Messy, Wonderful Us

by Catherine Isaac

  Chapter 79

  I step through the hospital doors and am hit by a smell that takes me back twenty-eight years, a blend of disinfectant, food and human sickness. Saliva gathers at the sides of my mouth as I follow the signs and take the lift up to the fourth floor.

  ‘I’m here to see Edward Holt,’ I tell a nurse at the reception desk.

  ‘Sorry, it’s immediate family only,’ she says.

  ‘I know, but it was his wife who sent me. I was involved in the crash with him. I’m his best friend. And—’

  ‘Ed would want her here.’ I turn around to see Ed’s mum, wearing a pink sweatshirt that seems to highlight the colourless tone of her skin, her hair loosely tied into a topknot. ‘Hello, Allie love.’

  There is a small, unbidden moment of connection when all we can do is fall into each other’s arms. ‘He’ll be okay,’ I whisper and she pulls away, wiping her eyes. Her dark nail polish is chipped around the edges and there is blood around the cuticle where she’s been picking at a hangnail. ‘Do you think?’

  ‘I’m certain of it,’ I say, immediately wondering if false hope is better than no hope at all. Still, she looks grateful for my forced optimism, before looking up at the nurse.

  ‘Well, I’ll have to speak to a consultant,’ she says. ‘You might have a bit of a wait before I get an answer.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ I turn back to Jackie. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since yesterday,’ she sighs. ‘Which is why I look like the living dead. His dad and I are on our way home for a little while – he’s gone ahead to get the car. I think both of us need to try and get a bit of sleep.’

  ‘You should. Definitely.’

  ‘We’ll be back in the morning though. We’ll be here for as long as it takes,’ she says, as a sob catches in the back of her throat.

  I reach over to clutch her hand, as the nurse reappears, far quicker than promised, and smiles at me softly. ‘He’s all yours.’

  *

  I’d assumed Ed would be in a room by himself, but it’s actually a ward with four other beds, one of which has a thin blue curtain drawn around it. There is a machine with two monitors, dozens of wires and so many buttons that looking at it would be enough to put the fear of God into anyone. The spongy silence of the room is interspersed only by the beep of a machine or laughter rising from the nurses’ station.

  ‘They reckon it helps if you talk to people in a coma,’ the nurse tells me.

  I’ve read lots of evidence indicating that Ed might hear what’s going on around him, but precisely nothing that would persuade me that that’s capable of improving a patient’s outcome. She obviously senses my doubt. ‘I’ve worked here sixteen years and I still haven’t decided if that’s true or not. But it can’t do any harm, eh?’

  I lower myself onto the chair next to the high orthopaedic bed as she disappears and I examine the contours of Ed’s face. There is a patch around his eye in a sallow shade of yellow and a pattern of stitches along his jaw. A plastic tube extends from his mouth and there are pads on his forehead. His chest is bare, but for the thin blue sheet pulled up to his shoulders.

  I’m here to talk but I haven’t a clue what to say.

  ‘Well, this is the first time in our lives I haven’t got you to answer back with some wisecrack. I should be relishing this moment.’ My words sound silly and pointless. Yet, there’s a tiny part of me that can imagine him replying, with something funny or kind. Just something.

  ‘So, how is it in here? It looks all right, actually. Clean. A bit bare. I preferred the Villa Cortine Palace Hotel, I must admit.’

  There is a shot of heat behind my eyes but I decide to carry on.

  ‘I nearly brought some grapes.’ His eyelids are heavy and unresponsive. ‘That’s what you do when you visit people in hospital, isn’t it? Part of me thought that if I bought you some grapes then you’d have to just wake up and sit here and eat them with me. I think that’s what you call blind optimism. Only I remembered when I was on the way here that you don’t even like grapes. Though seriously, Ed. Who doesn’t like grapes? They’re the most inoffensive fruit there is. They’re not like . . . lychees or anything. If you’d said you didn’t like lychees I could accept that. But not grapes. Grapes are . . . grapes are great.’

