by Megan Tayte
‘Sorry.’ I plastered a smile on my face. ‘Elephant. The zoo.’
But he didn’t smile. He put down his mug and stared at me seriously. ‘Where do you go when you do that? You look so serious.’
‘Nothing, nowhere – really.’
He sighed. ‘I get it. You’re a private person. And I try not to pry. But I worry about you.’
I reached over and laid a hand over his. ‘Really, you don’t need to. All tickety-boo over here.’
‘You know I’m here, though, right? If you need to talk.’
‘I know.’
‘Is it your sister?’
‘There is no it!’
‘Sorry!’ He raised his hands. ‘I just…’
I looked out of the window, then back to him. ‘The rain’s stopped. Where to next?’
He stared at me for a long moment, and then looked down at the map laid out on the table. ‘Big cats,’ he said. ‘Along here and then up to the top – see?’
‘Great! Just give me a moment.’
I kissed him and then walked casually across the room to the toilets. Once inside the ladies’, I sank onto a toilet seat and knocked back four painkillers. I allowed myself a couple of minutes with my eyes closed, leaning against the side of the stall. Then I emerged, splashed some water on my face, blinked away the fluttering lights in front of my eyes, fixed a smile on my face and headed back out to Luke.
It wasn’t a long walk from the restaurant to the top corner of the park where the big cats prowled. But it seemed to me that with each step, the pain in my head ramped up a gear.
At the lynx enclosure, I leaned on a wall.
You’re okay. Just breathe.
‘You all right?’ Luke was looking at me.
‘Fine!’ I said. ‘Look, there it is – by that tree.’
At the cheetah enclosure, I took deep breaths and stared at a sign until the dancing lights calmed.
Not here. Not with Luke.
‘Scarlett? You’re kind of white.’
‘Just cold.’
At the lion enclosure, I staggered and had to grab the fence to stay upright.
No, no, no, no, no.
‘Scarlett, hey – what is it?’
‘Tripped. Stupid wellies.’
But by the final big cat enclosure, fear had crept past the barriers I’d erected in my mind, insidious and cold – so cold, and yet it fuelled the pain like petrol oozing onto a fire.
Oh God, oh Luke.
‘Scarlett?’
It was waiting for me, as I knew it would be: the tiger. Sitting still and silent on top of a pile of rocks. Magnificent, majestic – a velvet-pawed predator exuding power and intelligence. I stared into its hungry eyes, fixed on me.
‘Can you see it, Luke?’ I whispered.
‘See what?’
‘The tiger.’
‘The tiger? Yes, of course I see it. It’s right there. What’s –’
‘The Ancient Chinese believed he was the protector of the dead.’
My knees gave out. Luke’s hands were on me quickly, pulling at me, but not fast enough to stop me sinking to my knees on the wet, stony path.
‘Scarlett!’
His voice was loud, frightened, but I couldn’t look at him – I was locked in the gaze of a mighty beast that was slinking towards me now.
‘Scarlett, you’re scaring me – talk to me – what’s wrong?’
But there were no words, only white agony eating through my head. And then I was sinking, and the tiger was swimming beside me, and someone was shouting my name, but it didn’t seem important now that I was in the ocean, in it, and I had to fight, I had to try to get to the surface, but it wasn’t water pressing down on me, it was the sky: I was on the beach and it was dark and there were so many stars, a million pinpricks fusing fast into one, bright brilliance.
I heard Luke calling my name, but my ears were filling with the roar of nothing, and the light was blinding and so damned white.
Jude, I thought. I need Jude.
But I couldn’t hold on for him. There was nothing to do but let go.
31: MIDDAY SUN
… back! Get back from the fence…
A girl in a garden.
… on their way…
A girl in a garden of a cottage on a wind-swept headland overlooking a cove.
… what’s her name?…
A girl in the midday sun, looking up at the impossible blue.
… get a line in…
A magpie looping and soaring.
