The Chaos (11 page)

I can’t be the only one who’s brought a knife. He turns out his pockets, opens his jacket to show me there’s nothing there. Shit, the only knife here is mine. And now I’m defenceless, wide open.

‘You came here to use it on me. You came here to kill me.’ He comes up close, jabbing his finger into my chest. ‘Well, I’m not going down. You’re not having me. Tomorrow you’ll have to find your book and cross my number out, ’cause I’m not going anywhere today. You got it wrong.’

He punches me hard in the stomach.

‘The only one in trouble tonight is you, loser.’

He gives me another punch, in the bottom of my ribs. And another. And another. I try and stand up to him, but with my arms pinned back, I’ve got nothing. He’s hitting my head now. My lip’s split and there’s blood pouring down. The smell of it sends me further into my nightmare.

‘That’s enough, Junior, you said it was going to be fair.’ Someone’s talking, the guy who searched me.

‘Shut up.’

‘He’s had it, look at him.’

‘I said shut the fuck up!’

‘Who’s gonna make me?’

I only half-hear what they’re saying. My head has flopped forward, and my legs have gone. If the guys weren’t holding me up, I’d be on the floor now.

Junior’s not stopping. He’s got into his stride now. More punches to the stomach, and I vomit up blood. He’s killing me. He don’t need a knife – his fists’ll do the job. 

‘Leave him.’ 

Another punch. 

‘I said leave him.’

I can’t see anything any more. The space behind my eyes has gone red. I’m hanging forward, and then suddenly I’m falling. There’s a cry, a great wail of rage, and someone buts my shoulder and I’m falling to one side. Then grunting, feet scuffling, shouts, voices but not words, and the space behind my eyes turning from red to black.

The fire sighs as I fall into it. My arms and legs aren’t working. I can’t push myself away. I force my eyes open and see the pinpricks of ash showering upwards, points of light travelling up, up, up around me. Through the flames I see the flash of a blade, the look of surprise in Junior’s eyes, and his number flickering like a fluorescent light on the blink. 

On, off. On, off, on. Off. 

Someone’s screaming.

The flames lick my face, fill my nostrils with the smell of cooking flesh.

Someone’s screaming. 

It’s me.

Chapter 22: Sarah

T
he first few days pass in a calm, milky haze. If she cries, I feed her. I have to steel myself to do it, because it hurts like hell when she starts sucking, but after a few seconds the pain eases and the milk works its magic – on her and on me. She gets drunk on it; warm and woozy and happy. Her whole body relaxes, her arms flop down by her sides, and the only movement is her ear wiggling as her jaw moves rhythmically – suck, suck, suck, pause … suck, suck, suck, pause. And I’m drawn down into a place where it’s only me and her, nothing else, a soft, warm, milky world.

I didn’t know it would be like this. How could I possibly know? That you can love someone so completely from the very first moment you see them.

Because I do. I love her. She was part of me and now she’s separate – her own person, and I love her. I hated my life, every bit of it. I hated being me. But that’s gone now, my past is gone, how I got here, who I was. I wanted to be a new ‘me’ and I am. I’m Mia’s Mum.

Chapter 23: Adam

I
’m like a snowman left out in the sun. Everything on one side of my face has melted. The edges have gone. I’ve lost my detail. The first time I see myself in the mirror I don’t cry, I just stare and stare, trying to find myself in that face. I look away and back again, hoping it’ll be different when I look again, hoping some miracle will have happened and I’ll be back to ‘normal’.

But there’s no miracles. I’m scarred from the fire. I always will be.

The police come calling, asking all sorts of questions, but I won’t talk. I close my eyes. I keep my mouth shut. And they go away. I keep the curtains round my bed closed. I don’t want to see anyone and I don’t want anyone to see me. When the nurses come in, I don’t look at them. I don’t need to see anyone’s number right now. For a couple of weeks, that works, but one day the nurse don’t draw the curtain properly and now the boy in the bed next to me is watching me through the gap when I hold the mirror up to
my face. He’s younger than me, about eleven, a pale little kid with no hair. I recognise that look. He’s on chemo, like my mum was.

I catch him watching, but instead of being embarrassed and looking away, his eyes lock onto mine and he says, ‘What happened to you?’

