What My Best Friend Did (2 page)

There’s a painting I’ve seen, I think maybe in the National Gallery. A girl is being floated down a river to her grave, clutching pale pink flowers to her chest in a locked grasp of icy fingers. Her wavy blonde hair streams out behind her like seaweed and her limpid green dress trails over the edge of the funeral pyre and drags lightly through the surface, causing ripples. That’s what Gretchen looks like now.

I am horrified to find myself wondering if she will look that beautiful dead, or if at the crucial moment, something will wisp away from her, unseen, up toward the ceiling on its way to Gretchen’s version of heaven. Tears flood to my eyes and I start to shake slightly again. One of the nurses glances at me curiously and I manage a frightened, watery smile. She smiles sympathetically back and I wonder if she can see everything written all over my face. I don’t think she can, because she turns away and then writes something down—there is just the rhythmical bleeping of machines helping Gretchen breathe. Outwardly, it looks like a scene under control.

Except in my head; even though I am trying to ignore it, to push the thought under water and hold it there until it stops breathing, I can’t stop thinking:

Please don’t wake up, please don’t wake up, please don’t wake up.

I
jump as one of the nurses cuts across this hideous thought and says kindly, “You can hold her hand if you want—it’s OK. And you can talk to her too.”

I shake my head vehemently, watching the other two nurses slip out of the room.

“I won’t listen,” the remaining one says with an honest smile. She looks about our age, twenty-nine or so.

“I’m OK, thanks,” I manage, and she nods understandingly.

“Well, if you change your mind feel free. I know it’ll seem a little bit weird, but lots of people do talk—we’re very used to it. I’m sorry we’ve been so rushed tonight and haven’t had much time to explain to you what we’re doing, what’s happening.” She sits down next to me. “There isn’t very much I’m able to tell you, Alice, because you’re not Gretchen’s next of kin, so I can’t give you specific details right now, but quite obviously, Gretchen is still unconscious.”

“Is she going to come around soon, do you think?” I ask anxiously.

“Gretchen’s in a very deep state of unconsciousness,” she says gently. “She’s not able to respond to her environment. It’s not like being asleep, so we can’t just wake her up. One of the symptoms of a severe overdose of the drugs you found near Gretchen is coma.”

“She’s in a coma?” I echo, shocked, and twist to look at Gretchen. A coma to me means days and days of the patient lying there, suspended between life and death, or cheap hospital TV dramas where someone has an agonizing decision: switch off a life-support machine or wait indefinitely forever? That’s not what could happen here, is it? “How long will she be in a coma for?”

“I don’t know,” the nurse says. “It’s too early to tell.”

“Is that why you said I should talk to her?” I ask, looking at the nurse directly as a thought occurs to me. “Can she hear me? Could she be aware I’m here?”

The nurse hesitates, and I can see she’s picking her words carefully so she doesn’t give me any false hope. “Some studies have documented coma sufferers recovering and reporting conversations they heard, yes.”

Oh, shit.

I turn back to Gretchen and look at her. On one long school trip in primary school I pretended to be asleep on the coach so I could hear what other people said about me. Actually no one said anything apart from, “I’m going to eat her crisps.” Obviously, I don’t think that is what Gretchen is doing now, pretending, but the thought that underneath those eyelids is a whirring brain aware of everything that is going on in this small room chills and stills my blood. She will know if I betray her confidence and tell her secrets.

“I’ll be right over here if you want to ask me anything else,” the nurse says. She stands up and moves to the back of the room.

“There is something, actually,” I blurt, turning to her. “When—if—she starts to regain consciousness, will she just open her eyes?”

The nurse pauses before speaking. “People in comas,” she says, cleverly making it general and not specific to Gretchen, “don’t do that, except on TV. They start to make little movements, like trying to lift their head or fluttering their fingers when they begin to come around.”

“Can they talk? Straightaway?”

The nurse shakes her head. “You see that tube in her mouth?”

I nod.

“That’s helping her breathe and she can’t talk with that in.”

“But she could write?” I ask. “If she came around.”

“She’d find a way to communicate with us.” The nurse looks at me steadily.

