The Art of Not Breathing (23 page)

Then he stops again.

“We should use something,” he says, breathlessly, his lips glistening.

“What?” I’m trembling and don’t know why he’s moved away.

“For him.” He nods downward. “I don’t think I have one. I mean, I wasn’t expecting to . . .”

“Ah,” I say, suppressing a giggle, and then I remember about my Superdrug stash.

Tay fumbles in the cupboard until he finds what he’s looking for. I want to explain that I wasn’t expecting to either, but I’m too embarrassed to even watch him put it on, let alone speak.

When he’s finally ready, he rolls on top of me and tries to push inside me.

“Wait,” I say. “I don’t think you’re in the right place.”

Tay blushes and moves around a bit, then tries again. This time it’s right, and after a couple more attempts, he slides inside me. It hurts a bit, but it feels good. I pull him closer and closer again.

Afterward, we lie side by side, dozing, touching each other, and occasionally lifting our heads to sip more vodka.

“Is this real?” I ask him, wishing that we could stay like this forever.

“This is real,” he replies, stroking my hair.

“Tell me a secret,” I whisper.

“Okay. Promise you won’t tell?”

His breath feels cool from the vodka.

“Who would I tell?”

“I cried when I got kicked out of school.”

“Liar.” I want this to be true, but I know it’s not.

“Your turn,” he says.

I don’t hesitate.

“There are over ten thousand species of seaweed,” I say.

“That’s not a secret.”

“Did you know about it? No. So it’s a secret.”

“Cheat.”

“Tay, can I ask you a serious question?”

“All your questions are serious.”

I sit up a bit so I can see his face. “Why don’t you like talking about yourself?”

He sits up and spills the vodka in the process. It leaks all over the blanket. “I’ve just told you my biggest secret,” he says, feigning annoyance.

“No, you didn’t. And that’s the point.”

He smiles and tries to mop up the vodka. We both smell like alcoholics.

“I’m just not that interesting,” he says eventually. “I’m socially awkward, like you. And a bit of a twat sometimes.” He throws the vodka blanket at me and then pulls me back down to the floor and kisses me. Everywhere.

I can tell it’s twilight when I wake up, because it’s almost dark inside the boathouse, and I feel a chill coming in through the gap in the top of the doors. We’ve been asleep for hours. I shake Tay awake to tell him that I need to go. He murmurs sleepily.

“Tomorrow is the day,” I remind him.

Tomorrow is the day I finally get to see Eddie again.

18

THE HALLWAY IS QUIET AND DARK WHEN I GET IN. THE KITCHEN, TOO.
There’s a draft, and I feel uneasy. The back door swings on its hinges. Slowly, I step out back, into the violet night. Dillon’s obstacle course takes up most of the garden—orange cones for running around, Mum’s aerobics step and gym ball. Then I see Dillon. Illuminated in the security light, he lies on his side under the apple tree, not moving, a dumbbell by his head.

I run to him and roll him over.

“Wake up,” I cry. “Get up, Dil.”

His skin is cool and clammy. His trainers look enormous on the ends of his pale stick legs, and his white T-shirt is covered in grass stains. I put my ear to his face and just make out his breath. A gust of wind whips over the garden, and the back gate that leads to the cemetery flies open, slamming into the fence. I walk over to it and look out into the cemetery, but it’s empty.

My head is fuzzy from the vodka, but I run to the phone, and my hands tremble as I dial the emergency number.

When I come back, Dillon’s eyes are half-open, so I can see the whites of them and the thick red blood vessels at the bottom. At first I think he’s dead, but then he moans.

“Where is she?” His voice is barely a whisper.

“Mum? I don’t know. She’s not back yet. Hang on for me, okay? An ambulance is coming.”

“I was going to find her.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll find her.”

Dillon lets out a long, raspy breath.

“No,” he croaks. “That day. That’s who I was looking for. I saw her from the water when I was swimming. She was on the beach.”

I can’t make sense of what he’s saying. I ask him if he’s taken something. I ask him if he smoked weed or if he took pills, but he shakes his head. I sound like Dad.

“She wasn’t there that day, Dil. She was at home, remember? She came later, after the police arrived.”

His head becomes heavy in my arms, his blond hair greasy and sticking to my skin.

As the ambulance crew comes into the garden, he murmurs again.

“She was,” he says. “Mum was there that day. She was having an affair.”

The images flash through my mind again: the pebbles, the blue haze—her coat—Eddie splashing about, Mum arriving in the car. I can’t make sense of it all. The memories are too cloudy.

As the crew loads Dillon onto a stretcher and into the ambulance, Mum appears at the end of the road. She stops short, then throws her hand over her mouth and starts to run, stumbling over the cracked pavement. I try to take her in. I don’t even know who she is.

“Dillon,” she gasps when she reaches us. She lifts the oxygen mask from his face. A paramedic pulls her back, and then she looks at me with bloodshot eyes.

