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If I Die
Before
I Wake

EMILY KOCH

Vintage Books

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Copyright © Emily Koch 2018

Cover design: Anna Morrison
Cover photographs © Getty Images

Emily Koch has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: VARIORUM EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

Excerpt from Look Up for Yes by Julia Tavalaro & Richard Tayson 1997

First published by Harvill Secker in 2018

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

For Matt

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—

Emily Dickinson

No one knows how dark the night is until you can’t speak into it.

Julia Tavalaro

She still smells of sleep. I lean back against the dishwasher, holding her against my chest, looking down the line of her spine – the striped black and white T-shirt rippling where it meets the waistband of her denim shorts; her pale legs curving towards her ankles. She doesn’t put her arms around me. I hook a finger under her chin, trying to lift it so that I can kiss her. If only she’d let me – then this would all be over, I know it. She hesitates, pushing her jaw down against my hand: her breath is warm against my skin. I think I feel her starting to give; she is tired of this, too. I can’t even remember what started it. Can she?

But I’m wrong. She puts her palm against my stomach and twists her face away from my fingers, her blonde hair falling across her eyes. ‘Don’t,’ she says.

She pushes me away, turns towards the kitchen table and picks up a spoon. Her small hands work quickly to finish making her sandwiches, scooping coleslaw onto the ham, pressing the second piece of white bread down firmly over the top. She makes a sharp slice with the knife diagonally across the middle. She won’t look at me, but she knows I am watching. She gives the knife an unnecessary second push downwards with the heel of her hand, her mouth set in a grimace.

‘Don’t be like this.’ I duck down, trying to get my face level with hers, trying to catch her eye. Her cheeks are flushed peach-pink. ‘Come with us. We’ll do some easy routes, you can have another go. You enjoyed it last—’

‘It’s your thing, Alex. I don’t have to do it too.’ She wraps her sandwiches tightly in several layers of cling film, squeezing the life out of them, and drops them into her rucksack. There’s a bottle of water in there, too, and the bright orange of the OS map of the Quantocks I saw her pull off the bookshelf last night.

‘It would just be nice to have you with us,’ I say, stretching my arms out behind me, rolling my shoulders. I feel strong, ready for a good session in the Gorge. I’m looking forward to that ache I know will come later, the familiar feeling of a body well-worked. ‘You don’t have to climb, if you don’t want to.’

She zips up the rucksack, walks over to the cupboard and pulls out her trainers, knocking mine onto the floor.

I bite my tongue to stop myself asking her if she is going to bother picking them up. Instead: ‘Please. I don’t want to leave it like this.’

Maybe, by this evening, she will have softened. A long walk will help clear her head.

I think about the letter. I need to tell her about it, but not when things are like this. I need to pick my moment.

She is kneeling down now, pulling on her trainers, stamping her heels down into them angrily – nearly rocking herself off balance in the process. I’ll wait a bit, give her time to decide she likes me again, try and get her when she’s in a good mood. She stands up, looks at herself in the mirror by the front door and puts some lip balm on, without smiling at her reflection.

Or should I do it now, when things couldn’t get much worse?

‘Bea, there’s something—’

She walks in my direction but doesn’t look at me, grabs the rucksack from its spot on the floor by my feet, and I follow her gaze as she looks at the clock on the wall above the sink. No – this isn’t the right time. I said I’d pick Eleanor and Tom up before half-eight. And anyway, I don’t want to have to think about it. I need a break. I’m sweating at the thought of that envelope, the accusatory words. My mind flashes with the questions that have been distracting me from my work, making me edgy around Bea, and interrupting my sleep. What have I done?

Later. I’ll do it later.

With the rucksack over her shoulder, she picks up her car keys from the bowl under the mirror and opens the door.

‘Have a nice time,’ I say, still trying, although part of me would like to make a snide remark, or walk over there and stand between her and the door until she acknowledges me. Why is it always me who has to make the first move to make up? It’s certainly not because it’s always my fault. ‘Looks like it should be a hot one. You sure you’ve got enough to drink?’

She pauses, rests her head against the door frame, her back to me. Then she walks out and pulls the door closed behind her.

Not even a goodbye.

1

WHAT’S YOUR INTRO, then?’

That’s what my news editor used to ask me as soon as I walked into the office. He’d say it without turning his gleaming bald head away from the computer screen. His unnervingly delicate fingers would be spidering across his keyboard, his bottom lip sticking out and wobbling as he mouthed the words he typed. I’d be expected to rattle out my answer straight away. The top line of the story. What you’d say to your friends at the pub to catch their attention. The most important part to tell the reader, so that if they stopped there, at least they would know the gist.

