A Proper Family Christmas (8 page)

‘Perhaps I could take half?’ Izzy suggested.

‘No, you don’t want to do that,’ Saul told her. ‘If you only take half, you can end up having a really bad time.’

‘Really?’ Izzy wasn’t sure how that made sense but Saul certainly had more experience of ecstasy than she did. She took him at his word. Still she hesitated. She started to say ‘I don’t know …’

‘I’ll be with you the whole time,’ he said. ‘I’ll look after you.’

Then Saul got a text from Jessica:
Since you can’t be arsed to come and find me, you can consider us over
, it said.
And tell Izzy-Wizzy she can fuck off too.

Saul gave a bark of a laugh and showed Izzy the text.

Fuck off? Izzy-Wizzy? Izzy would ordinarily have been mortified to get a text like that from her friend, but in the gathering dark, buzzing from the booze and the marijuana, with Saul beside her, she instead saw it as a crack in the door to a different life. Saul was single now. She was single too. Jessica wasn’t talking to her. She might as well have some real fun.

‘I’ll take one,’ she said, delicately picking one of the two tablets out of Saul’s hand. Saul smiled. Izzy popped the pill straight into her mouth.

Annabel and Richard had let their guards down. They had allowed themselves to believe that on the basis of Izzy’s first successful night away from home in a tent, her second would be equally uneventful. There was little reason why they needed to be on alert. Thus the bottle of prosecco was followed by a bottle of red, so that when the phone call came, at three in the morning, neither one of them was in a fit state to drive.

‘It’s Kerry. Chloe’s mum. We’re at the hospital. Izzy’s been taken unwell.’

While they waited for a taxi, Annabel and Richard had plenty of time to sober up. Annabel kept in constant contact with Kerry Greenwood while Richard kept his line free for a call from one of the doctors at the hospital itself.

No one seemed to know for sure what had happened. Chloe Greenwood and the other two girls were fine. They’d got back to the tent after watching a band and found Izzy just lying there.

‘I just thought she was asleep at first,’ Chloe cried in the background while her mother talked to Annabel. ‘But then she started having a fit.’

Apparently, the St John Ambulance team covering the festival that weekend were on the scene within minutes. But whatever was ailing Izzy seemed to be beyond their capabilities. Izzy was hurried to the nearest general hospital.

‘Annabel,’ Kerry’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Jessica thinks that Izzy might have taken something. She thinks she had some sort of drug.’

‘Impossible,’ Annabel muttered as the cab sped them cross-country towards Northampton. ‘She wouldn’t do that. She promised she wouldn’t do that.’

Annabel refused to entertain the possibility that her daughter might have taken ecstasy even when they got to the hospital and were whisked straight to the ICU. She told the doctors who met them there that they were barking up the wrong tree. They should be testing for some kind of virus. Might not meningitis cause the symptoms Izzy was experiencing? Why weren’t they testing for that?

There was no time for a debate. The ICU team just stuck to protocol and went through their usual routines. Izzy was semi-conscious with a temperature of forty degrees. She’d had another series of convulsions in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Her heart rate was too high. The clinical team were working hard to establish some stability before anyone even started to think about how Izzy had got into such a state.

Annabel tried to get closer to her daughter.

‘You’re going to need to stay out of the way,’ she was told.

Thank goodness Richard was the kind of person who was calm under pressure. While Annabel made desperate phone calls to her mother and fielded other calls from Jessica and Gina’s mums, Richard had the difficult conversations with the doctors and filled out paperwork and gave signatures when asked. He refused to go down the ‘worst-case scenario’ route that always seemed to beckon to Annabel. Izzy would be fine. They just had to let the hospital staff do their jobs. They didn’t seem panicked so Richard and Annabel shouldn’t panic either.

Annabel got off the phone to her mother and fell sobbing into her husband’s arms. He stroked her hair.

‘She’s going to be all right,’ Richard said. ‘You know our little girl. She’s a fighter. She gets it from you.’

But they had a long night ahead of them.

While Richard and Annabel could do nothing but wait, the medics battled to save Izzy’s life.

