Missing You (22 page)

Fen remembers her sister; she remembers why she’s here. She wishes the bus would go faster, and at the same time she does not want to reach the hospital, in case she has to look into Lucy’s face and see the worst.

She tries to be calm. She knows that babies are resilient. She knows that, mostly, high temperatures do not indicate serious illness. Only sometimes they do. She wishes Sean were with her; he is good at taking the logical, rational viewpoint while she is apt to imagine all kinds of terrors. He says she is an expert in dreaming up worst-case scenarios, and he is right, but he doesn’t know that it’s not her fault. She can’t help it. She feels a twinge of pain in her heart.

Fen asks the driver to drop her at the hospital entrance, and she thanks him when the bus judders to a stop and she steps down.

An emaciated old man in striped pyjamas and a blue dressing gown is standing outside the doors speaking to a girl who is wearing a green dress that strains at her waist and is stained under the arms. The man is attached to a drip. He is smoking a cigarette. As Fen passes he doubles over, wracked with coughs, and the cigarette burns between the yellowed knuckles of two fingers on the hand that clutches his stomach.

The automatic doors open. Fen steps aside for a man with a cast on his leg coming the other way.

‘Sorry, ’ she says, ‘sorry.’

It is getting late now, but still people are coming and going: a pale, acned teenager with no hair or eyebrows, a woman in a burkha holding the hand of a child, and two young men in combat gear, one of them weeping, the other rubbing his fist between the shoulder blades of his friend. Fen scans the area quickly but there’s no sign of Alan or Lucy. There’s no sign of Mrs Rees.

She crosses to the reception desk and waits for the attention of the woman behind it. ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ she says to herself, but the woman takes her time.

‘Yes?’ she asks, after an age.

‘I’ve come to see baby William Kelly. He was admitted this morning.’

‘You’re family, are you?’ asks the woman.

‘He’s my nephew,’ says Fen. Her palms feel clammy and her mouth is dry. She wishes she’d bought herself a drink at the station.

‘Are you all right?’ asks the receptionist. ‘You’re looking a bit pale yourself.’

‘I’m fine,’ says Fen.

‘William Kelly . . .’ The receptionist’s face has a greenish tinge from the computer screen in front of her. ‘You say he was admitted . . .’

‘He came into A and E. I don’t know what happened after that.’

‘Ah yes. Here he is. William Kelly, Thomas House, Merron College. Oh . . .’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, dear, he’s been transferred to the Special Care Baby Unit.’

Fen feels the blood drain from her. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. There are pins and needles in her fingers and her knees go weak. The hospital reception tilts suddenly and she holds on to the ledge beneath the window to stop herself falling.

‘Sit down,’ says the receptionist. ‘Sit down, love. I’ll call someone to come and look after you.’

thirty-one

It’s midnight. Sean stands in the living room, drinking coffee.

He cannot sleep.

There was a note on the kitchen counter when he came home. It was signed Sheila, and it said: ‘Connor’s with us. Food in fridge.’

Sean does not know who Sheila is. He does not know where Fen is, only that she’s in Merron. He hopes to God that the baby is all right. He knows he has let Fen down and he is furious with himself for this, but he’s also annoyed that she didn’t give him a chance to help. He would have taken her to Merron, of course he would. She should have let him speak. If she’d let him explain, she would have understood. Now he feels lonely, he feels useless, he feels as if something has been torn from him. He does not know if he should drive to Merron anyway. He would find the hospital, but he is not sure if he would find Fen. Her family might regard it as wholly inappropriate if he were to turn up in the middle of their crisis. He doesn’t know if they even know about him. He does not know what to do.

This is the first time since he has been lodging with Fen that she has not been here, at home at night. And it’s weird. It’s only a small house, but without Connor, without Fen quietly doing what Fen does, it feels like a mansion. It is full of empty space where Fen and Connor should be. It has dark corners and heavy hollows. It echoes like a cave.

Sean has called Fen a dozen times, but each time he has been connected to the digital voice of her answerphone, asking him to please leave a message.

He said: ‘Hi, it’s me. Hope everything’s OK. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

He said: ‘Fen, please call me, please let’s talk.’

He said: ‘I could drive over and meet you, if you’d like me to.’

He said: ‘I miss you.’

