Our Song

by Dani Atkins

The doctor beside me cleared his throat noisily. ‘This is Mrs Taylor, everyone. Is there any way we can give her just a moment with her husband?’ Every head in the room turned towards me, every eye was full of sympathy. That couldn’t be good.

  They parted like the Red Sea, clearing a path to the bed. Part of me wanted to ask them all to get out of the room to give us some privacy, and another part wanted to scream at them to keep doing whatever they were doing, don’t stop, don’t rest, not even for a second.

  Thankfully they had no intention of desisting from their efforts as I walked on shaky feet towards my unconscious husband, but they did fall silent in their tasks and moved with a hushed deference around us. I think I preferred their frenetic energy, their stillness made it seem as though they were giving up, as though the fight was already lost.

  I reached Joe’s side and tried to find some part of him, a hand, an arm, an anything, that didn’t have something either attached or inserted into it. There was none.

  ‘Hey Joe, it’s me,’ I began on a voice that trembled on every word. ‘It’s Ally,’ I added, because his eyes were closed. I looked down at him, feeling certain that whatever state he was in, wherever this accident had taken him, he would hear my voice and open his eyes. My own eyes grew hot and gritty as I stared unblinkingly at his face. Gone was the wind-burned colour that never left his skin, not even in the middle of winter. Gone was the warm pink of his lips. His face was a mottled mosaic of greys and blues. I had never seen that colour on a person before, at least not on a living one.

  But Joe wasn’t dead, his chest was moving rhythmically up and down, in tandem with the small bellows-like machine beside him that was doing all the work. I reached out my hand and then looked up hesitatingly, unsure.

  ‘Can I . . . can I touch him?’ Several heads nodded in reply. He was cold, so very cold. My fingertips ran over his cheek and the chill of him penetrated the pads. ‘Joe, wake up. Please wake up,’ I said, leaning down so my head was only inches from his. A chill emanated up from him; it was like standing before an open fridge. When the tears from my eyes fell from my own face and landed on his I almost expected them to freeze there.

  ‘We need to—’ began a voice behind me, before someone silenced them rapidly.

  ‘Let her have a minute. She needs this time.’ I closed my eyes against the hidden implication behind those words. They were allowing me time to say my goodbyes.

  I reached for Joe’s hand, ignoring the drip in the back of it, the tubes leading from it and the fact that it looked like a lifeless frozen mannequin. I gripped it, hard enough to hurt the delicate bones in my own fingers. ‘You have to wake up now, Joe Taylor. Because you have people here who love you and need you and . . . and Jake needs his daddy because you know I’m no good at all that boy stuff, and I don’t know how to teach him how to play football, or how to change a tyre on a car, or how to shave . . . or any of that kind of crap. So just wake up now please, and stop scaring me like this.’

  ‘We really need to—’

  I looked up with eyes that didn’t know how to stop crying. ‘I know. I have to go.’ I bent back down to the icy effigy of the warm and loving man I had fallen in love with so many years earlier. I kissed the side of his mouth, my lips grazing the plastic tube protruding from it. My eyes scanned the room, sweeping over every last one of the team of medical professionals. ‘Don’t stop,’ I begged them. ‘Please don’t stop. Bring him back to me.’

  I turned and as I got to the foot of the bed I gently placed our son’s toy against the metal rail, standing it upright as a small furry sentinel and protector. ‘Look after him,’ I said ridiculously to the stuffed toy. Not a single person laughed, not one.

  Charlotte

  I stepped out of the lift, at a rate worthy of a competitive race walker, or at least a seasoned London commuter. My path to the reception desk was momentarily blocked as two uniformed police officers crossed in front of me. They scanned the sparsely populated reception area, spoke briefly to the staff behind the desk and then strode towards the family with the crying children. I wondered fleetingly if whoever they were here to see had been involved in an accident. I wanted to feel compassion for them, but right then all of my sympathies were diverted a lot closer to home.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Williams,’ began one of the duo of receptionists as she saw me approach. ‘We were just on our way up to get you,’ she said, while simultaneously relieving me of the partially completed forms. ‘Your husband is still being settled into the unit, but they’ve said if you’d like to go up you could wait in their Relatives’ Room. At least that way you’ll be close at hand.’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely. The closer the better,’ I agreed.