  Pressure begins to build around my temples and my throat seems to dry up. ‘You know what, Ed, I feel like I’m doing my first stand-up routine and I’m dying out here. Can’t you just wake up and give me a little smile? Or even heckle me? I’d be very glad if you heckled me. You could give me all the abuse you wanted, I really wouldn’t mind.’

  I open up my plastic bag and unscrew the bottle of lemonade I’d bought, wincing at the jump of sugar as I take my first mouthful. I put the lid back on again. ‘So. They tell you to talk but they don’t tell you what to talk about. And I have no idea. I’d read to you but all they had in the shop downstairs was last week’s Take a Break.’

  I sit then for what must be five minutes, failing to come up with any ideas about what to say. At one point, my failure becomes just too overwhelming to bear. So I stand up to leave and pick up my bag. But, as I start walking away, I have an idea.

  I take out my mobile and head to the reception. ‘Excuse me, is there any Wi-Fi here?’ I ask. It’s a different nurse from the one I spoke to when I first came in, a man in his forties with a hangdog expression and a mop of grey hair.

  ‘You’re not meant to have a phone on in here, love,’ he replies. ‘If you need to use it, there’s Wi-Fi in the cafe.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ I take the stairs to the floor below but don’t join the queue for sandwiches. Instead, I spend my time browsing the books available online, until I find exactly what I’m looking for and download it to my phone. Then I return to the ward and click on my new purchase.

  ‘Okay, Ed, you win. Bloody poetry it is. She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron. Sounds pretentious – right up your street.’

  When I’ve finished the first poem, I flick on the next page and carry on reading.

  I read Emily Dickinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I read Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Wordsworth’s Ballads. I read Shelley, Keats, Blake, Milton and John Donne. I carry on reading, all the way through the night, beyond the point when my mouth is dry and the sun has come up. I carry on reading until it is abundantly clear that my efforts are, quite simply, hopeless.

  And even though I know they’re hopeless, I still carry on, ignoring the invisible hammer tapping at my temple. I have two per cent battery left on my phone when I land on a passage by Mary Coleridge and read it in a whisper.

  We never said farewell, nor even looked

  Our last upon each other, for no sign

  Was made when we the linked chain unhooked

  And broke the level line.

  And here we dwell together, side by side,

  Our places fixed for life upon the chart.

  Two islands that the roaring seas divide

  Are not more far apart.

  In the moments before my phone dies I recall what Ed said to me on the train to Portofino, how he loved poetry because it can express how you’re feeling better than you ever could.

  We never said farewell.

  I look at him again. He has not moved, or shifted or shown any tiny glimmer of recognition since the moment I walked in more than ten hours ago.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ed, but that’s it for today.’

  I gather my belongings and settle my eyes on his pale skin. The soft fall of his hands. His lovely face, bruised and battered.

  ‘Your mum will be here soon, then I’m going to come back later. And tomorrow.’

  We never said farewell.

  I glance around the hospital room for one last time, feeling like I’m six years old again, at my mother’s bedside. Knowing that she was going to die without fully understanding what that meant. I tried so hard that day not to cry, to tame the pain in my little broken heart. I remember how important i
t had felt after Grandma Peggy had taken me to the bathroom and urged me to hold it together. What she said had come from a good place, there is no doubt about that. But what did it achieve, really? Mum wouldn’t have minded if I’d cried. She’d have understood. It’s not as though keeping my emotions tied up in a knot inside me has done any good at all in all the years since.

  We never said farewell.

  I look at Ed again and instinctively know that this is goodbye. I reach over and touch the skin on his knuckles with my fingertips, as I am engulfed by a tsunami of regret and grief. For the first time in my life, I need to talk. I mean, really talk, and actually say something.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m never going to get to swim in a lake with you again, Ed,’ I hear myself saying. ‘Or hold your hand as we go for a walk. Or listen to the sound of you laughing. I love that sound so much. I am torn apart here, Ed. I keep thinking about our lovely, messy past. And the future that . . . I don’t think we’re going to have together.’

