Open Your Eyes

by Paula Daly

  I thought for a moment and nodded numbly.

  ‘Do that,’ she said. ‘Then come to Fazakerley. Don’t rush to get there. Take as long as you need and take care when you drive ’cause you’ll be shaky. They’re going to be busy with your husband when he arrives, CTing his head and so on. They may even take him straight to surgery. There’s not a lot you can do there, so my advice would be to get the children settled and pack some essentials for yourself before setting off. It’s probably going to be a long day.’ She reached down and touched my shoulder.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her. ‘Please thank your colleagues too for what they’re doing for Leon. Would you do that?’

  She told me she would. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  I put the kids in front of the TV and, my voice shaking as I tried to sound authoritative, as though I really, really meant it, I told them not to move until I came back. They made like statues. Held their breath. And I went to sit on the bottom stair and put my head between my knees.

  I wasn’t sure I could do what I had to do next.

  I took two more breaths and called Leon’s mother. She answered, saying, ‘Why aren’t you here yet? Where are you?’ in a stroppy, aggrieved manner that she would soon forget as I explained to her in the best way I could what had happened to her son. Her only son.

  We arranged to meet at the hospital and she said she’d phone Leon’s sister in Manchester. ‘Juliana’ll want to know,’ she said, and it was only on speaking her daughter’s name that she started to cry. Like, really cry. As if up until that moment she’d held the tears of a lifetime inside her. I’d not seen Gloria weep, not even when Leon’s father died. I’d always thought it was something she must do in private.

  ‘Gloria,’ I said, but her sobs were choking and she was unable to answer. ‘Gloria,’ I said again, louder this time. ‘I’m so sorry, I really don’t want to leave you like this, but I really must get someone to take the children.’

  And I replaced the receiver. I could apologize later.

  Then I called my neighbour, Erica, on her mobile.

  I knew she wasn’t at home. She lived diagonally opposite and would have been straight out of her house at the first signs of commotion.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ I told her quickly. ‘It’s bad. It’s Leon. It’s his head. I don’t know anything else, but they’ve taken him to hospital and I … I don’t know what to do. Can you come and watch the kids for me? I—’

  I heard Erica say to someone: ‘Sorry, love, but I won’t be buying these after all,’ before saying to me, ‘Fifteen minutes. I can maybe get there in ten.’

  3

  Leon’s head.

  That’s what this was all about. They were trying to save Leon’s head.

  I was in the relatives’ room. I’d been here for thirty minutes and there was no sign of Gloria yet. I watched the door, eager for her arrival.

  There was another family in the waiting room – another family in crisis. They were big talkers. And criers. Ones for big shows of emotion, and I felt very alone. From what I could gather, Grandad had slipped outside his back door while dealing with his pigeons. ‘Pigeons that should have been got shut of years ago.’ And, as a consequence, Grandad’s head was now full of blood.

  Was Leon’s head full of blood?

  That’s what they were trying to find out.

  On arrival at Fazakerley, once he’d been stabilized, they’d taken Leon straight to CT. But now they needed an MRI scan as well and a doctor wouldn’t be available to speak with me until they had the results of that.

  Leon had a beautifully shaped head. When our children were born, his mother had insisted that I let them sleep not on their backs, in accordance with the advice on preventing cot death, but on their sides. ‘You want to put your babies to sleep on their sides,’ she’d stressed. ‘Keep them in place with a rolled-up blanket. See?’ This was to prevent the unsightly, flattened, back-of-the-skull problem which Gloria said made people look like they had lower than average-sized IQs.

  Leon shaved his head, which Gloria didn’t care for. ‘Makes you look like a thug.’ But I knew she was secretly proud of the shape of her son’s head because I would catch her eyeing it sometimes, pleased.

  The paramedic had mentioned surgery.

  Which was an innocuous enough word until you realized surgery to the head meant brain surgery.