  The Relatives’ Room was small and oppressive, like a tomb, I thought darkly, a small gloomy NHS tomb. The Relatives’ Tomb. They should rename it. Then again, perhaps not. It wouldn’t give much hope to the countless desperate relatives who had sat exactly where I was now sitting. Possibly even on this self-same uncomfortable plastic armchair, with its wooden armrests with the chipped varnish. How many sweat-drenched palms had it taken for the varnish to be eroded like this? How many prayers had this tiny room heard, I wondered? More than a church confessional, I guessed. How many had been answered? Not all of them, that was for sure. Not every relative who sat within these walls got to leave and go home with their loved one. People died on this ward, there was no point pretending otherwise. They didn’t call it Intensive Care because they’d run out of ideas of what to name it. Only sometimes – however hard they tried – the care just wasn’t going to be intensive enough.

  Not that I thought for a moment that that was going to happen to David. He was sick, that much was obvious, but people didn’t die of an illness that just sprang up out of nowhere. You had time to prepare for the big life-threatening kind of diseases, didn’t you? Death didn’t just turn up unannounced and sweep you away on a rolling tsunami. You got a warning, time to prepare. Didn’t you?

  I shuddered. It must be the room, making me think this way. The claustrophobic green walls and the small grimy windows that looked out on absolutely nothing except the grey concrete slab of another building. Even the door felt morgue-like, with a tiny porthole set within it instead of a proper pane of glass. It was certainly as quiet as a tomb too. In fact, the whole ward was. But then only two of the eight glass-walled rooms were occupied. The one at the far end – the one I had mistakenly thought was David’s – was teeming with medical staff. They were bustling and flurrying around the patient within it, their faces unsmiling, full of concern. In panic I had gripped on to the arm of the small exotic-looking nurse who had led me through the ward, feeling her bird-like delicate bones beneath my fingers. ‘Is that David’s room? Is that my husband?’ I had asked, my voice thick with dread.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she had assured me, her voice a sing-song melody, her large dark almond eyes soft and kind. She looked wrong in her drab nurse’s uniform; she should be draped in a rich and vibrant silken sari. She shouldn’t be here in this setting, and neither should David, nor I.

  ‘Your husband’s room is at the far end of the corridor,’ she said, but when I’d tried to turn that way she had guided me (with surprising strength) in the opposite direction. ‘The doctors are with him now,’ she explained. I walked with my head craned, eyes fixed on the bay where my husband was being examined. Not that I could see anything, as venetian blinds had been pulled down for privacy. It didn’t look as though the poor chap in the other room cared much about privacy, one way or the other. He didn’t appear to be conscious and was hooked up to so many bits of machinery his room looked more like it belonged in a mission control centre than in a hospital.

  After twenty minutes the glaring bright fluorescent lights in the small waiting-room had begun to hurt my eyes, so I’d switched them off, preferring to sit in the dim light of just one small side lamp and the weak twinkling fairy lights wound about a small, tired-looking artificial Christmas tree. The tree sat on a low table positione
d against the wall, and was about a quarter of the size of the one we had in our flat, and nowhere near as elegant. I changed the colour theme of our decorations each year. This Christmas it was silver and ice blue. In January I’d take down the decorations and donate them all to a charity shop and start all over again next December. David had called me on that, just once, during our second year of marriage. ‘Don’t we want to keep them?’ he had asked, gently removing me from the small stepladder and taking over dismantling the uppermost branches. ‘When I was a kid I really enjoyed looking out for my favourite glass ornament every year . . .’ His voice had trailed away, and he’d said nothing more. But he’d given me a long hard squeeze before reaching for the roll of bubble wrap to carefully protect each delicate glass ball.

