by Kylie Ladd
‘It’s him,’ Hamish said flatly, cutting her off.
‘Who?’ Skye asked, confused.
Hamish waved his arm at the tallest figure. ‘The man in the statue. It’s him. Ben.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Skye. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘It is him,’ Hamish repeated. ‘They’ve got the same colour hair. He was in that photo that you showed me on the school website, the one of the mosaic being made. I remember noticing him because you’d said his name so many times, you were always talking about him . . .’ Hamish’s face flushed. ‘Right before you dumped me.’
‘Hamish, it’s brown tiles,’ Skye said in exasperation. ‘It could be anyone. That’s the point.’
Hamish came closer to the sculpture, stretched out a hand to touch it. ‘The shape of the face is the same, the eyes . . .’. He swung back to Skye. ‘You’re seeing him, aren’t you? Is that why you moved out?’
‘No!’ Skye cried.
‘But it explains it, doesn’t it?’ he went on. ‘It would explain a lot. Why you pulled away every time I touched you, how you’d barely say anything at dinner, all those hours you were supposedly working while Molly was at daycare . . .’
‘No, you’re wrong!’ Skye protested. ‘I was working. I was working on this! What do you think, that I knocked it up one morning when I had nothing else on for the day?’
‘I don’t know what to think about you anymore,’ Hamish said. Outside, Jess barked, a short, reproachful sound. ‘So you swear you haven’t seen him since he left you, after those blood tests? Not once, ever? You can promise that, can you?’
Skye couldn’t help it. She flushed, the blood rising up into her face at the sudden, unwanted memory of being in this exact place with Ben, the two of them naked on the couch—the couch that she’d had to move out of the studio afterwards because she couldn’t bear seeing it there, couldn’t bear the longing and the grief that it provoked in her.
Hamish caught her hesitation and strode towards her. ‘You are seeing him! I bet you were screwing him before you even left—in my house, in my bed. Screwing him, but staying with me so I could pay for all this,’ he gestured wildly around the studio, at the statue, ‘because he couldn’t, could he? When did you see him? Every day? While Molly was having her nap? It must have been bloody inconvenient for the two of you once she started talking.’
Skye shrank back behind her workbench. She had never seen him so angry, so out of control. Even when Molly was at her toddler worst Hamish had been unfailingly calm and gentle, could put her back in her cot for the sixth time in a night without once being tempted to slap her, like Skye was. ‘It’s not true,’ she sobbed. ‘I haven’t seen Ben for years.’
‘I bet. You slut. You’re not fit to be a mother.’
At the accusation Skye saw red. Yes, she’d seen Ben, once, but she hadn’t given in, as much as she’d wanted to. Because it was wrong, yes, but also because Molly had needed her, because she had to look after Molly, so Molly could grow up with her own parents, her own father. Yet it hadn’t turned out like that, had it? She’d ended up leaving Hamish anyway, and the futility of it all was suddenly more than she could bear.
‘I’m not seeing Ben!’ she screamed. ‘I haven’t seen him, but I wish I had. And I’ve certainly been thinking about him, every single time you fucked me.’
Hamish’s face contorted and he rushed at her bellowing, eyes ablaze. Skye saw his hands contract into fists, then at the last moment he seemed to change his mind and he struck the statue instead, shoving it, hard, so that it teetered on its base. Instinctively Skye leapt forward to catch it, trying to save all that work, but it was too heavy. Her legs buckled under its weight; it pitched in her arms like a drunken dance partner. She heard Hamish roar her name; saw him lurch towards her, arms outstretched, at the same moment as pain, swift and jagged, pinned her to the ground and turned the studio black.
36
The chatter from the nurses’ station was driving her crazy. Couldn’t they keep it down a little, show a bit of respect? This was a recovery room, not a nightclub. Nell was tempted to march over and tell them so, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave Skye’s side. Just say she woke up while Nell was gone? She wouldn’t know where she was, what had happened to her . . . Another gale of laughter swept through the ward, and Nell stiffened, turning back to her daughter.
