While I Was Sleeping

by Dani Atkins

  ‘What?’ I probed, when he failed to lift his head and look at me. ‘Don’t you agree with that idea? Do you think Ryan’s wrong?’ There was a clutching-at-straws eagerness to my voice, which I’m sure he easily recognised.

  ‘Not wrong, perhaps. But I think they’re seriously underestimating that little girl. She’s uncommonly bright, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my granddaughter.’ I smiled slowly, wondering if he knew the way his face lit up whenever he spoke about my daughter.

  ‘Do you think she’ll work out who I am? Even after everything Ryan has told her?’

  My father gave a small shrug of his elderly shoulders. ‘For a start, I think she’s going to notice she looks an awful lot more like you than she does either of her parents.’

  I stared at the woven pattern of my serviette, watching it blur, dance, and then finally crystallise back into fabric. ‘When Hope speaks to Chloe, what does she call her, Dad?’

  My father looked like he’d rather stab his steak knife straight into his heart than answer me truthfully. What parent would ever want to do or say something that they know will cause their child so much heartbreak or pain?

  ‘She believes what Ryan told her, my love. She believes her natural mother passed away after an accident.’

  I shook my head, because he wasn’t answering my question. His eyes were washed-out blue pools of anguish when he eventually replied. ‘She calls her Mummy. I’m so sorry, sweetheart, but Hope calls her Mummy.’

  For someone who had embraced the world of technology and social media so wholeheartedly, I’d been oddly reluctant to re-enter it since I’d woken up in hospital. However, sitting cross-legged on my hotel bed, poring over the infuriatingly small images on my phone’s screen, I really missed my laptop and tablet for the first time.

  ‘There’s no need to rush into things,’ urged my father, who was sitting in the hotel room’s only chair. ‘You don’t want to jump and sign a lease on the very first property you go to see. There’ll always be more next week.’

  I tried not to smile at his very poorly disguised attempt to discourage me from finding a place of my own to live.

  ‘I know that, Dad. But this flat looks ideal. It’s on the ground floor, and it even has a patio area. And it’s not expensive, either.’ The details of the two-bedroom flat had practically leapt off the screen at me, and I had to admit they sounded very encouraging. The rooms looked spacious and as I scrolled through the gallery of images, I got a strange fluttery feeling each time I arrived at the photograph of the small and sunny second bedroom. Would that be the room where one day Hope would come to stay? Was that something that Ryan and Chloe would allow? I shook my head. It was just as Heidi had said the very first time she’d pulled me out of my wheelchair and onto my feet: ‘One step at a time.’

  I passed the phone to my father and watched him read the property details with so much care you’d have thought he was studying for an imminent exam on them. He swiped through the photographs, not just once but three times, clearly looking for even a modest-sized fly in the ointment, but finding none.

  ‘It does look very promising,’ he admitted grudgingly.

  ‘I’m going to phone and see if I can arrange a viewing for today.’

  ‘So soon?’ he asked, looking startled. I still didn’t think he fully understood my need to take up the reins and regain control, but in order to make sense of this newly returned life, I knew that was what I needed to do. Which made what I had to say next so much harder.

  ‘Dad, would you be terribly offended if I went to see it by myself?’

  He coughed unnecessarily for a long moment, which I politely pretended was entirely normal, before answering in a gruff voice. ‘No. Of course not. I can drive you there and just wait in the car.’ I looked at him from beneath my lowered lashes, until he laughed at his own suggestion. ‘Okay, I get it. No interfering parent required.’

  I unfurled my legs and crossed the room to put my arms around his neck and kiss the prickly grey bristle on his cheek. ‘You’re not interfering. But I need to start doing things alone. And this is a good place to begin. If they can arrange a viewing for this afternoon, I’ll get the number of a taxi company from the hotel reception.’

  ‘There’s no need for that. You might as well Uber it. I’ve got the app on my phone.’

  I stopped midway through dialling the number of the estate agent, to look at my father in total confusion. ‘I have absolutely no idea what you just said.’

