Broken Heart Club

by Cathy Cassidy

  ‘Is it left to X-ray?’ I ask.

  ‘Through the blue door, turn right, second left,’ she says without looking up. ‘Have you got your form?’

  ‘Right here,’ I say brightly, waving Peter Smith’s school report from 1955 in the air. ‘Thank you!’

  She leans across distractedly and punches in the door code, and we sail through. We turn left instead of right, find the lifts and stop to study the ward plan next to them. ‘Where would she be, d’you think?’ I puzzle. ‘Orthopaedic, maybe, with a broken hip. Or Acute Geriatric? Both on the third floor. Here we go …’

  The lift hauls us upwards, spills us out into a deserted, brightly lit corridor that smells of disinfectant and despair.

  ‘Which one first?’ Eden asks. ‘Orthopaedic? I’m not sure I pass as geriatric, even with a shawl on.’

  We try the double door to Orthopaedic but it’s locked and requires a keyed-in password. We push on towards Acute Geriatric, trying to think up a plausible excuse to blag our way in, but an orderly comes out through the double doors pushing a trolley as we approach, and as if by magic we slide in before the doors swing shut.

  ‘Where now?’ Eden whispers.

  The ward is in partial darkness except for the nurses’ station at the far end. We slink along in the shadows, checking every room. Luck is on our side because we find Miss Smith in single room half way along. She’s on an IV drip, her face paper-white and strained in the dim light. Various electrodes link up to a little blue monitor screen that bleeps and purrs sporadically, and her bed has metal rails along the side to stop her falling out.

  I don’t know exactly what I thought someone with a broken hip might look like, but Miss Smith looks way worse. She seems weary, worn out, like she’s given up the fight. I don’t know what to say or what to do, but Eden is leaning over now, placing the soft blue shawl in Miss Smith’s twig-like arms and tucking the brown envelope under the coverlet.

  Her eyes flicker open.

  ‘Edie,’ she says, and then her eyes flicker past Eden to me. ‘Peter! I’ve been waiting for you! I’ve been waiting so long!’

  ‘Shhh, shhh. I’m here now,’ I whisper. ‘I’m never far away, I promise.’

  ‘Wait for me, Peter,’ the old lady says. ‘Wait for me. I’ll be home soon.’

  Miss Smith’s eyes flutter shut again and when it seems clear that she’s sleeping, Eden blows a kiss into the darkness and hangs a couple of paper crane garlands along the bed’s side rails. We abandon the wheelchair in a corner and slip out of the room, out of the ward and into the night.

  ‘Will she die, do you think?’ Eden asks in a small voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘She’s in her nineties. She looks so frail, but she was talking about going home.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ Eden says. ‘Some nephew who doesn’t even live here is putting her into a nursing home. She won’t know anyone – she won’t be able to look outside and remember things from long ago.’

  ‘Maybe that’s not what she meant about being home soon,’ I say softly. ‘Maybe home is where Peter is?’

  ‘How will we know?’ Eden says. ‘How will we find out?’

  ‘I’ll ring. If she gets better, I’ll find out where they send her. Promise. We did the right thing, Eden, tonight. We did a good thing.’

  ‘Yeah, I think we did.’

  She slips her hand into mine as we walk away.

  48

  Eden

  All night the memories have been pushing their way into my head; flashes of things I have tried to bury for too long. The past is rearing up again, smashing through the walls I have carefully built round it, ready to break everything to bits … my heart, my mind, my sanity.

  Ryan is rescuing the goldfish while I sit under the ancient tree in Miss Smith’s garden, fairy lights glittering above me, garlands of paper cranes rustling softly in the breeze.

  When somebody old is sick or hurt and their body is worn out, there’s a sense that their time is coming to an end, that death might even be a blessing. Maybe, if this is the end for Miss Smith, she will be with her son again; she’ll finally be ‘home’.

  When somebody young dies, though, there is no sense in it at all.

  ‘Ryan?’ I say. ‘We can talk about anything, can’t we? Trust each other totally?’

  His pale face turns towards me in the shadows.

  ‘Sure,’ he says, and there’s a soft splash as he scoops the second goldfish into the bucket.

  ‘So how come we never talk about Andie?’

  There must be an edge to my voice, because Ryan puts the bucket down and runs across the grass towards me, but he is too slow, too late to stop the tide of memories.

  I am falling to pieces, breaking apart. The past is rising up inside me like the monsoon after a long drought; violent, unstoppable, washing away everything in its path. Ryan’s arms fold round me, holding me close, and I let myself fall against him.

  I haven’t cried in two years, but now I cannot stop. Fat tears run down my cheeks and my breath comes in ugly, gasping sobs. I wipe away salt tears and snot with an angry fist, but they keep coming. A kind of animal pain rises up inside me and comes pouring out; a howling, wheezing, keening sound. I cannot stop it.

  I don’t know how long it goes on for. It feels like forever, but it could be half an hour; it could just be minutes. All I know is that I’m exhausted, shaking, spent. I know my eyes will be red and swollen and ugly, my skin blotchy, streaked with rivulets of eyeliner, and I don’t care.

