The Night That Changed Everything (33 page)

‘Not bad thanks, pal,' Angus replies. ‘So have you moved back in?'

‘Er, no – not exactly. How's the family?'

Oh, give me strength.

I go and collapse on to the sofa to wait for them to finish catching up and just as I do, Ben's mobile starts to vibrate. I look at him chatting away. He hasn't noticed. I glance at the screen and I swear, as I do, my blood runs completely cold.

It's Danielle.

Barely spoken to her since we broke up? The absolute lying bastard.

The room spins. I need to say something but I don't want to lose it while Angus is here. I didn't really think he was sleeping with her – I was just making a point – but the thought of them carrying on as normal tears me apart.

The phone stops but a few seconds later it buzzes again with a text, which shows up on the screen.

Where are you?

That's not a message you send to someone you only see through Jamie.

‘Good to see you too,' Ben is saying. ‘And sorry again about the shouting. We're done now.'

It takes every ounce of my being to keep my voice quiet as I hand Ben his phone and say: ‘I think you'd better leave now.'

His eyebrows furrow as he checks his alerts.

‘Least you have someone to go and cry to about your furniture,' I say as his face registers.

‘I have no idea why she called me.'

I laugh humourlessly. ‘Sure.'

‘I mean it,' he insists. ‘Isn't she with Jamie at the competition? Maybe she called to say he won or something?'

‘Oh, quit with the lying. Even after everything that's happened, I still can't trust you. Be friends with Danielle. Fuck her again, for all I care.' I open the door and stand next to it, my back against the wall. ‘Just leave. NOW.'

‘No,' cries Ben, sliding his phone in his back pocket and pushing the door shut. ‘You do not get to have the last word. Not when you're accusing me of something I haven't done.' He places his palms on the wall behind me, tensing his body so I can't wriggle free. ‘I've seen Danielle once. At Jamie's. And I can't believe you'd think for a second anything else might have happened between us. There's been nothing between me and
anyone
since we split up.'

I stop wriggling and look at his face.

‘Well, there's been nothing between
me
and anyone else either.'

‘Really?' he croaks.

‘Really.'

We stare at each other, just inches between his face and mine. I don't know which one of us it is that moves – maybe we both do – but the gap between our lips gets smaller, until suddenly it's barely there at all.

Then a loud insistent buzz breaks the spell and the gap widens again. Ben takes his phone out of his pocket and we both stare at it.

‘It's not mine,' he says as the buzzing continues. ‘That must be yours.'

I locate my phone on the dining table.

‘It's Danielle,' I tell him in disbelief. ‘Does she know you're here?'

‘What? No – just answer it.'

‘Hello?'

‘Rebecca, thank God. It's me – I—' Her voice breaks into a sob, and fear grips me, melting the ice from my voice.

‘Danielle, what's wrong? Has something happened? Are you hurt? Danielle, talk to me.'

‘It's Jamie,' she croaks.

‘What's wrong with Jamie?'

Ben rushes to my side and I hold the phone away from my ear a little so he can hear.

Her words don't seem to make sense. She's with him in an ambulance. A seizure at the competition. They're on their way to hospital.

‘I can't get hold of Ben,' she adds.

‘I'm here,' Ben says into the mouthpiece.

‘Oh. Hi.' A few seconds pass. ‘You should both come if you can.'

‘We'll meet you there.'

I hang up.

‘Call a cab,' I order a pale-faced Ben. ‘I'll get dressed.'

It is gone 1 a.m. when we arrive at the hospital. Rebecca scurries out of the taxi, and I find her waiting at the back of a queue at reception, already on tiptoes to peer over the shoulder of the person in front.

A drunk disregards the queue and sways towards the desk. Rebecca clicks her tongue when the receptionist starts to tend to him.

‘Our friend is here,' she says, jumping the queue and positioning her body in front of the drunk. ‘Jamie Hawley – could you tell us where he is, please?'

The woman elevates her string glasses to examine her monitor.

‘He's in the neurosurgical unit,' she says, offering directions before resuming her dialogue with the drunk.

