too late to change that now.
When we pulled up in the road, I saw crowds of people in the headlights, all the same people who had been at the Rainbow and were walking home along the same road. They parted and I floated through them. I heard people say, ‘That’s his sister.’
Matty was lying in the road. He looked so long; his body was covered with coats. A girl we knew called Vicky told me he was unconscious, that she had put him in the recovery position. I knelt next to him, touched his forehead, stroked his cheek with the back of my fingers. His eyes were closed. There was no damage to his face. I couldn’t see any blood. I felt for a pulse. Found it. Kept my fingers wrapped around his wrist so I could feel the evidence of his life.
One of the girls he had been with told me that a car had come out of nowhere. They’d been walking along, the three of them, Matty on the outside, and suddenly he wasn’t there any more. Then his body had crashed back onto the road in front of them and the car had sped off into the distance.
‘He gave me his jacket to wear,’ she said, through tears. ‘He gave it to me because I was cold.’
Lots of girls were crying. There was a whiff of drunken hysteria in the air and I knew I must stay calm and not submit to it. Vicky and I made people stand back, so they were not crowding in on Matty. Some of the men had formed a
circle facing the other way, ready to warn oncoming traffic.
Sirens, flashing lights. When the ambulance arrived I could tell from the demeanour of the men how serious it was. They scooped Matty onto a stretcher and in through the back doors.
‘You’re his sister? Hop in, lass.’
They were so quick, so deft. One of them sliced through Matty’s T-shirt with what looked like a set of shears. The red letters of The The could no longer be made out as the whole T-shirt was soaked with blood.
‘But I can’t see any cuts,’ I said. ‘Why is there so much blood?’
‘It’s coming from the back of his head, lass,’ said the ambulance man. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. The man gave me little jobs to do, showed me how to stick the pads onto Matty’s chest, how to clip on the wires.
The driver was on the radio. ‘We’ve got a bad one, here,’ he said. ‘I think we’re talking Pinderfield’s.’
I knew Pinderfield’s was a big hospital near Wakefield.
The other man explained that we’d go straight to Pontefract Hospital so Matty could be stabilized and assesssed before being transferred somewhere bigger.
‘Keep talking to him, love,’ he said. ‘Keep him with us.’
I talked and talked and talked. I told Matty everything would be OK. I told him about the man coming round to the car park at the back of the pub.
‘If he’d gone to the front door, he’d have got Mum and Dad. I should have woken them up. I’ll phone them from the hospital.’
I had a feeling that Matty had taken a bit of a shine to Vicky and I babbled at him about this being an extreme way to get her attention.
I was still talking when we arrived at Pontefract and he was wheeled away from me. I wanted to go with him but they wouldn’t let me.
‘I need you to help me fill in some forms, love,’ said a nurse, putting an arm round me.
‘Good luck, lass,’ said the ambulance man.
I sat in an office. I told the nurse that Matthew Peter Mintern was sixteen and lived at the Bell and Crown in Snaith. I gave her the names of my parents as his next of kin.
‘I have to tell them,’ I said.
The nurse let me use their office phone. I picked up the chunky receiver and dialled the number, stopping when there was still one digit to go. I thought how my parents would be surprised to hear me on the phone when they assumed I was in my bedroom across the corridor, that they only had a few seconds left of sleeping in happy ignorance of what had happened to Matty. I couldn’t leave it any longer. We both needed them. I dialled the last number, a ‘9’, and imagined the shattering of the silence in their bedroom.
‘I’m at Pontefract Hospital with Matty. He was knocked over. They say it’s very serious.’
My lip wobbled a bit on ‘serious’, but it was a calm and efficient conversation.
I went to the entrance of A&E to wait for them to arrive. A group of men who had been in a fight were kicking off because they’d been hanging around for a long time, and a nurse told them off. ‘This young lass’s brother has been knocked down and that’s why we don’t have any time for you,’ she said. They were instantly well behaved. One of them bought me a cup of tea from the machine, and they gathered around me, their big, bloody faces full of kindness and concern.
My composure vanished the moment my parents appeared. We sat on the bolted-down plastic seats, and I sobbed into my mother’s shoulder while my father wrapped his arms around her. After a few minutes we were taken to see Matty. He was lying on a bed with his eyes closed, a collar around his neck and an oxygen mask over his face. There were smears of dried blood on his upper chest and face but he looked reassuringly normal.
‘He’s a big lad,’ said Dad. ‘He’ll get over a knock like this.’
The doctor told us Matty had a serious head injury and was being transferred to Leeds General Infirmary. That a surgeon was waiting for him there. We followed the ambulance in the car, and I lay down on the back seat, stared at the motorway lights through my tears, and thought of all the times we had driven from Yorkshire to Cornwall at night to see my grandparents. Matty and I would share the back seat together top to toe. One of my earliest memories is how we used to bend our knees and put the soles of our feet together, pretending to be riding a bike against each other.