I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to talk to anyone, but especially not another twenty-seven. Because that’s what he is. He’s in here, up to his eyeballs in chemo, when his number’s telling me he’s going to be wiped out in a few weeks with all the rest of them. I pretend I haven’t heard him, but he just says it louder.

‘What happened? Looks like a burn.’ He’s not giving up.

‘Fell in a fire,’ I say eventually.
There, I’ve told you. Now shut up and leave me alone.
He nods.

‘I’m Wesley,’ he says. ‘Cancer, like Jake over there, but he’s kidneys and I’m leukaemia. In my blood.’

When I don’t say nothing, he takes it as some sort of invitation, and before I know it he’s moving his sheets out of the way, slipping out of bed, pushing back my curtain and perching on the side of my mattress.

‘That’s Carl,’ he says quietly, tipping his head towards the kid in the opposite bed with both legs in plaster, feet raised up. ‘Car crash,’ he whispers, ‘lost his dad and his brother.’

‘Shit,’ I say.

‘Yeah.’ Carl is looking over our way, but he’s not really seeing us. His eyes are glazed over, but I still clock his number. He’s going tomorrow.

‘He’s sick, man. Really sick,’ I whisper to Wesley.

‘No,’ he says. ‘He looks bad, but he’s way better than he was. It’s just the fractures in his legs now. The rest of him’s okay.’ Wesley’s obviously listened to the doctors but they’re
wrong. The numbers don’t change. They don’t lie. I should know.

Nan comes to see me in the afternoon.

‘Nan, you gotta get me out of here.’

‘Goin’ a bit stir crazy? Don’t blame you.’ She’s brought me a bag of mint humbugs and is chewing her way through them.

‘It’s doing my head in.’ I lower my voice and beckon to her, and she leans in nearer. ‘The numbers, Nan. The numbers. Some people in here, they ain’t got long to go.’

She stops chewing then, and looks me straight in the eye.

‘That boy over there, with the legs up. He’s checking out tomorrow, but nobody else sees it. They think he’s okay. They hardly bother with him.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, course I am. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t know.’

‘You should tell someone.’

‘Should I?’

‘Maybe …’

‘It wouldn’t make no difference, Nan. It didn’t make no difference with Mum or Junior.’

‘Maybe it would this time.’

‘Nan, I’ve seen it my whole life. The numbers don’t change. I could’ve died in that fire, but I didn’t, because it wasn’t my day. Junior could’ve just been nicked by that knife, but he wasn’t. It killed him, straight out. I seen his number. It was fixed. No one could change it.’

‘But that shouldn’t stop us trying … I’ll have a word with the staff. We need to get you out of here anyway. I don’t think it’s a good place for you.’

She gets up and goes off to find someone to talk to, taking the bag of mints with her.

That evening, when the duty nurse makes her last round before lights out, I stop her. 

‘Can you check on Carl?’ I say. 

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I check on everyone.’

‘But can you keep checking him. Tonight.’ 

She looks at me like I’ve lost my marbles, then smoothes the sheet over my legs.

‘Don’t worry about him. He’s doing fine.’ 

I keep my bedside light on when the ward lights go off, and I sit up. I promise myself I’ll watch over him, raise the alarm if I hear or see anything. When I feel myself starting to drift off, I give myself a good pinch. It wakes me up for a minute or so, but then I feel myself going and I can’t stop. The next thing I know the overhead lights are on and there’s a team of staff crowding round the bed opposite and someone’s yanking the curtains across.

‘What is it? What’s happening?’ I call out, but no one’s listening to me. Wesley and Jake are still asleep, even with all the frantic activity a few metres away from them, and everyone else is focussing on Carl.

Later, all the staff are tight-lipped about what happened. Even Wesley can’t find out what’s gone on.

‘It’s something bad,’ he says to me. ‘Someone slipped up, made a mistake, otherwise they’d tell us.’

What he don’t know is what I saw when they was working on Carl, trying to save him: the pool of blood spreading out from under the curtain, the scissors kicked along the floor in the confusion. I reckon Carl found his own way out.

I think about it all day. I can’t think about nothing else. If I’d stayed awake, I could’ve raised the alarm earlier. They might have saved him. I knew something was going to happen – I should have made them listen. It was my fault.

