by Julie Cohen
I don’t know what I’ll lose, but I hope none of this will fade. I hope I remember the seas of the moon.
Quinn
HE WASN’T CERTAIN what time it was when he woke up, but Felicity had fallen asleep too. Her head rested on his shoulder. His muscles were stiff from sleeping on the bench, but not very stiff, and the moon hadn’t moved much, so he didn’t think he had been out for long. Carefully, trying not to disturb her, he shifted her, put his arms around her, and lifted her up.
He hadn’t carried her over the doorstep of their home as a new bride. It had been raining too hard; they’d been in too much of a hurry to get inside. He carried her now into the hospital, down the flight of stairs and into the ward. A nurse approached him but he smiled at her and whispered that everything was fine. She followed him to the bed and folded the sheets back so he could tuck Felicity in.
‘You should go home,’ she told him. ‘We’ll look after her now.’
The bedside cabinet was still open. ‘She left her handbag up in the garden,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a tick.’
Her bag was open on the ground beside the bench. Her phone was flashing inside it. Without thinking, without considering that this was wrong even in this situation, he took the phone out and read the one message on it, sent less than an hour ago from Ewan.
I do love you. Meet me 12 September, in Greenwich. Our spot, at noon. I will be there. E xxx
He sat down, feeling sick. The text had come when they’d been on this bench together. When Felicity had been telling him her memories, when he’d held her. When he’d begun to think that maybe they would get through this, after all.
She’d talked with him, at last. But nothing had changed.
The phone was slender in his hands. A few keystrokes would let him know how many times she’d spoken with Ewan. It would allow him to listen to the messages he’d left, read the texts they’d exchanged. He would see enough of their relationship to be able to imagine the rest.
How long had his mother picked up the extra phone extension upstairs as soon as his father answered it downstairs? For how many months or years, even after it was supposed to be over, had she scrutinized every piece of post that came for Derek, and worried when he was late home from the office?
He’d never be able to ask her, but he thought he knew. Any time was too much. Even once was too much.
Quinn put Felicity’s phone back in her handbag and brought it back downstairs. He replaced it in her bedside cabinet. She was asleep, turned away from him, her body a question mark in the bed.
‘Going home for some rest?’ the nurse who’d helped him asked as he passed her. He nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m finished.’
Chapter Thirty-three
IN THE MORNING, Quinn isn’t there when I wake up. It’s two nurses and the anaesthetist, checking my blood pressure. ‘You’re in theatre a bit earlier than we’d thought,’ says one of the nurses. ‘Just as well since you can’t have any breakfast!’
‘My husband isn’t here yet.’
‘Well, give him a quick ring and I’m sure he’ll be waiting for you when you come out of theatre. Or we can ring for you, if you like?’
I find my phone and check for messages from Quinn. It’s not like him not to be here early, reading his newspaper. He hasn’t rung me at all, and Ewan has stopped ringing too. Although there are no unread messages, I check the list just in case I’ve missed something, and I see the text from Ewan on the top. Asking me to meet him in Greenwich again, in three weeks’ time. Telling me he does love me.
It’s marked as read. I don’t think I’ve read it, though I can’t trust my memory. But I have a sudden certainty, which may be wrong, that Quinn has read it, and that’s why he’s not here.
My empty stomach feels sick. It’s very much like the feeling I’ve had before, smelling frangipani. But now I’m on the drugs that stop those memories, so I know that my anxiety and dismay are real.
‘Actually,’ I say to the nurse, ‘it would be great if you’d ring my husband for me. Thank you.’
They give me a release form to sign, to say that I consent to this surgery. There’s no point hesitating; logic wins over doubt, though as I sign it, I feel as if I’m condemning a part of myself to death.
‘Has anyone ever refused to sign one of these?’ I ask, imagining it: the patient, detached from the IV and an obligation to his own health, puts on his clothes and walks out, free to pursue whatever delusions he chooses to take as truth.
‘Not for this surgery,’ says the anaesthetist. ‘This surgery saves people’s lives.’
