Innocence (18 page)

Then I realize it’s me.

Unsteadily I drag myself up. The bridge swims before my eyes, my vision a jumbled mess.

“Where is the hospital?” I manage to croak.

I
DON
’
T
know how I get there.

I stumble through the doors, a security guard at my back as I plead with the receptionist. But I’m not making any sense.

“A boy in the river. My brother,” I repeat.

But it all gets mixed up on names, and I’ve lost it, lost the thread that is my life. I slip to the floor. An uncaring hand grips my shoulder to hoist me up, throw me out.

“It’s okay, I know him.” Another voice, except this one has feelings attached to it. This one belongs to someone I know.

She crouches down. Her uniform scrapes against my cheek.

“Christopher? Nod if you can hear me. It’s Pixie.”

“The river. Jay,” I mouth.

She moves away, speaks to the receptionist. I can’t hear what they say.

All at once I’m lifted into a hospital wheelchair, lights flick quickly above me as though she’s running.

Stopping sharply in front of a set of double doors, she steps round the wheelchair and sinks down on her heels.

Her expression is full of sorrow, and I can’t stand it. There is no capacity inside me for this.

“No,” I say, sobering so fast it hurts, like a diver resurfacing too quickly from the bottom of the sea. He’s not here. It’s not him. It can’t be.

“Jay is very poorly, Christopher. He wasn’t breathing for a long time. I’m so sorry.”

Even as she wheels me through, I don’t believe her. She hates me.

I’m taken into a room full of emergency equipment. There are two beds. One of them is empty and in the process of being stripped down by two nurses. There is blood on the floor. The other bed is in the corner.

They don’t expect him to last the night. It’s the only reason I was allowed in here, the only reason they haven’t moved him up to a ward.

“I’m going to get someone to be with you,” Pixie says.

“No,” I say again.

The word is a hollow ache inside my chest. There is no one. My hand curls round the photograph in my pocket as I get up and walk over to the bed.

I’m not expecting anything but the worst, but I don’t even know what that is anymore. I have no idea how much worse things can actually get.

His hair is plastered back away from his face, but he looks so peaceful, even with the tube in his mouth, the monitor counting the beats of his heart.

The last time I saw him, he was so angry, and now it’s as though he’s just asleep.

“Will he wake up?” I ask.

I feel so calm. It’s unbelievable. It’s as if the boy who ran to the hospital in such a panic was a different person—a boy from a dream. A boy I left outside this door.

And I am only his ghost.

A nurse comes over to us. She gives a tiny shrug. “We don’t know.”

But there is a finality to her words that maybe even she is unaware of.

“Someone should tell our dad,” I say, turning to Pixie.

I’m so serene, I could be dead.

“Sit down, Christopher,” she says softly, bringing over a chair and putting it next to the bed. “I’ll get someone to go over and pick him up.”

I sit down knowing this is it—some part of me has died.

I’
M
WITH
Finn. Curled in his arms on the soft hospital bed. He kisses my head. One of his arms doesn’t work properly, but it doesn’t hurt him, and I hold it against my side like he tells me.

I don’t feel anything. It’s as though I’m falling through space. Dad is with Jay. I told Pixie I didn’t want to see him, and I snuck in up here. But I can’t stay long. In a minute I will go back down, see if there is any change.

Outside the sky is broken with clouds and weird silvery-gray morning light. It should be beautiful. Finn is sleeping again, his breathing deep and soundless. I slip out of his arms and into the shadows of the ward.

Maybe he will think I was part of his dream.

I take a detour outside on the way back to the crash room. I make my way to the roof and stand out on the railing at the very edge, my arms outstretched in the cool dawn air, daring whatever god exists to take me,
just fucking take me
. But no one answers under the silent expanse of sky. No one hears my plea. Instead I catch a glimpse of something so endless and blinding, it’s as if I have already crossed over into some other realm.

