The door near me slaps open and Phil emerges. He double-takes at me as I rise shakily to my feet.
‘Are you alright? Fuck me, you look like you’ve seen a ghost with its bollocks out. What were you drinking, Messer Schmitt Herbal Schnapps?’
‘My best friend’s been killed,’ I say, trying out this sentence for the first time, even though I think it has zero credibility. Phil’s face drops in horror.
‘In a car accident. I have to go to the hospital. Can you tell Kirsty where I am if she checks in?’
‘Jeezo, I’m sorry, Eve. Fuck! Sure,’ he says.
‘Thanks,’ I say, shouldering my bag and walking mechanically towards the city centre, and the cab rank.
I’m hovering somewhere outside my body, directing myself. I feel like a bag of clothes, held up by a skeleton.
Students from the nearby college pass by, chattering and whooping with laughter, as if this isn’t an abhorrent thing to be doing. As if it hasn’t happened.
9
Making sure I don’t throw up during the ride to the hospital is an unexpectedly useful distraction.
It forces me to prioritise the physical over the emotional and concentrate on swallowing, breathing, gripping the seatbelt and keeping my feet flat to the vibrating floor of the Hackney.
Focus on what’s real and what’s present, worry about the future when it arrives, in a few short minutes’ time.
Once we’re outside the QMC and start sweeping up the winding roads to the front entrance, and I see the red Accident & Emergency sign, abject terror washes over me. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more like a child in my life, including childhood. I want to run into the bushes and simply hide from this. I want an adult to make this alright, to protect me.
‘Just here OK?’ says the driver, peering at me curiously in the mirror.
‘Fine,’ I say and push a note into the tray in the window between us, before heaving myself out clumsily into the fresh air. I’m going to see Ed and when I see Ed, this will become real.
The thing is, you see, this can’t be true. It can’t be. But he’d never lie to me.
At first I can’t see him and my heart races. This was a prank. This was someone pretending to be Ed?! It hasn’t happened, it hasn’t happened, it hasn’t …
‘Eve! Eve?’ Ed calls to me and I look round. He’s rumpled in a t-shirt with his parka thrown over the top. His face twists, and collapses, as our eyes meet. I feel my own do the same. He belts over and throws his arms round me and I sink my face into the waxy cotton of his coat, and sob. I’ve never appreciated the solid six foot of Ed Cooper more, and I’ve done a lot of appreciating it. We grip each other as tightly and as desperately as if we’re on the deck of a sinking ship.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Ed says absently, on repeat, and I say indistinctly: ‘It’s not your fault,’ several times.
‘I called Justin. He can’t get off work until this afternoon,’ he says, wiping at his cheeks as we disentangle.
‘Right.’
Of course, Justin. In stark contrast to his irreverent persona and devil-may-care nature in his private life, Justin is a carer. He runs a local home for the elderly.
‘Who called you?’ I ask. I’m cold again, very cold. My teeth are chattering and I have to make an effort to disguise it.
‘The police. She’d listed you and I as emergency contacts in her wallet. Apparently her bag was thrown a long way from … they only found it searching, later. They said you weren’t answering. They went to see her dad but …’ Ed shrugs.
‘Oh God! Her dad.’ I’d been so busy thinking about us, I didn’t think of her family.
‘I don’t think he understood what they were saying, he told them his daughter should be in her classes,’ Ed says.
Susie’s dad’s had the signs of dementia for eighteen months or so. I’d not asked her recently how he was, she didn’t like to discuss it. Her mum died several years ago and her brother lives abroad.
‘I had no idea it was that bad,’ I say.
‘Neither did I … The doctor wants to talk to us together,’ Ed says.
The word ‘doctor’ hits me in the gut, and yet part of me is still resilient, even hopeful. Doctors make people better. Ed said dead, but he could’ve meant coma. Her bag was missing, sounds like they could’ve mixed up the files. This remains negotiable.
Look, this is Susie Hart. People die all the time, but Susie isn’t ‘people’.
‘Eve? Is that OK?’
‘Yes,’ I say, limp, and take Ed’s proffered hand. We have never held hands before. It goes without saying but I never imagined it would be like this, when we did.
Ed guides me through the busy, antiseptic-smelling, brightly lit reception and says something to the woman behind the desk that I don’t hear, I think it’s just his name. She turns away and makes a sotto voce internal phone call.
She doesn’t look remotely perturbed and I marvel at this, that it must be so ordinary for her. She has every day to practise being politely, professionally impassive in the face of people who look as bewildered and shaken as if they’ve stepped out of a time machine.
In the intervening seconds, Ed turns to me and looks like he’s going to say something to me and then doesn’t say anything, because what is there to say? Every single remark, platitude, expression of reassurance or hope, or practical discussion of what’s ahead, is impossible, null. We’ve transcended conversation.
I glance around.
Was Susie rushed through here, hours ago, people in uniform running by a gurney, holding a drip aloft, oxygen mask clamped to her face? Or was she never an emergency?
Ed’s name is called. A late-middle-aged man with a lanyard appears, and we’re ushered through double doors into the rest of the hospital, down a corridor, and into a side room. He wears a fixed expression of rueful, blank respectfulness. Not emotional, but mindful of your emotion. Like the men who drive the hearse, wear white gloves and never look directly at you.
My stomach muscles seize up as he asks us to sit down, in a featureless room where my sight immediately fastens on the box of tissues on the desk.
When he starts speaking, this will become real. If he tells us it’s all been a terrible mistake and Susie is in a bed with a leg in traction, or they’re operating right now, then that will be the new truth. This man is the Giver of Life or the Grim Reaper, the one with the power to give her back or take her away from us, forever.
As he walks over to shut the door, I fantasise the words he might use. Imploring us not to sue over their grave error.
Now this has never happened before, but I’m nevertheless incredibly relieved, if ashamed, to tell you.
The rush of relief that would knock us off our feet. Or what if she’s injured, but … there’s physio, we could do anything …
‘Hello. Ed? Eve,’ he nods.
I have never dreaded anyone speaking more in my life.
‘I’m consultant Gareth Prentice, I’m one of the medical team who saw Susie when she was brought in by the ambulance.’ Brought in. These strange passive terms, as if Susie is a puppet in their play.
‘Who called the ambulance?’ I blurt.