I turn back to Leo, wondering if he is aware we are here all the time. One of us always sitting beside him, watching, waiting. Waiting.
Do the sounds of the machines penetrate through to him? What about the hellos, the chats, the books I read, the goodnights? Does he know it’s Thursday? His second Thursday here? Do all these little pieces of our reality slither through the cracks in his sleep and make him aware of the world going on around him? Or is he locked away from it all? Hidden. Removed. Somewhere separate. I couldn’t bear it if it was like that. If he is all alone and doesn’t know I am here, waiting for him to come back.
“I’m ready, Mum. I want to go.”
I rub the base of my thumbs over my eyes, removing the crystals of grit, trying to massage wakefulness and life into my face.
“I’m ready to go.”
After thirteen days of this, I’d have thought my body would get used to being in that chair for hours on end; it wouldn’t be as sore and stiff, protesting with long snaps of pain every time I try to move. I get up, go to the bed, instinctively shutting out the IV drips, the electrodes attaching him to machines, and stare down at my boy. My boy. He’s been the reason I have opened my eyes and climbed out of bed every day for the past seven and a half years; even when I haven’t wanted to, I’ve done it. My world started to rotate around him from the moment he was born, and now it is off-kilter.
I stroke his forehead with the very tips of my fingers, gently, so as not to disturb him. Even now, my instinct is to be gentle so I don’t disturb him. Even though disturbing him, waking him, is exactly what we want.
His head is shorn, a fine covering of his black hair slowly growing back. They’d done that, clipped and shaved away all his beautiful, thick black curls, eight days ago. His mocha-caramel skin is smooth on his head, except at that point on his lower skull where they drilled into him to clamp off three blood vessels, to try to prevent a hemorrhage. The operation had been a complete success, they told me.
I’d stared at the surgeon, with his green cap on his head, his mask around his neck, his green operating scrubs surprisingly clean. “Success?” I’d echoed.
He’d nodded. Explained that the other aneurysm they’d been worried about hadn’t ruptured, and was now no longer a threat.
“Success,” I’d repeated, my voice far away and disconnected. Keith had put his hand on my forearm to steady me. That word obviously had different meanings to the surgeon and to me. My boy was still asleep, was still more “there” than here—he wasn’t talking or walking, his eyes weren’t open, his face wasn’t moving—but still, it’d been a success. “Thank you,” I’d said as Keith’s large, warm hand closed around mine. It wasn’t the surgeon’s fault he didn’t understand what the word “success” actually meant. It meant Leo would be back to normal. It meant, at the very least, that they would be able to tell me when he would be waking up.
I return to my brown padded chair and curl my legs up under me, rest my head back and watch Leo.
This is the world I live in now. A world where success means this. A world where I know those dreams are born of the feeling, the knowledge, that has been stealthily and determinedly uncoiling itself bit by bit inside me every day.
The feeling that maybe Leo is ready.
Maybe I might have to let him go.
“Look at that woman’s stomach!” he said.
He saw Mummy close her eyes before she said, “Shhh,” and kissed his head while rocking him on her lap.
“Look at that woman’s stomach!” he said again. He pointed. She had a big one. It was round like his football, but big like Mummy’s big, big cushion.
“Shush-shush,” Mummy said. She took his finger and kissed it.
“Mummy! Look at that woman’s stomach!”
Mummy didn’t look, she pressed the button and it happened again, the sound of the bell like on his fire car. Then the bus stopped like always. Mummy got his pram and her big bag and she let him jump on every step to get off.
She opened the pram and moved the straps for him to sit down, but he wanted to walk. “I just walk,” he told her. “I just walk.”
Mummy carried on looking in his pram and when the bus went away she stood up. “Leo, why do you have to keep pointing out people’s stomachs? Or that small man? Or that woman’s big milk boobies? Or that man’s funny hair?” she said to him. “That’s the third time in two days you’ve done that. I’m going to have to learn to drive ’cause I am never getting a bus with you again.”