“C
HRISTOPHER
?” P
IXIE
spots me wandering the corridor—stealing glimpses of Jay, overhearing conversations, working out that they’re going to move him, that they think he’s in a coma. I’m not sure what that means, how bad it is.

“You should go home and get some sleep. He’s made it through the night. It’s a good sign.” She gives me a reassuring smile. “I’ll get someone to let you know if there is any change.”

I don’t care if I never sleep again.

This is my fault.

And like the flick of some switch in my brain, my back slips down the wall, and the tears just come. I can do nothing to prevent them and it hurts so much I can’t breathe. I can’t stand the thought of never being able to talk to Jay again. I can’t stand to see him in a state so much like sleep, I want to shake him and shake him…. I want to tell him we’ll go find Mum, together, whatever he wants as long as he’s okay. I would take his place, anything, anything, so long as he’s okay.

She crouches down in front of me, and I recognize the look in her eyes, the sympathy. I just don’t want it.

“You can’t stay here in the corridor, Christopher. Can I get your dad to take you home? He was asking about you.”

I shake my head vehemently, my hands covering my face. I take deep breath after deep breath to ride out the pain in my chest.

“My shift finishes soon. I can’t leave you here like this.”

I don’t understand why not, why she cares, why she’s being so kind when she said all those things to me the first time I came to see Finn, why she sits with me on the floor in the corridor, her hand on my arm, until I’m calmer.

The only thing I understand is that people make mistakes, and they regret the things they’ve done.

It’s partly the reason why, at 6:00 a.m.,  when her shift ends, I let Pixie lead me out of the hospital and across the half-empty car park to her car. She asked me if I wanted to see Jay before we went, but I just couldn’t, and not because of Dad. Seeing him like that, knowing he might never wake up, is not something I can cope with.

I get in the car and close my eyes in a state of torpor that is so complete it might be impenetrable.

When I open them, we are jolting down the muddy track to the camp, and I realize, somewhat hopelessly, that she’s taking me to Malachi.

L
EAVING
ME
in the car, Pixie gets out and walks across the damp grass to Malachi’s van. I don’t want to be here at the camp. But then, I don’t want to be anywhere. I stare vacantly out the window, wondering abstractly what will happen with Malachi. The sun shines weakly through the trees, casting lacelike shadows across the ground. Rain-drenched spiderwebs hang like occult decorations all along the hedgerows. I stare at their strange shapes, feeling unaffected and numb as though my mind is once again shutting down, closing all the doors, shutting out the boy whose agony is tearing him apart, whose brother is dying. I shouldn’t be able to think that, and deep down the knowledge that I can scares me profoundly.

Isn’t this what I wanted, though, to stop feeling?

Maisie barks, and I look round, watching as Pixie scratches her behind the ears and Maisie settles down.

With a gentle tap, Pixie knocks first on the door and then on the window, but there is no answer, no one home.

She walks round the van, then gets back in the car, sighing.

“He’s not here. His car’s gone too,” she says, looking round to where the cars line up in the mud.

I picture him lying drunk in some ditch. After what he told me yesterday, I know he will be drunk somewhere, trying to numb the pain of what he told me. Knowing he will choose oblivion above everything hurts more than I imagine.

People are going to be stirring soon, wondering what Pixie’s car is doing here. I stare at Maisie, her head resting on her paws.

“It’s okay. I know where he keeps a spare key. I’ll wait for him,” I say, taking a deep breath.

I won’t, but I know Pixie doesn’t really want to be here, seeing everyone after what happened with Finn, and she can’t want me tagging along with her all day.

“I brought you here so you wouldn’t be on your own.”

I shrug. I don’t know what she thinks is going on between Malachi and me, why she thinks he would want me turning up on his doorstep, especially after my reaction to what he told me yesterday.

I’m drifting, lost.

“You could come back with me,” she says.

I shake my head and open the car door, willing my legs to work and not just give way beneath me. “Thank you. It’s okay,” I say, struggling to walk away.

Malachi keeps a spare key on Maisie’s collar. I unclip it while making a fuss of her. She follows me into the van, and I hear Pixie leave.

