All Sorts of Possible (13 page)

But it was difficult to sleep. Mason’s aftershave left a sickly vapour that drifted round the room, making Daniel’s head spin. The house felt fragile too, like something made of
paper that Mason could tear down and ball up in a meaty fist and throw away whenever he pleased. As if he owned it now. As if he owned Daniel too and knew why everything in his life was happening
to him the way it was.

‘Wake up, Dad. It’s Dan. Can you hear me?’

Daniel let go of his father’s hand and sat back in his chair and checked his watch. It was 10 a.m.

‘How long has it been now?’ asked his aunt who was sitting on the other side of the bed.

‘Two hours since they started reducing the sedation and about fifty minutes since he’s been taken off it completely.’

His aunt pursed her lips and then stood up. ‘One of the nurses said she was coming back to help wake him up. Why don’t I go see where she is?’

Daniel sat beside his father, listening to the ventilator, as he watched his aunt through the glass, talking to the nurse at her station. And then he sat forward on his chair.

‘Wake up. You need to start getting better. I’m running out of time to find someone. It won’t be my fault if Mason writes your name down in his little black notebook.’
Daniel bunched his legs up to his chest and watched his father over the tops of his knees. ‘You don’t know what he’s like.’ And then he put his forehead against his legs.
‘I won’t watch,’ he said quietly. ‘I won’t tell anyone you’re faking it. It can be our secret. Tell me how to do it. Tell me how I can vanish like you and not
care about anything.’

But not a word from the vanished.

When the nurse came to check on Daniel’s father, she stood at the top of the bed.

‘Mr Webb, can you open your eyes for me?
Daa-vid.
Can you open your eyes?’ She prised one eyelid open with a thumb. ‘David, I’m just going to have a look at your
eyes. I’m just going to shine a light in them.’

She shone a penlight into the eye she was holding open, but there was no reaction in the pupil. She looked into the other one.

‘David, your son Daniel’s here for you. Can you feel him holding your hand? Can you squeeze his hand for me?’

But Daniel felt nothing: no pressure, no squeeze and no love. It made his heart tremble inside.

Later that morning, Daniel and his aunt sat down in two brown plastic chairs in the office of the consultant who had operated to save Daniel’s father the day he had been
brought to the hospital. She told them it would take twenty-four hours to be sure that all the sedatives had been flushed out and only then could the team be certain that Daniel’s father was
in his own coma. The consultant told them that some patients could remain comatose much longer than others, that each situation was unique.

‘How long someone remains in their own coma depends on its cause, which in the case of your father, Daniel, is what we call a traumatic injury, and also the severity of any brain damage
sustained from such an injury.’

‘Do you know yet how much damage there might be?’ asked Daniel.

The consultant was about to answer when the beeper on her belt went off, and she unhooked it to check the message, nodding at the junior doctor sitting with them in the consulting room to take
over.

He nodded nervously and cleared his throat. ‘There are various ways of measuring how much damage there might be,’ he said. ‘We use brain scans and there are also certain scales
we use to ascertain the level of a person’s consciousness, the depth of their coma and the degree of their brain function.’

He stopped when he realized the consultant was listening closely, hands clasped together, and then he went on, aware that he was now being assessed. ‘Your father scores lower on one of the
key scales we use which suggests a higher degree of brain injury.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Daniel.

The junior doctor pursed his lips, flashed a look at his superior.

‘It suggests your father has a poorer outcome,’ replied the consultant. ‘That he might not wake up or, if he does, that he might be very different to the person you remember
him to be. That physically and mentally he might be very changed.’

‘How different?’ asked Daniel.

The consultant took a sip of water from her plastic cup and set it back down on the table beside her. She looked at the junior doctor who seemed reluctant to say anything.

‘James, can you suggest anything here?’

‘At the moment we don’t know anything for certain,’ said the junior doctor. ‘We have to wait and see. Although you need to know the reality of your father’s
situation, time is really only the best way we have of predicting what sort of recovery he might make.’