‘Why is he in the neurosurgical unit?' I interrupt, but the receptionist either doesn't hear or pretends not to, and Rebecca is away.

Danielle is already there, listening to a doctor in puce overalls. The doctor seems to recognize that we too are Jamie's friends without needing to be told. He carries on talking, and immediately I understand that Jamie is about to have surgery, but I'm finding it hard to get my head around exactly what's happened. Something about a blood clot, and something else I've never heard of.

‘As I've outlined, there are dangers,' the doctor continues. ‘Stroke, brain swelling, epilepsy, and so on.'

I gasp, but when I look at Rebecca and Danielle they're still listening intently.

‘But from what we've established from the head CT, removing both the clot and the complex arteriovenous malformation that caused it in one go would give Jamie the best chance of being able to move on with his life in a normal fashion.'

‘What do you mean,
normal fashion
?' says Rebecca.

Dr Paul Stevens is a consultant neurosurgeon, according to his name badge. His thick dark hair is almost wiggish, and I find the jowls that buffer his face reassuring, for some reason.

‘Let's just see how it pans out,' he says, inspecting the watch hanging from his breast pocket.

He tells us the surgery could take several hours, and that we should go home and get some sleep.

‘Go home?' asks Rebecca.

Dr Stevens smiles understandingly. ‘There are some blankets in the quiet room if you do want to stay. Someone will come and see you when there's news.'

As he departs my eyes are drawn to the white trainers on his feet. How odd they look, how out of place on a man who is about to cut a hole in my best mate's skull.

The quiet room is sky blue, which I guess is supposed to be calming, but I can't keep still. Rebecca and Danielle station themselves in a corner on the plastic chairs while I pace up and down the room.

‘He was one of the last to be called,' explains Danielle. ‘Everyone was given six minutes to make their cocktail – something original – but before their go they had five minutes to prepare the bar. I was bursting because of the free cocktails, so I whizzed off to the loo while Jamie did his prep work. I looked right at him, to gesture that I'd be back in a sec, but he didn't see me.' Danielle pauses as though making an effort to recall the particular moment. ‘I swear he looked totally normal. It was just like watching him behind the bar at Arch 13, but then when I got back everyone was around him and—'

It's as though there is a hairline fracture in Danielle's voice and she stops before it breaks completely. Rebecca leans forward to place a hand on her knee, but it's just for a few seconds, and her retreat is followed by a silence that stretches like an elastic band.

Rebecca and Danielle can't do small talk at the best of times, but all that leaves right now is big talk, fucking ginormous talk about everything that has happened these past four months, and this isn't the time or the place.

‘His parents are driving down now,' says Danielle. ‘They wanted to know how serious it was before setting off.'

‘For fuck's sake.' Rebecca folds one arm across her chest, gripping the opposite shoulder. ‘Their only son has collapsed.'

Rebecca might not be one for tears but I can see she is struggling right now, and I want so badly to wrap my arms around her, but I can't, because being here doesn't change what's happened, and it doesn't unsay all the things we said tonight. This is just an armistice, and no one is quite clear yet what the terms are or where it is leading.

I sit down next to her and close my eyes, trying to clear my head of all the shit, and when that doesn't work I pass the time by absorbing each and every poster on the wall, the ones featuring germs and hygiene outnumbered only by those offering spiritual guidance. I guess hospitals are a good place for them to reel you in, because everyone here is desperate. I don't think I knew what that word meant until tonight.

As we sit there time seems to slow. Not even in an abstract way. The tick of a plastic clock mounted on the wall sounds laboured, the night having become a form of purgatory with two possible outcomes.

Every so often someone passes by the blinded window to the corridor, and in each of these moments the norms of time resume, our pulses accelerating, but nobody comes into the room with news.

I think about Jamie, my best mate in the whole world, and maybe it's the hour, or the alcohol running through my veins, but I feel like I'm in some kind of daydream, and I'm going to wake up any moment with a dead arm.

