Alice hugs her faux-fur jacket around her body. ‘It’s fecking freezing out here.’
She’s right. It’s that kind of cold that seems to come from the ground, travelling through the soles of your boots, spreading across your feet and crawling up your body until even your teeth feel raw and exposed. I pull my woolly hat down that little bit further and try to make my body smaller, as though I can somehow dodge the chill.
‘Stop with the whining, you southern softie,’ Katie says, ‘we’re only five minutes away.’
Alice frowns. ‘In five minutes my boobs will have dropped off.’
The stone face of the hospital seems to grow larger with every step, transforming from a solitary Duplo block into an imposing tower of bricks and windows, shimmering with glass and ice. I always wonder if I can see our window; the window of the room I woke up in about six months ago, clutching at my neck, gasping for air, flailing my legs, a haze of white sheets and nurses flapping around me. And I always wonder if my friends are thinking the exact same as me, silently hunting for clues, a familiar vase on a windowsill, perhaps.
Alice and Katie woke from their comas within minutes of me. The Comic-Con Four, that’s what the press dubbed us – a group of kids who lost consciousness at London Comic-Con and slipped into comas following a minor earth tremor. Not a single detectable injury between us. Medical mysteries. And when three of us regained consciousness exactly one week later, we became minor celebrities for at least a day, until one of the Kardashian sisters got another butt implant.
We cross the road and the wind picks up, lifting snow dust from the pavement, the tops of the cars, the ridges in the brickwork of the shop faces, sending it twirling, spiralling, dancing through the air. This teases a familiar image from my brain. Thistledown. Hundreds of seeds encasing us in our very own snow globe. Or maybe feathers, white and brown, bursting around me and drifting to the floor, accompanied by laughter and the shriek of birds.
These images come to me often. Sometimes they explode into my consciousness, other times they slowly burrow, revealing themselves in stages. Fragments of pictures and scents and noises. At first they were blurred, dreamlike; now the details are sharper in all of my senses. But they remain squares of an unfinished patchwork. No matter how hard I try, I can’t quite sew them into something meaningful. At least not yet. A strange old lady with apple-green eyes visits me in my dreams. She tries to help, whispering about journeys, a far-off land.
‘Are you OK, Vi?’ Katie asks.
‘Yeah,’ I say – an obvious lie. My friends take an arm each, their body warmth closing around me, and we half walk, half skid across the car park towards the main entrance of the hospital. I can’t help staring at the winter sky. It’s this amazing pale blue colour. It almost looks like a sheet of glass suspended above us, reflecting the soft, muted colours of frost-bitten London. For the briefest of moments, it really reminds me of something, or more precisely, someone. Though I can’t place who.
We jog up the steps, grateful for the warm blast of air awaiting us in the hospital foyer, and I wonder if that smell – medicinal and unnatural – leaves my friends feeling uneasy too. We break apart to pull off our hats and smooth down our hair. I smile at our collective vanity while nurses in shower caps and patients in brittle-with-starch NHS hospital gowns move around us.
The receptionist sees me and waves. I know all of the admin staff not by their names, but by soundbites of descriptions in my head – a sign that I am becoming a true writer, perhaps. So this one is The lady with eyes which always look tired, but with hair which never sleeps. I return her wave and she smiles, but it looks kind of forced – like she can see the crushing, invisible weight I carry but doesn’t know how to acknowledge it or take it away. Or perhaps she knows it should be me lying in that hospital bed instead of Nate, tubes snaking into my mouth. Perhaps she can see the black aura of guilt which surrounds me, entombs me – the crippling feeling I get from knowing Nate would have woken up too, if only I’d been smarter, stronger, faster . . . better. It makes no sense, I know.
I head down the main corridor, my rubber soles squeaking against the vinyl floor. Alice, Katie and I always walk this stretch fast, an unspoken agreement. Like me, they don’t like seeing the medical staff – nothing personal, it’s just easier to avoid eye contact with someone who may have changed your catheter.
‘So what did you bring him today?’ Katie asks as we finally reach the lift. ‘The usual selection of fairy tales?’
‘Not today.’ I punch the up button, my finger cast in a jade light. ‘Today we’ve brought him something a bit more personal.’
We watch the numbers flash sequentially above our head, the lift descending its concrete tube towards us.
‘Ooh, curious,’ Katie says.
Alice grins. ‘Something a bit more futuristic, something a bit more dystopian—’
‘Oh my God,’ Katie shrieks, ‘don’t tell me you’ve finished it.’