  I lower my eyes and continue. ‘I had years to face up to how I felt about you. I could have told you what you meant to me. But I kept it all to myself. Buried my feelings. Now the most important person in my life is about to slip away and I have nothing to show for it except three decades of unexpressed love. Because I do love you, Ed. I really do.’

  The tears escape from the rims of my eyes before I’m even aware they’re there and roll down my cheeks in salty streaks. I cry silently at first, but the relief of allowing noisy sobs to leave my throat is so immense that I do it until my stomach hurts and my skin stings. I don’t know how long I stay there, but I rise to my feet well before my tears have dried and take out a tissue to wipe my eyes.

  I am about to turn away but allow myself one last glimpse of him as I bend down to press my swollen lips against his temple, breathing him in, feeling the texture of his skin and the direction of his soft hair. Slowly, I lift up my head to leave, when a hot tear lands with a splash on his cheek. And he opens his eyes.

  Chapter 80

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  The restaurant is fancier than Peggy is used to but she’s not complaining. It’s not every day you celebrate fifty years of marriage, after all. And she’s learnt from experience that it isn’t the done thing to tell her family that she’d have been just as happy with one of Joe’s roasts.

  ‘Are you having a cocktail, Grandma? I will if you will,’ Allie says. Peggy’s granddaughter looks especially lovely tonight, though she knows she’s biased. She’s in a blue dress that skims her pretty shoulders, and her eyes, with that little Audrey Hepburn flick in each corner, make her impossibly glamorous.

  Peggy picks up the cocktail menu and looks at the list, at the Martinis and the Manhattans, the Boulevardiers and the Sazeracs. Such pretty names, considering they’re all designed to get you smashed.

  ‘I don’t know where to start. I’m not really a cocktail kind of person.’

  ‘We had cocktails in Paris once, don’t you remember?’ Gerald says.

  Her mind is cast back to those dark times, when the man beside her provided the first glimmers of light. ‘Vaguely. What were they?’

  ‘Lethal,’ he says, and everyone laughs.

  ‘How about a Cosmopolitan, Grandma?’ Allie asks. ‘That’ll get you warmed up before we go on to the karaoke bar.’

  Peggy knows she’s joking but must look slightly worried anyway.

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Peggy,’ Ed says. ‘We won’t be going to the karaoke bar. Allie was banned last time she sang “The Wind Beneath My Wings”.’

  ‘Love me, love my bloody awful voice,’ Allie says.

  ‘I do love you. But I draw the line at your bloody awful voice.’ She shakes her head as he leans in and plants the sheerest of kisses on her lips, before attracting the attention of a waiter. ‘Is there an accessible bathroom?’

  ‘Certainly, sir, I’ll show you the way,’ the waiter replies, as Ed takes the brake off his wheelchair. ‘Excuse me, folks.’

  Allie had gone with him to see the consultant soon after he was discharged from hospital. They sat in silence as he opened his folder and took out the most recent radiology report, pushing it towards them so they could both read the results while he talked.

  There is a central fracture dislocation of the left hip joint with inward displacement of the left femoral head. Subluxation of the left sacro-iliac joint and the left side of the pelvis is asymmetrical following the fracture dislocation. A fracture in the right femoral neck with absorption of the femoral neck. United comminuted fracture of the distal tibia with separation of the fragment.

  The list of injuries went on for a page and a half. Though he’d emerged from the coma and the scars on his cheek and chest had healed, the surgery to both legs hadn’t been entirely successful. There were further operations planned, but the prognosis was uncertain and a full recovery unlikely. It was possible that the wheelchair was here to stay.

  Ed barely flinched as he listened. It was as if he’d already known. But Allie’s heartbroken silence filled the room. Then they headed outside into the waiting room and he took her by the hand, telling her with gentle but absolute certainty: ‘Hey. We’ll be fine. Whatever happens.’

  Now he makes his way across the restaurant towards the disabled toilet, without any of the difficulties they faced at the place they’d tried to go to for a drink a week earlier. It was a Grade II listed former gentlemen’s club, with a stunning neoclassical entrance, Doric columns and half a dozen steps none of the group had even remembered existed from their previous visits.