“I’m scared that she’s conscious but paralysed,” I say, which isn’t true, and if Gretchen can hear me, she’ll be doing an inward sardonic snort right now. Actually she won’t, she’ll have other things on her mind, like why and how her carefully laid plans have gone so awry—thanks to me. “You promised,” I can hear her saying. “Some best friend you turned out to be!”

“I read a book recently about a Frenchman that happened to, it was called locked-in syndrome,” I say, trying to focus on the real sound of my own voice.

“That’s not what this is,” the nurse assures me, and then pauses before saying, “Gretchen won’t be able to communicate with us until she regains consciousness, and she’s very ill, she’s not going to just wake up like you see in the films. I’m sorry.”

We fall silent and I look at Gretchen again, feeling more tears well up. Oh, Gretch. How the hell did we wind up here? How can this be happening to us? I just want to go back to us laughing together, laughing so much we could barely stand, I can even hear the sound of it! Please, I want those moments back.

I can’t do this—I can’t just sit in this room pretending. Not when I know, I know what we both did …

“I have to go and check my messages,” I say, unable to bear it a moment longer, standing up so quickly I surprise my legs and they almost give way beneath me. “In case Tom has called me.”

“OK,” the nurse says and smiles encouragingly, but I’ve already turned and I’m bursting back out into the corridor and practically running out of the ICU, shoving determinedly out through the double doors back into the main hospital. I see an exit. Having pushed through the door with a sickening relief, I find myself in what looks like a small spill-over staff car park. I’ve no idea where I am in relation to the ER now—I’ve completely lost my bearings. I just scrabble in my bag for my phone and switch it on. I have three new messages.

The first one is Tom, left twenty minutes after I called him. “Alice? What the hell has happened?” He sounds cross but I can tell it’s because he’s very frightened. “What do you mean you’re both at the hospital? Why? Look, if you get this in the next five minutes call me back, OK?”

The next one is him, six minutes later. “It’s me again. I’m going to call the hospital.”

And then, eighteen minutes after that, him shouting above a roaring car engine, obviously on the road, saying, “I’m on my way, don’t panic, Alice. It’ll be all right. I’ll be there just as soon as possible, I promise. I’ve left Bath—I don’t know how long it’ll take me—but luckily I’m going against the traffic, I’ll be as quick as I can.”

I picture him gripping the steering wheel firmly with one hand, mobile to his ear with the other, hurtling down the motorway in his work suit, and it makes me want to cry with relief that he is on his way. My bottom lip trembles and tears spring to the corners of my eyes. Thank God. I feel better just having heard his voice.

Tom is a fixer, someone to rely on. He’s the sort of person friends ring when they need advice on selling a car, filling out a tax return or have some heavy furniture that needs moving. My dad wanted me to marry Tom the second he found out he owned a fully stocked tool kit—with no bits missing—and knew what to do with it. He fixed a leaking tap for me the first day I met him, for God’s sake.

“That should do it,” he said, climbing out of the bath—fully clothed, sadly—and turning the tap on and off experimentally, still clutching the pair of pliers I’d given him, the only tool-type thing I’d been able to find in the whole flat. My flatmate, Vic, and I stared at the tap, waiting for the inevitable drip to begin—but it didn’t. We were totally delighted.

“So Tom,” Vic said quickly. “You’re a management consultant—which sounds well paid and stable …”

Tom nodded modestly.

“You’re a friend of a friend so you’re unlikely to be a lunatic,” Vic continued. “You can mend things …”

And you’re fit, I thought, staring as his light blue eyes crinkled behind his glasses because he’d smiled.

“The room’s yours if you want it,” Vic said, having looked at me for the OK first.

“That’s it?” he laughed. “Don’t you want to see any references? You should, you know,” he said, suddenly serious. “I could be anyone. I’m not—but I could be.”

But he was of course the model flatmate and, it turned out ten months later, boyfriend.

The phone rings in my already cold, numb hand. It’s him. “Tom?” I answer quickly. “Where are you?”

“… fen … M4 … like a wanker … but flyover … passed Olympia … twenty min …” It’s cutting in and out so badly I can barely hear him, but it sounds like he’s still in the car. “… happened? … hospital reception and I’ll …” Then it goes completely dead. I call him back but it goes straight to voice mail. He said twenty minutes though—I heard that. Gripping my phone like a talisman, I try to go back in through the door I just came out of, but discover I can’t because it requires a code.