The lift arrives and we step into the little metal box. It lurches upwards and I realize I no longer think about the mechanism whirring above us, pulling us higher and higher, further from the safety of the ground. Precoma, I would have sung Abba in my head to block out the panic. But something about that coma changed me. Guilt aside, it’s made me more confident, more self-assured. You’d think it would do the opposite, having dragged me so close to oblivion. I don’t pretend to understand, but it’s kind of nice, not shitting my pants every time I do a presentation.
Alice pulls her Kindle from her handbag. ‘Well, we’ve finished the first draft, haven’t we, Violet?’
I nod. ‘Yeah, but I’m sure our editor will want to make changes.’
‘Oh yes, darling, our editor.’ Katie forces her voice into an over-the-top plummy squeak, so she sounds more like the Queen than a Scouser.
‘Piss off,’ Alice says, laughing.
‘No really, it’s great,’ Katie says. ‘I’m so pleased for you both. A proper book deal. And not just any book – the sequel to The Gallows Dance.’
Alice looks coy for a moment. ‘Well, we had a little help.’ She means Russell Jones. After he posted that photo back in May, Alice’s popularity as a fanfic writer soared. Getting a book deal, even with her unknown bestie as co-author, was pretty easy. But it was my idea to write the sequel, not Alice’s. An idea which the old lady with apple-green eyes gave me soon after I regained consciousness, though I remember that dream as though it were last night.
I was standing in this orchard filled with birdsong and sunshine and the scent of fruit.
Then the old lady appeared and pushed something into my fist. Her barely-there lips parted and she spoke in a familiar voice. ‘It was no accident you came to our world with Alice. I brought you. The President had his plan, and I had mine.’
I didn’t really know what she meant, but I felt I should ask anyway. ‘What was your plan?’
‘Saving the Imps does not end with the falling of the gallows, my child.’
‘What does it end with?’
She smiled. ‘There’s no place like home, Little Flower.’
I uncurled my palm and saw the tiniest viola flower nestled between the cracks in my skin. And suddenly, it all made sense. ‘You brought me into your world so I would become a true Imp. You want me to write the sequel?’
She nodded. ‘You and Alice. You write a pro-Imp sequel for the fandom to read. Break this loop, Little Flower. Set us free.’
I woke that morning filled with an overwhelming urge to write a sequel with Alice. It felt like a matter of life or death – like the very future of the Imps depended on it. It took a jug of orange juice and several rounds of toast to remind myself the Imps are no more than characters from my favourite novel.
At first I was nervous suggesting to Alice we write a sequel together; she’s always been a bit protective of her writing. OK, I’ll say it, a bit precious. But I think maybe the coma changed her too. She’s still Alice, but she just seems a bit . . . softer. She leaves the house without make-up, she blushes when you compliment her, and the other day, she actually went to one of Katie’s cello recitals with me, and the accompanying pianist wasn’t even hot. Anyway, she threw her arms around me and said, ‘That’s the best idea ever.’
The process wasn’t entirely smooth, but with Alice softening and me gaining confidence, we kind of met in the middle. There were a few spats. For example, she still has this ridiculous fangirl crush on Willow and wanted him to take centre stage, whereas I was inclined to write him out completely. I don’t know why, but his character really annoys me now; he seems so weak and selfish – I guess recent experiences have made me grow up and prioritize personality over abs. We eventually agreed that the protagonist would be a different character from The Gallows Dance. Someone with the potential for real growth. I knew immediately it had to be the puppy – Ash. Because a puppy can only get bigger.
But there was one character we agreed on one hundred per cent from the get-go.
The lift doors open and the scent of medicine intensifies, causing my heart to flip. We walk down the corridor, reading the signs even though we’ve read them a thousand times, upping our pace as we approach the ward.
We reach the white doors and I pause so I can pump some alcohol rub on my hands. I take a moment to peer through the porthole windows. Nate lies on a bed, stretched out, his head elevated, so that at a glance he could be watching TV or listening to his iPod. This is my favourite bit of the hospital visit, watching him from behind a pane of glass, framed by a circular piece of wood. It’s like he’s in a whole other world, captured in a photo or a television screen. Floating in a bubble. Something about the surrealness, the distance, makes it feel like anything could happen – like he could just wake up.
‘You ready?’ Katie asks.
