Infinite Sky

by Cj Flood

  ‘The lorazepam is almost out of his system, so he might be more active than he has been before,’ Mary said, and I thought ‘active’ seemed a strange word to use.

  Mum held her hand out as if I was a little girl, and asked if I was sure I wanted to see him. I said of course I was, I’d already seen him, more times than she had, and she looked hurt, but I was angry with her for trying to take control suddenly and, more than that, I was disappointed in myself, because part of me didn’t want to see him one bit.

  Thirty-five

  Sam’s room was freezing, and he didn’t look much like my brother. The skin that wasn’t bruised or bandaged was a pale yellow colour. The ventilator sucked and puffed away, and the drip trickled, and Sam rocked his head back and forth on the pillow. His eyes flickered. Mum took one hand, while Dad went round the opposite side and took the other. I stood by Dad, my fingers scuffing Sam’s wrist.

  Mum talked to him, and he turned his head to her, and away again, and his eyes rolled, right back into his head, so we could see the reds of his bottom eyelids, and he let out this terrible moan, low and brainless-sounding, like a zombie. My fingers flinched away then made their way back, ashamed of themselves.

  A terrified look passed between Mum and Dad. I wanted them to put their arms around me.

  Mary came over. ‘Keep going,’ she urged. ‘He might be able to hear you.’

  Mum started again. She told him we were all here, waiting to hear his lovely voice, and not to worry, he was going to be fine, but there was no rush, because we weren’t going anywhere – none of us – we loved him and we’d wait as long as it took, and the groaning stopped then, and I was so relieved, until he shut his eyes again.

  Mary came closer and checked a few things. She told us we were doing great, that it was good to talk to him, that it might be only a matter of time before he woke. She told us how patients waking from comas could be so agitated and confused at first that they tried to leap out of bed or yank their tubes out.

  ‘All excellent,’ she said. ‘The more frightened they are the better: brain’s a-go-go.’

  She smiled at each of us encouragingly, and I felt strong and capable, like after a pep talk at half-time.

  ‘Come on, Sam,’ I said, leaning over the bed. ‘You can do it.’

  I grabbed his hand, not caring that Dad’s came with it. He was my brother, and whatever Dad thought of me, I wasn’t about to let him clear off without a fight.

  ‘Wake up!’ I shouted, and Dad shot me a look because there were two other families crowding around relatives in the small Intensive Care room. I saw how his knuckles were yellow, and Sam’s fingers purple at the tips from where he squeezed so hard.

  Mum smiled at me; a tight, scared little smile.

  I shouted again.

  And nothing happened.

  The noise began, rumbling from somewhere deep inside Sam. It set my nerves on fire. Any hopeful feelings died because it sounded so lifeless, so nothing like him at all.

  ‘You’re all right, boy,’ Dad tried to soothe, but he sounded heartbroken, like he was telling Sam that he’d love him no matter what.

  I felt Mum giving up beside me.

  Sam’s eyes opened, and he stared straight ahead, and it was like he saw nothing at all.

  Thirty-six

  Days passed and things didn’t get better. On Thursday we were taken into a small room on the seventh floor. There were no windows.

  There was me, then Dad, then Mum on padded grey chairs. Mary stood behind us. She had one hand on Mum’s shoulder. In front of us was a desk. Leaning against it was one of the consultants: Dr Lloyd. The room was that off-white that schools and offices and doctor’s surgeries always are. There were shelves full of textbooks on two of the walls. There were no family photos. It didn’t look like anyone in particular’s office.

  Mary squeezed my shoulder and my stomach dropped. I could hear Mum’s breathing, and Dad’s. They were breathing too heavily, and too fast.

  Dr Lloyd looked from one to the other of them, and occasionally at me, as she talked about Sam. Her grey and white pinstriped skirt was the same colour as her hair.

  ‘Thank you for coming to talk to me today. I won’t waste your time. I am terribly sorry to have to tell you that we are going to test your son for brain stem death. The EEG scans were flat. They showed a complete lack of brain activity.’