She put her bag in his pram. “Someday someone’s going to smack me one.”
“Are you naughty?” he asked. Was Mummy a naughty girl like he was a naughty boy so she would get a smack?
Mummy stared at him with her head on one side. “I sometimes wonder if I was in a former life.” She started pushing the pram with one hand, held his hand in the other. “Come on, we have a very long walk ahead of us.”
A woman who was old like Grandma smiled at him. “My mummy’s naughty,” he told her.
The woman looked at Mummy. “I’m sure she is,” the woman said and walked on.
He smiled at Mummy, but she didn’t see—she was staring at the woman with her mouth open.
Leo, age 2 years
CHAPTER 2
H ave you seen how much that girl with locker 117 runs?”
“The blonde?”
“Yeah. She’s here every day. Sometimes she does yoga or Pilates, then runs. It’s mad!”
My locker is 117. I had been about to throw the bolt on the toilet cubicle door when I heard the woman on the other side mention my locker, mention me. Now my hand is hovering over the lock, and I’m unsure whether to go ahead and leave or stay here. I’m already running a little late to meet Mal to go to this dinner party; I haven’t got time to sit here, a prisoner of their gossip.
“I’m not surprised,” the other woman replies.
Well, obviously I am not going anywhere now. I quietly lower the toilet lid and sit down. I have to know why she isn’t surprised that I’m here every day. My hands are trembling slightly, my mouth is dry, my heart a little jumpy in my chest. I absently fiddle with the strap of my black dress as I wait to find out.
“Have you seen her husband? He is ab-so-lutely gorgeous. I’d run a million miles every day if it meant it’d stop his eyes wandering.”
“Oh my God, I’ve seen him when he comes to pick her up sometimes … And bloody hell! I know what you mean. I could eat him up!”
“Do you think she’s one of those women who would balloon if she didn’t do all those things?”
“Yeah! You can see it in her face.”
They have no idea I am listening to their words echo around the marble floor and walls in the gym toilets. I recognize their voices; they are the two women who do everything together: use the equipment, have their mats next to each other in yoga and Pilates. I was on nodding terms with them and I thought they liked me. Maybe that was overstating the tenuous, fleeting nature of our association—I hadn’t thought they didn’t like me, I didn’t imagine for even one minute they did this: talked about me.
I fear this. Probably more than most rational adults, I fear people talking about me. Dissecting me in private, peeling back the layers I so carefully and painstakingly present to the world and finding truths and half-truths, as they interpret them; I am scared of people creating a reality that is different from the beautiful home, the perfect husband, the successful friends who invite me to dinner parties that actually make up my life.
“But you’ve got to give it to her, she was probably a bit of a porker when she was younger and now she’s shaped up.”
I wasn’t! I want to shout through the door at them. I really wasn’t. I was always this shape, and this size. Now I’m just firmer. In any case, I do not exercise to keep my looks, to fend off rolls of fat, nor to keep my husband faithful. I need it to keep grounded. Safe. Stable. Me.
If I don’t feel the push of blood chasing endorphins and adrenaline at a hundred mi
les an hour through my veins every day, things start to slip. My grip on reality begins to numb and the slow decline to feeling out of control begins. That’s why I run every day—even on a Friday night. What’s their excuse for being here? When most people who don’t need to run are out in the pub, why aren’t they?
“Yeah, not as if either of us has got there. Alan keeps asking me why I bother coming to the gym when the second I get in I light up and head straight to the fridge.”
“Yeah, my Ian asks me the same thing. His eyes would be out on stalks if he saw her.”
When I was younger, people used to gossip about my family, and especially about me. It became a pastime in the town where we lived. People spoke in whispers, cast disapproving looks, hushed themselves whenever one of us went past. I felt every whisper, nudge and look. We all did; they were like shards of glass, lacerating the skin. That’s why as an adult I do my best to not give anyone things to gossip about. Great job, beautiful home, gorgeous husband, group of friends. Why would you gossip about that? Envy that, maybe, but not find fault with.