Skye didn’t look good. Her ash-blonde hair was hidden by a surgical cap; her insentient face was pale, drained. There was a bandage over her right eye, the skin around it already yellowing. Tubes snaked from her nose and the back of one hand. Nell reached for the other, squeezing it softly, but there was no response. She squeezed again, harder, then leaned forward and whispered Skye’s name, but still Skye’s eyes stayed closed. Wake up! Nell wanted to scream. Get out of here, go back to your life. But she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t even cry. She felt utterly powerless, hollowed out. Children take all of you, she thought. They unravel your heart.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t heard the phone ringing. She had, a few times that afternoon, but she’d been in her studio and couldn’t bring herself to put down her palette and go inside and answer it. Neither Skye nor Molly was home, after all, and these days she had so few opportunities to work undisturbed. When she finally came in to start dinner there were four messages on the answering machine. Carbonara, she’d decided, hitting the play button as she reached inside the fridge for eggs and cream. ‘Nell, there’s been an accident,’ Hamish’s voice keened, and she’d promptly dropped the items on the floor.
They would still be there, the mess waiting for her when she finally returned home. Nell had grabbed her keys and driven straight to the hospital. Hamish had first called at almost three, when Skye had just gone into surgery. By the time Nell found him, sitting outside the operating room, his head in his hands, it was ten past six. The light outside was fading; as Nell had arrived, everyone else was going home. It was Skye’s kidneys, Hamish had told her. Somehow the statue she was working on had fallen on her, and the sheer weight of it had torn one kidney almost all the way through while grazing the other. The falling statue had also bruised her liver and spleen, broken some ribs and gashed her head, but it was the kidney tear that had put her in surgery. He didn’t know, he’d babbled—Skye had lost consciousness, probably because of the blow to her head when she’d been knocked to the concrete floor of the studio, and he’d thought that was her only injury. He’d called an ambulance, of course, but it wasn’t until her blood pressure plummeted on the way to the hospital that the paramedics had realised there was another problem. Then at Emergency they’d scanned her and rushed her straight up here, into theatre . . .
‘The statue?’ Nell had asked. ‘But I thought it was big—bigger than Skye, not the sort of thing that falls over.’
A cleaner trudged past them pushing a mop and a bucket, leaving a trail of popping suds in his wake.
‘It is. Was,’ Hamish said. ‘I surprised her. I came into the studio while she was tiling the base. She wasn’t expecting me, and she must have jumped up and knocked it somehow. It all happened so quickly.’ He’d started to cry. ‘It’s my fault, it’s all my fault.’
Nell had put her arms around him. She liked Hamish, she always had. He was considerate and caring; he’d been good to Skye. Yet something wasn’t right. She didn’t understand it, didn’t understand how such a large, heavy sculpture could just topple over, or what Hamish was doing there in the middle of the day . . . But then they’d wheeled Skye out of surgery and Hamish had been called away to speak with the surgeon while Nell began her vigil beside her daughter’s still body.
Now Hamish was in the hallway, calling his mother, who had picked Molly up from daycare and was keeping her overnight. Nell bent over Skye again, willing her to wake up. This was the third time she’d done so in only four years: first following Skye’s collapse when she read the results of the blood test, then again after Molly’s traumatic arrival. It didn’t get easier. An image o
f Charlie came to her, just before he died. He’d ended up in a hospital bed too, like this one—not speaking, not seeing. Unlike Skye now, Charlie was conscious, but he hadn’t recognised Nell. A life together—two children, all their travels, that night he’d scrubbed her blood from the floor and they’d both wept for their loss—all that, and at the end he couldn’t tell her from the nurse who came to change his catheter. It was the dementia, his doctor had said, he wasn’t Charlie anymore; she shouldn’t take it personally. But how could she not? He still smelled like Charlie and slept like Charlie, mouth slightly agape, hair falling over his eyes. She remembered the shock of it, the absolute slap in the face: that he’d open those eyes and not know who she was.
