by Jo Gatford
Angela shrieks and a slithering body follows, a boneless thing covered in grey slime, one hand grasping its cord, squeezing rhythmically. It takes a moment to adjust to the cold, bright world, reacts with disappointment and outrage. I smile so hard my cheeks hurt, through eyes full of tears, at the little face which seems to be mostly made up of one huge screaming mouth. The nurses whip a towel around it and place the baby gently onto Angela’s chest.
She doesn’t speak, the baby doesn’t cry. They look at each other. Angela kisses its gunky forehead, streaking blood onto her cheek. As one, the onlookers sway and breathe and swallow the lumps in our throats and the midwife whispers, “Girl.”
Angela considers the tiny head rooting for her breasts.
“Clare,” she says.
#
I can hear her but I can’t see her. Can’t find her. Can’t breathe. Can’t keep going but can’t stop moving. Door. Wall. Floor. Something sharp against my ribs. A fork in my fist. And I hear her voice but I see his face. So many times I wanted to hurt him.
“Peter, let me help you,” he says.
“Graham,” I say.
“Paul,” he says. Lies. From the start.
“You,” I say. Simpler that way.
My wrist throbs inside its cast. I let him pull me up off the carpet since I don’t know how I came to be lying there, and halfway to standing I take my chance. The fork tines pierce his polyester slacks, his fatless thigh, and stick into stringy muscle. He cries out. Falls. And me with him, back down into the ocean again. My head glances off a doorframe and a girl calls my name but this isn’t a portal, this is rest.
Chapter Seventeen
I’m only out for a minute or two. I’d sidestepped like a startled seagull, but not far enough to stop the front right corner of the bus from barrelling into my left hip (“I just nudged him,” the driver claimed). The impact spun me backwards, perfectly in line for the wing mirror to crack into the back of my head. Another ‘nudge’ that split the plastic.
Sound and vision melt back into my head, taking begrudged turns as if I am trying to mix oil and water.
“Don’t move him!”
“Idiot was in the middle of the road… ”
“I’m a witness, I’m a witness. Has someone called the police?”
“Police? He needs an ambulance, look at his head.”
“What’s your name?”
I realise my eyes are open and Lee Burnett is looming over me, a wad of tissues pressed to a fat, split lip, but genuine concern in his eyes. The buzzing in my brain makes me forget that it was Alex who got the letter about Dad and not me, and for a moment the man looking down at me could be my own alternate father. One who might give a shit if his son got hit by a bus.
“What’s your name?” he says again.
“Matthew.”
“Can you move?”
A blush heats my face and I want to cry. My eyes cartwheel, checking that Jamie is not part of the growing crowd. Thank fuck for that.
I grasp blindly for his hands, my depth perception somewhere far off and happy in its ignorance. “I’m so sorry, Lee. I honestly didn’t know he was going to hit you.”
Lee laughs, throwing his head back like a jovial musketeer, only without the flowing hair. “Don’t worry about me. Can you get up? You’re still in the road.”
A car passes too close, blasting out a baseline that jumps octaves without warning. The beat settles in my stomach and when I sit up I think I’m going to puke.
Lee quickly takes my arm and pulls me, limping, over to the curb so the bus can pull in to the side of the road, letting off a double-deckerload of inquisitive, irritated and irate passengers who take up residence on the opposite side of the street to stare at me.
“Ambulance is coming,” the waitress informs us, iPhone to her ear, a strange smile aimed my way.
I count in my head until the siren comes veering around the corner but the numerical order gets lost. I am stuck on seventeen.
Lee dabs at his lip and peers at the tissue to see if his blood has clotted yet.
The paramedic looks us both up and down. “Right, who first?”
In the back of the ambulance they pull at my clothes and ask me why I’m fighting them and I am forced to yell, “No! I’m - I’m - I’m going commando!”
The paramedic pauses, Lee stifles a laugh, the driver says, “What?”
I explain in a whisper, “I had no clean pants this morning.”
“Well, we still need to have a look at that leg, mate.”
“Please - it’s okay, just a bruise. Really.”
