The Bellwether Revivals (19 page)

Theo told them to sit down, and they did, hunching towards him. He told them that Iris had broken her femur. ‘They’ve just taken her into surgery, but the signs are good. It’s not too bad a break.’

‘Oh, thank heavens,’ Jane said.

‘I spoke with the surgeon. He’s more than competent. They do these procedures every day.’

‘She really had us worried,’ Yin added. ‘We thought we’d lost her.’

‘Well, she’s in a lot of pain at the moment,’ Theo said, ‘but she’s going to be fine, thank God.’

Marcus said: ‘I knew she’d be alright. She’s a tough old bird.’

Eden didn’t talk. He stood up, walked across the waiting room to the water cooler, and began to fill up a paper cone. He drank it down, then filled another, and another.

Mrs Bellwether looked at Oscar. ‘Don’t worry, dear, she’s going to pull through. Iris is made of sturdy stuff. She’ll be back on her feet in no time.’ She continued to fold and refold her cashmere gloves upon her lap. ‘When she was a child, she got into all sorts of scrapes. Gashed her knees, cut her tongue, even broke her collarbone once. But she never complained, always healed up quickly. That’s the thing about Iris, she’s always been an incredibly fast healer. Hasn’t she, Theo?’

Her husband nodded. ‘What? Oh, yes, incredibly.’

Oscar couldn’t take his eyes off Eden, who had finished at the
water cooler and was now walking back to his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when will you be moving her out of this rathole?’

‘Soon enough,’ Theo said. ‘When she’s had some recovery.’

‘What d’you mean
move her
?’ Yin asked.

Marcus leaned towards him, lowering his voice. ‘He means when is she going to the private hospital.’

‘Ah.’

‘What’s wrong with
this
hospital?’ Oscar said.

‘Oh, nothing,’ Eden said. ‘It’s just, I want her to be comfortable.’

‘She’ll be fine here.’

‘No she won’t. She’ll bloody well hate it. Sharing a ward with a bunch of strangers, only a little curtain for privacy? That’s not my sister.’

‘We’ll be moving her, son, don’t you worry,’ said Theo. ‘She might even be alright to come home. It depends on how well the procedure goes.’

Oscar didn’t like the idea of unsettling Iris during her recovery. ‘Sounds like you’re the only one who’s uncomfortable here, Eden.’

‘Puh!’

‘Iris won’t mind sharing a room for a while.’

‘Well, that just shows how little you know her, doesn’t it?’ Eden folded his arms. The sleeves of his jumper were so short that they rode up, revealing pale moley skin. ‘We’re not all capable of dossing down with the proletariat, you know. She won’t even drink water if it’s out of the tap.’ He turned to his parents, as if sharing a private joke. ‘Only been in the picture five minutes and already telling me he knows best.’

‘Alright, cut it out, the pair of you,’ Theo said. ‘You’re making a scene.’

‘You have to get her out of here immediately. She’ll have MRSA before you can blink.’

‘Eden, that’s
enough
,’ Mrs Bellwether said. Her voice was as firm as it had ever sounded; it echoed against the magnolia walls. Eden looked away, cowed.

‘When can we see her?’ Jane asked.

Theo rubbed his eyelids. ‘She’ll be in surgery for a few hours yet. After that, she’ll be groggy with the anaesthesia. Could take a while. You should all go home.’

‘We’ve only just got here,’ Oscar said.

‘I know, but you’ll be no use to anyone sitting around this place all night. You’ve all got work to do, I’m sure. Go home and sleep and come back tomorrow. She’s going to be fine—just broken bones, nothing that can’t be fixed.’

Eden pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘We’ll see how she is. If she’s okay, we’ll go back to the house. And if she needs us, there’s a bed-and-breakfast over the road. We’ll stay there for the night.’

‘A bed-and-breakfast? You?’

‘Needs must.’

‘Well, I thought it’d take a worse disaster than this—’

Theo looked at his son, mouth ajar. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I was just saying—’

‘Go home, Eden.’

‘I just meant—’

‘If you think there’s a worse disaster than your sister being in emergency surgery, my dear boy, I’d really like to hear it.’

Eden stayed quiet, staring at the floor. ‘She’s not dead. That’s all I meant.’

Jane gasped: ‘Eden!’

With this, Theo rose to his feet. Mrs Bellwether reached out for him, trying to hold him down, but her effort was limp, half-hearted. Eden seemed shocked by his father’s anger. He wilted into his chair.

‘You better hope those words don’t end up haunting you, son,’ Theo said, stooping over him. ‘All surgery,
any
surgery, is life and death. What the bloody hell is wrong with you? I’ve just about had it with your glibness.’