“What happened to him?” she wails, her voice high and squeaky. I can smell the booze on her breath, but then I wonder if it’s me. I clamp my lips shut, too afraid to speak.

A paramedic turns to us. “We’re taking him to Raigmore Hospital. You can follow us in your car.”

Mum launches herself at him. “I’m his mother!” she cries. “I need to be with him.”

The paramedic holds her at arm’s length and looks at me. He tells us that there’s only room for one of us. Mum breaks free from him and clambers up into the ambulance. She throws me her handbag, and it lands on the road with a great clunk.

“Get a taxi, Elsie. There’s money in my purse.”

I am too stunned to move. The other paramedic whispers in my mum’s ear and looks at me, but Mum pushes her away.

“Call your father and tell him to come quick,” she yells as the doors are closing. I stand alone on our street, my hair still damp. Even though it’s gone ten, the light hasn’t completely faded yet. The sky is now a rich indigo, and the midsummer air is balmy.

In the taxi on the way to Inverness, I search through my mother’s bag, looking for her mobile. I find a whole load of pictures of me, Eddie, and Dillon that I didn’t even know existed—us on the beach, at Fairy Glen, on a farm. Most of them are creased and faded. I find three bottles of sleeping pills and an unopened box of condoms. I feel sick, and I hate her even more than my father. I hate Tay for making me forget that my brother needed me, but most of all I hate myself. I’m still covered in salt from the sea, and when I lick my lips, it makes me heave. The taxi slams on its brakes, and the driver helps me out to be sick at the side of the road.

“Do you think my brother will die?” I ask him when I finish throwing up.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” he says, rubbing my back in small circles. I can hear the meter ticking.

I call my father from Mum’s mobile, but he doesn’t answer. I keep pressing redial. Eventually, I withhold the number and he picks up. When I tell him about Dillon, he makes a noise that sounds like he’s being strangled. I know that when we all crash into each other at the hospital, there’s going to be one almighty eruption.

EDDIE:
Just one more. Then I’ll go to sleep.

DILLON:
I can’t think of any more.

EDDIE:
Pleeeeeease.

DILLON:
Eddie, I’m all out.

1

THE DOCTORS ARE VERY WORRIED ABOUT DILLON.
I stand between my parents outside the door that leads to intensive care as two doctors with masks around their necks tell us that he is severely malnourished and there is a chance he will go into organ failure. They say he is dehydrated, that he needs nutrients immediately.

We stare at him through the small window. He is either asleep or unconscious, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the flurry of people in scrubs fussing about him, sticking needles in his arms, squeezing fluid into his veins. Clear tubes snake across his face and up his nose, and his face is almost the same color as the sheet covering him.

“Can we go in?” my father asks.

“No, we need to stabilize him first.”

My mother holds on to my arm and digs her fingernails into my skin. My mind swings wildly between worrying that Dillon will die and imagining my mum having an affair.

We are shown to the waiting room.

A series of people in different-colored scrubs enter the room one by one to ask us questions. The same questions over and over again.

Has he collapsed before?

Does he have any medical conditions?

How much does he weigh?

What has he eaten in the last few days?

What about fluids?

Is he depressed?

Are there any problems at school? At home?

How long has he been restricting for?

“What do you mean,
restricting?
” my father asks the first time this question is fired.

“I mean limiting his intake of food or fluids.”

My parents cannot answer these questions, and I don’t want to, so I stay silent. It comes easy, just like it did five
years ago.

Hours pass. I sit by the door so I am the first to see any visitors coming down the corridor. My parents sit against the back wall, a single frayed brown chair between them. My father pulls the stuffing from the middle chair. My mother yawns. They both have their eyes on the floor.

When the corridor is empty, I slip out and wander down the hallways, peering into all the rooms until I am stopped by a lady doctor wearing a white coat and clickety heels. She was in our waiting room earlier.

“Are you looking for the toilets?”

I shake my head.

“The coffee machine?”

I nod, only now realizing how thirsty I am. She points down the corridor.

“I’m just going to check on your brother,” she says, smiling. Then she turns and clicks off in the direction I’ve just come from.

“Wait,” I call.

“Yes? It’s Elsie, isn’t it?” She walks back toward me, adjusting her stethoscope.

“Yes.” I suddenly feel afraid of what I have to say, but the doctor keeps smiling. She is listening.

“He . . . I mean Dillon . . . Dillon has been ill for a long time. He makes himself sick and he pretends to eat. I don’t think he’s eaten for days.”

I swallow what feels like a golf ball and wait for her to yell at me, but she speaks softly.

“You found him, didn’t you? Well done for ringing an ambulance.”

I want to tell her that it was my fault, that I didn’t stop him, that I let him do this to himself because I was too busy trying to sort my own life out, but then I tell her about the lemon water. On her badge it says
DR. S. SHAW
. I wonder if her first name is Sarah. Or Sally. Or Serena, like the tennis player my dad fancies.

“Thank you,” Dr. Shaw says. “That’s very helpful.”