As a cub reporter I stammered out a few answers, staring down at the brown carpet tiles, sweating in my suit and tie, hoping for someone to step in and tell me how I should start. Before Bill could bark at me, I might try and beat him to it and ask, ‘What do you want me to go in on?’ It worked a few times but then he got irritated. He’d drag his eyes from the monitor, wheel his office chair out from under his desk with a push of his feet, place his hands gently on his medicine-ball stomach, and say, ‘I don’t know, Alexander. You tell me. You need me to hold your hand, sweetheart?’

In those days, I thought it would be impossible for me to ever despise a person more than I despised Bill, or for anyone to deliberately humiliate me more than he did. I have been proved wrong on both counts.

I’d attempt another answer, mesmerised as always by the disturbing pink smoothness of his flabby face. Then he’d add his pet catchphrase, which he delighted in shouting across the newsroom even after I learned to file perfect copy, ‘Want me to wipe your arse as well?’

Given my current condition, the irony of that final question is not lost on me. I heard it about once a week for four years but I never dreamed that I would actually need someone to clean up my shit on a daily basis before I turned thirty.

I learned to work out my intros as I walked back from press conferences, or drove back from interviews. What most excited me? What was the most important, the most arresting bit of information? How could I pull two, maybe three, elements into it and still keep it under twenty-five words? (‘Keep it short, keep it sexy,’ Bill used to growl.) That way, when I came through the doors of the Bristol Post offices, I could just sit down and write, knowing where I wanted to go.

But I’m struggling with the intro for this. I’ve got Bill’s voice in my head – he’s telling me to go straight in on the drama. How I ended up in hospital, the injustice, the heartbreak, the deceit and so on. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s the obvious stuff. The story I really want to tell boils down to one question. What will happen to me next?

The opening lines for the article Bill would want would be easy. But the version I want? That’s harder. The trouble is, you can’t write your intro until you know how the story ends. So I have two versions ready:

A BRISTOL man has been hailed a medical miracle after waking up from a two-year coma to enjoy an emotional reunion with his family.

Or:

A BRISTOL climber, who had been in a coma since a fall in the Avon Gorge two years ago, has died.

Everyone thinks that behind my eyes there is darkness.

They think that when I wake up they will have to fill me in on months of lost time. They believed, of course, that I would wake up. At first. But after a year or so had passed – when I heard nurses discussing their New Year’s Eve plans for the second time since I’d been in this place – I knew. My family were turning. When they visited my hospital bed, I picked it up in their voices. Hope and determination were becoming weariness and doubt.

Hope For An End – whatever end – raced head-to-head with Hope For A Sign Of Life. Would the race have been run differently, if they’d known the truth about what happened when the starting gun was fired? Who knows? As it was, Hope For An End was edging it.

And who can blame them? I must look totally lifeless. I can’t talk, I can’t move. I can’t tell them that I hear every word they say.

My life as I knew it was stopped shortly after I turned twenty-seven. Now hours, days and months merge together into a trick of time, so all I know for sure is that I’ve been conscious for two Christmases – you can’t miss it when carol singers visit each bed on the ward – and I assume that makes the length of my imprisonment a couple of years so far. The words the doctors and nurses use include ‘coma’ and ‘vegetative state’. They have no idea that I am awake; no tests show them the activity in my brain that I’m desperate for them to see.

I don’t know what is wrong with me either. How can I be paralysed but still able to feel when a nurse touches me? How can I seem to be a vegetable but actually understand everything that’s going on? Sometimes my eyes open of their own accord. The doctors tell my family: ‘it happens – nothing to get excited about’. But how would they explain the fact that I can see, in those random, thrilling, moments? A coma patient can’t see, surely? Okay, so I can’t see properly. I see shapes, shades of grey. Changes in the light. Not people’s faces or features. Not colours. But still – this isn’t what I thought being in a coma would feel like.

I wonder if I’m the only one of me in the world. A medical phenomenon they don’t even know exists.

All of this leads to one place: a decision my family must make about whether they should pull the plug. From what the doctors say, I know I’m not attached to any kind of life-support machine. So, strictly speaking, there’s no plug to pull – but I have learned that there are other ways to let someone like me fade away. I am fighting for my life, fighting to be kept alive. I have to prove there is something worth saving.

I’ve tried moving: nothing. I can’t even make myself blink. I’ve tried talking: nothing. The doctors never notice any physical progress. But what if there is some other way I could show them that my mind is working? If I can keep my brain ticking over as much as possible; if I can think and think and think; if I can train my mind to keep active and moving; then maybe things will change. My brain might jump-start my body. Or perhaps they will see something when they next wheel me into the MRI scanner for tests.

Maybe then they will grab me by the hand, or by the collar of this hospital gown – I don’t care which – and pull me out of this hole. Give me back my pile of clothes, hand me my release papers, open the doors and let me walk out. Maybe they will talk to me, treat me like a proper human being. There must be a way.