  Leon couldn’t stomach the night-time medico-trauma documentaries I liked to watch. He could be remarkably squeamish, even with his thirst for all things crime. But I’d sit through emergency amputations, spleen reparations, quadruple bypasses, because I found them life-affirming. The one thing I did know from my limited knowledge of head trauma was that, after injury, the brain would swell. And it was this swelling, often as much as the trauma itself, which could cause brain damage or indeed often death. Sometimes they would cut the top of the skull away to give the brain more room to swell. I tried to push away the thought of this happening to Leon.

  Gloria arrived twenty minutes later with Leon’s sister, Juliana. With them was Juliana’s on-off girlfriend, Meredith. We hugged and cried. Cried some more. And then, never really knowing what to say to Meredith, I murmured, ‘You made good time,’ and she smiled sadly, saying, ‘Juliana was driving. You know how she can be.’

  What Juliana could be was erratic. Which was generally the reason they couldn’t seem to live together for more than a few months before it was all over again. Gloria didn’t like it. She thought that as a gay couple they should show the world that they could stick it out for the duration. ‘Set an example,’ she liked to say. Which Juliana told her was ‘totally fucking insulting’.

  Juliana was the only one who swore at Gloria. Gloria was quite churchy – a Methodist. Her father had come over from Trinidad and married a woman from Wolverhampton, whom he’d met at church, and Gloria was brought up ‘knowing Jesus’. She met Leon’s father on a church day trip to Liverpool and they married soon after. I’d never heard Gloria actually say she disapproved of profanity, but I took it as a given, and so it was not something I did when I was around her. I swore at my own mother all the time. But that was different.

  The door to the waiting room opened and a plump young woman in a grey tunic gestured to the other family with a slight nod of the head. They filed out after her in respectful silence and Juliana’s gaze followed them. ‘I hate hospitals,’ she said. ‘Can’t stand the smell.’

  ‘So, what have they told you?’ Meredith asked me.

  ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘They’ll let us know what’s going on when they have his MRI results.’

  ‘I just don’t get how he did this,’ Juliana said. ‘How does he go and knock himself unconscious by reversing into a wall? Wasn’t he wearing his seat belt? He can’t have been going that fast, can he? You were in your driveway, Mum said. Is that right?’ Then before I could answer, she said, ‘Shit. I haven’t asked about the kids. Sorry, Jane. How are the kids? Are they injured? Are the kids OK?’

  ‘The kids are fine. They’re with a neighbour.’

  ‘And what about you? Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Shook up, but fine.’

  We sat down. Juliana put her arm around Gloria and pulled her mother in towards her tightly. Gloria was doing her utmost to appear stoic but had been weeping silent tears since arriving. ‘Think positive, Mum,’ Juliana instructed and Gloria said, ‘I am, love. You know I am. I’m praying for Leon.’ She closed her eyes and dipped her head before clasping her hands together in her lap. Her lips began moving, almost imperceptibly, and the effect was such that the rest of us saw fit to close our eyes as well.

  A few minutes passed before I thought it was the right time to say what was on my mind.

  ‘I think Leon may have had some sort of … thing before he crashed,’ I began carefully.

  Juliana’s eyes snapped open. ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘I don’t know what to call it. A funny turn. When I got into the car he didn’t look li
ke himself.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’ Juliana asked.

  I shook my head. ‘It was as if he couldn’t hear me … He was almost trance-like.’

  ‘Do you think he could have been having a stroke?’ Gloria asked.

  ‘It crossed my mind … but I’m sorry, I’m no expert. I don’t know what a stroke would even look like.’

  ‘You’re supposed to ask them to raise both arms,’ said Meredith helpfully. ‘Then ask them to smile and say a few words. If they can’t do any of those three things, then it’s probably a stroke.’

  Meredith worked for the NHS, dealing with patient complaints. Sometimes, it could make her a bit moody. She did appear to have some degree of medical knowledge, but Gloria always said to take any advice from Meredith with a pinch of salt.

  ‘I didn’t think to do that,’ I said quietly, and I neglected to tell them that by the time I realized there was something very wrong with Leon, we were in Lawrence’s front garden, the kids screaming in the back seat and Leon slumped lifelessly at the wheel.