… I’m here. I won’t leave you…
A magpie jerking, plummeting... saved.
… meet us at A&E…
A man in the garden, holding a struggling magpie.
… Scarlett, eighteen, collapsed at…
A man with green eyes standing before a girl with green eyes.
… no known history…
A girl whispering, ‘Is it over? Is this the end?’
… stand back, lad. Let them work…
A man answering, ‘There is no end. Only change.’
… Scarlett! No – get off me!…
A girl sobbing. ‘But I don’t want to lose him.’
… call Dr Morris, and a porter for CT…
A man smiling. ‘You can only lose what you cling to.’
… boyfriend’s outside…
A man opening his hands, releasing a struggling magpie.
… Can you hear me? Open your eyes…
A girl and a man in the midday sun, looking up at a magpie looping and soaring in the impossible blue.
32: DON’T YOU EVER
Someone was calling my name.
‘Go away, Grandad,’ I mumbled. ‘Sleepin’.’
‘Cara, actually. And I’m going nowhere. And you’re not sleeping, you’re lying in a hospital bed freaking everyone out.’
I peeled open an eyelid and winced at a stab of fluorescent lighting.
‘What…?’
‘My thought exactly – what the hell, Scarlett?’
My pupils contracted sufficiently for me to get a look at my friend: flushed face, pinched, no hint of her usual dimples. I refocused and looked past her – a large room, clinical and stark, three empty bays, medical paraphernalia, a desk at which people in blue scrubs were talking. Hospital. I was in hospital. How –
Golden eyes, Luke shouting, roaring, pain, light…
But there was no time to process the memories; a nurse was moving towards me.
‘Hello, Scarlett. I see you’re awake.’
The nurse – young and serious and with eyes full of sympathy – stepped neatly in front of Cara and surveyed a beeping machine next to me. She asked me a series of questions, which I answered fairly honestly: it was true that I felt better than I had at the zoo, but of course I couldn’t admit in front of Cara that my head still ached, that it always did on some level now. Apparently satisfied, the nurse dug into her pocket and retrieved a small plastic bag and handed it to me.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘We had to remove your jewellery for the CT scan. I’m sure your friend can help you put it back on while I track down the doctor for you.’
But once the nurse left Cara moved back into place beside me, arms crossed, so I left the little package containing Luke’s pendant sitting on my palm and closed my fist tightly around it. Hair was on my forehead, tickling me, and I moved to brush it away with the other hand, but a sharp pain stopped me. I raised the hand high enough to see a cannula taped to the back and an IV tube leading out. Not good.
‘You collapsed,’ said Cara. ‘At the zoo. You’ve been out a couple of hours. They won’t tell us anything. So how about you start talking.’
I stared up at her. She looked more than worried. She looked mad.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t give me that, Scarlett Blake,’ she hissed. ‘After what you’ve done to Luke, you at least owe me the truth.’
I struggled in the bed, pulling myself upright on the metal guard rails.
‘Luke? Where is he? What did I do?’
‘Scared him senseless, that’s what. When he called me from the zoo he wasn’t even making sense he was in such a state, and when I got here – Jesus, Scarlett, he was a mess. They had to get security to pull him out of here while they treated you in the end. And then it took me a good hour to talk him into going for coffees. Honestly, I haven’t seen him so upset since it was me in that bed.’
‘Oh no – I’m sorry! I didn’t mean…’
She leaned over and gripped my arm. ‘He loves you, Scarlett – don’t you see that? He loves you, and he thought he was going to lose you, and it tore him apart.’
Had my hands been free to cover my ears, they’d have done so. This was unbearable.
‘So you tell me why you’re in here then.’ Her eyes bored into mine. ‘And don’t bother lying, because I’ll know. You’ve been lying to us for weeks. I knew something was off with you. So spill it. Now.’