There’s an empty space where his bed used to be. I get out of mine and walk over to it.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ I murmur. ‘I let you down.’

I’m thinking Nan was right.
If you try hard enough, you might be able to change the numbers.
If I’d stayed awake, if I’d seen him make his move, it could all have been different. Now I’m thinking about all the twenty-sevens. They’re still out there.

If I warn people, make myself heard, perhaps it won’t be thousands or millions dead. Maybe I can save them, or some of them. Even if I only save a few, it will be worth something, won’t it?

There’s not long to go now, I’d better start telling people.

But how do I get people to listen?

And what am I going to tell them?

Chapter 24: Sarah

S
he won’t stop crying. She just won’t stop.

It starts out of the blue, one evening, she just starts to cry. Feeding doesn’t help. Changing her doesn’t make any difference. I pick her up, hold her to my shoulder and walk her backwards and forwards across the room. After what seems like hours she falls asleep from sheer exhaustion.

I put her into the drawer I’m using as a cot and flop onto the bed. The sound of crying is still ringing in my ears, bouncing off the walls in an everlasting echo. I curl up and put my hands over my ears to try to stop it. I suppose I drop off to sleep, but I don’t know how long for. All I do know is that her cries reach into my dreams and drag me to the surface. Automatically I reach down to her. Her skin is red hot and sticky with sweat.

I try the things that I know; feeding, changing, singing, pacing. And she cries and cries and cries.

Vinny knocks on the door and comes in.

‘You all right? I saw your light on. Well, I heard you.
Brought you a cup of tea.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Fiveish.’

‘In the morning?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I can’t stop her, Vin. I can’t stop her crying.’ My voice is high and wobbly.

‘Give her here. I’ll have her while you have your tea. Let’s see what we can do.’

He takes her from me.

‘Jesus, Sarah, she’s boiling.’

‘I know. What do I do, Vin? What do I do?’

‘We’d better take her to the walk-in, at the hospital.’

‘I can’t. They’ll want ID, an address, everything.’

‘We’ll have to take her somewhere. We can’t leave her like this. Just pretend you’ve forgotten your ID, give them a false name. It’ll be all right. They’ll take one look at her and treat her – she’s tiny, she needs their help, they’ll see that. Come on. Get some clothes on. I’ll find the car keys.’

There’s no car seat for Mia, so I sit in the back and cuddle her.

‘Drive slowly,’ I say. 

‘Course.’

The hospital is a bright, white place. I’ve hardly left the house in weeks, and it’s overwhelming being there. It’s so busy, so big, so clean. I look down at myself; stained sweatshirt pulled over my T-shirt and jogging bottoms. No socks, feet stuffed into slippers. I look like I’ve been sleeping rough.

‘Name?’

‘Sally Harrison.’

‘ID, please.’

‘Oh God, I left it at home. We were just in such a rush …’

The receptionist looks at me and raises an eyebrow. ‘You’re not chipped?’

‘No.’

‘And your baby?’

‘No.’

They can refuse treatment without ID. I look at her, wondering which way she’s going to jump. 

‘Please,’ I say.

The eyebrows shoot higher, but then she just sighs and asks me for more details. I give a false address and phone number and tell her as much about Mia’s symptoms as I can.

We only have to wait for twenty minutes, and then a nurse takes us to an assessment room. A doctor joins us there – she’s young, but she’s got grey rings under her eyes and her blonde hair is escaping from a messy ponytail. 

‘Let’s have a look at her.’

They lie her on a white mattress in a plastic tank, like a fishtank, and gently take her clothes off.

‘How long has she been running a temperature?’

‘’Bout twelve hours. She’s been crying for twelve hours, too, on and off.’

‘Feeding okay?’

‘Not since she started crying.’

They look at every inch of her, examine her eyes and ears and mouth, move her arms and legs gently.

‘She’s got a bit of an infection around the umbilical stump. Can you see how it’s red and swollen here?’

When the doctor points it out, it’s obvious. The skin is puffed and angry-looking on her belly where the remains of her cord are. Oh God, why didn’t I see it? What sort of
mother am I? She’s crying because she’s in pain.

‘We’ll give her some antibiotics straight away.’ Before I know it they’re injecting something into her leg. And then they’ve got another syringe out of its cellophane wrapper.