Mum nudges me with her elbow. ‘Stay awake.’
The moon bounces through the window. In the headlights – mist.
We were going dancing. I wanted to try alcohol again. I wanted to stand on tables and sing cheering songs. I wanted to climb over the fence in the park, steal a boat and circle the lake. I wanted to go back to Adam’s house and creep up to his room and make love.
‘Adam,’ I say under my breath. But it gets covered in blood like everything else.
At the hospital, they find me a wheelchair and make me sit in it. I’m an emergency, they tell me as they rush me away from the reception area. We leave behind the ordinary victims of pub brawls, bad drugs and late-night domestics and we speed down the corridor to somewhere more important.
I find the layers of a hospital strangely reassuring. This is a duplicate world with its own rules and everyone has their place. In the emergency rooms will be the young men with fast cars and crap brakes. The motorcyclists who took a bend too sharply.
In the operating theatres are the people who mucked around with air rifles, or who got followed home by a psychopath. Also, the victims of random accident – the child whose hair got caught in an escalator, the woman wearing an underwired bra in a lightning storm.
And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won’t go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed.
And then there’s the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.
The room I end up in is bright and sterile. There’s a bed, a sink, a doctor and a nurse.
‘I think she’s thirsty,’ Mum says. ‘She’s lost so much blood. Shouldn’t she have a drink?’
The doctor dismisses this with a wave of his hand. ‘We need to pack her nose.’
‘Pack it?’
The nurse ushers Mum to a chair and sits down next to her. ‘The doctor will put strips of gauze in her nose to stop the blood,’ she says. ‘You’re welcome to stay.’
I’m shivering. The nurse gets up to give me a blanket and pulls it up to my chin. I shiver again.
‘Someone’s dreaming about you,’ Mum says. ‘That’s what that means.’
I always thought it meant that, in another life, someone was standing on my grave.
The doctor pinches my nose, peers in my mouth, feels my throat and the back of my neck.
‘Mum?’ he says.
She looks startled, sits upright in her chair. ‘Me?’
‘Any signs of thrombocytopenia before today?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Has she complained of a headache? Have you noticed any pinprick bruising?’
‘I didn’t look.’
The doctor sighs, clocks in a moment that this is a whole new language for her, yet, strangely, persists.
‘When was the last platelet transfusion?’
Mum looks increasingly bewildered. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Has she used aspirin products recently?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know any of this.’
I decide to save her. She’s not strong enough, and she might just walk out if it gets too difficult.
‘December the twenty-first was the last platelet transfusion,’ I say. My voice sounds raspy. Blood bubbles in my throat.
The doctor frowns at me. ‘Don’t talk. Mum, get yourself over here and take your daughter’s hand.’
She obediently comes to sit on the edge of the bed.
‘Squeeze your mum’s hand once for yes,’ the doctor tells me. ‘Twice for no. Understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shush,’ he says. ‘Squeeze. Don’t talk.’
We go through the same routine – the bruising, the headaches, the aspirin, but this time Mum knows the answers.
‘Bonjela or Teejel?’ the doctor asks.
Two squeezes. ‘No,’ Mum tells him. ‘She hasn’t used them.’
‘Anti-inflammatories?’
‘No,’ Mum says. She looks me in the eyes. She speaks my language at last.
‘Good,’ the doctor says. ‘I’m going to pack the front of your nose with gauze. If that doesn’t do it, we’ll pack the back, and if the bleeding still persists, we’ll have to cauterize. Have you had your nose cauterized before?’
I squeeze Mum’s hand so hard that she winces. ‘Yes, she has.’
It hurts like hell. I could smell my own flesh burning for days.
‘We’ll need to check your platelets,’ he goes on. ‘I’d be surprised if you weren’t below twenty.’ He touches my knee through the blanket. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a rotten night for you.’
‘Below twenty?’ Mum echoes.
‘She’ll probably need a couple of units,’ he explains. ‘Don’t worry, it shouldn’t take more than an hour.’
As he packs sterile cotton into my nose, I try and concentrate on simple things – a chair, the twin silver birch trees in Adam’s garden and the way their leaves shiver in sunlight.
But I can’t hold onto it.
I feel as if I’ve eaten a sanitary towel; my mouth is dry and it’s hard to breathe. I look at Mum, but all I see is that she’s feeling squeamish and has turned her face away. How can I feel older than my own mother? I close my eyes so I don’t have to see her fail.
‘Uncomfortable?’ the doctor asks. ‘Mum, any chance of distracting her?’
I wish he hadn’t said that. What’s she going to do? Dance for us? Sing? Perhaps she’ll do her famous disappearing act and walk out of the door.
The silence goes on a long time. Then, ‘Do you remember the day we all tried oysters, and how your dad was sick in the bin at the end of the pier?’
I open my eyes. Whatever shadows are in the room disappear with the brightness of her words. Even the nurse smiles.
‘They tasted exactly of the sea,’ she says. ‘Do you remember?’
I do. We bought four, one for each of us. Mum tipped her head right back and swallowed hers whole. I did the same. But Dad chewed his and it got stuck in his teeth. He ran down the pier clutching his stomach, and when he came back, he drank a whole can of lemonade without pausing for breath. Cal didn’t like them either. ‘Perhaps they’re a female thing,’ Mum said, and she bought us both another one.
She goes on to describe a seaside town and a hotel, a short walk to the beach and days when the sun shone bright and warm.
‘You loved it there,’ she says. ‘You’d collect shells and pebbles for hours. Once you tied some rope to a lump of driftwood and spent an entire day dragging it up and down the beach pretending you had a dog.’
The nurse laughs at this and Mum smiles. ‘You were a wonderfully imaginative little girl,’ she tells me. ‘Such an easy child.’
And if I could talk, I’d ask her why, then, did she leave me? And maybe she’d speak at last of the man she left Dad for. She might tell me of a love so big that I’d begin to understand.
But I can’t talk. My throat feels small and feverish. So instead, I listen as Mum explores an old sun, faded days, past beauty. It’s good. She’s very inventive. Even the doctor looks as if he’s enjoying himself. In her story, the sky shimmers, and day after day we see dolphins playing in the sea.
‘Supplementary oxygen,’ the doctor says. And he winks at me as if he’s offering me dope. ‘No need to cauterize. Well done.’ He has a word with the nurse, then turns in the doorway to wave goodbye. ‘Best customer tonight so far,’ he tells me, then he gives Mum a little bow. ‘And you weren’t so bad either.’
‘Well, what a night that was!’ Mum says as we finally climb into a cab to take us home.
‘I liked you being with me.’
She looks surprised, pleased even. ‘I’m not sure how much use I was.’
Early-morning light spills from the sky onto the road. It’s cold in the taxi, the air rarefied, like inside a church.
‘Here,’ Mum says, and she unbuttons her coat and wraps it round my shoulders.