I stared at her, my astute, tell-it-as-it-is best friend. I’d hurt her, and Luke too. They’d known I was keeping something from them, and now I’d put them here, in this position, worried about me, stuck powerless in a hospital – the very hospital they’d come to after the accident, where Cara had been told she would be disabled for life, where their parents’ bodies were laid in the morgue.
I was a terrible, terrible person to have brought them here.
‘Is it drugs?’ Cara demanded when I didn’t answer. ‘Painkiller popping? I saw the pills in your bag.’
‘What? No!’
‘Something stronger?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Starving yourself? You’ve dropped weight – don’t think I haven’t noticed.’
‘I eat like a horse, Cara; you know I do.’
‘Bulimia, then. You’re barfing it all back up.’
‘Urgh! No, Cara.’
‘Epilepsy?’
‘No.’
‘Diabetes?’
‘No.’
‘Cancer?’
‘NO!’
‘Then there’s only one explanation left.’
‘Cara, please…’
‘Scarlett Blake, you’re pregnant.’
A crash from behind distracted me from the indignant denial I was about to utter, and as Cara spun around I caught sight of the source of the commotion: Luke standing in the middle of the room in a puddle of coffee, staring at me.
‘Luke,’ I said quickly, reaching out a hand but held back by the IV.
The nurse was by his side already, armed with a stack of paper towels. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said kindly to him, ‘I’ve got it.’
He seemed to barely notice the mess he’d made, or the nurse now on her knees blotting it up. His eyes fixed on me, he walked to the bed. Each step he took brought me closer to warmth and safety, but something else, something new: regret.
‘One visitor per bed, remember?’ called the nurse.
‘I’ll go,’ said Cara at once.
She gave me a long look, then turned and headed out of the room, giving Luke’s arm a squeeze as she passed.
Luke’s eyes, when he reached me, were haunted and rimmed with red, and his hands, I saw, were trembling.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I began, but he cut me off.
‘How do you feel?’
‘All right. Bit washed out.’
‘Are you in pain?’
‘No.’
‘Scarlett…’ He swallowed. ‘When I walked in, Cara –’
‘Was way off the mark, Luke,’ I said quickly.
‘You’re not pregnant.’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘We’ve been careful, Luke.’
‘But accidents happen – and pregnant women sometimes faint, right?’
I looked into his eyes, and I was staggered to see hope there. He’d rather pregnancy than illness, of course. I wished, for a moment, that was the truth of it all. I thought of little Ivor at the zoo, and my heart contracted painfully.
He saw me wince. ‘What is it? What hurts? I’ll get someone.’
I reached out with my unrestricted hand and pulled him down, to sit on the chair beside the bed. ‘I’m okay, Luke. But there’s no baby.’
‘Right. Well, that’s… right.’
I smoothed his crazy hair back from his forehead. ‘It’s okay. I’m okay.’
‘How can you say that? You collapsed, Scarlett. In my arms. And I couldn’t wake you up. That’s not okay. That’s not right.’
Fury rose up inside me. He shouldn’t have seen that. I’d never wanted him to see that. It wasn’t fair on him. I should have protected him.
He misinterpreted the wash of angry tears building up in my eyes.
‘Hey, don’t be scared. It’s okay. They’ll work out what’s going on. They did lots of tests while you were… asleep. The doctor, he’ll be back soon.’
For a while we sat silently, each lost in our own thoughts – his, no doubt, a horrific replaying of a scene that should never have happened; mine an imagining of that same scene, of what he’d seen, what he’d felt.
‘Scarlett,’ he said at last. ‘Is there anything you need to tell me?’
I saw the pain in his face. I wanted to take it away.
‘Just that I’m so sorry that you had to see that,’ I said. ‘And I love you.’
I expected a smile, at least, for the last three words, but Luke ran a hand through his fingers and sighed.
‘Jude is outside,’ he said.
‘What?’ The abrupt subject change confused me.
‘Jude. He’s in the waiting room. Turned up an hour ago. Said he heard you were ill from Si – Cara’s told half of Twycombe, I think.’
I groaned.