It had happened like this. After taking one of Saul’s tablets, Izzy had gone dancing. At first she felt exactly as Saul had promised she would, as though the volume had been turned up on the world. Music was louder; colours were brighter. She had never felt so happy to be alive. A little later Saul persuaded her to take another pill. And another. But the joy of Izzy’s first ecstasy experience was to be short-lived. Within an hour of taking the third dose, she’d suffered a rare reaction to one of the ingredients in the tablet. Perhaps the MDMA itself. Perhaps any one of a hundred contaminants the drug dealers had used to bring the cost of making the tablets down. Those pills contained ingredients even wise-guy Saul had never heard of. Suddenly Izzy was unable to control her body temperature. She hadn’t been drinking enough water anyway. She was already dehydrated from all the cider she’d had that day. She got too hot. She started boiling on the inside. Her organs couldn’t cope.

As the Buchanans sat in the waiting room, a television they couldn’t turn off kept them company. There was an item on the local news. ‘A Midlands schoolgirl,’ said the presenter, ‘attending the SummerBox Music Festival was taken to hospital in Northampton earlier this evening. It’s believed that she may have suffered an extreme reaction to the drug ecstasy, which has been known to cause overheating and acute organ failure. A hospital spokesperson described her as being in a stable but critical condition.’

Then the newsreader was on to the next story. Noisy neighbours had forced an elderly pensioner out of her home. She was planning to sue the council for having failed to protect her from emotional distress. Then there was a segment about a local school choir that had made it to the national finals of a singing competition.

Life was going on.

All night long, the ward was busy. The night shift made no concessions to the late hour, bustling around every bit as noisily as their day-shift counterparts. Vital signs were taken every hour on the hour. Izzy’s blood and urine were tested. The presence of MDMA, amphetamine and benzylpiperazine was confirmed.

Annabel and Richard looked to every hospital worker who entered Izzy’s room for the slightest indication that the situation might be improving. They even asked a cleaner what he thought. No one would tell them anything without a doctor’s approval, though the cleaner said that he had seen another kid in the exact same position the previous year and that kid had pulled through.

‘Woke up asking for chocolate milk,’ the cleaner added.

Annabel and Richard fell upon the cleaner’s anecdote as though it was a consultant’s report. But the comfort didn’t last long. Izzy was attached to half a dozen drips and a frightening array of monitoring machines. She was still barely conscious. She didn’t speak.

Whenever she could get close enough, Annabel held Izzy’s hand and talked to her. She reminded her of the funny things she’d said as a small child. She told her that Jessica, Gina and Chloe were all keen to know when she woke up. Annabel talked and talked and talked while the plastic bags hanging from the drip stands emptied themselves into Izzy’s tainted bloodstream, flushing out whatever was ailing her. More medics came and went, taking measurements and consulting screens.

As dawn began to break, Annabel convinced herself that Izzy was starting to look better. Her skin was pinker, wasn’t it? Annabel showed Richard Izzy’s hand. ‘Look, you can see it in her nails. Her circulation is coming back.’

Richard wanted to believe it too

Annabel’s mother Sarah arrived around half eight, having started driving from Hertfordshire as soon as it was light. There was no one else to come. Annabel’s father and Richard’s parents had all unfortunately passed away. Sarah burst into tears the moment she saw her daughter at her granddaughter’s bedside.

‘I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,’ she snorted into Richard’s swiftly proffered handkerchief. ‘Oh, Izzy! Oh, Annabel. What on earth happened?’

Izzy still wouldn’t wake up. She’d been sedated so that the medics could do their work. More blood was taken. More tests.

Jessica came to visit at about ten o’clock. Her mother Jodie was with her. As soon as her mother was out of earshot at the coffee machine, Jessica began to tell her side of the story. She was distraught. She was full of guilt.

‘I told her not to, Mrs Buchanan. Saul was trying to get us all to take them but I told him I wouldn’t and he called me a baby and me and Gina and Chloe walked off. I thought Izzy would come with us. But she didn’t. Even then, I didn’t think she’d be persuaded to take anything. She was always the sensible one.’