  I’ve been ignoring the truth for so long, too long. I can’t fight it any more.

  ‘Why did she have to die, Ryan?’ I whisper. ‘Why did Andie have to die?’

  I quarrelled with Andie because of Ryan, and it was different from any other row we’d had – not that there had been many. Maybe this one would have blown over too, but we didn’t get the chance to see if that would happen. Andie went on holiday to Scotland the day after the camp-out sleepover, and the angry silence deepened into something sad and sour.

  I texted her non-stop for three days; grovelling apologies, promises of loyalty, bitter regrets. Silence. On the fourth day, my anger boiled over.

  Is this the kind of friendship we have? I challenged her. The kind that only works when you’re getting your own way? The kind that puts your feelings above mine, above everybody else’s? That’s not a friendship, Andie. I thought we were better than this, but I can see now that it was all one way and I don’t need that in my life. I don’t need you. You’ve smashed our friendship to pieces. I hope you’re proud.

  The text made me feel better for about five minutes, and then the regrets began, but this time I was too proud to grovel. Andie had made a choice; she didn’t want me in her life any more, and I pretended I didn’t want her.

  Ryan kept his head down through it all, but Hasmita and Tasha were distraught.

  ‘She’ll calm down,’ Hasmita insisted. ‘Give her time. Her pride’s hurt, that’s all.’

  Andie had texted Tasha and Hasmita to say the Scottish beaches were beautiful and deserted, that the sun was shining. Andie was in the one place in the whole of the British Isles that was actually sunny; she was having fun while I was stuck here in the endless rain, eaten up with anger and regret. The family planned to travel home on Saturday, stopping off a few times on the way, Tasha told me. They’d be home by midnight.

  ‘Go and see her first thing on Monday,’ Tasha advised. ‘You need to talk it through, clear the air. Everything will be OK, you’ll see!’

  But thing
s were never OK again.

  At ten that evening, just as Andie’s family were driving off the M1 in torrential rain, a lorry jackknifed and skidded into them.

  Andie’s mum and little brothers got off with minor cuts and bruises, and her dad had a broken arm and minor head injuries. Andie, though, had been sitting on the right-hand side of the car, behind her dad. She’d taken the full force of the crash.

  She was eleven years old, full of life, brimming with ideas, brave and beautiful and clever and kind. She could do a cartwheel, get ten out ten in any maths test, tell the best ghost stories, run faster than any boy I knew. She never got colds, she never got nits, she never said a mean thing in her life until the day we fell out over Ryan.

  Bad things were not supposed to happen to people like Andie.

  She died that night.

  49

  Ryan

  Some things you just don’t see coming, and then it’s too late and all you can do is try to pick up the pieces, even though you know that nothing will ever be the same again. That was how it was when Andie died. We were in shock, all of us, and instead of sticking together we fell apart. I tried to talk to Eden, but I could see she was numb, her feelings buried deep beneath a thick layer of permafrost. Her eyes had been blank, as if she didn’t even know who I was.

  I wondered if she blamed me; I thought she probably did.

  The rain lashed down all through the funeral, as if the heavens were crying. The coffin was small and made of golden-coloured wood, heaped high with white wreaths. The smell of flowers was so heady, so strong, that even now I can’t stand that smell. It brings back the pain.

  So many bad things.

  Andie’s dad, with his head bandaged, his arm in plaster, was sobbing. Andie’s mum broke down and had to be taken out of the church. So many people, cramming the pews, the aisles, crowding outside the church under black umbrellas. Did they all feel as broken inside as I did?

  So much black, too. Black suits, black ties, black dresses, black hats. Andie would have hated that; she was all about colour and sunshine, after all. The girls wore the brightest clothes they could find, pink and purple and emerald green, and I wore bright blue jeans and a red sweatshirt.

  I think that would have made Andie smile.

  After the funeral was over, the clouds rolled away and the sun finally came out for the first time in weeks and weeks, but it was a thin, watery kind of sunshine.

  Well, it was a thin, watery kind of world, without Andie.

  Andie’s dad came up to me after the funeral and handed me the Harry Potter book I’d lent her to read on holiday; I’d never know now if she’d liked it or not. I put it back on the shelf, but I knew I’d never look at those books again. It was like they belonged to someone else, a kid who had had the world at his feet, a kid with high hopes and big dreams of a world where anything was possible.

  I wasn’t that kid any more.

  It’s crazy, I know, but after the first shock wore off, after the tears and the nightmares and the funeral, I got angry. Why Andie? It made no sense at all.

  Andie was the first friend I ever had, my best friend, and now she was gone. After a couple of months, her family put their house on the market and moved north to Scotland. They said there were too many memories here, that they needed a fresh start. They went back to the town they’d holidayed in; they said it was the last place Andie had been really happy. A new family moved in next door; a family with two little girls who rampaged around the garden whooping, shrieking and laughing. It was a strange kind of torture to listen to that.