  He tapped the side of his nose playfully, and I could see how much he was enjoying this moment of unexpected role reversal. ‘I’ll explain it to you later,’ he said with a wink.

  I recognised him straight away. For me it had been just months since we’d last met. It took him a moment or two longer to place me. Some of my father’s concern had managed to rub off on me during the twenty-minute journey to the large Victorian property I’d come to see. By the time I’d climbed out of the car, thanked the driver; felt weird about not having to pay him; and stood looking up at the tall imposing building, I was more than just a little jittery.

  Had my father been right? Was it foolish for a single woman to have arranged to meet a landlord in an empty property by herself? Was I so doggedly determined to prove I was capable of looking after myself that I’d made a stupid – even dangerous – mistake? Could this man pose a threat to me? My footsteps were slowing as I walked up the black-and-white tiled path. Because suddenly I was back on a June day, when my own paranoia, my own imagination, had turned a perfectly innocent man into a threat. And look how that had ended up. There was nothing to fear here.

  I pressed the buzzer for the ground-floor flat, and moments later was standing in the tiled hallway outside a black painted front door. I heard the approach of footsteps from within and shifted nervously from one foot to the other. And then the door swung open, and before it had completed its arc, I was smiling broadly. There really was nothing at all to fear, because I knew this man, and he knew me.

  ‘Mitch,’ I cried, frantically mobilising all of my brain cells to come up with his surname, and failing miserably. I’d only ever known him as ‘Mitch’, which was a step up from most of my former colleagues, who used to refer to him simply as ‘the IT guy . . . you know, the one who looks like Grizzly Adams’.

  As though the remembered insult might possibly be written all over my face, I overcompensated slightly, greeting him as enthusiastically as if we were long-lost cousins.

  ‘How amazing to see you again. I had no idea this was your place.’

  ‘Madeline?’ he said cautiously, like a diver who wasn’t quite ready to jump in at the deep end. ‘Madeline Chambers? Maddie? I thought you were . . . I didn’t know you had . . .’

  It wasn’t fair or kind to leave him floundering like that, and I only allowed it to continue for a moment. ‘You knew about my accident then?’

  His eyebrows rose incredulously. They were thick and dark, like well-fed caterpillars. ‘Everyone knew. You were sort of a local celebrity.’ He suddenly realised what he’d said and a hint of pink crept onto his face, or as much of it as I could see beneath the beard. ‘I guess no one wants to be famous that way though, do they?’ he added sympathetically.

  We stood for a moment, neither one of us sure how to proceed. What should have been a simple business-like property-viewing had been derailed by our tenuous history, and neither of us knew how to get it back on track.

  ‘Come in, please,’ Mitch invited, allowing the door to swing wider. Even so, there wasn’t much room to squeeze past him in the narrow hallway. I’d forgotten how huge he was. Not just tall, but broad with it. He’d always reminded me of an American football player who’d idly wandered off the field having forgotten to remove his shoulder pads. It wasn’t until I’d followed Mitch down a short passageway, which led to a lovely cosy lounge, that I realised he’d actually lost quite a lot of weight since the last time we’d met. But then again, so had I. Of the two of us, he looked far bette
r for it than I did.

  ‘Sit down,’ urged Mitch, gesturing towards a faded chintz-patterned sofa. ‘Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee? Something stronger? I think there’s a bottle of sherry knocking around here somewhere.’ Once again we were way off track, lost in a no-man’s-land between business and social niceties.

  ‘No. I’m fine thanks.’

  ‘You look fine. Well, you look a bit pale. But I’ve got to be truthful, you look a hell of a lot better than you did the last time I saw you.’

  I tried not to wince at the brutal honesty. He was clearly a direct, shoot-from-the-hip kind of a person. I pushed away the mountain-man image that my description conjured up, and tried to remember the occasion he was talking about. The company we both worked for had switched its computer operating system, and there’d been an avalanche of glitches and problems that had resulted in Mitch being a very frequent visitor to the Media section where I worked. Had worked, I corrected mentally.

  ‘It was pretty tough seeing you like that. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for your fiancé and family.’