So, here I am: telling myself my own story, to keep my mind moving. Back in the day I’d have been delighted to land this assignment. There’s a lot of meat, plenty for me to get my teeth into – both in the darkness of my time in hospital, and the darkness of what put me here.

There are details that I’d have had to phrase carefully to get past the editor. There would have been legal hoops to jump through so that I didn’t risk prejudicing the trial. The paper would have splashed on it; maybe even for two days in a row if I’d found enough angles. It would have been picked up by the nationals and won me some awards. This is the kind of scoop that could make a career.

I feel like I used to when I called in to a copytaker, back in the early days before they were all made redundant. Before we all started emailing our articles straight in to the newsdesk. Every now and then I am tempted to use a bit of the lingo – add an extra level for me to concentrate on and exercise my brain that bit harder. I could say ‘Point’ to indicate the end of each sentence. ‘Par’ for a new paragraph. ‘Ends’ for the end of each piece. Point. But I’m not sure I can be bothered to do that the whole time. Point. This story isn’t just a quick fifty-word NIB. Point. It could get tedious. Point. Par.

But I like to let myself run with this scenario, sometimes. Allow myself to believe I’m not so alone, and that I’m not talking to myself. I imagine it just like the old days. I’m sitting in my car, parked up next to a murder scene: a pot washer in a Fishponds café has stabbed his boss over unpaid wages, in front of horrified customers enjoying their fry-ups. I have spoken to a barber from across the street, who tearfully told me the dead man was a ‘top guy, the kind of person who always stopped to say hello’. The usual kind of thing.

Murder, I learned in my years as a reporter, affects the lives of the most ordinary people. Not just those you might think deserve it. No one ever thinks it will happen to them, until it does.

‘Put me through to a copytaker,’ I say. She answers the phone brightly with a thick Bristolian accent, ‘Morning! Where you to, then?’ She’s wearing her headset, tapping away on the keyboard with painted false nails, as I read to her. She stops me every now and then to check a sentence, tell me I’ve used the same word twice, or that it’s too windy to hear me, but otherwise all she says is, ‘Mmm. Yep. Go on,’ before she eventually signs off. And that’s what I want now: I don’t want questions, demands. I want to explain how everything I felt sure of was thrown into doubt, how horrifying it is to find out that someone wants to do you harm. I just want to talk.

That’s a lie. I don’t ‘just’ want to talk. It hurts – physically hurts – to think about all the things I want to do.

Had I known this whole situation was on the cards I would have done so much more. Led on the most difficult climb in the Gorge. Pitched to present a TV show where I explored remote deserts and interviewed indigenous tribes living halfway up desolate mountainsides. I would have scaled Everest. I would have enjoyed the small stuff, the everyday things, too. I would have looked at the sky more.

If I could get out of here, I would spend a night asleep in my own bed under a duvet that didn’t smell of starch, lying however the hell I wanted to lie – not where a nurse had arranged me, propped up with cushions. If I woke up to a sound in the night, I wouldn’t be terrified of the dark, because I’d be able to defend myself. In the morning, I would roll over to face Bea, and watch her sleep for a few minutes before waking her up. She would climb on top of me and take over my lips with those starving kisses. One thing would lead to another, and afterwards I wouldn’t make the bed.

I would eat a bacon sandwich – crisp salty meat on slices of soft white bloomer. Brown sauce. There would be fresh coffee in the cafetière filling the flat with the smell of toasted nuts and sugar on the edge of burning; there would be ice-cold apple juice; Bea would hand me a bowl of bright pink fresh grapefruit so sour it would make me wince. I would walk – no, run – through the streets in the rain. I would talk and talk and talk.

Since being struck dumb, I have so much to say.

2

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN fighting, since the moment I woke up in hospital. But I haven’t always been on the same side of the battle lines. For a while, before everything started to go crazy with Bea and the police, I stopped wanting to live. It wasn’t that I gave up. In my mind I was still fighting, just for a different outcome.

After what must have been months and months of doing my best to show the doctors my mental alertness, of attempting to move different parts of my body, of straining to speak – or even just grunt – I stopped. When they ran tests, I didn’t bother to try and respond. I had a new goal: death. I hoped that if they thought I was unresponsive for long enough, they would let me go. After listening to conversations between doctors and my dad, I knew they could. They could stop feeding me, or let me slip away the next time I got an infection.

I had many reasons for thinking this would be for the best. I would be doing everyone else a favour. I could give Bea, Dad and Philippa the chance to move on with their lives. Even if I woke up from this nightmare, who could say whether I would be able to walk? Look after myself? Feed myself? I couldn’t burden them with that.