My problem is not the surgery. My problem is what I’m going to do afterwards.
If Ewan really does love me, if he’s counted on my love, which everyone tells me is only a symptom, what will happen to him if I don’t meet him in Greenwich in three weeks’ time? The first time I met him in Greenwich it was to save his life, though I didn’t know it. If I don’t meet him, he’ll have lost his best friend and his lover, all in the space of a summer.
Maybe I should have answered his calls, or rung him again when I wasn’t having a seizure and told him what’s wrong with me. But I couldn’t explain to him that everything I’ve done has been the result of pressure in the wrong part of my brain. It seemed easier to wait and see how I felt after the surgery. Ewan, for all his strong body and his stubbornness, is incredibly fragile.
Quinn isn’t fragile. I have hurt him, but he is whole within himself. But the read text, his absence now, tells me that the feeling I had last night, talking to him, being in his arms, wasn’t real either. It was only a temporary respite from the silence. Our conversation last night under the moon was the end.
‘You’re very quiet,’ says one of the nurses, the one who offered to call Quinn. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Just enjoying thinking as hard as I can before you lot start messing around with my brain.’ They all laugh again.
The neuroradiologist arrives. We spoke yesterday when she explained the surgery, but this morning, she regards me with more interest. ‘I wasn’t up to speed on your symptoms yesterday,’ she says. ‘I hear your PCA makes you fall in love. A wonderful sort of seizure to have, I’d imagine.’
What’s the answer to that, anyway? No? Yes? Mind your own fucking business and stop envisioning professional publications?
‘Maybe that’s all love is,’ I say. ‘An imbalance in the brain.’
Everyone laughs. What a funny girl I am today.
‘Well,’ says the neuroradiologist, ‘not to worry. When you wake up, you’ll be cured.’
This well-trained and experienced woman who’s so intrigued by my symptoms will insert something into an artery at the groin and it will wend its way upwards through my body, past my heart, which does not feel emotion though we say it does, up my neck and into my brain. There will be a tiny camera to guide the operator. It will carry a load of platinum and it will deposit this precious metal inside the aneurysm, choking it off. Coiling, it’s called, which I think is an unfortunate word, with connotations of deadly snakes. As platinum doesn’t grow, though there are probably many people who wish it did, the aneurysm should deflate and my temporal lobe should be safe from the pressure it has been labouring under. My blood flow should go back to normal.
Unless, of course, it doesn’t. The success rate of these operations is 95 per cent, but that’s the technical rate of whether the equipment works or not. Clinical success rate is about 80 per cent. In the other 20 per cent, the coiling ruptures the aneurysm, or there is a stroke in another part of the brain, or the coiling doesn’t work and something else has to be tried. Of course, in addition there are always the complications possible from the anaesthesia. But chances are, it will all be fine.
See? I do listen to facts, I say to Quinn, who isn’t here.
The anaesthesia is like warm honey in my veins, relief from a pain I didn’t know I had. I asked them if I would dream while I was out, and they said no. It’s not like
regular sleep. It’s blankness. They said you’ll wake up and not remember anything; you may feel a bit sick, but that’s normal. The hours you’ve been unconscious will be the hours that were spent making you better.
So it’s probably not a dream I have, but maybe something caused by the small instrument insinuating itself into my mind. In this not-dream I see myself holding a book with a glossy full-colour cover. It’s the next Igor the Owl book, the one I haven’t produced yet, except when I open it to the first page, it’s not any story I’ve been working on. The drawings are mine, though. I recognize the style.
On page one, Igor is lost. He’s flying through a dark forest, and he can’t get high enough through the canopy to see where he’s going. It’s the kind of picture that I usually put three-quarters of the way through, when we don’t think Igor is going to find the solution to his puzzle, but when I turn back there’s only the title page. That’s a new idea, to start with Igor in peril, rather than somewhere safe. Why haven’t I thought to start the story this way before?