  I raised my head to look him in the face. It had to travel upwards a considerable distance from my position on the couch to where he stood before me.

  ‘You came to the hospital? I didn’t know that.’ It wasn’t the smartest comment I had ever made, considering there were six whole years which I’d known nothing about, and during one of them I’d even delivered a baby without any recollection of doing so. ‘How come . . .? Why did you . . .?’ I must have looked as confused as I felt. I’d always got on well with Mitch. We used to chat while he worked at fixing whatever had gone wrong with my computer. And a couple of times I had joined him for coffee, if we both happened to be in the canteen at the same time. But I wouldn’t exactly have called us friends. I never saw him out of work. We moved in different circles, and I knew he and his wife had lived in a small village some distance from town.

  Once again Mitch’s face coloured slightly, and I felt bad that I’d embarrassed him twice in the space of almost as many minutes. I only hoped he wouldn’t hold it against me if I wanted to rent his flat, because from the little I’d seen so far, it looked exactly what I was hoping to find.

  ‘I didn’t go alone,’ he admitted. ‘A whole group of us from work went up to see you. I think everyone hoped that the more voices you heard, the more chance there was of something penetrating through to wherever you were lost.’ It was an unexpectedly poetic way of describing the nothingness of my coma.

  I looked away from the watchful concern in his dark brown eyes. ‘Well, that was really nice of you. Thank you. Sorry I didn’t wake up for you.’

  ‘I guess you just weren’t ready to come back then,’ Mitch replied, and there was a sympathy in his voice that told me he probably knew not only about Hope, but also about Ryan’s marriage to another fiancée. My five minutes of fame had made my life an open book to everyone who’d known me. The only person who hadn’t uncovered all of its secrets yet was me.

  ‘So, the flat,’ I said with breezy enthusiasm, that didn’t sound entirely natural.

  Mitch seized on the safer topic, like a life buoy in the ocean. ‘Yes. Absolutely. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Erm, can I see it?’

  He flushed for the third time. The poor man was practically allergic to whatever I said. It also told me that he wasn’t exactly a practised landlord, something he himself confirmed as he politely held open the door of the lounge for me. ‘This place was actually my grandmother’s,’ he explained. He rested a hand, which felt as large as a dinner plate, on my shoulder to guide me. ‘The kitchen’s this way.’

  It was a reasonable-sized room, and there were certainly enough cabinets and storage for someone who didn’t own as much as a single saucepan any more. It was six years too late to regret donating all of my kitchen utensils to a local charity shop, and somehow I doubted the plan to share Ryan’s equipment was still an option.

  ‘It’s a bit dated, I know,’ Mitch apologised. ‘I fitted it myself about ten years ago, but these things go out of style so quickly.’ He ran his hand thoughtfully along one wooden surface and I could see the affection in his eyes which I’m sure wasn’t for the smooth oak worktop, but for the kitchen’s former owner.

  ‘You said the flat used to be your grandmother’s?’ My question dangled in the air, seeking more information.

  The sorrow in Mitch’s eyes answered it for me, even before he spoke. ‘Yes. It was. She passed away six months ago.’ He looked around the kitchen, as though he still expected to see its former occupant here. ‘She left this place to me. I think she hoped I’d sell it and pay off my mortgage, but . . .’ His eyes looked a little bright, so I feigned an interest in the wooden grain of the cupboards until he was able to continue. ‘I’m not ready to sell it yet and have strangers living here. But I don’t want to move in myself. So renting it out – to the right person – seems like the best option.’

  ‘It’s a good idea,’ I said, surprising myself by reaching out and laying a hand gently on his forearm. My fingers didn’t even go halfway around it. Mitch cleared his throat, and I drew back my hand, afraid I’d just overstepped the tenant/landlord boundary.

  ‘There’s something I should tell you before you make a decision about whether you’re interested in the place.’

  I waited, wondering why he suddenly seemed uncomfortable. He looked like someone about to rip off a very big sticking plaster. ‘My grandmother died here, in the flat. Not in the bedroom . . .’ he added hastily, as though the geography was all important, ‘but in the lounge.’ I thought of the lovely cosy lounge and waited to see if this breaking news altered my earlier opinion of it. It didn’t.