But that wasn’t going to happen to Skye, Nell reminded herself. She was going to be alright. The surgeon had said so. She had lost a lot of blood and the kidney was badly damaged, but he thought he’d saved it. Skye would have to stay in hospital for a while, then take things easy once she was discharged. It was lucky, really, that they were living together—this way Nell could look after her. Though that was something else Nell didn’t understand: the split; why Skye had come home. She had thought Skye was happy, was settled at last; she’d been surprised and upset to answer the phone and hear she had decided to leave Hamish. Nell had endeavoured to talk to her, to tell her that all marriages went through their rough patches, that she should go back and work on things for Molly’s sake, but Skye hadn’t wanted to listen. It had got to the stage where she stormed off to her room whenever the subject was raised. And she shouldn’t have kept on raising it, Nell told herself now, she should have been more patient, more understanding. Skye was her only daughter, after all, and she’d fought so hard for her, gone through so many tests and tears to conjure her into being. Nell remembered once more that night in the studio, her thighs slick and red—then the next cycle, the day they’d been told they had seven healthy embryos. Ben, she thought suddenly. It was two years since the night she had rung him and tried to bring him back into their lives. Ben had spoken with her, but he hadn’t made further contact since that time. Surely, though, he must have contacted his mother—his ‘other’ mother, as she’d come to think of the woman in Tatong who’d carried him, raised him, who’d loved him as she loved Skye and Arran. Nell hoped he had contacted her, anyway. To lose a child would be the worst thing in the world.
37
‘Hamish, can I have a word?’ Dr Madigan hovered at the entrance to Skye’s room, clutching some files.
‘Sure,’ said Hamish uneasily. It wasn’t like her to ask—normally she just breezed in and started chatting as she stood by the bed, flicking through Skye’s chart. Today she closed the door behind her and pulled up a chair.
‘I was hoping I’d get to talk to you before I left. Skye too. How long’s she been asleep?’
Hamish glanced over at his wife. Though her eyes were closed she was frowning slightly, as if supremely irritated by the whole business of being stuck in bed but too polite to say so. ‘As long as I’ve been here. Fifteen minutes, maybe? She sleeps a lot,’ he added.
‘I know,’ Dr Madigan said. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’ She opened one of the files and began to riffle through it, eventually pulling out two sheets covered with numbers. Renal function tests, Hamish read upside down. Dr Madigan looked up and seemed to sigh a little. ‘Skye’s latest results weren’t great, I’m afraid.’ She paused and raised a tired hand to push back her dark hair, which was shot through with grey. ‘Actually, they were awful.’
Hamish looked around the room before he replied. Cheap curtains, scuffed walls, a murky watercolour hanging in one corner. Skye had been here a week now, and the decor never failed to depress him. It was standard hospital issue, he imagined, but how could anyone get well in such a place? He had thought she would be home by now. ‘Awful?’ he said finally. ‘How awful?’
‘The kidney that was injured doesn’t seem to be recovering. It was damaged pretty badly, as you know, but she’s young, and her surgeon was fairly confident that everything would be OK.’ Dr Madigan’s eyes darted to the page in front of her, and she pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘That’s not what the figures are saying though. I can show you, if you like.’ She looked up, but Hamish shook his head, and she closed the folder again. ‘We think the problem is the preeclampsia Skye suffered during pregnancy. I had her records sent over from the Royal Women’s. She was pretty sick, wasn’t she? I see that her kidneys failed after your daughter was born; she was in the ICU.’
‘But she got better,’ Hamish said. ‘The doctors said she did. They wouldn’t have discharged her otherwise.’
‘She did,’ Dr Madigan agreed, ‘but we suspect that that episode compromised her kidneys, weakened them. Her test results never quite went back to normal, and usually that wouldn’t matter, but when something like this happens . . .’
Skye stirred, and Hamish reached across and stroked her forehead. ‘Hey, Skye, can you wake up?’ he said. ‘Dr Madigan needs to talk to you.’ Her eyelids fluttered, then sank down again.