Her phone may not be ringing because its battery is flat. Fen’s charger is still plugged into the socket behind the armchair in the living room, where she always leaves it. But Sean knows that’s not the reason why the phone is turned off.

Earlier, he went for a run. He ran to release all the stress hormones from his body. He ran to get rid of the excess adrenaline in his bloodstream, to diffuse his anxiety, to make himself think straight again. He ran along the rim of the city, keeping to the roads that run straight along the side of the hill that curves around the westerly edge of Bath. He ran past elegant terraces, past the backs of hotels where the maids still wear ankle-length dresses and aprons, past shopkeepers watering their newly planted hanging baskets, past groups of teenagers sitting on walls, talking self-consciously and spitting on the pavements. Sean ran all the way to the top of the golf course, and then he stood panting in the shade of one of the grand old trees, his hands on his knees, catching his breath. He bought a bottle of water, then sat on the grass and watched the families playing pitch and putt while expensive cars purred up the hill to the exclusive houses behind.

He jogged back more slowly, showered, and went to the pub for chicken and chips and a couple of beers.

He should be tired after all that.

But he isn’t.

Everything goes round and round in his mind. He takes his guitar out of its case and plays a few tunes. More time goes by and eventually Sean dozes on the settee covered by his leather jacket, his legs curled up behind him and his face on a cushion.

He is woken by the trilling of his phone, and spends an age finding it in the pocket of his jacket.

‘Hello?’ he mumbles. ‘Hello? Fen? You OK? Fen?’

There is silence at the other end, but there’s somebody there, Sean knows there is.

‘Fen . . . ?’

The person at the other end disconnects.

‘Shit,’ says Sean. He squints at the face of the phone, but his eyes are still sleepy and won’t focus. After several attempts, each tetchier than the last, his fumbling fingers manage to find the call log. It doesn’t help. The number of the last call received was withheld.

‘Shit,’ says Sean again.

He yawns, scratches his crotch and shambles into the kitchen, switching on the light and screwing up his face against its brightness. The back door is ajar, and moths speckle the outside of the light shade. Sean pushes the door shut and locks it. He pulls the window closed and locks that too. Then he draws down the blind.

The room is chilly. He switches on the kettle, and is leaning on the counter, his eyes closed, waiting for it to boil, when the phone rings again. This time it’s on the counter, jumping with its vibrations. Sean stares at the phone. Number withheld, it says on the screen. He lets it ring five times and then he picks it up and answers but says nothing. There is silence at the other end too, but he can hear somebody holding their breath.

‘Fen?’ he whispers eventually and immediately the call is cut off.

Sean switches the phone off with his thumb and bounces it down on the counter. It spins on its face.

It was Belle. He knows it was Belle.

thirty-two

The two sisters sit in the light and airy day room attached to the SCBU. Lucy is feeding William and Fen keeps her sister company, sipping lukewarm tea from a cardboard cup.

‘Thank you for coming,’ says Lucy, for the twentieth time. ‘It means the world to me that you’re here.’

Fen smiles. ‘Of course I came.’

‘I didn’t think you would. I thought you’d have one of your turns and chicken out, like you always do.’

Fen looks away. Lucy does not know why it is so difficult for Fen to be in Merron. She thinks Fen is just being lazy, or awkward, or maybe even throwing some kind of drama-queen act.

Lucy looks up. ‘Now you’ve made the journey once, you’ll be able to come again, won’t you? You’ll be able to bring Connor to stay with us.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ says Fen. She changes the subject: ‘Did you get any sleep last night?’

Lucy shakes her head. ‘Not really.’

‘Didn’t they give you a bed?’

‘There’s a room for parents, but I didn’t want to be in it, I wanted to watch over William. I thought if I took my eyes off him for a moment he might stop breathing . . .’

‘You need to rest, Lucy.’

‘I can rest at home. Honestly, Fen, I thought we were going to lose him.’

Lucy looks down at her baby. She touches his forehead with her fingertips.

‘You can’t imagine how frightened I was yesterday when he was so hot and ill. Alan kept telling me to stay with it, but my mind insisted on thinking the worst. I kept running through what would happen if it was meningitis, what the consequences might be, you know?’

Fen nods. She knows.

‘And when they told us they were transferring him here, to the Special Care Baby Unit, I thought: “That’s it, he’s going to die.” I was planning the music we’d play at his funeral.’

Lucy sighs.