  Gloria put her hand on top of mine. ‘I wouldn’t have known to do that either, love.’

  The door opened and the four of us looked up expectantly.

  ‘Are you Mr Campbell’s family?’ A woman in a smart taupe-coloured suit approached. We told her that we were. ‘We’ll talk in here then,’ she said, ‘if that’s OK with you? Seeing as though it’s empty.’

  We didn’t argue and she pulled a chair around so that she was sitting directly in front of us.

  ‘I’m Dr Letts,’ she began. ‘I’m one of the neurologists here. I’ve had the chance to examine each of Leon’s scans and so now we’re fully aware of what we’re dealing with.’

  She cleared her throat.

  ‘OK … it seems Leon has two fifty-millimetre nails lodged inside his brain.’

  I repeated what she’d said silently back to myself: Two fifty-millimetre nails inside his brain.

  Nobody spoke.

  I could only assume the others were staring back at her with the same look of incredulity I was.

  ‘One entered here,’ Dr Letts said, gesturing to the area just above her right ear, ‘and one here.’ She moved her finger forwards, to her forehead.

  I wondered if she’d got the wrong family.

  Wrong family. Wrong patient. Wrong scans.

  ‘How did they get in there?’ Juliana asked, quietly stunned.

  I looked at Gloria to see if she had the answer. For one mad moment, I had an image of her suddenly smacking her own forehead, exclaiming that Leon had fallen off a wall/bicycle/horse as a kid, and had run all the way home with a piece of wood stuck to the side of his head.

  But instead, Gloria whispered, ‘How long is fifty millimetres?’

  The neurologist held her fingers two inches apart and Gloria swallowed, closing her eyes. She took a steadying breath and I saw it shudder inside her chest.

  How had this happened? I didn’t understand.

  I once read about a woman who, having experienced some weird tunnel vision and tingling arm pain, had a head X-ray. She was told there was a bullet inside her brain; she’d been shot as a kid, and no one had thought to tell her.

  Could the same have happened to Leon? Had these nails been inside his head for years?

  ‘I’ll be straight with you,’ said the neurologist. ‘It looks very much as though this is the result of a violent attack.’

  And when each of us stayed silent, when each of us listened to her words and found they just didn’t quite make sense, she said, ‘It seems to me as if it was done intentionally.’

  Juliana gasped.

  ‘He was shot with a nail gun,’ Dr Letts explained. ‘We’ve contacted the police because, well, to be frank, this looks like attempted murder.’

  Immediately, Gloria asked, ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s in an induced coma. And the—’

  ‘Attempted murder?’ I said, and the neurologist nodded her head gravely. ‘Murder?’ I repeated. ‘Who would want to murder Leon …? No one would want to murder Leon. Are you sure you have this right?’

  ‘It’s important to stress that we can’t be completely sure of anything right now,’ said Dr Letts. ‘But we have notified the police. And unless Leon was working with a nail gun at the time, which, from what I understand …?’ She looked at me.

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid everything points to him being the victim of an intentional attack,’ she said. ‘I’m very sorry. It’s a shock to hear, I know.’

  ‘Will you remove the nails?’ asked Juliana.

  ‘We will. This afternoon if possible.’

  ‘Will it be you who does the operation?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t perform surgery. It will be one of my colleagues, most likely Mr Jorgensen. He’s the one who leads the neurosurgical team here.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Leon isn’t the kind of person who … Leon doesn’t have enemies. This isn’t something that happens to a person like Leon. And we don’t live in an area that … You’re telling me he was really shot? On purpose? In the head?’

  I felt as if my blood was draining from me.

  ‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is that we will do our very best to treat Leon and help him recover.’

  Dr Letts was calm. Softly spoken. She had small pearl earrings that fitted neatly against her skin and she wore a layer of barely-there make-up. We knew we were in the presence of someone exceptionally clever, someone with great authority, and that seemed to make us go against our instincts. We should have been screaming. I felt as though I wanted to tear my skin off, and yet I sat there listening to what she had to say, my manner remaining composed.