  This tree, sitting in the hospital room, held little cheer. The decorations were tattered, and the metallic paint on most of them was chipped. It looked sad and old, and I knew just how it felt. I resolved to give our own decorations to the ward when we took them down in January. Hell, if they just got David better, I’d buy them the biggest Christmas tree imaginable every damn year. I touched my fingers against the tiny silver star on the top of the small tree and wished very, very hard.

  Ally

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to get Stan to drive us to the hospital so we can be there with you?’ I shook my head, a pretty stupid thing to do when you’re on the phone. ‘Don’t worry about the snow storm,’ Alice continued, ‘Stan’s a good driver and he says he’ll be happy to take us.’

  I looked around me, momentarily confused by my neighbour’s words. I was standing just outside of the hospital’s main entrance, where I’d come to phone Alice, as promised. I hadn’t been sure where I was allowed to use my mobile phone within the hospital, but just in case there was any truth in the medical urban myth that they interfere with patients’ life-support systems, I’d taken myself as far away from Joe’s bed as possible to make the call. But until Alice had mentioned the weather, I hadn’t even noticed it was snowing, and quite heavily at that.

  I looked up at the falling white flakes, illuminated and backlit by the orange glow of the sodium arc lights ringing the parking bay. They gave the drab concrete area an ethereal air, which felt at odds with the turbulent churning feeling squirming inside me.

  ‘No, Alice. Stay where you are. I don’t want Jake seeing Joe like this. It would terrify him.’ I knew that for a fact, because I was twenty-three years older than my young son, and it had scared the life out of me. I shivered violently, only then noticing that I’d come outside without my coat, and had absolutely no recollection of where I had left it. I was barely capable of looking after myself right then, Jake was far better off staying at home in the capable hands of my good-hearted neighbour. When the medical team restored Joe from his cryogenic state back to the warm – in every sense of the word – man we both loved, I would bring Jake straight to his father’s bedside, whatever time of the day or night it was.

  ‘Okay Ally. Whatever you think is best. Don’t worry about Jake. Stan and I are happy to stay here all night if needs be.’

  ‘Thank you so much, you’re being so kind and—’ My throat constricted, preventing me from saying any more. Alice gave a small harrumphing sound of dismissal, which turned into a cough followed by several moments of discreet nose blowing. When she next spoke there was an authority and pragmatism to her voice which was probably for the best. Sympathy would have been my undoing just then.

  ‘Now what else can I do for you? Do you need me to call anyone? Your parents? Joe’s?’

  I swallowed noisily. As much as I would dearly have loved the weight of both of those calls to be lifted from me, they were mine to make, no one else’s. ‘No, I’ll phone them, but I thought I might wait until the doctors have some more encouraging news.’

  ‘Good idea,’ confirmed my friendly neighbour, who was probably about the same age as Joe’s parents, but seemed decades younger. The thought of how Joe’s parents would react to news of his accident was a real concern. Neither of them had been particularly well recently, and Joe’s dad had given up driving several years ago, so even without the impending blizzard, there was no easy way for them to make the five-hour drive that evening.

  ‘Can you just put Jakey on?’ I asked, using the time it took my son to run from the kitchen, where he had been playing with Alice’s husband, to the hall telephone to compose myself. I breathed in deeply, inhaling small snowy particles which stung my lips, turning them cold, but nowhere near as cold as Joe’s had felt.

  ‘How’s Daddy? Is he all better yet? Are you coming home now?’

  I breathed in some more snow, which coated the lies I was about to tell like a frosting of icing sugar. ‘Daddy’s doing just fine, sweetie. They’re giving him some really horrible medicine, but it’s going to make him all better very soon.’

  There were probably whole chapters written in child psychology books about why you aren’t meant to lie to your child in this kind of situation. But sod that. I would protect my son from anyone and anything that I thought would hurt him. That was the only type of mother I knew how to be.

  ‘Tell him to hold his nose, then it won’t taste so bad,’ recommended Jake wisely.

  My eyes began to water, and it had nothing to do with the sharp icy crystals stinging them. ‘I’ll do that. Good idea.’