Pages two and three are a spread. Igor is only a small owl, but the trees are growing tighter and tighter together, and he can’t spread his wings any more. It’s getting darker, too, and there are creatures in the shadows. Owls don’t need to fear predators, but small owls, small puzzle-solving owls, do.
This spread is scary, but of course these stories are read at bedtime, safe under the covers. There is an unspoken contract in these books that the problem will be cured. I mean, it will be solved.
On page four, Igor alights on a branch, and on this branch there is a mouse. You and I know that mice are the natural prey of owls, but this is another unspoken contract. Besides, this is a talking mouse, and talking mice never get eaten.
‘What’s wrong?’ says the mouse. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m lost,’ says Igor. ‘I’m a famous owl detective, but I can’t find my way. I’m afraid my way can’t be found at all.’
‘If you’re in doubt,’ says the mouse, ‘you should follow your heart.’
On page five, Igor eats the mouse. You can see its tail disappearing into his beak.
I turn back to the title page. I’ve seen the title, but I haven’t read it till now. Igor the Owl Follows His Heart, it’s called.
On pages six and seven, Igor follows his heart. It looks much like Igor himself, except it’s even smaller, and it’s pink with white wings like a cherub. The trees thin, shrink into twigs, die off. On page eight, Igor is in a desert. He lands on a rock. In all directions, there is sand. There isn’t another owl in sight, but the sun beats down on the fragile skulls of creatures who have wandered here and died. In each one of them, there is a small glowing spot shaped like a kidney bean.
And there he stayed, says the text.
The next page is the blank endpaper. That’s the end of the book.
You can’t have a book this short; it’s not worth the money to print it. People will feel cheated. Children will be afraid. I flip back to the beginning and start again, but the story is the same each time: Igor is lost, he eats the mouse, he follows his heart, he ends up in the desert, alone.
This is not a good book for children. This is not a good book for anybody.
Ewan
THE HOUSE WAS the last in a cul-de-sac, in a neighbourhood outside of Leicester. It was a normal house. Ewan parked his borrowed car on the street outside it and sat with his hands on the wheel for a few moments, looking at the lawn in front, the red-painted door. This was what Lee had come home to, when he had come home. It was where the bedroom ceiling fell down because he’d put too much gear up in the loft; where he’d made a mess of the kitchen trying to lay tiles himself. Lee had a story about nearly every room in this house, but Ewan had never been in it. Their friendship had been on the road.
Walking up the path to the red door was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Every single part of him wanted to turn around and get back in the car. But he had promised himself a new start. A new life of not running away. Of being responsible. Of being polite to post-office counter assistants.
He rubbed the fingers of his right hand, where he could still feel the back of Lee’s sweatshirt, as it was torn away.
Petra opened the door even before he knocked. ‘Mate,’ she said, and hugged him on the doorstep. Then she stepped back and looked up at him, her hands still on his arms. ‘You’re an hour and a half late.’
‘I got lost,’ he said, and then corrected himself: ‘I sat in the motorway services for ages trying to get up the courage.’
‘I’m glad you’re here now.’ She wore thick-rimmed glasses, an enormous jumper that he thought had probably belonged to Lee. Worn slippers on her feet. Her hair had grown out of her crop and looked shaggy. She was quite different from the lipsticked, laughing, sexy girl he’d met with Lee. But her smile, though sad, was warm. Behind her, the house smelled of coffee.
‘Petra,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. It would never have happened if not for me. I know I can never make it up to you, but whatever you need, I’ll try to do it.’
‘I don’t hold you responsible for Lee’s death,’ she told him. ‘And the fact that you came to see me is enough. But now that you mention it, if you’re feeling like you’ve got a strong back, I could use a hand.’
Three hours later, the entire contents of Lee’s shed were spread out on the lawn. Petra rubbed the small of her back and said, ‘I have no idea what any of this shit is.’
Ewan balanced a soldering iron on top of a gutted speaker cabinet. ‘He was a bit of a pack rat. But he could fix anything – not just electrics. Anything.’