  Allie had looked at Ed anxiously but he just shrugged. ‘I never liked this place anyway.’ A spurt of laughter erupted from somewhere inside her chest and her eyes settled on his. That was the moment when she knew that he hadn’t been quite right. They were going to be better than fine. Whatever happens.

  After the crash, Julia had pleaded guilty to dangerous driving and was sentenced to an eighteen-month ban and three months in prison, which the judge suspended. With her previous good character and driving record, he accepted that she had experienced a temporary breakdown and loss of control after finding out about her husband’s ‘affair’. She has lost her job and is currently living with her parents while divorce proceedings commence between her and Ed.

  They only communicate through solicitors now, a request of Ed’s that Julia has respected. His feelings towards her, like Allie’s, have covered a whole spectrum of emotion since the crash. There have been times when he’s reflected on what happened and felt angry, of course. But that isn’t a state of mind he wears easily and is telling the truth when he says he refuses to be resentful, or bitter, or allow any of the rage that ate her up do the same to him. And, although there have been nights when they’ve talked and talked about the dark secrets of Ed’s marriage, their focus now is not on the past, but their future. In that, Julia has no part.

  When Ed returns to the table, Peggy is asking her granddaughter about the new clinical trial she’s just been approached to lead. ‘It’s all to do with gene-editing technology,’ Allie explains.

  ‘Wasn’t that the last thing you were working on?’ Joe asks.

  ‘That was gene editing too but this is different. At least, we hope it will be different. All any of us can do when these things fail is to pick ourselves up and try again. That’s how we’ll eventually find a cure for CF. And we will find one, eventually.’

  As a waiter arrives to replenish their drinks, the conversation turns to what they’re all here to celebrate.

  ‘So how does it feel to have managed fifty years of marriage, you two?’ Joe asks. ‘It is quite an achievement.’

  Gerald coughs. ‘I think I speak for my wife when I say that it’s been very easy, given that I’m still such a catch and all.’

  Peggy rolls her eyes. ‘His jokes never improve, that’s for sure. Honestly though, I can’t entirely believe it’s been this long.’

  Peggy has never really worried about getting older. That her
skin is thinner, the flesh on her jawline lower than before. She has a heart that still pumps and a brain that tackles the quick crossword every day, albeit not quite as fast as it once did.

  She won’t ever be free from grief, but she never has any desire to be. Nobody who loses a child ever does. But, she is no longer drowning in the sea of intense and never-ending sadness that consumed her twice in her life. Instead, she lives with grief as her permanent companion. It accompanies her every day, when she’s putting on her clothes in the morning, or when she wakes in the night and sees Gerald softly snoring next to her. When she’s cooking or polishing and even when she’s practicing her yoga and is supposed to be concentrating on her pranayama. She doesn’t fight it. Why would she?

  The meal is lovely, if a little on the small side, prompting Gerald and Ed to joke about stopping off for fish and chips on the way home. Peggy is showered with gifts, things she and Gerald don’t really need, but that she knows it makes her family happy to give. And she must admit that she’s looking forward to the posh hotel spa stay from Allie and Ed.

  As they’re finishing dessert, Allie’s phone beeps.

  ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she says, pushing her chair out from the table.

  When she returns a few minutes later, she is carrying another gift. She slips into her seat again and hands it over to Peggy, a beautifully wrapped square, tied up with a dark blue ribbon.

  ‘Just a little extra,’ she says.

  Peggy slips her finger under the paper and gently prises it off to find a jewellery box. Inside is a necklace, with a rose gold chain and a pendant made of onyx and mother-of-pearl, with a tiny diamond set into the bail. It’s exquisite and quintessentially Italian.

  ‘Gosh . . . thank you,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not from me,’ Allie tells her.

  Gerald leans in and whispers to her: ‘Open the note.’

  Peggy lifts the flap of the small envelope that accompanies it and pulls out a card.