I don't know what I'd have done without him through all of this. It's only when I notice Rebecca holding a tissue for me that I realize my eyes are teary.

‘This is Jamie, remember,' she tries to comfort. ‘The little boy who got hit by a van and didn't break a single bone in his body. He's indestructible.'

I laugh, genuine and snotty, into the tissue, and I'm grateful when Rebecca smiles, apparently satisfied that she's made me feel better.

I've heard him tell the story so many times over the years, about how he'd just been standing there playing when this van came flying out of nowhere. It was a woman, and she never stopped to make sure he was OK. It's how he got the scar on his forehead.

That's how Jamie tells the story, but I was there. We were six, and the van
was
flying, and the woman really didn't stop to make sure he was OK, but what he doesn't mention is that it was a toy van, and the woman in question was another six year old, Jessica Parris, also known as Pigtail Parris. She threw it after Jamie refused to kiss her on the lips.

This isn't the time to break Rebecca's illusion about Jamie being indestructible, though. I wish I didn't know the truth myself.

The minutes continue to pass like hours, and it feels like we've been waiting for ever for some kind of update. Danielle plays with her cuticles, her head shooting up whenever anyone passes by the corridor outside; Rebecca has become glassy-eyed, as though she's in Airplane Mode. Eventually she falls asleep, upright in her chair.

I fetch a blanket and place it over her gently, careful not to wake her. When I sit down again I notice Danielle staring at me.

‘When I called you were together,' she says. ‘Are you . . . ?'

I open my mouth to say no, because that is the answer, but the word doesn't come. I'm wondering what the answer would have been if Danielle had called five minutes later, and the weird moment Rebecca and I were caught up in had been allowed to play out.

When Rebecca told me there was nothing happening between her and Michael I felt like a complete prat for going round there, but now I'm kind of glad I did, because if there was one person in the world I would have wanted with me when I heard Jamie had collapsed it is Rebecca.

I look at Danielle, but her eyes are now set on the fuzzy grey carpet.

‘The only real friend I have left is Jamie,' she says. ‘And what if now . . . ?'

A solitary tear emerges from the corner of her eye.

‘I think he was going to do it,' she says.

‘Do what?'

‘At the competition. I think he was going to get to the national finals. He hadn't even had his turn yet but there was no one there like Jamie.'

‘Of course he was going to win,' I say.

I look back to Danielle just in time to see her eyes dart to the corridor window. Seconds later the door opens, causing Rebecca to jolt awake.

Something in Dr Stevens' expression fills me with dread.

Dr Stevens' expression is serious as he looks from one face to another, before taking a deep breath.

‘The craniotomy wasn't as straightforward as we would have liked,' he explains.

Danielle covers her mouth with her hands, and I hear Ben swear under his breath.

‘There were complications,' continues the doctor. ‘It was touch and go for a while. But . . .' He looks around the room again, his expression softening. ‘We managed to get through it, and both the complex arteriovenous malformation and the blood clot have been successfully removed.'

I have to bite my tongue to stop myself yelling at him to just tell us whether our friend is going to be OK.

‘He's in the recovery room now,' clarifies Dr Stevens. ‘And once his pulse, blood pressure and breathing are stable and he's alert, he'll be taken to the Critical Care Unit and monitored closely from there.' The corners of his mouth turn up into something approaching a smile. ‘I don't anticipate any long-term damage.'

‘You should have opened with that,' I snap as everyone else breathes a sigh of relief.

Dr Stevens looks taken aback and I feel the others' eyes on me. I don't want a scene so I try to sound less aggressive as I ask when we can see him.

‘It's family only for at least twenty-four hours,' he says, even though there's no sign of Jamie's family yet. Where are they? Even with the drive from Manchester they could have been here hours ago. ‘You can come during visiting hours after that.'

Once the doctor has gone the three of us look at each other. We haven't been in the same room since Ben's birthday in the cable car, and in any other situation this would be all kinds of awkward, but this isn't any other situation, and simultaneously we break into smiles. No one needs to say anything because the words we're all thinking wrap themselves around us and pull us together like a force.