Matty was whisked away as soon as we got to Leeds so we didn’t see him. I was distraught, but Mum told me that we didn’t want to be getting in the way, that any time we spent with him would delay surgery, would delay fixing him. This calmed me down a bit. We were shown to a little room with a table and chairs, a kettle and an ashtray, and drank tea for what felt like hours and hours. I noticed a Guinness stain on the bottom edge of my cream shirt, knew that it would have happened as I’d leaned over the pump at work earlier, and thought how much the world had changed in the lifetime of that little stain. I smoked. I had never smoked in front of my parents before, but now that little deceit belonged to another universe. There was a smear of blood on my handbag. It was a big brown patent-leather old lady bag that I’d found in a charity shop. I called it Gladys. How stupid, I thought, to give a handbag a name, how childish – I’ll never call it Gladys again; and then looked down to see the bloodstains on my hands. I didn’t want to wash them. I had been Lady Macbeth in our school play and had used her monologues for my GCSE drama exam. I thought of her, unable to wash the phantom blood from her hands.
‘If Matty dies,’ I thought, ‘I’ll never wash my hands again.’
We were taken to another room, the family room in the intensive care unit, and the surgeon told us that he had removed a clot from Matty’s brain and a piece of his skull to allow for swelling. It was too early to say if the operation had been successful or what the future might hold for Matty.
‘I’ve saved your son’s life, Mr Mintern,’ the surgeon said. ‘We don’t know yet whether that was the right thing to do.’
‘Will he be able to walk?’ I asked.
He looked at me with weary eyes. ‘We don’t know anything at this point.’
He told us that Matty would be purposely sedated for at least forty-eight hours. He needed to rest – they didn’t want him waking up yet. We could see him shorty.
We carried on waiting in the little room, and I curled up into a ball on the sofa and cried. I still couldn’t believe what had happened. Another family arrived – the parents and girlfriend of a man in his mid-twenties called Alex. Alex’s girlfriend had come home from her nightshift as a nurse to find him collapsed by their bed.
‘I thought he was drunk,’ said the girlfriend. Her face was blotched and swollen with tears. I realized I must look like her, must be wearing the same stunned expression.
‘I can’t believe I thought he was drunk. “Get up,” I said, and I was shaking him. And then I realized.’
Finally a nurse took us down to Matty’s bed at the bottom end of the intensive care unit. His head and arms were swathed in white bandages, his chest was bare and there were orange stains on his skin, which the nurse told us was iodine from the operation.
I watched his chest rise and fall. I watched the monitor showing the beat of his heart. Forty-eight hours, I thought. A full two days to endure this uncertainty of whether he will live or die.
My only fear at this point was that he would die. I’d been terrified of that since getting in the car with the man outside the pub. Would he die before I got to him, would he die in the ambulance, would he die at Pontefract, would he die in the second ambulance, would he die in surgery? I knew other boys, other young men who had died. There was William, a boy I was at school with who had come off his motorbike, and sweet, gentle Garry, one of our customers, who had been kicked to death by a gang in sleepy Rawcliffe in what had turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. And Rory, another customer and family friend, whose car had come off the road not far from the scene of Matty’s accident. I was used to the notion that young men die tragically and suddenly. I’d even had a dream the week before
that Matty died in a motorbike accident. I had never heard the expression ‘head injury’, I had no concept of brain damage, except that sometimes babies are born that way. I saw things only in binary terms. Dead or alive. All I cared about was that Matty lived.
At 10 a.m. we decided to go home. The pub needed to be opened at 12. As Dad drove and Mum rested her hand on his knee, they made a plan. Dad’s priority would be the pub, because more than ever now we would need the money and couldn’t afford to let the pub slide. Mum’s priority would be Matty. I said I would help with both.
When we got back, Dad did the cellar work, and Mum cashed up and emptied the slot machines; the usual Sunday morning jobs. I had a bath. Polly sat on the bathroom floor and watched me with her big, brown, sad eyes.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be all right.’
I washed Matty’s blood from my hands. He was not dead, he had not died in surgery, he would not die. I was already a bit ashamed of my earlier drama-queenery. I couldn’t have blood on my hands – I had to work the bar with my dad, as I did every Sunday lunchtime. I didn’t wash the blood off Gladys, though, and my orange trousers would always bear bloodstains on the knees from where I’d knelt on the road. I would never mention this to anyone, but would find a macabre enjoyment in the secret tribute every time I wore them.
Mum went back to the hospital, Dad and I opened the pub. We cried all the way through the lunchtime service, and so did many of our customers. The news was flying around the village and people were coming in in streams to ask questions about Matty.
I stood washing glasses. There was a technique to it: you took the circular tray of clean glasses out of the dishwasher, put it on the side and put the next tray of dirty glasses in. Pint pots went straight onto the shelves, half pints on top of the dishwasher, and the rim of each one needed to be wiped with a tea towel in case of lipstick before being put back. I picked the half pints up by their bottoms, four in each hand. As I put them on the other side of the bar by the till, I rested my hand on the warmth of the upturned glass and felt a bolt in my tummy that almost knocked the breath out of me. Everything is different now, I thought. Don’t forget, don’t be lulled by this satisfying, familiar task. Everything is different now.
The Last Act of Love Page 2