Richard wrapped his arm round Jessica’s shoulders and Annabel did her best to assure the girl that it really wasn’t her fault. Though inside Annabel was blaming everyone. For once, ironically, Izzy hadn’t blindly followed her friend. But if Jessica hadn’t been allowed to run so wild, she wouldn’t have got mixed up with Saul in the first place. And if Jessica hadn’t been seeing Saul, Izzy would never have met him. He wouldn’t have offered her those drugs. She would be getting ready to come home right now. Tired and dirty, perhaps, but not ill. Not on the verge of death.

But most of all, Annabel blamed herself.

‘We should never have let her go,’ she said over and over again.

‘We had to let her go at some point,’ said Richard. ‘She’s nearly seventeen. She’s almost an adult.’

‘Now she might not make it to being an adult!’ Annabel wailed.

‘She will,’ Richard insisted. ‘She’s a fighter.’

Jessica was starting to look awkward. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘Will you text me to let me know what happens? I’ll come and see her later.’

‘Of course,’ said Richard.

Annabel was too busy crying to say ‘goodbye’. Jessica touched her on the arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have protected her.’

‘No,’ said Annabel. ‘I should.’

By that afternoon, the waiting room was full of Izzy’s friends. A steady stream of schoolgirls arrived with flowers they weren’t allowed to leave. They couldn’t get close to Izzy either. Still Jessica returned with her iPad and showed Annabel Izzy’s Facebook page, which was already full of tributes.

Get well soon babe.

Cant beleev whats happened hun.

Were all thinking of u.

Annabel knew that Jessica was trying to cheer her up by showing her just how many people had been moved to make a comment, but she found it horribly disconcerting. One poster, who clearly hadn’t been keeping up to speed with developments, had actually written ‘RIP’. Annabel asked Jessica to make a Facebook announcement to the effect that Izzy was going to be fine. Then she vowed that she would not look at that stupid page again. She hated all that rote sympathy. She hated that Izzy even knew these people who seemed to be only borderline literate. How had she come to know them? How was it possible that Izzy and Jessica, who attended one of the most expensive private schools in the country, would have come to socialise with low-life scum like Saul?

Saul had disappeared of course. He was long gone even as the girls were finding Izzy unconscious in her tent. Jessica claimed she hadn’t seen him since they argued about taking the tablets. Annabel believed her.

Jessica had her own problems. She had to talk to the police. As did Gina and Chloe. Once, when Annabel went out into the hospital car park for a breath of fresh air – though that was hard to come by with the cluster of smokers around the door – she saw Gina’s mother. She was there to pick up her visiting daughter. Though she said all the right things, Annabel couldn’t fail to pick up on the hint of anger beneath the commiseration. It was clear that Gina’s mother considered that Izzy was somehow at fault and was responsible for Gina – sweet innocent Gina – having a brush with the drug-addled underworld.

After Gina had come out and her mother had ushered her quickly away, Annabel kicked a concrete bollard in frustration. The bollard won. Annabel had forgotten she was wearing open-toed shoes. It was just then that Jessica ran out with the news.

‘Mrs Buchanan, you’ve got to come back inside. Izzy’s waking up.’

Though her foot would later be covered in bruises, Annabel sprinted back to the ward.

Richard was there. He made space for Annabel at the bedside. Sarah was holding Izzy’s hand. She let Annabel take over. Izzy’s eyes were barely open but she was making a strange mewing sound.

‘Izzy, Izzy, my baby girl.’ Annabel stroked her daughter’s forearm. ‘It’s all right. We’re here. Mummy and Daddy and Granny Sarah. You’re in hospital but you’re going to be OK.’

Izzy said nothing. She burst into tears.

Izzy was in a hundred kinds of pain. And she had no idea where she was. She’d gone to sleep in a tent in the middle of a field and had woken up in a nightmare. It was so bright in that room. And when gradually the things that surrounded her came into focus, she only became more scared. The machines. The constant beeping. Her father looking worried. Her grandmother looking distraught. And then her mother, hysterical and crying like somebody had died.

Izzy was in hospital. She had the feeling she had been there for a while.

‘Am I OK?’ she asked, when she finally worked out how to use her tongue again.

‘Everything is going to be fine,’ her father assured her, but she could tell from the sound of his voice that he wasn’t sure.

‘What happened to me?’