I looked at it as the kind of life-or-death decision I’d heard about people making when a climb went badly wrong; it was rare, but there were still stories. You had to keep your cool, make the best decision for you and your partner. It would be horrendous to cut your friend’s rope and send them to their probable death, but if it meant the difference between one or two people crashing to the ground, then you’d do it. And, theoretically, the same applied if you had to make the call on cutting the rope above you, knowing that the fall would kill you, but save your partner. That’s how I looked at it. I was cutting my rope. It was the best decision I could make in the circumstances.

A feeling that I deserved to die had slowly built up over the months of lying here. This had all happened for a reason. My body and my guilt locked me into my sentence. There was no question in my mind that this was a punishment: and my biggest crime had been killing my mum.

That’s what Philippa said I had done – my sister wasn’t known for mincing her words. Is it any excuse to say that I was ‘only eighteen’ at the time, when Mum found out the cancer was back? While Dad lobbied our mother with reasons for hope and life, in the face of her second round of radiotherapy, I held her hands, looked into her eyes and let myself be carried away by her desperation and pain. If I hadn’t taken her side and let her slowly surrender, we all knew she would have had more skin-blistering treatment. She would have listened to me.

But she had such convincing arguments. She was so sure of what she wanted. ‘Was hospice nurse,’ she reminded me, writing her stilted messages on the notepad she carried everywhere. Talking was too embarrassing because of the slur she was left with after they removed part of her tongue, and too painful because of the dryness the hours of radiation had bequeathed her. ‘Saw hundreds of people die,’ she wrote. ‘Know what I want. No more treatment. Help me explain to your dad.’

How was I going to break it to him that she was giving up? He was already a shell of his old self. My voice felt loud those days, in a house where no one else seemed to speak. Dad had retreated into crime thrillers, guitar practice, and piles of geography coursework marking – the once-open door to his study now firmly shut. He hated talking to Mum through the notepad, so he avoided it as much as she did and they moved politely around each other, hiding from difficult conversations in their separate quiet worlds. How was I going to tell him that his wife wanted to die? Philippa had followed his lead and sunk into a bitter, seething silence. Mum got ill when she was fourteen, and died when Philippa was sixteen – it was hard to know how much of her reaction was down to Mum’s illness and how much would have happened anyway as she embraced her teenage moodiness. She swung from sulking in her room to screaming at any one of us. Mum was not spared, and in fact seemed to get the worst of it. It was hard to watch them together, with Philippa refusing to hug her, looking at her with undisguised hatred, deliberately making her life difficult by insisting different clothes be ironed, or different food be cooked for dinner, or that she wanted to watch a different DVD to the one we’d chosen for our monthly family movie night. Mum’s capacity for patience was astonishing, and when I glanced at her eyes to check for tears, they were always resolutely dry.

I didn’t have quite the same level of tolerance. One evening Mum pushed a note over the dinner table, asking Philippa, ‘How’s Jenny?’

Out of nowhere Philippa had rolled her eyes and sneered, ‘Screw you. Seriously – screw you.’

I followed her upstairs to her bedroom, fuming. Mum didn’t deserve this. Ignoring her protests, I slammed open her door. ‘What the fuck, Phil?’

‘Leave me alone.’ She was crying, wiping her face with the sleeve of her hoodie.

‘Why are you treating her like this?’

‘Do you even know who Jenny is?’ she asked, sitting down on her bed, picking up a magazine and flicking through its pages. ‘She was my friend from debating club. Which I don’t go to any more because Dad has to take Mum to her acupuncture session on Tuesday nights instead. Doesn’t she get it? I haven’t seen Jenny for months, because of her.’

I looked around her room – at her Cruel Intentions and Never Been Kissed film posters, her old teddy bears kicked off the bed onto the floor, the history textbooks on her desk – looking for something that would help me understand her selfishness. ‘You think debating club is more important than Mum getting better?’

‘It’s all right for you. You don’t care that everything has changed since she got ill. I caught Dad crying the other day. Have you ever seen him do that before? He didn’t even cry when Nana and Grandad died. Mum’s made him miserable.’ She slapped a hand down onto her magazine’s cover – as if this fact was sure to convince me.

‘It’s not her that’s made him like that,’ I said, sitting down in the chair at her desk, smoothing over the open pages of her textbook. ‘It’s not her fault. It’s the cancer. If you need to blame something, blame that.’

She tore the cover of her magazine off, ripped it into small pieces and tossed them into the bin by my feet. ‘But I can’t touch the cancer, can I? I can’t shout at it. I can’t see it.’ She looked up at me, tore out another page without glancing down, screwed it into a ball, and held my gaze until I had to look away.

