Mask pressed to my nose and mouth. Pressed firmly.
I don’t know where.
Ask questions, ask–
What’s the day—? It’s—?
I have no idea. I don’t even know where to start to find something like that out.
What was the day yesterday?
I—?
Sheila spiders out her hands and threads the elastic of the mask back over my head. It snaps tight above my ears.
‘OK, lovey. Now breathing, yes? You know the drill.’
‘Breathing, breathing.’
‘And it looks like it’s time for a little more of the morphine solution, OK?’
‘OK, yeah.’
Yeah, yeah.
She starts to move around in the now familiar morphine routine. Methodically get the bottle. Strange, formal little movements. She doesn’t want to get anything wrong. Top responsibility, the drugs.
‘Down the hatch.’
‘Here we are, at last,’ I say, arriving finally on the crest of the hill.
You follow on behind, pushing down with your hands on your knee to lever yourself up the final incline. You fall in breathlessly beside me and slip your hands around my middle, as I drop my arm across your shoulders and squeeze you tight: the anxious clinch of a couple once lost to one another, now reunited. It feels so good to be holding each other after everything we’ve come through.
A day at a time, then a week, and all’s well.
All’s well.
‘My favourite place in the world,’ I say.
Up here we’re more in touch with this deep, deep sky than the valley down below. Huge grey-white clouds bloom epically in the blue.
Beneath us, the land drops away and sweeps off down the valley. A tiny cyclist lends perspective, cranking herself east along the dirt track towards town. She’s further away than seems possible.
‘This is where my dad’s ashes are scattered,’ I say. ‘I remember me and Mum and Laura coming out here and doing that.’
‘It’s a beautiful spot. Perfect.’
‘I think my mum left it a couple of years before we scattered him. She wanted us to be old enough to remember.’
We carefully lay out the blanket on a clean patch of ground — the blanket now happily being used for what you intended — and you sit. I sit down behind you and thread my arms around your middle, rest my chin on your shoulder.
‘Whoever first used the word “rolling” about hills knew exactly what they were talking about,’ you say. ‘These hills really roll.’
‘They’re exactly the right size and roundness.’
‘And millions of colours. Really like a picturebook green, and then if you look at it long enough you start to see all the yellows and browns coming through. Purple skirting the bottoms.’
‘Could you make a blanket out of those colours?’
‘Nature’s got that one covered,’ you say.
You pull out an apple and bite into it. I lift my head from your shoulder and you let me take a bite too.
‘So,’ I say, ‘I’ve been invited to join the garden design course.’
‘Ah really? Well done! I think you’ll be great at it,’ you say. Then: ‘You’re going to be sick through nerves again, aren’t you?’
‘Can’t wait.’
‘No, I think you’re going to get in there, and you’re totally going to blossom.’
You back into me for a tight cuddle, and draw my arms tighter around you.
‘This feels so good,’ you say.
‘Yeah.’
‘It doesn’t feel like living day by day any more. Not to me. Does it to you?’
‘No — no, it feels — just right.’
You draw in a deep breath and exhale languorously.
‘Do you think, when you die–
‘OK — nice—’
‘—that the ash when you get cremated is the same ash people use on their gardens?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to know things like that if you’re going to do a garden design course?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
I laugh.
‘What?’
‘Why do you always take us to the darkest places?’
‘Do I? I think nursing might have broken my darkness filter.’
‘So, when you’re a nurse, do you get immune to people dying?’
You chew thoughtfully for a moment.
‘No,’ you say, ‘not immune. If you know you’ve done the best in your power to help this person, then — well, the alternative is that you weren’t there and you didn’t help.’
‘I suppose.’
‘You have a job to do, to help them, and you just have to do your best. Sometimes I almost think it’s quite a selfish thing to do — the better job you do, the more self-respect you can have. I tried explaining that to one of the women on my course, and she looked at me like I was gone out.’
You examine the apple to select the next best bite.
‘I get that.’
‘I always think it’s worse when you see the family. You can’t do a lot for them. There’s no time. And you can’t really prescribe to take away people’s grief.’
‘Not properly, no.’
‘And you see little kids, like the doctors and nurses might have looked at you when your dad died, and you think — there’s a lot of loving that person needs, right there.’
You fling the apple core down the valley; watch it catch now and nestle in the bracken.
Crickle crackle.
‘Well that’s one way of deciding where you want to place your apple tree,’ I say.
You grin at me, and give me an appley kiss, smack on the lips, and we lie down on the blanket, huddle in close.
‘If I was ash,’ you say, your voice washed out as you talk into the air, ‘I’d like to be sprinkled under a fruit tree. Or if it’s the wrong kind of ash, I’d like to be buried under a fruit tree. Worm food.’
‘Yeah?’ My voice bassy and loud in my ears.
‘Because then the nutrients from me would go to swelling the fruit. And then maybe the birds would peck at the fruit and get the energy to fly — so the same energy that is making me say these words now would be used to help the bird fly. I’d literally be flying.’
‘Yeah — yeah.’
‘And that to me is truly comforting. Seeing myself, launching off from this hill, and diving down there into the sky, down there in the valley. Deep down, and up around. Everywhere.’
You hold your hands up to the sky, cross them, palms downward, pressing your thumbs together to make a bird. A fluttering bird.
I take my right hand, press it to your left, thumb to thumb.
A bird. A fluttering bird.
Hold our hands against the sky.
Fluttering, fluttering in the blue.
At that moment, I hear the signature squiggles of birdsong in the distance, and a brief flutter of wings, and a look of childlike delight crosses your face.
R
Rib
MAL HOLDS UP a sticky spare rib and turns it about, before greedily stripping off the meat with his teeth.
‘Mal,’ says Laura in a warning tone.
‘What?’
‘That’s probably not very nice for a vegetarian to have to put up with.’
Mal looks up at you and grins, dropping the bone on his plate and licking his fingers noisily. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
You shrug, and continue with your risotto.
I knew this was a bad idea. All I’ve done is sit here and hope that Mal behaves himself. But he’s in one of his petulant, contrary moods. Careful piloting required.
The look you gave me when he blatantly whipped the reserved sign off the table pretty much set the tone for the evening. You’re only here reluctantly anyway, and so now I have half an eye on you and whether you’re having an OK time. Now we’re all just tense that we’re about to be found out. All of us except Mal.