‘I was thinking about Emma Rees. I was thinking that I’ve only known William for a few months and already he is everything to me, and that poor woman had Joe for twenty-two years, and she didn’t have anyone else, did she? I don’t think I ever really understood before, how she must have felt when she lost him.’

Fen turns her face away.

‘I mean I felt sorry for her, of course I did, but I didn’t really get it. I was outwardly sympathetic at Christmas, you know, but there was a bit of me thinking: “Oh, come on, it’s been ten years. Move on.”’ Lucy shakes her head. ‘I should be ashamed of myself,’ she says.

Fen wipes her eyes with the wrist of her sleeve. Lucy doesn’t notice; she’s engrossed in her son.

‘William does look a bit better, though, doesn’t he?’ says Lucy. ‘The nurse said his temperature’s normal again. She said she thinks he’s over the worst.’

Fen nods and manages a smile. ‘He’s looking much better.’

Lucy is sitting in a faded old wing chair by the hospital window. Fen can just see the baby’s hand patting his mother’s swollen breast. She can hear the contented little clucking noises he makes as he sucks. Through the window, she sees the shrubs and trees in the walled garden beyond, nodding and shaking in the wind. Little grey clouds are sketching across the blue sky and rooks are in the air.

Fen is wearing her sister’s clothes: a pale green jersey dress that falls to mid calf and a lemon-coloured cardigan that smells of fabric softener. She should have picked up the dress she bought in Bath yesterday, but she must have left it in its plastic bag on the counter in the bookshop. She stares at the baby’s hand and misses Connor. She misses Tomas. She misses Sean.

Lucy pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose, and unhooks the baby with her little finger. ‘Greedy little boy,’ she says affectionately.

She sits the baby upright, his head lolling drunkenly between her thumb and forefinger, and rubs his back. The baby has a stupidly content expression on his face.

He burps and a bubble of milk forms between his lips. The bubble swells and glistens, and then it pops. His eyes roll.

Lucy leans down and kisses the baby’s head. She wipes his mouth with the cloth she’d been holding beneath his chin, and picks at his cradle cap for a few moments with a sleepy expression in her eyes. Then she seems to wake up. ‘How’s your shoulder?’ she asks.

Fen touches her back. It hurts where she fell in the hospital reception area and banged it. It’s stiff and achy. It embarrasses her.

‘It’s OK.’

‘You’ll wait with me, won’t you, Fen? Until the doctors come round? Then if they say we can take him home, we can go together.’

‘Of course I’ll wait,’ says Fen.

She would rather be here, in the hospital, than outside on the streets or at the college. She wants to be with her sister, but also she feels safe here because the Special Care Baby Unit at Merron Royal Infirmary is the last place on earth where she would expect to see Emma Rees.

Lucy and Alan live in staff accommodation provided by Merron College. Their house faces the tree-lined street that connects with Aberaeron Road at the front, and the back garden is separated from the college playing fields only by an old, red-brick wall.

It’s not as grand as the house where Lucy, Tomas and Fen grew up when their father was headmaster, but it is more comfortable. It is lighter and has been refurbished within the last decade, so tastefully double-glazed windows and solar-powered roof panels now sit alongside the ornate cornicing and the fancy end gables. The carpets are plush and new and everything in the kitchen works efficiently and without fuss.

After William was discharged, Lucy called Alan, who fetched them home from the hospital. Now he has gone back to the school, and Lucy, who is exhausted, is running herself a bath. Baby William is sleeping in his carry-seat on the living-room carpet.

Fen wanders over to him and feels his forehead with the inside of her wrist; their blood is the same temperature. She smiles, and leans down to pull his blanket up to his chin then, left to her own devices, she wanders across the room to Alan’s meticulously polished grand piano. She looks at the framed photographs displayed on top. There is one particular picture of her parents that Fen likes. Her mother is laughing, posing for the camera, while her father, Gordon, stands beside her. He is looking at Mari with the greatest affection and she, so much younger and so much more vivacious, seems almost oblivious to him. A few photographs track the years they had together. There’s a picture of Mari holding a baby who looks just like William in her arms, and she’s smiling down at the baby – Tomas – and Gordon, with his hand on her shoulder, is smiling down too. They both look very proud. Lucy, a curly-haired, chubby little girl with clips in her hair is standing next to Gordon with her thumb in her mouth, looking slightly sad.