‘But how long till you start to worry?’ asked Daniel. ‘How long is it till you’re going to say that he’s definitely not going to be my dad any more when he wakes
up?’

The consultant perched forward on the chair, listening to what the junior doctor might say next.

‘No one can say for sure—’

‘How long?’ asked Daniel’s aunt, ignoring him and looking straight at the consultant.

She nodded as if the anxiety in Aunt Jane’s voice had clicked something ‘on’ inside her. ‘The majority of patients like Mr Webb who score low on the scales are more
likely to die or remain in a vegetative state.’

The junior doctor stared at the floor. When he looked up, the consultant was watching, waiting to see if he had anything to add, and he cleared his throat again and turned to Daniel.

‘More scans will give us a better view of what’s going on inside your father’s brain. We need to consider all the evidence before we start thinking about what might happen
next. About what’s in the best interests of your father, what he would want to happen.’

‘That’s something for the future,’ added the consultant. ‘For all of us to discuss at a later date. Daniel, for the time being, we need to watch and wait and see how well
your father does over the next few days.’

‘You haven’t told us everything.’ Daniel shifted in his chair and sat up straight as the three adults all looked directly at him. ‘You haven’t said
why
it’s happened.’

The consultant studied her fingernails and thought about that. James tapped his pencil on his pad.

‘I don’t think anyone can, Daniel,’ said his aunt.

‘So you’re saying none of you can tell me then?’ He waited for someone to speak. ‘I need to know because somebody told me everything happens for a reason and I want to
tell them they’re wrong.’

‘Oh, Daniel,’ said his aunt, squeezing his arm. ‘Who said that?’

But Daniel just shrugged. When he felt his eyes warming up, he rubbed his fingers across them to wipe away the wet.

James leant forward and looked at Daniel. ‘Life may or may not have a purpose, but one thing it definitely has is love and you’re proof of that. It’s why you’re here in
this room now, listening to everything we can tell you about your father. And all that love you have might be the most important thing to him right now. After they’ve woken up, patients in
comas have talked about hearing loved ones around their beds. I read about one patient who said he felt his wife’s hand in his and heard everything she was telling him about their children
and their life together as she sat beside him. That he had found her presence reassuring. So you let other people argue about why things happen in life, especially the bad things, because I’m
not sure there are any answers to questions like that, at least not any good ones. You just focus on what you do best, which is to love your father like you’ve always done.’

Daniel nodded. Said nothing more.

The consultant folded her arms and stared at something on the floor and then she nodded too as she looked up at the junior doctor in the chair beside her. ‘Thank you, James,’ she
said.

After the meeting with the consultant, Daniel and his aunt went back to see his father. When they opened the door, it was like cracking off the top of a bottle as the
ventilator hissed. It was only the second time his aunt had been in his father’s room and Daniel could sense her discomfort. They sat down in the plastic chairs either side of the bed and
Daniel watched her looking around the room, not seeming to see his father at all until she folded her arms and dropped her chin on to her chest like a tiny bird getting ready to roost.

‘Daniel,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Your father and I haven’t spoken in a very long time, at least not what people would call a normal conversation.’

‘Dad? I’m here with Aunt Jane. She’s staying at home, looking after me. She’s here now with me.’ He stopped to see if his aunt might say something, but she
didn’t. And then he took hold of his father’s hand. ‘I’m not sure how long she’s going to be staying or whether you even approve, but she’s helping to keep
things ticking over till you wake up. It’s the summer holidays now. I don’t know if you remember that or whether the part of you that cares is even listening.’ He sat forward in
the chair. ‘Because it’s only the machines that tell us you’re still up and running. But we’re here just in case you can hear. In case it makes a difference to you. And
because it must be fucking boring lying there.’

There was a little cough from his aunt. Something disapproving muttered into a cupped hand.

But Daniel kept staring at his dad, waiting for a smile, until he gave up and looked at his aunt, his eyes fixed on her until she cleared her throat and leant forward in her chair.