The next day I was helping Mum do weeding in the garden – she tended it devotedly right up until the final weeks of her life – and she pulled her notepad out of her apron. ‘Sun cream?’ she wrote, and I got up from my kneeling pad to fetch her some from the house. In the August sun she needed to apply a high factor to the long scar running down her neck, the result of the surgery to remove her lymph nodes which had been done at the same time as they removed part of her tongue. I had started walking away across the lawn, when I heard her speak – a rasping, garbled word, but unmistakable. ‘Alex.’ I turned, and she beckoned to me. As I made my way back to her, she started writing again. ‘Ask Phil to bring it to me,’ she wrote. ‘You take a break. She can help me.’

I winced. ‘I don’t know if she’ll come, Mum.’

‘Ask,’ she wrote.

I sighed. I didn’t want her to be disappointed.

‘It’s okay,’ she wrote, smiling up at me from her spot on the ground at the foot of the apple tree. ‘It’s just her way. I understand. Ask her. She might come.’

But Philippa wouldn’t leave her desk when I passed the message on. She rolled her eyes and told me she was too busy with her homework.

This was how she was for the whole two years of our mother’s illness. How would she take it when I told her that Mum was going to refuse more treatment? Part of me was worried that she’d be glad – worried she might even tell Mum that she would be pleased to see the back of her.

I spent several days agonising over how I was going to tell them. I’d always been a procrastinator, particularly when it came to sharing bad news. I could have saved myself and the people around me a lot of pain if I hadn’t been. And there were things I should never have put off telling Bea, things that happened in my final weeks. I’ve paid for that cowardly delay these past few months.

In the end, it was taken out of my hands. While she was in the shower, Dad leafed through one of her notebooks. He found the page that read, in fat blue felt-tip pen, ‘No more treatment. Help me explain to your dad.’ I was watching TV in the living room when he strode in, threw the notebook in my lap and asked: ‘When were you going to tell me?’ His face was red and shiny with sweat, his breathing fast and shallow. ‘I won’t have it,’ he said, when I didn’t reply. Snatching the pad out of my hands, he walked back out of the living room. The door to his study slammed. ‘I won’t let her!’ He shouted the words this time – it was the loudest noise I had ever heard him make. I muted the TV, walked quietly out into the corridor and put an ear to his door. All I could hear was the sound of sheets of paper being torn from their spiral binding – Mum’s notepad. ‘You can’t do this to us, Diane,’ he shouted, before the house went silent again. When Philippa appeared at the bottom of the stairs, wondering what was going on, I dragged her into the living room and sat her down next to me on the sofa. She wasn’t glad after all. ‘She can’t do that,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘The doctors won’t allow it.’

‘They’ll have to.’ I put my arm around her. ‘And we have to respect her wishes.’

She pulled away. ‘We do not,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to go along with this?’

I nodded, without looking at her.

‘What’s wrong with you? You can’t let her die. The radiotherapy will make her better this time.’ She spoke rapidly, standing up. ‘Dad will know how to talk her round. You can’t let her do this. Please.’ She started crying. ‘I just want my old mum back,’ she whimpered. I still couldn’t look at her face. ‘I want everything to go back to how it was before.’

Over the first months I had spent in hospital, my mind stormed with these painful scenes. I was convinced I was being punished.

By choosing death I finally accepted my fate: I had to pay for everything I had done.

3

I REMEMBER THE last time Bea visited me, before everything changed for both of us.

The nurses had positioned me on my left side, propped up with cushions to relieve my back and prevent the pressure sores that they constantly checked me for. This meant I was facing the window; my eyes were closed but I could feel dim sunlight on my skin. I listened to the sirens as the ambulances sped by on the road outside, their pitch changing as they passed.

The door to my room whined, and someone padded up behind my back. I recognised the scent: citrus and cigarettes. Bea walked around to stand between me and the window, and I felt the soft touch of her lips on my forehead – her usual greeting.

‘Only me,’ she said, her sing-song voice drowning out the chatter on the ward. ‘Oh.’ She touched my face. ‘Hang on, I’ll sort that out.’

Footsteps. Then the soft rip of paper from near the foot of my bed. Footsteps approached my head again. Bea dabbed a tissue to the corner of my mouth, where saliva was dribbling out and dampening the pillow under my turned cheek.

Don’t, I thought. She wasn’t my nurse. I didn’t want her to see me as her helpless patient. Don’t do that.

‘There we go. That’s better.’ She walked around to the other side of my bed and leaned in to kiss my right ear, then pressed her cheek up to mine and asked, ‘Are you dreaming in there?’

She paused.

‘That would be nice.’

I felt the cold frame of her glasses against my skin, then she lifted her head away from me and her weight sank the mattress as she climbed onto the bed, curling her small body around the back of mine.

‘Then maybe, when I go to sleep and I dream, we could meet up, you know? Dream-me and dream-you. Hang out.’

Her bent knees dug into the back of my thighs as she breathed into my neck.