  The rest of the Heart Club melted away as if it had never existed at all. Tasha and her parents packed up and drove to France, shell-shocked, the day after the funeral. I emailed her a couple of times, but I didn’t hear back. Nothing.

  Hasmita put on that bottle-green blazer and tartan skirt, drew a line under her childhood and refused to cross it. I’d see her sometimes, in town with her new friends, arms full of books. Mostly, she didn’t even notice me, but once our eyes met and she waved awkwardly and hurried on to catch up with her friends.

  Eden turned herself into someone I barely recognized, a grey, silent shadow of the girl she used to be. I saw her that first day, her golden-brown hair dyed black, her uniform several sizes too big, looking like she wanted to hide inside its folds, and I didn’t even know it was her. If she wanted to be invisible, well, it was working.

  Me? I had no strategy at all for handling the hurt, and slowly my grief hardened into anger.

  My parents took me to the RSPCA kennels and we picked out a black and white mongrel puppy that looked exactly like the dog I’d been doodling and drawing all those years; the dog I’d campaigned so hard to have. I called him Rocket and sometimes, late at night, I held him close and cried into his fur, but still the anger remained. Some days I woke up filled with it; some days it spilled out of me at school and I found myself yelling at teachers, scrapping with classmates, kicking walls, committing small acts of insolence and defiance. Nobody understood; I didn’t think anyone ever could, but it turned out I was wrong about that.

  Eden sits beside me in the quiet darkness, her face tilted up to the black velvet sky as if watching the stars. In the silvery glow from the fairy lights I can see the scatter of freckles on her upturned nose, the glint of tears on her pale cheeks.

  ‘How long does it take for this to stop hurting?’ she asks, her voice soft.

  I tell her I don’t know.

  50

  Eden

  Ryan walks me home through the pink and gold daybreak, and we talk about Andie; about how wonderful it was to know her, how devastating it was to lose her, how messed up we’ve been ever since. It turns out it wasn’t just tears I’d been bottling up for so long; it was memories too – happy ones, sad ones, silly ones. They all come tumbling out, a tangle of life and love and sadness, and I wonder how I have survived for two years without talking about Andie, without having Ryan by my side.

  ‘Do you remember when we used to tell ghost stories at Halloween?’ I ask him now. ‘How Andie used to say that if she ever died young, she’d come back and haunt us? I’ve thought of that over and over, these last two years.’

  ‘Me too,’ Ryan says. ‘I’d have given anything to see her – just once, to say goodbye. We didn’t get the chance, did we?’

  I shake my head, tears starring my lashes.

  We didn’t get the chance to say goodbye, and we didn’t get the chance to patch up the first serious bump in the road our friendship ever hit. We didn’t get the chance to part as friends.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I ask now.

  ‘No,’ Ryan says. ‘I wish I did.’

  I take a deep breath and try to find the words to tell him about Andie; about how she’d vanished in the park when Ryan came along, how she’d slipped away from the party before I could say goodbye. I can’t work out how to say it, where to start.

  Would he even believe me? Would he be hurt that Andie had come back to see me, but not him?

  Andie breezed back into my life and turned it upside down. In typical Andie style, she sorted out my wardrobe, nudged me out of my solitude, helped me find the courage to reach out to Ryan and Hasmita and Tasha. Didn’t she?

  Doubt floods through me suddenly. Was any of it real?

  The mind plays tricks on us, tells us what we want to hear, shows us what we want to see. Would it be such a big leap for me to dream up a scenario where Andie came back, told me she was sorry, told me to get a grip?

  I hug Ryan goodnight at the gate and let myself into the fla
t, creep up the stairs and into my room. In the shadows the room looks peaceful, calm; two pillows beneath the duvet mimicking a sleeping body. Well … enough to fool my mum, anyway.

  Did I imagine it all? I don’t know what to think any more.

  I crawl under the covers, pull the duvet over my head and fall into sleep.

  A hail of gravel clatters against my window, waking me just after two in the afternoon, and I go to the window, bleary eyed. Ryan waves at me from the path, Rocket at his side. The goldfish bucket is on the path beside him, and his face is lit up with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen.

  ‘Come down!’ he yells. ‘Wait till you see!’

  I clatter down the stairs and open the door, and Ryan is on the doorstep grinning.

  ‘You brought the goldfish to see me?’ I ask, baffled.

  ‘Only briefly,’ he says. ‘Listen, this morning, when I woke up, I was thinking about Andie. I couldn’t get her out of my head, and something made me take down that Harry Potter book I lent to her to take to Scotland. Do you remember? Her dad gave it back to me at the funeral, but I’ve never been able to look at it until now.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Just look,’ Ryan says. ‘Look inside!’

  He opens the book and inside the front cover there is Andie’s handwriting, as lively and vivid as she once was. Loved the book, Ryan. Bad news; now you’ll have to lend me the others! Sorry I was such a drama queen at the camp-out – what can I say? I’m an idiot! Forgive me?

  ‘No way,’ I breathe. ‘That’s amazing, Ryan! So weird!’