The intensive-care unit was in the basement and the hallways were like a rabbit warren. It was as if the hospital didn’t want me to reach him, there were so many signs and so many turns. I ran. People stared at me. They couldn’t understand. The real world was miles away. They couldn’t know a catastrophe had hit my life.
He had to live.
He had to.
When I found the end of the maze it wasn’t the end. The end was barred beyond locked doubled doors. He was lying unconscious behind them. I pressed a button that had a sign above it saying ‘press to let us know you’re here. Then please take a seat’. It took ages for a nurse to come. She was dressed in the blue pyjama style clothing I’d seen people wearing for operations on the TV.
‘Yes.’
‘I want to see Jack Rendell. I was told he’s here. Is he here?’ I was breathless from running and my hair was probably a mess I’d gripped it so many times during the night – and my makeup must be half on and half off.
‘I’m sorry, we’re only allowed to let family in. His mother is with him.’
‘But I’m seeing him. I’m going to move in with him. We were going away yesterday. He was meant to pick me up and he never came.’ The tension of not knowing where he was for twelve hours broke. I wiped the tears off my cheeks on to my sleeve as my hand shook. I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday lunchtime, or even had a drink yet this morning and I was so tired – and scared. ‘Is he alive?’
The nurse smiled. ‘Yes. I’ll ask his mother to come out and speak to you. If she’s happy for you to come in, then you can see him.’
‘I’ve never met his parents…’
‘Sit down. I’m sure she won’t be a moment.’
His parents. His mother…
I sat with the heels of my Converse tapping against the floor. I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve again. I probably had black streaks of mascara all over my face now.
My hands gripped my elbows.
A very stylish woman with brown hair came out of the doors. She had eyes the colour of Jack’s. She looked at me. ‘Ivy?’
I stood up. ‘Yes.’ More tears leaked on to my cheeks. I wiped them off. Her eyes and her expression implied that she was in pain, in the same way I was, but she didn’t look as though she’d cried; her makeup was still perfect.
‘How’s Jack?’
‘Very sick. Some mad man drove straight into him. The witnesses told the police it was deliberate. He’s broken Jack’s femur in his right leg and in his left leg the tibia and fibula and the bone at the top of his right arm. He’s also broken two ribs and torn ligaments in his knees. They’ve operated on his arm and his legs, and pinned all the bones back together, but when he came around the nurse said he turned blue – he couldn’t breathe. He has an embolism on his lung, which means his body cannot absorb oxygen. They have him on the machines to keep him breathing and oxygenated. But unless he recovers enough to breathe for himself…’ Her stiff upper lip trembled, then curled in a pain-filled expression and fluid glossed her eyes.
I stepped forward and hugged her, a stranger, but she did not seem a stranger because there were tears in her eyes, and there were tears dripping from my cheeks for the same person. Jack meant we weren’t strangers.
‘Come along…’ She let me go and took my hand, ‘Let me take you in to see him. I’m alone and it would be nice to have some company. Jack’s father is abroad on business.’
She spoke very properly, with a classic plum in her mouth, as though she’d stepped out of Downton Abbey. Jack spoke well, but it was almost accent-less, only British, but his mum spoke with a strong upper- class lilt.
She squeezed my hand as she led me along a wide hall with white walls and clinical washable skirting boards. My heart skipped a dozen beats. I was not here. Jack was not here. He was at home safe and this was a dream.
‘This young lady is my son’s friend, Ivy Cooper,’ his mum said to a nurse at the desk. ‘I‘m happy for her to visit Jack whenever she wishes. It’s what he would want.’
She turned me towards an area with a central nurses’ station, where two nurses watched a dozen monitors, and on either side was a bank of small rooms. Within them I could hear more monitors beeping and machines. Bitter-tasting bile rose in the back of my throat as nausea twisted through my stomach.
‘Has he talked about me?’
She glanced at me after she’d acknowledged a nurse with a smile. ‘He has, Ivy, yes. A dozen times. I believe he’s been building his father and me up for the moment he intended introducing you.’
He’d been thinking of the future, of us in the future, and I’d doubted him. The guilt hung heavily around my neck. I wanted to have the chance to believe – to really believe.
She let go of my hand. ‘He’s in here.’
A nurse was in the room doing something with the machines.
Emotion wrapped its fingers about my throat and squeezed and my whole body became cold. He was so pale and he had a dark black-and-yellow bruise across half his face and across his side. His arm, which lay over the top of the sheet, was covered in a dressing that had blood seeping through it. His hair, which was always neat, was messy and sticking out at all angles. Then there were tubes coming out of him from everywhere, out of his nose, his mouth, chest, neck and his arm, and there were wires everywhere too, where he was attached to all the machines around him.
‘Jack.’