  Dad’s head thudded against the wall. He closed his eyes.

  Mary stroked Mum’s shoulder. The consultant carried on.

  ‘When the brain stem stops working, the brain can’t send messages to the body to control even unconscious functions like breathing, blinking, swallowing and coughing. Equally, it can’t receive messages back from the body. When this is the case, the person has no chance of recovery. We believe this is the stage your son is at.’

  I stared at the rough, lined carpet. At the little balls of fluff.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Mum said. ‘How can you know there is no chance of recovery? How can you be so sure?’

  Dr Lloyd explained about the extent of the damage Sam had taken to his head. She talked about the tests they were proposing, but I couldn’t follow what she was saying. Something about corneal reflects and gag reflexes. Fixed pupils and water being injected into ears. Mum couldn’t follow it either, but she wouldn’t stop asking questions.

  ‘I’m so sorry to say this. We believe your son is alive only because the hospital is keeping him that way. The tests have shown no activity in the brain whatsoever after a rapid decline since the seizures.’

  Mum talked about miracles. She asked about those stories you hear where people comatose for years wake up and learn to play the piano. She couldn’t stop talking. Like maybe if she never stopped, what the consultant was saying could never start being true. Dad stared with closed eyes at the ceiling.

  Dr Lloyd told her that these stories were very damaging, that they got people’s hopes up unfairly; that they were often propaganda from religious groups.

  ‘Such patients wouldn’t be declared brain stem dead in the first place,’ she said.

  She looked at us, and I hated her for being so unaffected.

  ‘If Sam shows even the slightest response to the tests, we will review the whole situation. This is hard for you to accept, but you must prepare yourselves for the worst. We will be very surprised to see a response.’

  Mum looked like she might tear Dr Lloyd’s face off.

  Instead she asked questions. Sometimes she asked the same question again and again. She leaned further and further forward on her chair.

  Dr Lloyd glanced at Mary. She gave the tiniest nod.

  ‘The doctors can perform the tests with you present, if it’d help,’ Mary said. ‘It can help relatives to understand their loved one has really gone. If he has. But it’s very traumatic. It can be hard to forget.’

  Mum’s face lit up at this. She turned in her seat to look at Mary.

  ‘We don’t recommend it,’ Dr Lloyd added. ‘Absolutely not. It is very much the last option.’

  Mary bent to talk quietly in Mum’s ear about how it was our choice what happened next, but I couldn’t hear. Mum was breathing too noisily.

  Dad put one arm across each of us as if we were unseatbelted children in a car he was driving too fast.

  ‘No,’ he said, very quietly. ‘We don’t want to see that. None of us will see that. Do the tests.’

  Thirty-seven

  The three of us sat in the windowless room, in the comfortable chairs, while the tests were carried out. Dr Kang had stayed for a while explaining things to us but I didn’t have much idea what she’d said. Apart from that we needed to be prepared for what might happen – but that was impossible.

  If Sam didn’t respond to any of the tests his support would be withdrawn. If that happened, there would be some time where we could say goodbye before they removed all the breathing tubes and intravenous lines. She told us that we could take as long as we needed, but there wasn’t enough
time in the world for that.

  Shortly afterwards, Sam’s heart would stop beating. We could stay with him as he passed away, of course, she said. But that was our decision.

  She had asked about the possibility of Sam being a donor – but Mum couldn’t take it. She said no, louder and louder, covering her ears like a crazy person. Dr Kang turned her attention to the floor and then told us about the tests.

  She and Dr Lloyd would do them together. All of them sounded unbearable, and that was the point. A person shouldn’t be able to stand them.

  I was worried. If Sam didn’t respond and they had to turn the ventilator off, would it feel like choking? Dr Kang said no. She said it wouldn’t feel like anything, because if they had to turn the ventilator off, Sam would already be gone. She said he wouldn’t suffer, but how did she know?

  Thirty-eight

  Finally, the door opens.

  Dr Kang shakes her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘We did all we could.’

  The room shifts and slips and swells.