“I’ll close my eyes,” Lee says patiently, patting my shoulder. The lump on my head bulges through my hair. It pounds with every heartbeat. Each time I reach up to feel the thick congealed blood, the paramedic tuts at me and slaps my hand away.
Lee shuts his eyes and rests his hands over them. The paramedic lays a sheet of paper towelling over my crotch and cuts away my left jean-leg.
When I was younger I always dreamed about being in some sort of accident - nothing too bad, just enough to warrant a sling, or crutches, or a head bandage. The worst I managed was a sprained ankle when I was twelve, missing a step coming out of a chapel assembly. In fact, shoved by Jamie. Laughed at by Alex. Reluctantly acknowledged by Dad, who only took me to the doctor after it turned black and I couldn’t fit my shoe on.
This is not what I dreamed of.
The paramedic’s rubber-gloved hands are tacky and drag on my leg-hair. My balls shrink inside my body with shame beneath the pathetic modesty of paper towel.
Hands press my skin. A tongue clicks. My hip is already blotching purple. There’s no sweetness of a day-old surface bruise. It’s deep. An ache that twists my lower intestine. I don’t know what I was expecting.
The paramedic looks up, “Lie back. You need stitches for your head. Maybe an x-ray for this leg.”
I nod. No, that was a stupid idea. I shake my head. Equally bad. “I just need to get home,” I try. His response is to ping off his gloves.
The ambulance takes a right on a roundabout and I throw up over the side of the gurney, splattering the shoes of Alex’s real dad.
#
In A&E I cower in a fold-up wheelchair, clutch my paper towel blanket, and tell Lee repeatedly to go back to his bar, to go home, to leave me here. He ignores me, tells me stories about weird bar customers, the strange things he’s found in his restaurant toilets, the idiots he’s employed over the years. He manages this for a good hour before he mentions her name, then barrels in with no warning:
“Was Lydia sure Alex was mine?”
I feel like a betrayer to my father even saying it aloud. “She never even talked about it. Alex just got this letter.” And I remember I have the very thing – the earth-shattering, equilibrium-destroying object itself – in my pocket. I hold it out to him. “Here.”
I can’t read it again. I won’t. It’s actually, bizarrely, pleasantly, none of my business now that Alex is no longer a blood relation of mine. Lee reads it, chewing on his inflamed lip. His Alex-eyes squint at some of the words as if they hurt. When he’s finished he sighs long and low, and because you might as well kick someone while they’re down, I tell him how his son died. Lee bobs his head rhythmically and empty of expression as he listens. I run out of words when I get to the funeral so he ends it by clearing his throat and trying to pass the letter back.“Keep it,” I say, more bitterly than I mean to.
“He was your brother.”
He was my half-brother. Now I suppose he was my stepbrother. Though really, now he’s dead, he’s nothing to no-one. I nod all the same.
“Who was the other one?” Lee asks, “The one who hit me?”
“Alex’s best friend. He’s a prick. Sorry.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Stop apologising.”
He’s too calm. His ability to deal with all this shit is as irritating as it is reassuring. “You’ve taken all this pretty w
ell,” I say.
He sort of smiles, eyes everywhere but my face. “Lydia and I were only together for a few months. Over thirty years ago now. It doesn’t really seem real, I suppose.”
He can’t have known about Alex. Jamie is insane. Lee’s a nice guy. He wouldn’t have run if he’d known he had a child. He’s looking after me and he’s only known me a few hours. I’ve had a longer conversation with him than I have had with my own father in the last five years.
“When did your brother die?” he asks softly, folding and unfolding the letter in his hands.
“My - ” I start to say half/step/non-brother then swallow it down. There is no need to be so pedantic. “About a month ago.”
Lee pulls on the handle of my chair so he can look at me straight. “This is the worst part,” he says quietly. “But then you’ll start feeling guilty for things getting easier. Then angry that people have stopped asking you about it, stopped wondering if you’re okay. You’ll think they’ve forgotten. But you’ll still think about it all the time. Give it a year. Actually, not spot on a year – that’s almost harder than this bit, the anniversary – but give it just over a year and you won’t feel so close to it all. It’s not going to go away, though. It just gets further away from where it hurts.”