A machine, which I presumed was helping him breathe, carried on a noisy rhythm, pushing air into the thick tube going into his mouth, while a monitor with green lines beeped out a steady pattern of sound. I would’ve taken his hand, but there was a peg thing on one of his fingers. I gripped his thumb instead, leaned down and kissed his cheek. His skin was cold.
‘Ivy’s come to see you, darling,’ his mother said, as though he was awake and just couldn’t see.
I thought of him climbing. I saw him in my mind. He’d been going to climb in Cumbria this week. I’d promised to watch him… Would he be able to climb now? ‘I’ve been climbing since I was a teenager and, strangely, I’m not bored of it.’
This wasn’t fair. He didn’t deserve this.
I looked at his mother, then looked at the nurse. ‘Will he hear me?’
‘We can’t know,’ the nurse replied. ‘But we say it’s best to talk to people as though they can hear.’
‘Hi, Jack,’ I said close to his ear, conscious of his mum. ‘I was waiting for you. You didn’t come.’
‘You were waiting…’
I looked at his mother. ‘We were going away, to the house in Cumbria.’
‘It’s pretty there.’
‘We spent Christmas there.’
‘Ah, so you were who he was with over Christmas. He didn’t say.’
Heat burned under my skin. But he’d told them about me since then. I wondered if he’d said he wanted me to move in with him. ‘Does Daisy know? Have you called Victoria?’
‘Yes.’ His mother walked around to his other side and laid her hand on Jack’s arm as the nurse stepped out of the way. ‘Daisy sent you her love, Jack. She’s going to make you a get-well card. I suggested she didn’t come and visit until you’re a bit better.’
My stomach churned. I hadn’t eaten for about eighteen hours, but I doubted I could eat even if someone put food in front of me. I slid my hand under his and let my thumb slot around his, longing to feel his hand grip mine back but there was no response.
His mum sat on a high stool on the far side and began talking to him about me being here, about Daisy and what she’d said, and she spoke about a meal she’d had with him and Daisy, and spoke about his dad trying to get back so he could come and visit too.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. My heart just cried out silently.
It was dark when I finally had some time alone with Jack. His mother had been in the room all day, and there were no opportunities when she went to the toilet or to eat because the nurses regularly kicked us out to change a tube or something so we used those times to use the toilet and eat. But finally, at nine o’clock, after they’d turned the lights out, his mother had said she’d leave for the night because she was going to meet his dad at the airport. I thanked her for the offer of a lift home, but declined. I wanted to be alone with Jack.
A different nurse, a woman with dark hair, who’d taken over for the night shift, was in the room. She replaced the bag that was dripping clear liquid into a tube going into his arm, then checked the machines.
I was sitting on the stool beside him. I leaned down to whisper. The longing in me… the screaming, shouting fear of last night… was now a quiet sleeping terror that was breathing slowly, waiting to know if Jack would get well… ‘Jack. I love you.’
The machines kept playing their rhythm around us. I looked at the white tape holding his eyes closed, hoping to see some movement. There was nothing.
‘This is a strange way to meet your mum.’
There were another few seconds of the machines playing.
‘I missed you. I was terrified last night. I didn’t know where you were. I’m sorry I wasn’t with you…’
Tears slipped out. I’d controlled them for most of the day since I’d come in here, but… He looked so broken.
I looked up at the nurse. ‘Will he wake up?’
The woman stopped what she was doing and turned to face me. ‘It’s hard to tell. He’s not in a coma, he’s been given medication to induce a coma, it’s paralysing his body so that he isn’t able to fight against the machine that’s helping him breathe. It makes it more comfortable for him. We’ve been running x-rays of his lungs all day and he’s not absorbing oxygen properly. He wouldn’t survive at the moment if the machine was switched off.’
‘But he’ll get better…’
‘We hope so.’
Her words rang through my head as I looked back at Jack. Hope. Was that all my control freak had? Hope… I hated that word suddenly. I wanted control. I wanted certainty.
I lifted his hand and held it against my forehead. I wanted him to feel me here. I wanted him to know how much I felt, that I loved him with desperation.
I sat with him and kept whispering in his ear for an hour, talking about the things we’d planned to do when we’d got to Cumbria, and how, when he was well, we’d go there and do them – like swim in the tarn at dawn, naked. He’d climb again; he had to be able to climb. He’d hate it if he couldn’t. He had to get well.
‘You should really go home now,’ the nurse said to me at ten-thirty.
‘What time can I come back tomorrow?’
‘Any time.’
I wondered what Jack would think of himself lying here.
I stood up, my hand squeezing his, as I tried not to disturb the clip on his finger. Then I leant down. ‘I love you. You’ll be okay. I’ll come back tomorrow. Don’t be afraid.’ I didn’t even know why I said that, I’d never known him be afraid, and yet if he could hear and couldn’t move I imagined, for Jack, that would be the worst nightmare.
‘I love you,’ I said again, then I let go of his hand, crying as I turned away.
The nurse said goodnight, but I couldn’t answer. The reply was stuck in my throat.