‘Sorry,’ she sighed. ‘It sounds stupid. But I had a weird dream about you this morning and it would be nice to think it was really you, somehow.’

She put a hand on my back.

‘I dreamed I was in bed, about to get up. Then a cat jumps in through the window and starts clawing at my back, like this.’ She scratched her nails through the thin material of my pyjama top in long, deliberate strokes down my spine. It was the best thing I had felt in days. ‘God, Al. I swear you’re still losing weight. These ribs.’

She gently dragged her fingers upwards towards my neck.

‘Anyway, so then it starts drawing circles on my shoulder blades. Like a little, I don’t know, a little cat masseuse or something.’ She laughed without a sound – but the slight movement of her lips on my neck set the fine hairs of my back and shoulders on end. She inhaled, and reached her arm around my stomach.

‘Outside I could hear someone moving their bins around. I think that was real. I could hear someone laughing.’ She rubbed my abdomen. ‘And I was pissed off because – well, you know what I get like when I’m woken up before my alarm goes off.’

I did. A smile flickered through my face without moving any of my muscles. I remembered my dopey, puffy-eyed Bea, her face creased from the folds in her pillowcase, rolling over and groaning at me if our neighbours dared to slam the door to their flat before seven o’clock. If I ever needed to get up before her, I had to be absolutely silent. Although, strangely, if it was the other way round, she was allowed to make as much noise as she wanted, and switch all the lights on.

‘Then this cat starts pinching my fingers,’ she said. ‘And I’m thinking, how is this cat pinching me? Then there’s more laughing, but this time in our bedroom. I hear this voice, saying: “You’re so cute when you sleep. Sleepy little Honey Bea.”’

She had always pretended to hate it when I called her that.

‘I know that voice, I’m thinking. And I say: “You’ve been gone a long time.” I smile, I reach out to touch your face.’

She lifted her hand to my cheek.

‘And I say: “You’re back. You came home.”’

Bea.

‘It was vivid. You were right there, pinching me, stroking my forehead. You were kissing my scar.’

I saw her. That perfect scar, a little dent that tugged her lip gently up towards her nostril, the only visible remnant of a mild cleft lip. After several years of me kissing it, she had eventually stopped trying to hide it behind her hand.

‘I was happy,’ she whispered, the laughter gone. ‘But then you weren’t there. You know how in dreams the edges slide away? I rolled over and reached for you, and you weren’t there any more.’

She held her palm tight against my stomach, thumbing my protruding lower ribs instead of the muscles she used to stroke.

‘And then I woke up and I remembered. You couldn’t have been there.’

She sniffed, and her head moved away from me.

My body may have been paralysed, but I could still feel when my heart twisted for her, as it did then. I wanted to lift my needled hand and put it on hers, and tell her it would be over soon.

That was my hope. I wanted to put an end to it, knock the weight from her small shoulders and push her forward into better days. I was making progress, I thought. They would soon start to talk about letting me die.

Before my hospital confinement, we used to talk about our three future kids. Two boys, one girl. They’d all be climbing (taught by me) and learning to draw (taught by Bea) from a young age. They would learn guitar from my dad, and we’d name the girl after my mum. Bea had never met her, but it was her idea. I remember exactly where we were when she suggested it – on holiday in the Algarve. The beach at Praia de Odeceixe was a spit of golden sand, bordered on one side by a river and lagoons where smaller children paddled, and on the other side by the sea, where older children played in the surf. Bea was sketching me as I lay on my back, propped up on my elbows, while I tried to work out how the black, jagged cliffs of schist overlooking the river mouth had been formed and shaped – and, more importantly, whether they could be climbed.

‘There’s a little girl over there, who keeps throwing her brother’s toys into the water,’ Bea said, putting her pencil down. ‘She’s a terror.’

I turned to see. ‘Where?’

‘Don’t move!’ she said. ‘I haven’t finished yet.’

I shook my head and laughed.

‘Sorry.’ She picked up her pencil again. ‘I didn’t mean for you to look. I was just saying.’

With my head back in the desired position, I resumed my study of the cliffs.

‘I was thinking, if we had a girl, one day,’ she said. Her pencil scratched at the paper, and I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She tilted her head, squinting her eyes at the sketchbook, assessing her progress. ‘We could call her something to remember your mum. Maybe not Diane – it sounds a bit dated now, don’t you think? But what about Didi?’

I smiled. Little Didi. Using my mum’s name had never crossed my mind, but now that she mentioned it – yes. It would be the perfect way to keep her memory alive.

‘What do you think?’

‘Am I allowed to talk?’ I asked. ‘It would involve moving my mouth – it could mess up your masterpiece.’

She threw her pencil at me and laughed. ‘You may speak.’

‘In that case, I think that would be a great idea. Mum would have loved it.’ I handed her pencil back, trying not to move the rest of my body too much.