“Do you fancy a pint?” one of the girls on the other side says.
“Oh, go on then. I’ve been fantasizing about salt and vinegar crisps all day. If I do extra time on the machines next week, it won’t matter so much, will it?”
“If that’s the game we’re playing right now, then I’ll say yes. Extra time—in other words five more minutes—on the machines will make the extra fat just magically melt away.”
“You are such a bitch! Hey, shall we ask Miss Locker 117?”
The other woman smirks: nasty and cruel, perfectly expressive. “She probably doesn’t drink or eat.”
“I know!”
My mother always dealt with vicious smirks and bitchy comments by praying. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” she would say, as if that would make it stop, or even stem the rivers of pain that it caused. Whenever my sister, Mary, would cry about the things she heard, my mother would say, “Remember them in your prayers, Mary.” Remember to ask God to make bad things happen to them, I would think but never say. Nothing bad ever did happen to those accusers who were with and without sin, and they still cast stones at us; they still called me a slut and a whore and a host of other things behind my back, to my face, on all available walls. Praying didn’t help, but neither did crying. Nothing helped. Nothing made it stop.
Time passes and the two women fall silent, then their footsteps, loud and magnified like their words have been, echo around the room as they retreat, the door slamming shut behind them. I wait a few more minutes, even though I’m really quite late for Mal, just to make sure they’re really gone. When I can hear nothing, no sound from outside the cubicle, I unlock the door and release myself from my self-imposed prison into the marbled bathroom, with its wide mirror strip above the sinks opposite the cubicles.
My body stops short and my heart halts at exactly the same moment: they’re still here. They’re still here and now they know that I know what they were saying. That I have been sitting in the cubicle, listening to them rip me apart.
One of them, a tall blonde with her hair tucked behind her ears, is leaning over the bank of sinks applying a thick layer of eyeliner; the other, a small brunette, is perched on the edge of the sinks, rolling up a cigarette on her thigh.
All our eyes collide and everything becomes unnaturally, eerily still, a death shroud of stunned silence thrown over us. The one now frozen in applying makeup drains of all color until her face is an ashen-gray mask of horror; the other now paused in rolling her cigarette fills up with red until her face resembles a pulsating, puce tomato.
Lowering my eyes, I move to the nearest basin, squirt blue gel handwash between my palms and rub them together under the sensor-operated tap. I had wanted to apply lipstick, check my eye makeup and foundation before I went to meet Mal. Now, I dare not look up from the blue gel slipping and foaming through my fingers, not even a glance to see if my hair is in place.
I dry my hands on two scratchy paper towels, crush them in one hand and drop them into the bin under the sink. I’m sure the women can hear the thrash of my heart in my chest, the throbbing of my pulse in my throat, because the slightest movement is magnified in here, and they have not moved at all since they saw me.
Their words and the cruel little smirk reverberate all around us as I start my epic journey to the door. The door, by the way, seems to have moved to the other side of London, and every step toward it in these six-inch heels sounds like an anvil being dropped through a glass roof.
RING! RING! RING! goes my mobile and it sounds like I have a miniature Hunchback of Notre Dame crammed into my bag, clanging “the bells, the bells” for all he’s worth. It’s Mal’s ringtone. Probably asking why I am not there, when I warned him—repeatedly—I’d skin him alive if he dared to work late tonight.
RING! RING! RING! insists my phone as I continue to walk to the door. I can’t answer it, of course. If I stop for even a fraction of a moment of a second, something bad will happen. Something more bad than what has just happened will happen. I don’t know what, but I know it will.
RING! RING! RING! I just have to get out of here. Out of this bathroom, out of this gym. Once I do that, it’ll all be fine.
RING! RING! RING! I’m nearly there. Just one more step. Two at the most. And then I’m home free.
RING! RIN—! The final ring is cut short and the sudden silence causes my heart to leap to my throat and my legs to wobble. But it’s OK, I’m here, at the door.