  Objects move around like gravity has been switched off.

  Mum is making a loud noise. Her head is between her knees.

  Dr Kang is saying we can stay with Sam as he passes, and medicine books are floating through the air like spaceships.

  Thirty-nine

  The curtains are pulled around Sam’s bed. They are pale blue and waterproof and they make a snapping noise when we walk in. He looks peaceful, and it isn’t right. Mum goes to him. She says Oh God. She moans No in this terrible low way. She kisses his face. She rests her head on his chest and sobs.

  Dad bows his forehead to Sam’s. His eyes are squeezed shut. He says My boy, my boy, my boy. No one knows what they are doing.

  Sam’s hand is warm in mine and I’m not ready to let it go. I want to lie next to him, like we did before, on his bed. I want his hair to grow back, and his dimple to pop and him to call me Eyeball. I don’t want to think about what he is, right now, my brother, plugged into machines and breathing and dead.

  Mum is hyperventilating. She is clutching at Sam’s arms and looking at his face and shaking her head very slowly.

  ‘They can’t, they can’t, they can’t,’ she says, she can’t stop saying it, and Dad reaches across the bed. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he says, and his voice breaks. ‘Anna. He’s gone.’

  Sam’s chest rises and falls with the ventilator.

  Forty

  It’s like a black box has opened inside my head. The doctors give Mum something, and Dad buys whisky on the way home, but I’m just here, feeling everything.

  Sometimes we’re in the kitchen and sometimes we’re in Dad’s room. Or is it Mum and Dad’s room? I don’t know, but me and Dad are in our pyjamas. Mum’s wearing Sam’s navy blue Adidas Stripes and one of his white T-shirts. We don’t wash but occasionally Mum makes us all go and clean our teeth. The sun comes up and the moon comes up. And then they go down.

  At some point an envelope addressed to me arrives. Inside is something damp and crushed and purple. An iris. It’s dead, and sweet-smelling, and I know it means Trick made it home. I put it on my windowsill next to his address. I think about writing to him.

  At some point WPC Baker calls round. She wants to know if I’m ready to make a statement. Mum tells her I’m not. At some point she rings, and Mum says the same thing. Dad doesn’t say anything. If I’m near the phone when it rings, and I can get away with it, I hang up without answering.

  At some point Father Caffrey comes round. Tess is with him, and an order of service is made. We get old photos out to choose a nice one. Mum has to go upstairs to lie down, so I choose one, from the end of last summer.

  Sometimes Tess comes round. She feeds the cats and the dog and puts milk in the fridge. She forgot to stoke the Aga – she didn’t know how it worked – and so it’s gone out. The kitchen is cold, and full of insects. The windowsills rattle with bluebottles and moths. Daddy-long-legs butt at the strip light.

  ‘Look after your mum and dad,’ Tess said to me when we first got back. She had washed all the lasagne plates and was putting a tray of savoury rice in the fridge, and I felt like she was saying I hadn’t lost as much as them.

  The heatwave continues outside, and the house is getting stuffy when Mum starts asking questions.

  ‘What was he doing out there?’ she asks, and it’s clear from her voice that her tablets have worn off.

  The curtains are drawn and there’s a sheet pinned over them. The mirror on the dressing table faces down.

  Her voice is very flat and very careful, and it makes me sit up because we’ve covered this; we’ve been over it a hundred times at the hospital.

  Next to me, in the damp bed, Dad takes a swig of whisky. He repeats the sentences that in a certain order explain what happened to Sam.

  ‘But why was he out there?’ Mum says. ‘With those boys. How did he know them? And why was he wearing his football boots?’

  She turns to look at Dad, who is the only one still lying down. His neck is tilted against the headboard at an uncomfortable angle. His arm, which must be numb by now, is lodged underneath the pillow I’ve just moved from.

  He lifts himself out of the bed and walks to the window. He pulls the curtains and sheet aside and looks out, rests one fist against the glass. The day shining into the room makes us close our eyes.

  ‘Football boots,’ he says very quietly.

