All Sorts of Possible (17 page)

‘
St-op!
’ he shouted as his breath came back to him. ‘
St-op!
’

But Rosie shook her head. ‘Just a little more,’ she managed to say. When she wiped her nose, a tiny smear of blood striped the back of her hand and Daniel remembered that Lawson had
done exactly the same, before everything had gone wrong.

‘Stop, Rosie! Please!’ But she didn’t seem able to hear him now. He put out his arms to try and shake her, but the pain in his chest had taken all his strength away.

A sound started up inside him, a clicking noise. Steady and regular like a metronome beating time. Daniel remembered the sound and what had happened to Lawson’s hand after it had stopped.
He shouted to Rosie again, but his words were slurred now. It was like chewing toffee as he tried to speak. The clicking grew faster and faster. Louder and louder. It seemed like a wasp had flown
deep into his skull and was lost there, becoming angrier and angrier as it tried to get out.

Suddenly, he was dimly aware of Bennett standing beside them, drawing back his hand and striking Rosie hard across her face, the crack of his palm like a whip on her cheek.

It brought her back from whatever place she was in and her eyes snapped open and she sat back in the chair, breathing heavily, a red stripe forming on her face, sweat strung in beads across her
brow.

The buzzing in Daniel’s head was already fading and the pain in his chest was softening, melting away.

‘Oh, Daniel,’ whispered Rosie. ‘I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see your dad. There was nothing there.’

When the door opened, the nurse came rushing in, but the machine had stopped chiming and Daniel’s father was lying there peacefully as if nothing had happened at all.

Bennett brought them plastic cups of cold water filled from the reservoir beside the ward door. He said sorry to Rosie again for slapping her and told them that he had been
scared and hadn’t known what else to do.

She nodded and said it was OK. But when she rubbed her face again Bennett wasn’t sure if he believed her.

‘I thought if I just pushed a bit harder I could find him,’ said Rosie. She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Daniel.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘It is. It’s me. I need to learn more about what I’m doing. We need to practise and then we can try again.’

Before Rosie could say anything else, the bleeper went off and she knew her chemotherapy infusion was ready.

‘We’ll try again. We will,’ said Rosie as she clicked the bleeper off and then she hugged Daniel and left to go back to the unit where her mother was fretting, waiting for her,
asking where in the hell she had been.

After she had gone, Bennett sat down beside Daniel. ‘Do you think you can really do it? That you can really help your dad?’

‘I do in my heart, Bennett.’

‘But in your head?’

Daniel tapped his foot.

‘Daniel, do you believe it in your head?’

He looked up at Bennett. ‘Of course I do. How can I think anything else?’

When Rosie looked again, the cannula was already pricked into the vein on the back of her hand, secure with a dressing, and the nurse was walking away.

She watched the
drip drip drip
of the vincristine drug in its solution inside the transparent bag, hanging from its stand, and tried not to think about how bad the side effects of the
chemotherapy might be. Whatever worries she had didn’t come close to matching the fears that constantly bubbled up inside her about her tumour and what the cancer might do to her.

She had googled survival rates for low-grade gliomas like hers constantly, after her diagnosis, trying to decipher her future from the numbers and graphs. When she had started reading about the
experiences of other patients like her, everybody had seemed to have their own story to tell. It had all seemed so random to Rosie that she eventually gave up using them to search for clues to the
truth about how her own story was going to turn out. Despite being told by doctors that having chemotherapy before surgery might be very effective in her particular circumstances it was hard not to
daydream about the worst of it now that she was here finally embarking on her treatment.

Seeing Daniel’s father made all her fears seem more real too. The man had seemed so empty inside, like something hollowed out. It reminded her of the eggs she and her mum used to paint at
Easter when she was younger, the shells pricked through with pins so the yolks and the whites could be blown out into a Pyrex bowl and kept for cooking. Rosie wished she had been able to do more to
help him, and to help Daniel too. But she hadn’t seemed close to being able to make anything happen, not even right up to the moment she had felt the sting of Bennett’s slap and her
eyes had snapped open.