I push it open and step outside, feeling the sweet rush of freedom crash like a welcome wave over me.
I do not know what happens after I am gone: if they fall about laughing, if they wither up and die in shame or if they decide to do what I have to do—look for another gym.
CHAPTER 3
I t’s 11 p.m. and Keith isn’t here.
He usually gets here by eight, sometimes nine, but never this late. Not without calling. Normally, I wouldn’t worry even if he hasn’t called, because he’s Keith and he does the job he does and he always turns up. Sometimes a little worse for wear and full of affection, sometimes because he couldn’t get to a phone, sometimes because he’s Keith and he does the job he does. That was before our lives became about this hospital room, about taking it in “shifts” to sit here and keep our son company, and before I started to believe that even the smallest mishap could escalate into something unmanageable and terrifying. That was before I discovered you could bring your son to the hospital because of a gusher of a nosebleed and find he has an aneurysm that is hours away from rupturing, and needs a life-saving operation that leaves him in a coma.
Now, I worry about everything.
I flip over the book I was reading, splaying it open in my lap, and try to avoid looking at my watch.
“Where’s your dad?” I ask Leo in my head. I don’t want to worry him, so I don’t say it out loud. I don’t like to think of him listening to everything going on around him and panicking because he can’t ask the questions whose answers will reassure him it will be OK. Worrying is my job. He just needs to concentrate on getting better. Because it’s all up to him now.
The medically induced coma they put him in after the first operation should have worn off by now. They’ve removed all sedation, they’ve attempted to wake him, he’s had multiple MRI scans, all of which show he has brain activity, but he is still asleep.
He is still asleep.
Which means Leo, my seven-year-old who would choose to wear his Teen League Fighter costume all day every day, who would choose cheesy beans over broccoli but not spinach, who is still trying to find proof that Keith is a spy, decides from now on when he will wake up. His fate is in his chubby, perfectly formed hands.
I gnaw on the first knuckle of my thumb; the worry is like a multi-barreled lock, each barrel moving slowly and precisely into position until every one clicks into place and the lock is set. Fused shut with no key to open it up again.
&nbs
p; 11:03 p.m., my watch shows me. 11:03. You’d think he’d call. If not to reassure me that he is OK, which he’s never had to do, then to at least ask how Leo is. If there’s been any change.
His mobile was off when I tried him earlier. Off or crushed in the smoldering carcass of his car? I’d asked myself. Off or sitting in his locker at work, waiting for someone to find it and call his next of kin with the news? Off for now or off forever?
What would I do if something happened to him? How would I cope? Would I cope? Probably, but how would I divide my time between Leo and Keith? Your husband and your son, how do you carve yourself up so you can be with both of them at the same time?
This is the anatomy of worry: becoming extremely irrational, very quickly, playing scenario after scenario out until the normal option, the probable option, seems fantastical rather than likely.
I’m a qualified clinical psychologist; I know better, I should behave better. But I can’t. Not right now. It simply isn’t in me. If I prepare for the worst-case scenario, then anything less than that will seem trivial, something I can shrug a shoulder at, can become Zen and stoic about. Besides, I don’t use my “Doctor” title enough, according to my parents, and the job of restaurant manager I took to fund my studies somehow became my career.
I check my watch again at the exact same moment that BUZZZZ rises up from my bag. BUZZ-BUZZ-BUZZ, insists my mobile and I snatch it up, press the “answer” button and put it to my ear without checking the caller display.
“Come outside,” Keith says. As if he hasn’t caused me hours of worry, as if it’s the normal way to start a phone call. The relief, however, is incredible. My heart starts beating normally again, my lungs are untwisting themselves, the feeling is returning to my muscles.
“I can’t leave Leo,” I say, whispering so Leo won’t hear.
“It’ll only take a few minutes, come outside.”
I hesitate. Why does he want me to come outside? Why hasn’t he been in? Have I been a bit too hasty in being relieved?