‘Mostly with gaffer tape and spit, if our house is anything to go by.’ Petra plopped herself down on the lawn next to the speaker cabinet. ‘You don’t get the face when I mention him.’
‘What do you mean, the face?’
‘It’s something like this.’ She slackened her expression into a tragic mask. ‘Except with panic in their eyes. It’s what everyone in my family looks like when I talk about Lee. And all of my friends around here. It’s like I’m not allowed to talk about him normally, as my husband. As someone I still love. They expect me to burst into tears and freak out. Don’t get me wrong: sometimes I do want to burst into tears and freak out. But sometimes I just want to talk about him.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ewan. ‘Sometimes I do, too.’
‘You were his best friend. He talked about you all the time. He said you were a total fuck-up, by the way, but he said it fondly.’
‘He only ever said nice things about you.’
‘Oh sweetie, I don’t believe you at all.’ She stretched her legs out. ‘So what should we do with all of this stuff? The tip?’
‘Are you sure you want to get rid of it? Doesn’t it have memories?’
‘These memories, I don’t need. This shed is a pit to hell. Did you clock those spiders?’
‘We could try eBay.’
‘I wouldn’t even know how to list this junk.’
‘I probably know what most of it is,’ Ewan said. ‘If you’ve got a camera and a laptop, I can list it for you. Some of it’s worth money.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Thank you.’ She lay back on the grass, her hands laced over her belly. ‘I’m stupidly tired.’
Ewan surveyed the equipment strewn over the lawn. ‘What are you going to do with the shed? Paint it?’
‘It’s beyond a lick of paint. I’m tearing the fucker down. I’ll put up a swing set or something.’
‘You’re—’
‘Pregnant. Yes. Thirteen weeks. It happened right before he went away. Now you’ve got the face. Stop it.’
He sat down next to her, though he had to move a roll of cable to do it. He closed his eyes and, with an effort, put aside the guilt. Because she’d told him to stop it, and she was more important than anything he could feel.
‘I just … yeah. Okay. Did Lee know?’
‘Yeah. I’m surmising that he didn’t tell you.’
> ‘He said some things. Mostly about me getting my life in order.’
‘That’s Lee. And you have to do it now, because it was his last request.’
‘Someone else said the same thing to me not long ago.’
‘It’s why I don’t need this shed. Or any of these things. I’ve got someone much more important, who will always be a connection to him. I just don’t want people to get the face when this kid asks about its daddy. You know?’
‘Well,’ said Ewan, ‘I’ve got a lot of stories. As soon as the kid’s old enough, send him to me. Or her. I’ll tell the story about the time in Memphis that I broke Graceland, and Daddy fixed it.’
‘With gaffer tape, I’ll bet,’ said Petra, and both of them laughed, the kind of laughter where after a while, you’re crying.
That night in his hotel, Ewan put on some sort of zombie film and lay on the bed, looking at his phone. Flick hadn’t answered his calls or returned his message. But he liked that. She’d told him not to get in touch while she sorted out her head, and she was sticking to it. He didn’t want a woman who was married to someone else. He wanted, for once and for all, to be in love with a woman who was available. Someone who would see through him. It was scary, in a way, but he was ready for that. Or at least he hoped he was.
Tomorrow he’d go back to Petra’s and finish listing Lee’s stuff on eBay. They’d drink coffee and tell stories. Tonight he was in another hotel room, just like all the hundreds of hotel rooms he’d stayed in all over the world. And just like he’d done in every one of them, every time for the past two years, he put down his own phone and picked up the room landline. He dialled nine to get an outside line, and then, from memory, he punched in Alana’s number. All except for the last digit.
It was a zero. For the past two years, that zero had seemed to sum up an awful lot. Maybe that was why he’d never punched it.
Or maybe it was because he was, plain and simple, a coward who couldn’t ring his ex-wife and ask to speak to his daughter. Who couldn’t send a birthday card. Who would always have the connection, but couldn’t connect.