‘What was she like?’ Bea asked.

‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? I feel like I’ve told you everything.’

‘There must be more.’ Bea put her sketchbook down and moved her towel closer to me. She sat down at my side, pulling her pale green kaftan over her knees. She’d insisted that she wanted to go somewhere warm, where the sea was bright blue and the sand was golden – somewhere I would be forced to walk around without a top on and show off my climber’s shoulders, she had added with a grin. She picked up a handful of sand and let it slip out in cascades between her fingers. ‘Tell me little things about her,’ she said. ‘I wonder if our children will be like her in any way, even if they never meet her?’

‘Little things?’ I repeated, tilting my head back and closing my eyes against the glare of the sun. ‘She didn’t know how to say no to people.’

‘A good or bad thing?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Mostly. But sometimes people took advantage.’

‘Like Philippa?’ I nodded. Bea understood a lot about our family dynamic, considering she hadn’t been around when Mum was alive.

‘She loved roses. Always wanted a new one to plant in the garden, for every birthday. She never wanted anything else. She preferred pink ones, and she liked to keep a list of the names in her gardening diary. I got her one once called Gertrude Jekyll.’

Bea laughed. ‘That’s Didi’s middle names sorted.’

I could see Mum clearly now, crouching in the garden to plant one of her new roses, the hem of her patterned skirt sinking into the muddy earth. I felt a tightness begin to form in my chest, so I moved on. ‘And she liked blue cheese with caramelised onion chutney. On chive crackers. No butter.’

Bea put a hand on my shoulder and the tightness forming around my heart slunk away. ‘I wish I had met her,’ she said.

‘Because of the cheese?’

She laughed. ‘Yes. Because of the cheese.’

We had lots of conversations like that.

But now I wasn’t around to have those kids with. Bea had amazed me with her determination to stick at my side. I had worried that her visits might tail off over time. That the draw of real life and real conversations would start to pull her away from me. But still she came. Would I have done the same? Surely, by this point, part of her thought it would be better if I could die. Better for me, but also better for her. She would be able to move on.

Bea laid her head back down next to mine. ‘There are times when I miss you so badly. Like last night – I convinced myself there was someone watching me from the garden. I really freaked out. You’d have said something to make me feel better, you know?’ She paused, and sighed. ‘Maybe I’m spending too much time on my own.’

I felt her lips against my neck.

‘Wake up, wake up, wake up,’ she whispered. Then: ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.’ She couldn’t decide which she wanted. My Bea. Breaking with too-painful love.

After she left, I could still feel her there, tucked up behind me. We weren’t in a hospital bed, but back at home. I was just pretending to be asleep, as I had done so many times before with her, challenging her to stir me. She lay behind me, kissing my shoulder blades. She wrapped a smooth leg around me, rolled the weight of my body back onto her so I could feel her nakedness press into my back. ‘Come on, Alex. Wake up,’ she murmured, as she used her nails to lightly circle over my chest, down my stomach. She flicked the elastic of my boxers. ‘Wake. Up.’

As the fantasy continued, my body responded for real. It’s another quirk of this condition of mine – I can still get it up. Not necessarily when I want to. It doesn’t happen every time Bea is here, or every time a nurse touches me. I don’t get hard every time I think about Bea naked – not like I used to. The first time she noticed the sheets moving unexpectedly I heard her breath stutter and change. She touched my leg, moving her hand upwards – then she hesitated and pulled away. She stood silent for a moment before calling Dr Sharma in.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s unlikely to mean anything at all,’ Dr Sharma said. ‘Alex will still be able to get erections – parts of his body will still function in a similar way to how they used to.’

‘But it seems so strange that his body would do that. What if it’s the sound of my voice?’

‘I know it’s confusing for you. I’m sorry. But I’m not convinced that it is. I don’t think this is a result of him reacting to outside stimuli.’

I briefly imagined shoving him up against the wall and asking him what his game was. I was desperate for her to touch me. Why wouldn’t he let her try it? What harm could it do?

‘Look, Bea – can I call you Bea?’ Dr Sharma asked. ‘What I think we are seeing here is a bit like what happens with Alex’s eyes. You know how sometimes they are open a little bit, and sometimes they are closed?’

‘Yes. But this. What’s happening now. This is different, isn’t it?’

‘Less frequent, perhaps. But it’s that same kind of scenario. His body will do some things – open his eyes, or even cry – without him having control over it, and without him necessarily reacting to you being here. Some things he does are just reflexive.’

‘But how can you be so sure?’

‘We’ve done lots of tests. We’ve watched him. In the very rare cases when we find out that a patient like Alex is conscious, it’s because one of the scans shows up certain kinds of activity in their brain, or because we notice they are blinking or moving their eyes in response to things we say. Alex isn’t doing any of that.’