But it doesn’t hurt. It’s just an emptiness. Grief I could work with. I don’t know what to do with this void.
“Are you married?” I ask him.
“No.”
“Kids?”
He hesitates. “No.”
“Oh.” The space between us is too quiet. “Do you remember Angela?” I ask.
His face brightens, “Oh, yes, of course. She was such a funny little thing. How is she?”
“She’s okay.”
He struggles to find the right word, masticates it around his tongue first. “I was… surprised that Lydia had another baby. After Angela. Having her… the birth nearly killed her, you know?”
I didn’t. I shake my head. “She had a caesarean with Alex. And blood transfusions after, I think.”
He nods. “Does your dad know? About me? The letter?”
“No.”
“Is he a good dad?” He’s asking questions he doesn’t want the answers to. It’s wounding him to ask them, but he’ll probably never see me again so he has to. And I realise that’s why he’s here: not to look after me but to salve his conscience.
“To Alex? Yeah. He was. Lydia was a good mum to both of us.” My fists clench around the scrappy edges of my jeans, holding them tight against my throbbing leg. Every time the automatic doors admit another waiting, bleeding, wheezing A&E patient, goose bumps ripple along my skin. Lee’s pale eyes, presumably capable of as much hatred as his son’s, peer at me, almost amused. A rush of protective love for Lydia floods me cold. She chose the right father, I want to say.
Fuck it, why not? “She chose the right father for Alex.”
He blinks, sits back, tucks the letter away inside his jacket. “You’re right there.”
I edge my wheelchair a few inches back. “You don’t have to wait with me.”
“It’s okay. I’ll see you to the doctor, anyway.”
“No, really - ”
I yank on the wheel to turn away and nearly tip myself out. The spirit level in my head explodes and I have to stuff the paper towel into my mouth to stop myself from being sick again. Instead of leaping away, Lee lays a warm hand on my back and rubs in slow circles. And I, stupidly, start to cry.
Lee sighs, not impatiently, just heavy with air. “I get the feeling you didn’t really get on with your brother,” he says.
I don’t need a pause, “I hated him.”
“So why are you so upset?”
“It was my fault.”
“Sounds like an accident to me.”
I know it does. But I know somehow it wasn’t.
A doctor comes through from the treatment rooms and swaps paperwork with a nurse behind the front desk. The waiting inhabitants of the room lean forward expectantly, hoping to hear their name called next.
Lee picks at a jagged thumbnail roughly, “I didn’t believe her when she told me. I thought it was just an excuse to make me stay. I was moving to Scotland for a new job and I thought she was just trying to manipulate me.”
“Matthew Landrow?” calls the doctor, hiding a yawn behind his clipboard.
“You knew?” I whisper.
Lee nods at the doctor, “That’s you.”
“Why didn’t you ever try to find him?”
Lee stands, waves at the doctor and wheels me over to the desk.
“To be honest, Matthew, Lydia was a liar. I didn’t want to know if it was true or not. It seemed easier that way.” He falters for a moment. “But now I have my karma, don’t I?” he pats his pocket where the letter lies.
“Matthew?” the doctor smiles with his mouth but not his eyes. He takes the wheelchair handles from Lee and spins me deftly about and away through the double doors and Lee doesn’t say goodbye.
#
I am taken to the underbelly of the hospital, an overflow ward containing what appears to be mostly moaning elderly people. No curtains have been drawn to divide us. After the doctor prods my head and pulls back the paper towel over my crotch without warning, he writes something on my clipboard and leaves again. The nurses at their station refuse to look up in case they make eye contact with someone. It is sweltering but my joints have seized in their sockets and I can’t take off my coat.
The man in the cubicle next to me sits on the edge of his bed holding a large paper bag and stares at me. “You here visitin’?” he asks, “Mum or Dad? They dyin’?”
“No… ” I say slowly, expecting the dried blood on my face and hands to explain for me.