  ‘Some of the people I’ve shown around have been a bit . . . freaked out when I’ve told them. They’ve all said they couldn’t possibly live in a place where someone had recently died. One girl told me – quite straight-faced – that the flat was definitely haunted.’ Mitch gave a nervous laugh and looked up to see if I was joining in. I smiled weakly, which I hoped would suffice.

  ‘Anyway, in case you’re scared of ghosts, or vampires, or zombies, I thought I should tell you this before we go any further.’ He had an expression on his face, of a man who couldn’t believe he was having this conversation.

  I probably spent less than five seconds considering what he’d said, and knew I wasn’t in the least bit put off. ‘Mitch, I’ve been about as close to death as it’s possible to get for a very long time, and now I’ve come back. If there is a zombie around here, it’s probably me.’

  The sigh of relief he gave sounded like air escaping from a balloon. But before the subject was lost in a tour of the flat, I was curious about one thing: ‘If prospective tenants were put off by what had happened, why did you keep telling them about it?’

  Mitch seemed genuinely puzzled by my question. ‘Because invariably they asked, and because . . .’ He gave a shrug of his massive shoulders. ‘. . . because I didn’t want to deceive anyone. I don’t tell lies.’

  Mitch’s philosophy in life sounded like the polar opposite to Ryan’s, and I was never really sure if that was what made me impulsively say: ‘I’ll take it.’

  Mitch looked confused. ‘You’ll take what?’

  ‘The flat. That’s if you’re willing to have a quasi-zombie for a tenant.’

  ‘But you haven’t even seen the rest of it yet.’

  I grinned, unable to explain the exact feeling of ‘rightness’ that making this decision had suddenly given me. ‘I don’t need to. I mean, I will look, but I don’t need to. My mind’s made up.’

  He laughed, and I’d forgotten how low and deep the sound was. It used to fill the office or the corridors of the building whenever someone cracked a ridiculous joke. The laugh rumbled up from somewhere deep within him, as though it had travelled a long way before it was released. From the height of him – well over six foot four – it probably had.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, his eyes still tw
inkling in merriment. ‘But just so no one can accuse me of taking advantage of you, why don’t I show you the rest of it anyway?’

  We did a whistle-stop tour, and everything I saw I liked. Okay, so the bathroom wasn’t particularly modern, and I really would have preferred a separate shower, but there was a charm to the flat that had won me over.

  The master bedroom was empty apart from one large wardrobe – which would easily accommodate my very modest suitcase-full of clothes – and a brand-new double bed, its mattress still encased in a plastic wrapper. I gave a small inward sigh of relief. For six years I had slept in beds occupied by goodness-only-knows how many people before me. It would be rather nice to sleep in one that was totally new.

  ‘It’s all perfect,’ I said, looking around with a smile. ‘Where do I sign?’

  He looked as though I’d presented him with a very tricky equation. ‘I have absolutely no idea. I guess the estate agents will handle all the paperwork. I just wanted to be the one to show the flat, and make sure it went to the right kind of tenant.’ He looked down at me, and even though I’m not short, I felt dwarfed by him. ‘And I really think that it has.’ This time I was the one who blushed. I probably owed him that one.

  We were walking down the corridor, on our way back to the lounge, when he stopped so suddenly that I walked straight into him. It was like colliding with a brick wall. ‘I’ve just realised, I forgot to show you the second bedroom.’ He pulled open the door immediately to his right, to reveal the small sunny room. True, in real-life the wallpaper was slightly tired and faded, but I was picturing the walls painted bright yellow, with a colourful duvet and cushions thrown across the single bed. I felt the same excited shiver run through me that I’d experienced when I’d seen this room on the internet. This was Hope’s bedroom.

  The thought led me to a memory that hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment. ‘I’ve just remembered, the last time we spoke – it must have been a few weeks before my accident – you and your wife had just had a baby, hadn’t you? A little boy, wasn’t it?’