  ‘I’m just asking what he was doing out there. How did he meet them? It’s a reasonable question.’

  Mum continues to list reasonable questions in the kind of voice a lioness might discover if it woke one morning on the savannah to find it could speak.

  ‘Bloody good time to come back and take an interest. Bit more of this a few weeks ago and we might have a son we could sit down and give a good talking to.’

  Mum is standing now. Her cold blue eyes are on fire.

  ‘How dare you accuse me of not being interested? I did everything for the lot of you until a few months ago! You didn’t know your arse from your elbow! How dare you say my leaving was anything to do with my kids!’

  They take opposite sides of the room, and I stand between them on the bed. I hold my hands out, telling them to stop. My voice is tinny and unclear. I’m bouncing slightly with the effort of asking them not to fight. I get the urge to laugh.

  ‘Please,’ Dad says. ‘Tell me again why you left. I’d love to hear it.’

  ‘I didn’t think I loved you any more,’ Mum says, and her blue eyes are frightening.

  They step closer, until they are shouting into each other’s mouths.

  ‘I tell you why Sam was wearing his football boots, Anna. Because I’d hidden all his trainers. Because that’s how bad it had got. I didn’t know how else to keep him in. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  Mum wants to know why he didn’t tell her, why we hadn’t let her know.

  ‘Why didn’t we let you know? Why didn’t we let you know?’

  Dad’s face is purple. He can’t breathe.

  ‘Do you remember leaving? Packing a van? Filing for divorce?’

  ‘I would have come back!’ Mum shouts. ‘I would have come back!’

  ‘But I didn’t know. Don’t you get it, woman? I didn’t know!’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Iris?’ Mum says ‘All those times on the phone. Why didn’t you say something?’

  They are both looking at me now, standing above them as I do, on their bed, swaying slightly, and it’s all the wrong way round.

  ‘Nasty habit you’ve developed,’ Dad says, and he’s slurring slightly. He stinks of whisky.

  ‘Don’t start, Thomas. Please don’t start on her.’

  ‘No, don’t you start. All your love and everybody’s equal. Bollocks. You weren’t here.’

  He points at me, still looking at Mum.

  ‘She left me there, at the hospital, without a flaming clue about what had happened. Looked me in the eye.’
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br />   ‘Iris!’ Mum calls, but I’m already halfway down the stairs.

  All I want is to go outside, to feel the sky above me, to be on my own. Instead I go to my room. I pull Trick’s address out from my copy of The Outsiders. I copy it neatly, watching my hand as if it’s someone else’s. I walk back upstairs. It’s like looking through the wrong end of binoculars.

  ‘What’s this?’ Dad says, when I hold the address out to him. His voice follows me out the room, terrible and quiet like a balloon full of toxic gas.

  ‘Is this it? Is this his address? How long have you had it?’

  I don’t stay around for the balloon to explode.

  Forty-one

  All day I stay out in the corn den. I dig holes in the ditch to go to the toilet. I make a fire and I bake corn. Fiasco chases rabbits, and I will her to catch one so she can eat something and we never have to go home again. Night comes, and I feel like a traitor but all I can think about is Trick.

  I keep seeing his odd eyes, the way they looked when Sam was on the floor. I see his chest and stomach, cut up, and his expression, outside my window, when he told me he hadn’t wanted any of it.

  The further back I go the more it hurts, but I can’t stop. I remember him lying next to me in his red vest and jeans, listening to me in that serious way of his. I picture him hiding out here in the dark, his mum and dad shouting, Sam’s blood drying on his hands. How much pain he must have been in.

  He’ll have to go to prison for years. He picked up a brick and cracked it against someone’s skull, and now I don’t have a brother.

  The stars come out and I stare at them until they throb and grow and shrink again. I remember Sam’s face as I washed his cuts at the kitchen table, how he warned me about Trick.

  I wish he was here to act smug and rub it in, to say he was right all along. I want to argue it with him, to tell him Trick was backed into a corner, that he should never have started on him in the first place. Suddenly I can hear his voice.