He shook his mother’s hand off his arm, and she said sorry to him then. She was sorry about everything, always.
They got back in the car and his mother continued driving – but much more slowly.
2
TRACY EVANS HAD imagined that the Cardiff neurological unit would give her plenty of time to catch up on her reading. All that quiet; all that stillness; all those comatose patients not vomiting into paper dishes, not peeing into cardboard bottles, not ringing those buzzers that made her feel like an effing air hostess – without the perks, or the prospect of marrying a pilot.
She’d been looking forward to the lack of hassle, and to Rose in Bloom, the third in the Rose Mackenzie series. In the first, Rose Mackenzie had graduated from the orphanage, shy and beautiful and still a virgin, despite several titillating attempts on her virtue. In the second, she’d had her money and her heart stolen by the cad Dander Cole – only to be rescued from imminent ruin by Raft Ankers, her tall, dark and monosyllabically handsome guardian. Raft’s secret (and therefore, no doubt, tragic) past kept him from paying any but the most formal attention to her, of course, but Tracy knew what Rose could not yet see – that embers glowed in the depths of his unfathomable eyes, waiting to burst into flames of passion.
The title alone of Rose in Bloom promised much in the way of conflagration, and twenty-four-year-old Tracy had filled the opening on Cardiff’s neurological unit with that very vow in mind. She’d imagined rows of sleeping patients, serene among the machines, and herself moving silently between them – more a nightwatchman than a nurse – or turning slow pages by the light of a single yellow lamp…
The reality, however, had turned out to be quite annoyingly different, in ways Tracy had barely imagined, let alone encountered. A few patients were deep in comas – ostensibly asleep, motionless – but others were in a range of vegetative states. Tracy undertook all the usual nursing tasks – changing drips and catheters, sponge baths, administering medication and nutrition, and noting alterations in respiration or motion. But here there was also cream to be massaged into skin to keep it supple, guards to be raised on the beds of those patients who thrashed and flailed, and bedsores to be prevented on those who did not. There were grunts and moans and blinks and incoherent shouts to be translated into sane requests for water or a switch of TV channel. There were nappies to be changed and arses to be wiped clean of soupy orange excrement. Physios wrestled noisily with stiffening limbs and clawed hands. There were splints to be strapped around legs, and dead-weight bodies to be hoisted into wheelchairs, or on to tilt tables, where patients hung as if crucified – all in an attempt to keep them from contracting into crooked foetal balls from which there might be no return.
Basically it was bedlam. Combined – for Tracy, at least – with a prickling fear that the dead-eyed patients were watching her, and biding their time…
To cap it all, there was the ward initiation – a painful C-diff infection that had Tracy doubled over in the toilet half a dozen times a day, and left her literally and figuratively drained. The other nurses called it ‘the diff-shits’ and told her it wouldn’t be so bad the next time. Tracy vowed to learn by her mistake and to start applying now for other jobs, before the next time could ever become this time.
In the meantime she learned that there were good coma patients and there were bad coma patients. A more experienced colleague, Jean, told her this in a way that let her know that such things were understood, and that it was OK to understand them, but not to talk openly about them.
Good coma patients were quiet. They didn’t make noise; they didn’t lash out when you tried to help them. They didn’t get pneumonia and require a lot of extra attention, or pull out their feeding tubes and drips. Good coma patients had families who were polite and didn’t clutter the place up with bits from home, and who brought little gifts – bribes, really – for the nurses, in the hope that they would take good care of their loved ones in the long hours filled with their absence. There were always at least two boxes of chocolates open behind the nurses’ station; Tracy liked the nuts, and would lift up the top layers before they were finished to get at the hard centres below, before anyone else had a chance.
It was also understood – by the nurses, at least – that good coma patients had been good people in their previous lives, too. They were here because of strokes brought on by overwork, car accidents that were not their fault, and falls from ladders while helping neighbours clear their guttering, or rescuing cats from trees. Good coma patients got their brows stroked and kind words in their ears, encouraging them to return to the world in one mental piece.
Bad coma patients cried all night long, or choked on even the thinnest porridge, or gripped their bed guards and rattled them like the bars of an old cage. They shouted out and flailed, and sometimes connected with a fist or a foot. They soiled themselves into freshly changed nappies – apparently just for the hell of it – and got constant infections that required extra nursing all night long. Bad patients were here because of drug overdoses and speeding and drunken brawls outside pubs. Their families were demanding and mistrustful. Bad patients got pursed lips and brisk handling, and their restraints tightened ‘for their own good’.
Nothing of this distinction was written down or discussed with doctors or families, but all the nurses knew the difference. When Jean first showed Tracy around the ward, she walked from bed to bed, filling Tracy’s head with biographies that were never to be rewritten or erased – or even verified as truthful.
‘This poor lad was going to buy his girlfriend an engagement ring when he was hit by a taxi. Driver was on his phone, I’ll bet,’ said Jean. ‘The girl comes in after work and just cries. Every day for seven months. Sweet little thing says she still wants to marry him. Breaks your heart.’ She sighed and sounded sincere, so Tracy nodded in a way she hoped denoted that she, too, was a little bit heartbroken – even though she thought that if her (hypothetical) boyfriend were in a coma for more than a few weeks, she’d probably just cut her losses and move on, not stick around to watch him shit in his pants for the next fifty years.
Jean was on to the next bed. ‘This one,’ she said with a brusque tug of the sheets over the chest of a middle-aged man, ‘fell off that bridge at the end of Queen Street. Drunk, most likely. Or running from the police. Shouldn’t have been on it in the first place; it’s a rail bridge, you know, not pedestrian.’
Tracy did know. She herself had staggered under it many a Friday and Saturday night as she wove the mile from Evolution back to the house she shared with three other girls. People were always hanging over the parapet of the bridge with spray cans, or playing chicken with the trains as they left Queen Street station.
‘A right pain, this one,’ whispered Jean over another man. ‘Bawling and shouting. Sometimes in a foreign language, makes me think he has something to hide.’
Tracy nodded, enthralled.
‘He has us all running about like headless chickens. Gets violent too.’
‘Really?’
‘Well,’ shrugged Jean, ‘he doesn’t mean to, I suppose, but he can knock things about. He’s very strong. He broke Angie’s finger.’ She nodded at a pretty, dark-haired nurse with white tape on her left hand, then looked back at Tracy seriously.