‘Why is he here, Scarlett?’
My head was clear now, the residual headache a niggle, not a distraction, and yet my mind struggled to fathom the meaning in his words.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
Luke nodded his head slightly, then asked bluntly, ‘Is there something going on with you and him?’
‘No! What on earth – why would you think that?’
A deep voice interrupted Luke’s reply: ‘Miss Blake. Remember me?’
I tore my eyes from Luke and looked at the man at the end of the bed. I certainly did remember him. It was the doctor who’d treated me when I’d come in with a head injury after killing – no, healing – a deer. He was also the doctor who’d treated my sister after she collapsed… oh, just like me. He was a jovial, friendly sort who’d been very kind to me before now, but today there was no hint of a smile in his eyes, only that same sympathy I’d seen in the nurse.
I swallowed. ‘I remember you,’ I said. ‘Hello, Dr Morris.’
‘I need to talk with you, Scarlett.’ He looked expectantly at Luke, who remained sitting at the bedside, jaw set. ‘Perhaps you’d like to get a coffee.’
‘No, thanks.’
I saw Dr Morris’s expression, and could guess what he was about to say: I need to speak with Scarlett alone. Quickly, I said to Luke, ‘I’d like a coffee. Please?’
Luke looked from the doctor to me and then stood up. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he promised me.
I watched him until he was out of sight, and then I sank back onto the pillows. Dr Morris took Luke’s place on the chair and laid two files on the bed beside me. Even upside down the name labels were clear: Sienna Blake and Scarlett Blake.
‘Scarlett,’ he began. ‘There’s no easy way to say this…’
‘You scanned my head. And you found a tumour. Like my sister’s.’
‘You knew.’
‘Yes.’
‘You were diagnosed elsewhere?’
‘No. I just knew.’
‘What? I don’t understand. Why didn’t you seek help? I wanted to scan you last time, given the history. It’s rare for such tumours to run in families, but not unheard of. We’d have caught it earlier, and then…’
‘There wo
uld have been no point. I was never going to survive it.’
‘I was going to say we may have been able to buy you more time.’
His words stung. That had been my wish – more time. Maybe he could have granted it to me. But then, what would the time have been like, under treatment? These past few weeks I’d at least been able to live a normal life, been able to hide the truth.
Until today.
Oh God, Luke – what he must have felt.
‘I didn’t need more time to suffer and make others suffer,’ I told him.
‘She said the same thing. Your sister. You’re very like her.’
‘No, I’m not.’
He stared at me for a moment, with eyes that were suspiciously bright, and then sighed and picked up my file and flipped through it. ‘Well,’ he said in a more businesslike tone, ‘I suppose there’s no point trying to get you to stay, or take a referral to neurology?’
‘No. I just want to go home.’
‘Then I’ll start the paperwork. And I’ll get you some prescriptions that will help with the symptoms. I assume you have pain regularly?
I nodded.
‘Visual disturbances?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can give you some drugs, but there’s only so much they can do for you. You’re going to deteriorate, Scarlett – you know that.’
‘How long do you think?’
‘It’s impossible to say without further analysis. But towards the end – it won’t be pleasant, I’m afraid. You’ll need to think about what you’ll do then, when you can’t function normally any longer. Here’s some literature to look through.’
He handed me a pile of leaflets that had been slotted into my file. On top a picture of a smiling elderly woman in a chair surrounded by a smiling nurse and various smiling family members was overlaid with the title The Clairmont Hospice: Compassionate End-of-Life Care. Before my eyes the scene shifted to me in that chair, and around me everyone I loved. No one was smiling. No one.
I thrust the leaflets back at him. ‘I won’t be needing a hospice,’ I told him.
‘I see,’ he said quietly, taking them from me and eying my outstretched hand. It was shaking, I realised. I pulled it back. ‘Then does that mean you will –’
Raised voices drew our attention. We both looked towards the doors, beyond which snatches of an argument were audible.