  ‘And come home soon, because Daddy was going to read me the last chapter of my story for bedtime tonight, and no one does all the voices right except him.’

  My fingers tightened fiercely on the small handset pressed to my ear. It was a precious lifeline, my only link to a rapidly disappearing normality and far removed from this terrifying world, where doctors gave you time to say goodbye to the man you love, while a machine pumped oxygen into his lungs.

  ‘I promise we’ll both be home as soon as we can. Be a good boy for Alice and Stan.’ I know you’re not meant to make promises to a child which you don’t know you can keep, but you’re also not supposed to tear their world apart either. On balance, I could live with the choices I’d made.

  I spent most of the lift journey back up to the Intensive Care ward trying to convince myself that my decision not to contact our families was the right one. If I was being honest, part of me was scared that once I let word of the accident out, I would set in motion a terrible chain of events. I stared miserably at my distorted image in the polished chrome of the lift’s control panel and wondered if I was already too late. The dominoes were already beginning to fall and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

  One of the nurses found me staring through the glass walls of the room where the team of doctors were still busily working on Joe. I couldn’t tell from their activity or the looks on their faces if his condition had improved or worsened, and I was too scared to ask. She cupped my elbow and led me away from the room, virtually having to drag me when I resisted the pull of her arm.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do out here,’ she said gently.

  ‘I just wanted to stay close by. So he knows he’s not alone,’ I added. I glanced up at the crowded room. Joe was far from alone.

  The nurse patted my hand comfortingly. ‘As soon as there’s any change, I’ll come and get you. I promise. In the meantime, you can wait far more comfortably in here,’ she advised, coming to a stop outside a door with a glass porthole set within its wooden panel.

  I wondered in what universe the nurse might imagine that I would be even remotely concerned about whether or not I was comfortable while my husband’s life hung in the balance. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, the very worst night of my entire life. I reached out my hand and opened the door to enter the Relatives’ Room. And that was the moment when my night suddenly got a whole lot worse.

  Charlotte

  My ears were attuned to the sound of footsteps travelling briskly up and down the corridor. Each time they approached I could feel my heart increase its rhythm and my mouth immediately went dry in anxiety as I forgot how t
o swallow, forgot how to breathe. Each false alarm stretched my fragile composure until it was gossamer-thin and in danger of ripping to shreds at the smallest provocation. The silence took on its own tempo and sound as I continued to strain my ears, trying to make out anything that was taking place in the infuriatingly muted ward outside. Footsteps approached again, only this time they didn’t hurry past on some mission but paused and lingered at the threshold of the room. I froze. I’d been waiting for so long to talk with the doctors, but now they were here I suddenly wanted to barricade the door and prevent them from entering. I looked up as the chrome handle inched downward and the door swung open.

  Ally

  I was expecting the room to be empty. The nurse hadn’t said there was another occupant. But there was. Her face was turned to the door and her eyes locked on mine. There was no moment of uncertainty or any lack of recognition. It had been years since we’d last met, but I knew the contours of her face as well as I knew my own. She was the woman who had changed the course of my life.

  There was a moment of simultaneously shocked silence. She was the first to speak.

  Charlotte

  ‘You?’ I saw the nurse’s eyebrows rise several centimetres, as Ally’s mouth dropped open in shock. ‘How did you know he was here? Who told you?’ I continued.

  The nurse’s glance darted between us both, clearly baffled. And she wasn’t the only one.

  Ally shook her head, as though she was in the middle of a really confusing dream. ‘I . . . I was at home . . . the police told me. Why are you here?’

  I didn’t even register her question. A million suspicions, ones I thought were so deeply buried that they’d never crawl their way back to the surface, suddenly returned. ‘How did they know how to reach you?’

  ‘They found my number in his wallet. I’m confused. Just what are you doing here, Charlotte?’

  For a moment her words rendered me speechless. Was she delusional? Was she having some sort of breakdown? I could think of no other reason for her to challenge me. She was the one who didn’t belong in this room. She was the intruder.