Her hands balled into white-hot fists the more she thought about it, refusing to believe that she and Daniel had made the best fit they could. It felt like everything was up to her to try harder
because Daniel was only the battery who increased her power.

She began to watch the two other teenagers in the room who were also receiving their chemotherapy, both of them lying on beds and wearing headphones, plugged into screens. Rosie knew a little
bit about the girl because they had met on the ward before. Her name was Sophie. She was a year older and had been diagnosed with a medulloblastoma. Rosie focused on her first, trying to use her
talents to find out something personal about the girl, about what her life was like outside the ward.

But the
drip drip drip
of the vincristine in the bag hanging above her seemed to get in the way of Rosie’s thinking. She found it impossible to get a hold on Sophie and find out
anything. She kept trying, but her brain felt useless and heavy. She could have been holding hot coals in her hands as she clenched her fists to try harder. The coil of tubing on the pillow beside
her moved when she did and kept breaking her concentration.

Frustrated, she turned her attention to the patient sitting on the other side of her, a boy called Mike who was the same age as her. He had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia and his
bare scalp shone in the daylight like a wet rock. But when she tried to look inside him nothing happened, as if a valve had been switched off inside her to stop her using her gift. The harder she
tried, the more the
drip drip drip
of the drug in the bag above her seemed to grow louder until it was all she could hear, like something was dripping inside her.

When Rosie gave up trying, she decided the efforts with Daniel’s father must have tired her out. Maybe she needed to recharge somehow. So she sat back and wished the drugs into her system
and deep into the tumour that had grown mysteriously and silently in her brain.

The infusion only took ten minutes after which the cannula was removed. Rosie was given two different coloured tablets – one blue and one ivory. She was asked to repeat
the strict instructions about when to take the tablets in the upcoming days because the nurse wanted to make sure she understood.

‘How will I feel?’ asked Rosie. ‘How long will any side effects last?’

‘Do you feel ill now?’ asked the nurse, concerned.

‘No . . . but . . .’ She paused and wondered what to say. ‘No, I’m OK,’ she said and bit the inside of her cheek as her mother pushed open the doors and came back
through into the unit, ready to whisk her home.

Daniel and Bennett decided to wait and see if Rosie came back. But the longer they sat there talking, trying to involve Daniel’s father in their conversation, the more
certain they became that she wouldn’t.

Bennett suggested they watch YouTube clips from Daniel’s father’s favourite films on his phone, saying he had been reading up on coma patients and what might help. So they played
scenes from classic movies like
Jaws
and
Star Wars
that Daniel’s dad was always quoting lines from and they joined in loudly when the most famous lines came up. They went
through clips from
Alien
and
Blade Runner
and comedies like
Ghostbusters
and
Beverly Hills Cop
and
The Breakfast Club
.

They tried playing songs that Daniel knew his father liked, singing along to rock tunes and dancing to house music and banging their heads to grunge.

Eventually, the battery on the phone was too low to play any more and Bennett said he had to go and he told Daniel that he should go home too.

‘I can’t,’ Daniel replied. ‘My feet feel like they’re stuck to the floor.’

‘Why don’t you think of one memory then?’ suggested Bennett. ‘A really special one your dad might like to hear. Then you’ll know that you’ve tried your best
for today.’

Daniel rubbed his head as if trying to summon a personal genie to tell him the very best memory he had. ‘We went fishing once,’ he said eventually. ‘Fly-fishing. It feels
stupid now, talking about it.’ He shrugged like it was a bad idea. ‘Maybe—’

‘Go on,’ said Bennett.

‘But nothing really happened.’

‘Tell me what it was like. I want to hear.’

So Daniel told him everything he could remember about it. How it had been an early August morning last summer when they had been staying in a holiday cottage in Devon. His father had found two
fly rods in the attic and had knocked on Daniel’s bedroom door as the world was breaking open for the day.