  ‘I think the police will have more information for you when they arrive,’ she said. ‘Maybe they’ll be able to shed some light on things. In the meantime, I know you have a lot of questions. And I’ll do my very best to answer them. But I’ll be honest with you: I’m not going to be able to give you definitive answers at this early stage. It’s going to be a difficult time and we’ll keep you informed at every step. But right now we just don’t know what the outcome will be.’

  ‘Outcome?’ Juliana said. ‘You mean you don’t know if Leon will actually survive this operation?’

  Gloria glared at her daughter’s insensitivity. And Juliana glared back, saying, ‘What? We need to know, Mother. We need to know what his odds are.’

  Dr Letts smiled sympathetically. ‘Mr Jorgensen will talk to you in more detail. But as with any operation there are risks. And it goes without saying that any surgery to the brain comes with significant risks. But we wouldn’t be attempting this procedure without the belief that it’s absolutely necessary. The foreign bodies must be removed from inside the brain if Leon’s to stand any chance of recovery.’

  ‘The nails can’t stay in there?’ I asked.

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘But why didn’t I see them? I don’t understand. I was with Leon when this happened. Why didn’t I see the nails in the side of his head? It doesn’t make any sense to me.’

  ‘Perhaps because they were the last thing you were expecting to see,’ she suggested. ‘And also, the heads of the nails used in nail guns are relatively small in diameter. You’re maybe imagining the size of a drawing pin. Well, these are actually much smaller than that and …’ She paused, checking each of our faces before continuing. ‘… they’re currently sitting just beneath the surface of the skin.’

  So they were really in there. Those nails had gone right into Leon’s brain.

  I tried to remember the accident.

  Did Leon have blood coming from above his right ear? It was certainly possible. But I’d been sitting to the left of him, and by the time I was out of the car I was pretty much hysterical, trying to get the kids out, trying to keep people away from Leon. I wasn’t the one who called for an ambulance. I wasn’t sure who had.

  Dr Letts made to stand. ‘For now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to
be getting back. I’ll bring you more news as I have it,’ and when she left it was as if she took all the air out of the room with her.

  Suddenly I needed to escape. Blood was thrashing around my body making my head woozy. I was hot and clammy and the muscles of my throat were constricting.

  Someone had meant to do this to Leon. Someone had shot him in the head and had actually wanted him to die.

  Perhaps they’d even hung around for a moment waiting for him to die.

  And they’d shot him in front of his children. His own children.

  4

  I was heavy-limbed and numb. We were in my kitchen. The front of the house was ribboned with blue and white tape and my home was now a crime scene.

  ‘I think I must be in shock,’ I apologized to the woman detective, because I was finding it hard to speak.

  She had asked me to talk about Leon. About me and Leon. ‘Tell me anything,’ she’d said, but my thoughts were jumbled. I couldn’t seem to hold things in my mind for longer than a few seconds; thoughts were evaporating before I could turn them into words.

  I put my hands to my face.

  Someone had shot Leon in the head. Had Lawrence shot him in the head? He was with him before it happened.

  I felt sick.

  It was only a few hours ago that I’d been in this kitchen preparing for our day at Gloria’s. And now I was back here again, but this time I was without my husband. Somehow, in his place, was Detective Inspector Hazel Ledecky, and she wanted to know about Leon, she wanted to know about our marriage, so that she might have a starting point. So she might have some clue as to what would make a person want to try to execute Leon as he waited in the car.

  It didn’t feel real.

  ‘Take your time, Jane,’ she said.

  I couldn’t concentrate. I was running through suspects. Could Lawrence Williams have done this? He was the last one to see Leon fit and well. But he was a pensioner. Lawrence was a nuisance, yes, but this? It seemed implausible.

  I blinked hard a few times and then opened my eyes.

  DI Ledecky was a tall, lean woman in her early sixties. She had the physique of a dedicated runner and I’d seen her on North West Tonight several times when commenting on behalf of Merseyside Police. She spoke well on air. She was contained. Discerning. And to have her in my kitchen felt almost hallucinatory.