Dr Madigan waited a moment before continuing. ‘Pre-existing renal abnormality complicates both injury and recovery. The blow to Skye’s kidney caused more damage than it normally would have because the kidney had already been impaired. It’s not healing well for the same reason.’
Hamish barely heard her. He was concentrating on Skye, searching her inert face for any sign that she could hear him. ‘How much longer do you think it will take?’ he asked.
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ Dr Madigan said, her voice weary. ‘We don’t know if the kidney will recover. It’s not looking like it at this stage. Generally if you lose a kidney it’s not a problem—lots of people live healthy lives with only one—but Skye’s remaining kidney was also affected by the preeclampsia. It’s too much of a risk. If something goes wrong with that one she could get sick very quickly. She might even die.’
Hamish was listening now. ‘So what will you do?’ he asked, turning to her.
‘There’s always dialysis if we have to, but at her stage of life, with a young child, that’s not ideal—she’d have to spend too much time in hospital, at least three sessions a week. I’ve talked about it with the consultant, and he thinks that in the long term her best bet would be a kidney transplant. They’re usually very successful these days—if it goes well, it would be as if all this had never happened.’
But it had happened, thought Hamish. It had not only happened, it had been his fault, and he had hated himself for it every day since. How the hell had they ended up here? He thought of how Skye had looked at him when they’d first met, how she’d pulled him into the storage room or across his desk; he remembered the smile on her face when she came round from the C-section and he’d handed her Molly. She had loved him, he was sure of it, she’d loved him and wanted him every bit as much as he’d loved her, and then suddenly she had gone cold, she had moved out, she’d goaded him, and he’d reacted so terribly because he was already heartsick with the ache of losing her. What was the word Dr Madigan had used? Compromised. He had been compromised by loss, but it wasn’t an excuse and it couldn’t change what he had done.
Dr Madigan misinterpreted his silence. ‘I know it’s a shock, but you shouldn’t be too worried. Kidney transplants are really quite straightforward these days.’ She leaned forward as if wanting to comfort him, but Hamish’s gaze had returned to Skye.
‘Is she in pain?’ he asked.
‘Not much,’ Dr Madigan said. ‘Mostly she’s just tired. Her body’s working hard. It’s exhausted. There’s no quality of life for her, and dialysis wouldn’t be much better. We’ll wait another week to be sure, but if that kidney does continue to fail it will have to come out, and I don’t intend to discharge her with the other one not being one hundred per cent.’
‘Could I give her one of mine?’ Hamish asked.
‘Possibly. It would depend on your blood type and some other factors, but it’s not hard to
check. The usual protocol is to consider a few donors, and have you all tested at once—which we could do this week, while we wait. Would that be OK? And maybe I could give you some information for Skye’s family, in case they want to consider it?’
Hamish nodded.
‘Good,’ said Dr Madigan. ‘I’ll go and get that now, before I leave.’
Hamish waited until she had left the room, then stood up and moved to the head of Skye’s bed. Bending down, he kissed her gently on the forehead and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’ She didn’t stir.
Hamish pushed open the front gate and walked down the path. He needed to see Molly—to bury his nose in her hair, feel her arms around his neck. It wasn’t his normal night to visit, but he didn’t think Nell would mind. Nothing about their lives was normal right now. Besides, he had to tell Nell what Dr Madigan had said about Skye’s results and the need for a donation; thank God he could still talk to her, that she hadn’t shut him out. It had taken him a few days, but when he’d finally screwed up the courage and explained what had happened in the studio Nell had cried, but she hadn’t turned on him, as he’d expected; she’d looked at him with sorrow, not hate. Thank God for Nell, he thought again, as he waited on the doorstep . . . and Ria too. Ria, who rang every day to fill him in on what was happening at work, who asked how he was, how Skye was, with concern in her voice, who seemed to know that one day he’d be ready to tell her what had happened, just not yet. Ria, who’d caused that strange bubble of delight when she’d mentioned during their conversation that morning that she’d ended things with Darren.