“Check-up for me. And picking up my drugs,” he swings the bag at me and hoicks up his left trouser leg, revealing a bloated calf scabbed with black discs and criss-crossed with discoloured veins. “Blood clot,” he tells me proudly.
I nod, swallow more saliva than is comfortable. An old man shuffles a painstaking journey from his bed on the right side of the ward to the toilet on the left, drip-stand in tow. He doesn’t make it in time. Little pools of urine trail behind him and the stand’s wheels leave tracks as he drags them through.
A woman with thinning, greasy red hair makes her rounds from bed to bed. She’s not a nurse, clearly – her right eye is half-closed and weepy and she’s wearing a purple dressing gown and trainers – but the intent and manner is there. She squeezes blood clot man’s shoulders affectionately. “Alright, my darling?” she coos. Her accent is thick and throaty. Her eyes find mine and I try a smile.
“You visiting someone?” she asks. I shake my head, blushing beneath the sweat that gathers on my face under the unnatural heating of the ward.
She scurries around the bed and presses a palm against my forehead, yelling over to the nurse’s station, “He is rather hot. He is very hot!” then to me, “You’re burning up, my darling.” And I am. And maybe it’s not just the heating. The lump is still there.
The nurses ignore her and she moves onto the old peeing man, just inches away from the toilet door now, and goes to help him in. Finally the nurses move, waving the red-haired woman away and returning the old man to his bed. A porter comes to clean up the piss. A nurse glances at my chart as she passes and returns an hour later with a fucking terrifying curved needle and some catgut or whatever it is.
“You shouldn’t really be on this ward,” she mutters, as if it’s my fault I was brought here.
“Oh,” I say.
She shakes her head and when I see the pouches of tiredness beneath her eyes I realise it was meant to be an apology. “Busy afternoon.”
“Right.”
“Put your head forward.”
“Okay.”
She stitches up my head with an accompaniment of sighs and a wet cough that she vaguely tries to cover with her forearm. My swollen head throbs around the wound. My jaw aches from clenching. My pho
ne buzzes in my jeans pocket, cut away and hanging over the side of the bed.
“No mobiles allowed in here,” she snaps as she cuts the last thread and pulls the knot tight. She smiles like it takes a lot of effort to do so. “I’ll try to get a doctor to sign your forms as soon as we can and you can go home.”
“Thanks.”
She pulls the curtain around my bed as she leaves and I attempt to quietly burst into tears. My phone goes again. It’s Sabine. I turn it to silent. Someone else is crying outside my cubicle, a gentle but heartbroken weeping that makes my self-pitying sobs impotent. I wonder if anyone is coming to visit the red-haired wannabe nurse or the pissing man or those blood-clotted legs or anyone else here. I wonder how the fuck Angela maintains any kind of positivity facing this lost battle every day. How Dad doesn’t just kill himself outright. I would. Except I wouldn’t have the guts. I wonder if it’s because of the concussion that I can’t remember where I parked the car.
Chapter Eighteen
It’s a hotel room. It’s a cell. It’s a waiting room. It’s my room. Not my room. Not my flat. Not the house. But mine. Temporarily. Connect the dots, you’ll get there eventually. Nightness outside. Darkling. A door between me and all the muttering staff people. Spots of blood on the knees of my pyjamas. Not my blood, so that’s okay then.
A window, unlatched. Ground floor. I could leave. But nowhere to go. No more doorways. All gone. I think I swallowed my voice.
Don’t ask, don’t recall
What happened to that damn fork?
No regret, all dark.
Maybe I can pull my voice back up my throat manually. I find the bathroom eventually. It’s not where it used to be in my flat - the door opens the wrong way and these are not my towels. Fingers as far back as I can stick them, stroking my epiglottis until bile and mashed vegetables splatter into the toilet bowl but there’s no voice to be dragged up. I try again, until nothing is left, until there is blood. Until the retching turns to barking - a flapping seal trapped behind my voice box. My throat is raw but the more I swallow the looser my tongue becomes.
