He nodded, then stared down at his coffee.
‘He saved Luke’s life, doing what he did.’
Andrew nodded again. Not giving much away. Trying to hold it all in, perhaps fearing that if he started talking it might all come rolling out, like a bag of marbles tipped over, clattering every which way.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ she said again. She was painfully aware that she still had Luke. Upstairs, resting, getting stronger every hour. She still had such hope that he’d get well and come home, and although things would never be like they were before, there would still be everything to look forward to. The man opposite had none of that.
‘Have the police told you anything?’ she asked, testing her cup with her fingers, still too hot to drink.
He shrugged. ‘Not really.’
He was a wreck, she thought, greying hair dishevelled, unshaven. She guessed he was in his late forties or early fifties, something like that. The skin on his face blotchy, his eyes bloodshot, stubble peppering his jaw. A pleasant face beneath the stress, but no more than that. His clothes were decent enough, but it didn’t appear that anyone was looking after him. Maybe he wouldn’t let them. She had clients like that, people who felt that accepting help was a sign of weakness, that it undermined their independence, reduced their selfesteem, or those who were so angry at their failing abilities that they wouldn’t countenance assistance, denying there was a problem, bitter and hurt.
She’d showered today, washed her hair, even put a load in the washing machine. Seemed like a big deal at the time, functioning. But her clothes weren’t ironed and she knew she looked wiped out too.
‘Did he know them? Luke?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘But the descriptions,’ he went on. She saw a glint of anger in the cast of his eyes. ‘You read them?’
‘Yes, it didn’t sound like anyone I could think of.’
‘So you think it was random? They picked on him out of the blue?’
‘I don’t know.’
A man dressed in a Santa suit wandered up to the counter, setting off banter among the staff and customers. Louise wanted to weep.
She wondered why Andrew Barnes expected her to have any answers. What had driven him to come and see Luke? Surely he’d enough going on dealing with his own situation. She felt a flare of irritation with him. Edgy, she moved her drink towards the middle of the table. ‘I’m just going out for a smoke, won’t be long.’
He dipped his head, picked up his own drink.
She had to go outside and across the road to escape all the no-smoking notices. Other people ignored the exhortations near the entrance and clustered there; she could see two women sucking hungrily on fags and a man in a wheelchair and another youngish lad with a drip. She didn’t feel proud of smoking again and she didn’t want to flout the rules. The first drag made her cough and her mouth felt dry, her tongue rough; she wished she’d brought her drink out with her.
When she went back to the café, Andrew Barnes had gone.
The man probably didn’t know whether he was coming or going. His son had died trying to help Luke; maybe he’d needed to see the cause of his bereavement. She wondered if he had spoken to Luke and what he’d said. She could have asked Andrew about the fight if she’d only taken the chance instead of running off for a fag. It had been at his house after all. How had it started? Thinking about that, about Luke’s fear and the violence of what they’d done, made her stomach turn.
She hadn’t seen Carl since Saturday, when he’d rung first then come round with takeaway and a couple of bottles of wine. They’d kept in touch by phone, but there had not been any time and she needed to concentrate on Luke and Ruby for now.
She asked him to take the Christmas tree away – see if anyone he knew could make use of it. Ruby stayed close, as if she was frightened to leave Louise. ‘You can go round to Becky’s,’ Louise had told her, ‘or she can come over.’ Thinking that seeing her best friend might be a break for the girl; but Ruby shook her head.
They’d watched a film on telly, a mindless rom-com. Carl laughed too loudly at the slapstick and she wished he’d leave.
At midnight Ruby went to bed and Carl asked Louise if she’d like him to stay. She shook her head and hugged him, said she’d barely slept but wanted to try and get a good night tonight. Thanked him for the food and the wine.
After he’d gone, she stood in the back garden to have the last fag of the day. There was a full moon rising, bright and luminous, a ring around it, mother-of-pearl. It illuminated the whole of the landscape, bouncing magnesium white off the blanket of snow. The lights in Angie’s were off now; Angie would be sleeping in the warm fug of the living room, Sian upstairs.
Louise had wondered about her clients. All the people she’d missed seeing and would miss in the coming week. Some of them – Miriam and Terence and Mrs Coulson (who preferred the formality) – would have got her a Christmas present like last year. Not easy for them to arrange when they were stuck in the house. Miriam’s delight at keeping the gift secret from Louise (who had access to her cupboards and drawers in the course of looking after her) had been present enough. Mrs Coulson had flourished a crumpled parcel wrapped in half a mile of Sellotape, and Louise had thanked her, keeping her face straight when she fought her way into it and discovered the packet of assorted mints that Mrs Coulson herself had received for her birthday back in April. As for Terence, he’d arranged for his daughter in Cornwall to buy and post a beautiful pair of sheepskin mittens. They must have cost him a few bob. ‘It’s perishing out there,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t want you getting chilblains, eh?’ They’d be disappointed not to have a chance to give her their presents. She had not bought theirs yet – always last-minute.
Would they know what had happened? Would some replacement carer tell them about Luke, or would they just be told Louise was off sick?
Louise had dropped her cigarette and heard the hiss as it went out, stooped to pick it up and put it in the wheelie bin. The wind blew even harder, buffeting the fence. Across town, just a couple of miles away, Luke lay still. Alone. ‘Night, night, darling,’ she whispered. And went in.
They stopped the sedation on Tuesday morning. Louise and Ruby had been warned that it was impossible to predict what would happen. ‘Some patients open their eyes almost immediately, others can take hours, days. And some remain unresponsive.’ Persistent vegetative state. Someone had used the term at some point, but she wasn’t going to think about that. He was going to wake up.
There was nothing very dramatic to the withdrawal of sedation, just the unhooking of a drip and a note in his charts. It would take several hours for the sedative to clear from his system. Then they could try rousing him. He was breathing on his own, which they said was really good.
The past three days of bedside vigils had forced Louise to find something to do while she sat there. There was only so much chattering she could manage while Luke lay calm and quiet and so very still. Was he running in his mind? Climbing and ducking and diving? Flying even? Unfettered. She liked to think so, but no one could tell her if he was even able to dream.
So, incapable of reading, her concentration in shreds, and unwilling to sit there like a lemon, she had ransacked the roof space for her rag-bags, pulled out all the cotton pieces and the old card templates and started on a quilt. She’d no clear idea yet whose bed it would go on. There might only be enough for a single, in which case it would be Ruby’s. Or maybe she’d hang it on the wall like a picture. The project meant she could sit with Luke, cutting and tacking hexagons. Threads of cotton and scraps got all over the floor but were easily cleared up.
Ruby had loaded an MP3 player with all Luke’s favourite tunes and rigged it up to a little speaker so they could play it to him. They had it on for a while. Ruby brought some homework to do – a history project. It was one of the few subjects Louise could help her with if needs be, unlike maths or French. Grandad had been big on history and some of it had stuck.