‘Hello, David, Jane calling.’ She smoothed her hands down the trousers of her suit. ‘David, I’ve come to stay like Daniel said. I’m looking after him so
there’s no need to worry. You just work on getting yourself better. I’m sleeping in the spare room. Which is nice. The bed’s fine. Springy.’

‘Tell him how you’re feeling,’ Daniel urged.

She folded her arms and leant back in the plastic chair. She smiled as if remembering some past remark. ‘Oh, your father won’t care about that.’

‘But I do,’ said Daniel, and he perched further forward on his chair.

‘Well.’ She paused. ‘Well, I feel sad. Your accident was a terrible thing—’

‘Tell him you’ve come to say sorry,’ hissed Daniel. ‘That you’re putting an end to whatever went bad between you.’

Her eyes shone as if she had been slapped. ‘Daniel, it’s more complicated than you think.’

‘Then tell me what happened and I’ll tell you what to say.’

She rubbed at a spot on the moulded plastic arm of the chair. ‘No. It’s between me and your father.’

‘But it might help. He might hear. It might
do
something.’

‘I’m sorry. But I’m not able to do what you want.’

‘You don’t want him to get better.’

‘Of course I do, Daniel, but—’

‘But what?’

‘But however much you want him to wake up there’s nothing you or I can do to make that happen. We’re just going to have to wait. Daniel, you need to accept how things are. I
know it’s hard. That none of it makes sense.’

When she reached out, Daniel thought she might touch his father’s arm. But her hand stopped short and landed on the bedspread and smoothed out the wrinkles that had gathered there.

‘He can’t just be lying there with nothing going on,’ said Daniel. ‘Where’s the rest of him? Where’s Dad?’

But his aunt shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Daniel, really I don’t.’

After a while his aunt said she had to go home and do some work, so Daniel sat by his father on his own into the afternoon, watching for any sign that he might be awake.

Nursing staff came and went, wanting to know if he had seen anything, but each time they asked he shook his head.

When a nurse came to open his father’s eyes again and look into them with a penlight, Daniel asked if his father could really hear them speaking as the junior doctor had suggested earlier
in their meeting.

‘I don’t know is the honest answer,’ she said. ‘But some people do think speaking helps, that patients like your father can hear, and are aware of, things going on around
them. Sometimes patients have woken up here in this unit and said exactly that as they’ve slowly got better.’

Although there was no way of knowing if his father could really hear, Daniel decided he was going to keep believing he could, that talking to him would make a difference and help him weave a
little magic all of his own.

So after the nurse had left he started to describe the little things at first.

The room they were in.

The nurse sitting at her central station.

What the hospital was really like because, even though it was on the outskirts of Cambridge, the city in which they had always lived, until now they hadn’t paid it much notice.

On and on, until he found the words he wanted most.

‘I didn’t mean what I said in the car.’

To prove it, Daniel told his father about the camping trip they were going to take as soon as he was better, describing how they would pitch their tent in a clearing of soft brown needles, with
a stream nearby into which boulders had tumbled an age ago.

‘At night, we’ll make a fire inside a ring of stones,’ said Daniel. ‘And when the logs have burned down to red-hot bricks we’ll put tins of beans round the sides,
and we’ll cook sausages and bacon in a black pan, and fry eggs. We’ll sit by the fire with the trees around us, eating and talking about whatever we want to, watching moths shine above
the coals and listening to bats clicking in the dark, the cold at our backs, imagining the rest of the world has been shorn off into space.’

But his father didn’t move, as if the future meant nothing at all.

Daniel didn’t give up. He kept talking, describing things that had already happened in their lives as clearly and as truthfully as he could remember them, like the yew tree they had cut up
after it had fallen on the greenhouse two years ago. About the evening they had come back from the cinema to find the back door wrenched open and the television gone, a bright rectangle left in the
dust on the cabinet. Even the weekend in a cottage with his father’s friends where the four men had drunk themselves to sleep in the living room, leaving Daniel to wake them in the morning
with heads sore enough to make them swear never to drink again.