I spend the next ten minutes walking faster and faster around the outside of the hospital, following signs that say they are taking me to the main reception but in fact lead me down unlit, narrow passageways between very dark, old redbrick clinic buildings that have open curtains on eerily empty rooms. I try not to look in through the windows as I speed past them, scared of glimpsing ghostly figures moving silently around inside—past patients who died there and are now bound to the austere Victorian building forever. I’m almost sick with the fear I’ve worked myself into and have to—need to—hear someone’s familiar, no-nonsense voice. So I call Frances.

“Hello?” My elder sister answers the phone with a hushed tone.

“It’s me.” My voice is wavering around all over the place, not just because of my hurried footsteps.

“Oh hi, Al. Look, I’m really sorry, but now’s not a great time—I’ve just put Freddie down. He’s really unsettled tonight.”

I try to picture Frances sitting in her neat, little semi-detached, curtains regimentally pulled, tea washed up, TV on—calm and normal.

“It’s a dreadful line anyway,” she says. “It sounds like you’re in a wind tunnel.”

I turn a corner sharply, look to my left and nearly collapse with relief. Oh thank God—I can see the front of the ER. I slow down, trying to catch my breath as I walk past several stationary ambulances, but then leap out of my skin as one suddenly blasts out a brief siren, begins to flash its lights and then swiftly pulls away to go and rescue somebody else. I hadn’t even noticed a driver was sitting in the dark front seat.

“Where are you?” Frances says immediately.

I take a breath. “I’m—”

“Oh no!” she interrupts. “I think Freddie heard that. Oh please God, don’t let him wake up! Just don’t say anything, Alice!” she whispers urgently and obediently I fall silent, although I can’t help but wonder how Freddie could possibly have heard an ambulance over a phone that he’s probably nowhere near. He’s a baby, not a bat.

“It’s OK,” she breathes. “He’s fine. Actually I’m glad you rang, I can’t get hold of Mum. Do you know where she is? I’ve tried at home, but there’s no answer. They can’t all be out—it’s a Thursday night!”

I pause, knowing full well that, on my advice, Mum and Dad have taken to unplugging the phone during mealtimes for half an hour of peace from the incessant baby-related calls. They’ve probably forgotten to plug it back in again.

“Freddie feels a little flushed,” Frances says. “And he’s only just recovered from that cough last week. I think it might be the start of pneumonia, and Adam’s still at work.”

“I have no idea where Mum is,” I say, and then I burst into tears.

“Alice? Are you crying? What on earth is the matter?”

“I’m at the hospital and—”

“Why? Are you hurt?” Frances says sharply, automatically swinging into big-sister mode.

“No,” I begin. “I’m fine but—”

But she bulldozes over me, “You’re not ill? Nothing’s broken?”

This is typical Frances. Back in secondary school, there was a group of “cool” girls in my class who bullied everyone from time to time. They used to cluster around their victim in the corridors between classes, always one of the worst times, or at lunch when the teachers would be shut away in the staffroom reading the paper, having a fag and angrily watching the clock hands, which had dragged all morning, suddenly whizzing around.

It was my turn on the day I was the only person to get an A in art and the teacher warmly and stupidly praised me in front of the whole class. The cool girls’ eyes all swiveled on to me—and I just knew what was going to happen at break.

Sure enough, six of them circled around me on the top corridor and began jostling and pushing me. I kept quiet and looked at the floor, because saying anything only made it worse. I’d seen what they’d done to poor Catherine Gibbons, who’d bravely chanted, “Sticks and stones may break my bones.”

One of the girls had just given me a rather halfhearted push that made me stumble and clutch my bag a little tighter when, amid their increasingly bored jeers, there was a sudden bellow of “HEY!” We all turned to see Frances steamrolling toward us, red in the face with rage. Within seconds she grabbed the ringleader around the neck and growled, “You touch my little sister again and I’ll break your face, understand?”

She dumped the girl down, at which point they all fled. I remember she looked at me and sighed. “Pull your shirt out, Al, no one tucks it in like that …”

“Alice,” she says, waiting for me to answer her. “You’re frightening me. Are you sure nothing’s wrong with you?”