Inside, the curtains are drawn, daylight glowing through the thin material. I’m just going to go, leave, walk across the fields until I can’t walk anymore, but I find myself sitting on the floor, Maisie’s warm body nuzzling into me, and I just can’t move.

I sob into her coat.

Malachi should never have tried to be my friend. How could he have thought that would be the right thing to do? How could he have thought that would help anything?

The photograph album is in the same place under the seat. I dig it out and in the process dislodge a bottle of red wine hidden under the boards at the bottom.

It’s easy to say that if I hadn’t looked at the stupid photograph album, none of this would have happened. Because maybe it would. Maybe something like this was always going to happen. Maybe the truth was always going to destroy us, Jay, Malachi, and I. Maybe our worlds were just waiting to fracture into pieces.

Or maybe I’m just trying to escape the blame.

There is a bottle opener in a kitchen drawer. I put it in my pocket, take the photo album and the wine, and stumble out across the fields.

I imagine this is what it feels like to self-destruct.

I’m lying in the grass, Maisie’s head rested on my stomach. Sometimes it rains lightly, the wind blowing through the grass around us like the sky is whispering. Sometimes I tell myself Maisie is shaking and I need to take her back, but really I know that it’s me lying there trembling, me that should go home.

Something changes in the weight of the world.

Maisie lifts her head—she hears him coming. Her tail thumps against the soggy ground but she doesn’t get up and leave me.

“She won’t let just anyone steal her, you know.”

He sounds so far away, so sad, but still my body responds to his voice in a way I wish it didn’t.

Trying to hide the empty wine bottle under my arm, I turn my head, but I can’t even see him. I’ve been staring up at the sky so long, my vision has whited out.

“Didn’t steal her, followed me,” I mutter.

In the distance, I make out the blurred shape of the caravans, and I realize I didn’t stumble far.

Malachi crouches down in the wet mud next to me, his fingers brushing like the wind through my hair. But I must be imagining it, along with the look on his face—because he’s never looked at me like that.

“Wish I could start over with you,” he says out of nowhere, his voice soft and melancholy, sober as hell.

One of my arms is still holding the photo album, the weight of its pages heavy against my chest.

“Why?” I blink, catching a glimpse of his hair, his face, his regretful expression.

If I squint, he looks like the boy in the photographs—elfin and beautiful and wildly innocent. It makes my heart hurt that I will never know that boy. The boy who was as taken with me as I was with him.

“You mean something to me. Everything, maybe.” He shrugs, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve, not even trying to disguise the fact he’s crying.

Maybe this would all make some sort of sense if I wasn’t so drunk I can’t even sit up.

“What happened last night, Christopher?”

There is so much sorrow in his question it hurts.

I happened
, I think painfully. I look away.

Pixie told me on the drive over here that the police will record Jay’s accident as misadventure. He had a high level of alcohol in his blood, and the statements of the few witnesses said he just slipped while walking along the wall. But the only reason he was so drunk and at the river was because of me.

I’m crying again. More than anything I want the numbness back or the muffled cushion of alcohol or something, God, something to stop the pain.

Today I’m nineteen, and I’ve already managed to fuck my life.

I
BEGIN
to lose track of time.

M
ALACHI
TAKES
me to the hospital. He thinks I want to be with Jay, but I don’t, and I leave him there without looking back, walking out some side entrance, unable to take the pain of seeing Jay unbearably still and unchanged.

A
FTER
THAT
I begin to lose track of days.

I step out of time.

I no longer want to inhabit the space inside my head. If I’m not drunk, I’m halfway to being. I hang around with the kids on the bridge, occasionally sleeping on the streets or sometimes crashing in someone I don’t know’s room.

I don’t eat. Or speak much. The only money I have I earn through giving the occasional blow job or letting someone grope me. I think I see Malachi once in town, and I run.

One night I end up outside a gay club. I’ve never been to a club before. The night air is warm and humid.