I respond by pushing through the doors into the ward. The tinny hospital sounds fill my head, the pips of the monitors, the wheeze of the ventilators, the smell of antiseptic and urine, and that sense of something magical, other-worldly, vanishes completely. Reality kicks in. Nate is in a coma. He hasn’t woken up for six months. And with every day, every hour, every minute which passes, it becomes less likely he ever will. My vision clouds with tears and that black aura of guilt seems to cast the ward in shadow.
Alice sits in the chair beside him and rubs his hand. ‘Hey, squirt,’ she says.
I imagine him opening his eyes and telling her to feck off. He’s fourteen. Then I remember he turned fifteen a few weeks back – I held his favourite homemade chocolate cake beneath his nose so he could smell it – and the tears begin to fall down my face.
Katie drags a comfy seat over so I can sit beside him, across the bed from Alice. ‘Twunting hospital furniture,’ she mutters, battling it into position. I smile to myself; good old reliable Katie. No coma could change her.
Before I sit, I lean forward and kiss him on the forehead. He smells faintly of sweat and baby wipes, and I swear his golden eyelashes quiver slightly, stirring beneath my breath.
I still remember the first time I saw him like this. I’d only been awake for a short while, and even though the doctors assured me he was alive, was lying in the bed next to me in fact, I could only make out the sandy spikes of his hair, and I just wouldn’t believe it was him. I knew with such certainty he was dead, it was as if I’d watched him die.
So, as soon as the medical staff and the parents left the ward to have a private, ‘grown-up’ chat, I pulled out my remaining tubes and stumbled to his bedside. Alice and Katie were pressing their buzzers like mad, trying to get the nurses to help, begging me in rasping voices to get back into bed before I fell. But I reached him all the same.
He looked like he was built from wax, all these wires and tubes and pieces of tape holding him together. But that little monitor was pipping away and I could finally see with my eyes what I could not believe with my heart.
The doctors were right.
He was alive.
Before the guilt and grief and anger arrived (and boy, did they arrive), I felt only relief. I wanted to kiss him and hold him and laugh all at once, but instead, I did an odd thing. I pulled back his covers and lifted his pyjama top. And there it was, no bigger than the size of a penny piece; a red, circular scar on his abdomen. A healed bullet wound. And the strangest thing? It didn’t surprise me, not in the least. I looked from Alice to Katie, and they didn’t look surprised either. And I knew we were all thinking the same thing – it was my responsibility to reach him, to wake him, to bring him home.
Later, Mum told me that Nate had died the day before I awoke, that he’d flatlined for three minutes before they’d managed to revive him. Three whole minutes. I can’t even hold my breath for two. I remember Mum’s face, draining of all colour as she whispered the words: I will never forget the sound of that flatline, Violet. And I remember thinking: Neither will I.
Alice hands me her Kindle and I finally sink into the chair beside him. I rest one hand on his arm, which feels surprisingly warm, and with the other, I load up the first page of our manuscript. The Sequel to The Gallows Dance – The Gallows Song.
Alice peers over the bed at the screen. ‘No,’ she blurts out. ‘Go straight to the good bit, you know, the bit he’ll really love.’
‘Yeah, don’t make him listen to the set-up,’ Katie says, perching on the bed. ‘The poor thing must be bored out of his tree as it is.’
We never talk about it, my friends and I – why we fell into comas in the first place, why we woke within minutes of each other, Nate’s mysterious bullet wound – but I sometimes wonder if they have strange post-coma dreams too, if they’re busy piecing together their own patchwork of disjointed memories. Because it’s like they know Nate can really hear us, like they know there’s something a bit different – a bit special – about the Comic-Con Four.
I drum my finger against the page-turner button, jumping through the electronic words until I find the right place. The entrance of the boy. The only character Alice and I could agree on one hundred per cent from the get-go.
Then I squeeze Nate’s warm flesh, and I begin to read.
‘Thorn circled the boy, looking him up and down. “And you think you can help us why?”
The boy smiled – his face all angles and mischief – and pushed his sandy hair from his forehead. “Because I may look like a dumb Imp kid, but I’m as clever as your average Gem. That makes me perfect spy material, don’t you think?”
“OK, you think you’re so clever . . . prove it.”
“You’re a Gem,” the boy says.
Thorn scowls. “That’s not so difficult to work out. I’m tall and I have symmetrical features.”
“It wasn’t that. Imps can be tall and attractive too. Your voice gave you away – you try too hard to flatten your vowels.”
Thorn adjusted his eyepatch, pretending he wasn’t rattled. “Well, you’re certainly braver than the average Gem, I’ll give you that. What’s your name, Imp?”
The boy grinned his pixie grin. “Nate.”’