‘I thought this might mean something,’ she said quietly.

‘I know, I’m sorry. The same goes for some other things too – if you notice his heart rate changing or him getting goosebumps when you touch him. It makes it look like he is awake, but he’s not. If you see his eyes follow you, or you think he blinks at you, then that’s different. Tell me if that happens.’

‘You’re saying he has no idea I’m here.’

‘I’m saying that, for the moment, we don’t think he is conscious. But it’s still good to visit him. Just try not to get your hopes up.’

There was an awkward silence.

‘While you’re here,’ Bea said, finally, ‘there’s something else I’ve been wanting to ask.’

‘Of course, go ahead.’

‘If he comes round, how much will he be able to remember, from before?’

‘Bea,’ Dr Sharma said, a warning in his voice. ‘You know that we are not predicting that he will come round, don’t you? You understand the prognosis?’

‘Yes, but hypothetically speaking. If he did?’

‘You’re worried he might not remember you?’

‘No, I …’ She stopped, sighed. ‘More like his immediate memory. The weeks before, the day of his fall. That kind of thing. I’ve heard with head injuries, sometimes they can’t recall—’

‘You must be very keen to know exactly what happened to make him slip. He was an experienced climber, I heard?’

‘Very.’

‘He might remember, he might not. I’m not sure I should really—’

‘Hypothetical situation,’ Bea cut in. She sounded frustrated – one beat short of losing her temper with Dr Sharma and his evasiveness.

‘Someone with these injuries probably wouldn’t remember the day of the accident itself. Before that – it’s too hard to say. It would depend on a number of things.’

‘Fine, I understand,’ she said. ‘He might remember, he might not.’

At the time I assumed she was asking these questions because she hoped I would have full recall. It’s only now, looking back, that I wonder if she was hoping the opposite.

4

AS THE MONTHS passed after my hospital admission, I had become increasingly sure that Bea didn’t think I could hear her. What I deduced from the way she spoke to me was that she liked the idea that I might be listening, but that’s all it was – an idea. It wasn’t reality, not as she saw it.

Sometimes she would ask me something, and wait for a second as though I might answer. But mostly she spoke to me as if I was a diary to be filled with her daily activities and thoughts – and a few confessions thrown in here and there. Her monologues were journal entries, or letters to an old friend. But – no, they weren’t quite like that. There was something unnerving in the way she threw the words out into the room as if they’d never matter. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, my mind wouldn’t make the link. But Bea made it for me. It wasn’t long after her dream about me appearing in her bed, when she visited again.

She was pacing. Her voice swung from one side of the room to the other, following the noise of her footsteps.

‘So, what have I done today …?’ she began. I couldn’t concentrate on what she said. The nurses had moved me onto my back, leaving my arm twisted. They were well trained in this inadvertent torture technique – leaving their victim in excruciating stress positions.

‘… then I went for a run …’

Not only could I not concentrate, but I didn’t have much interest in what she was talking about, either. All I wanted her to do was rearrange me, and get me comfortable.

My left arm, Bea. Can you straighten me out?

Pins and needles bit into my hand, spreading up past my wrist. She stopped still next to my bed, and stroked my tingling fingers.

‘… new trainers were good but I’m not sure they have as much support as I’m used to and I’m sure I’m still over-pronating …’

Still rubbing across my knuckles, she leaned in to kiss my forehead. The pain eased in my arm, and I willed her to talk about something more interesting. I wanted to listen to her – it was better than the mind-numbing silence I usually had on repeat – but sometimes the banality of what she chose to tell me did my head in.

‘If I’m honest,’ she said, and paused. ‘I was running for a reason. To straighten something out in my head.’

I felt the gentle tickle of her nails on the back of my thumb.

‘There’s this group.’

She walked away from the bed, her shoes padding softly on the floor.

‘A grief counselling group. I went to a grief counselling group.’ The words tumbled from her mouth in a rush.

‘It was Rosie’s idea. I thought it was stupid.’

I didn’t understand. Who had died?

‘She suggested going to the same one Tom went to when his dad died – he said it wasn’t just for people who have been bereaved. A life change is enough.’

So nobody was dead. Which meant – was she talking about me being in here? Was that her life change? She was right, it sounded stupid. There must have been other counselling available for someone in her position.

There was a crinkling sound, and when she next spoke she had something in her mouth. ‘God, Al,’ she garbled, and the smell of spearmint hit me. ‘It was a disaster.’

Her footsteps came closer again, and I heard her scratching at her head as she walked. She used to run her fingers up through her short, blonde hair when she got stressed, over and over. I could see it now. I had always loved the way it fell across her khaki green eyes and the freckled skin of her forehead.

‘It started when I called the guy to find out about it. He asked me why I wanted to go, and I don’t know why I did it, but I said –’