‘They were two-piece canes as light as bones,’ said Daniel. ‘Each one had a cork handle, and they were so dainty you could balance them on a finger. There was a river a mile
from where we were staying. After we walked there, we found a spot clear of trees and started to cast. I’d never tried fishing before.’

He described to Bennett how the cane rods whipped and the wet lines hissed as they peeled up off the water, unfurling behind them, then hurtling forward with a flick of the wrist to land soft on
the face of the river.

‘We aimed the flies for spots that looked likely. Dark holes in the water or pools or beneath an overhanging branch. The first tug of a trout I felt, I struck too hard and yanked the fly
out of the water in a coil of line. Three times I missed a fish. And after the third time, as I was pulling back to cast again, I saw a tiny fish hooked to the end, a parr Dad called it. It was so
small I hadn’t felt it. I was so shocked I lost control and shanked the line and it caught in a branch, leaving the tiny fish hanging like a Christmas decoration, flipping and sparkling,
gasping in the air. We cut it down and I slid it off my hand back into the water, watching it swim safely back into the deep.’

He told Bennett how they spent three hours fishing in the sharp morning light with the blue sky hardening above them and the air starting to bake as the sun burned off the mist. And they barely
spoke. Somehow, the silence made them one with each other and at one with everything around them. It was a memory to cherish.

‘I remember it all, Dad,’ said Daniel. ‘It’ll stay with me forever.’

As they left through the ward security door, Bennett immediately recognised the junior doctor, James, coming the other way along the corridor. They said hello and Bennett told
Daniel that James had been at university at the same time as Bennett’s brother where they had been best friends.

‘We drank a lot together,’ said James ruefully. ‘And did some silly things along the way to getting a degree. Just.’ He tapped his lips and then asked if he could speak
to Daniel alone for a moment.

‘You can speak to both of us. Bennett’s
my
best friend. That’s why he’s here.’

James nodded. Tucked the folder of notes he was holding tighter under his arm. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about what you were asking yesterday, about why things happen and how to
explain them. It reminded me of a book I read a few years ago by a man called Viktor Frankl. I thumbed through it again last night.’ James cupped his chin in his hand and thought for a
moment. ‘How about we say it doesn’t matter
why
things happen, but only
what
they can do for you.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Daniel.

James drummed his fingers on the folder of notes he was holding.

‘Imagine you switch your brain from trying to figure out
why
something happens to you to thinking about how to respond to it. If you do that then the power’s with you to
decide
who
you want to be,
what
sort of person you want to become. The most important thing isn’t about trying to work out why things occur, or how the world works,
it’s about discovering who you are in the face of everything that happens to you, the good as well as the bad, and even the somewhere in between.’ He smiled at Daniel. ‘I thought
it might help in some tiny way, to have something positive to ponder rather than all the dark inside you. Daniel, if there’s anything you want to talk about, anything at all, then please ask
and I’ll do whatever I can to help. The ward staff know how to get hold of me.’ He bade them goodbye and then went on his way.

Bennett leant in close to Daniel as they walked towards the lift. ‘James was like you, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was in the papers as well, about ten years ago. My brother told me what happened. He was a bit younger than you when he ran away and got kidnapped by travellers. My brother said James
told him there was some weird stuff that happened. Black magic stuff, the sort that people would never believe if they knew about it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Maybe you should ask him. Maybe he can help you and Rosie with the fit. He might know something?’

Daniel shrugged as he punched the call button for the lift. ‘He’s a doctor, Bennett. I bet he wouldn’t know anything about how it works.’

On the bus ride home, Daniel thought about everything James had told him. But it was hard to stop wishing for answers about the sinkhole and what had happened to his father,
and how he had found a way out of the ground. He didn’t want to think about who he was supposed to be now, he wanted to be the same person he had always been, the boy his dad had always known
and would recognise when he woke up.