Eden gave an apologetic tilt of his head, but Oscar thought he could see him repressing a smile; his mouth seemed to draw upwards into the slightest, most imperceptible of sneers. Nothing seemed to register behind his eyes; he was not tearful, not obviously rattled nor openly remorseful. He just got up and said, ‘Well, if that’s all,’ and walked right out of the waiting room. The automatic doors parted and closed behind him. Nobody followed. Outside, the fog was still heavy, moving like the slowest cloud that ever passed across the sky.

Oscar couldn’t leave the hospital until he knew that Iris was okay, until he’d seen that for himself. He said goodbye to the others—to Jane, who offered her car for him to sleep in; to Marcus, who wrote down his mobile number and asked to be kept in the loop; and to Yin, who gave him the coins from his wallet so he might have some change for the coffee machine. If the truest measure of people is how they act in an emergency, then they were all good people, he thought. He could not say the same about Eden.

The Bellwethers stayed with him in the waiting room, until an RGN came through the swing doors and told them there was a more comfortable room upstairs, closer to the operating theatre. They went up silently in the lift. Theo’s arm didn’t move from his wife’s shoulder. He kept leaning to whisper consoling words into her ear. When they got to the family room, she lay down on one of the couches and Theo covered her with his dinner jacket. He went to sit beside Oscar, staring across at his wife as she slept. ‘We were at a function,’ he said, gesturing at his dinner suit almost apologetically. ‘Wren Library benefit. Hence the attire. My mobile rang and—well, here we are.’

‘I was sleeping,’ Oscar said. ‘Came as quick as I could.’

‘There’s no need to stay, you know. I can handle this. No harm will come to her on my watch.’

‘The harm’s already been done.’ Oscar stared down at the linoleum. ‘I can’t go home. I love her. I need to know she’s okay.’

This seemed to get through to Theo. ‘Yes, I suppose you do.’ He made a small sound with his nose—a tiny release of air. ‘Want to know the irony of all this?’

‘What?’

‘I thought if anything was going to derail her school year, it’d be
you
. Medicine doesn’t let you take any lateral steps. You can’t skip a lecture or not do the reading. You certainly can’t miss an entire bloody term. This is really going to set her back.’ He gave Oscar’s thigh a swift double-tap, getting up. ‘Shall I go and see if I can find anything out?’ He headed for the corridor, tucking in the loose tail of his shirt.

Oscar waited. The hands on the wall clock hardly seemed to move. In the corner of the room there was a tiny red table and a chair—a kid’s desk-set. White paper, crayons, and felt pens were spread out upon it and a few messy pictures had been taped up on the notice board, beside posters for group therapy, grief counselling. He thought about writing Iris a letter, something she could read when she woke up from surgery. He knelt down at the tiny table, took a sheet of paper and a pen, and tried to write, but the words just wouldn’t come. The clock crept around to three a.m. He closed his eyes and thought of her.

He imagined them together, drinking Pimm’s under the apple trees at The Orchard, lying in the lush grass. And he smelled the scent of her, still on his clothes—the same smoke and bergamot that clung to everything in his flat; he could smell her on the pages of every book she’d ever pulled from his shelf. He heard the voices of the King’s choir whenever he came through his front door, and the sound of Fauré whenever he crossed the Magdalene Bridge. She had made his life worth writing about. So he wrote it down the only way he could.

Around four, Theo came back. He gently nudged his wife awake with two poised fingers. ‘They just brought her out,’ he said, looking at Oscar. ‘The surgeon’s on his way.’

‘Did you see her?’

‘Only briefly. They were wheeling her into recovery. She looked fine. I think it went well.’

The surgeon—a towering black man with a moustache and a kindly face—came in to speak with them. His name was Mr Akingbade and he was still wearing his pale green scrubs. Oscar could see no bloodstains on him, just two large sweat patches underneath his armpits and one on his chest. A nurse in a blue uniform lingered near the doorway, her back against the dimmer switch.

‘It went as well as it could have,’ Mr Akingbade said. ‘I am very confident.’ In his slow, African voice, he told them he’d repaired the femur by drilling through the bone and driving a metal rod through the hollow, then stabilising it with a series of screws. It was an intra-articular fracture, a bad one, but not as bad as some he’d seen. ‘We’ll keep an eye on her, of course, but she’s going to be alright. In a few days, you’ll be able to take her home.’

Theo pulled Akingbade aside to discuss the finer details of the surgery; they talked in hushed, murmured sentences, all nods and gestures. The nurse stepped forward and said: ‘Would you all like to see her? You can’t go in, but you can look through the glass.’

They walked down the corridor and stopped outside a large room with a viewing window. Curtains were drawn across it on the inside, and the nurse went to slide them back. As the door opened, Oscar could hear the steady blips of a heart monitor.

Iris lay helpless in the bed, an oxygen mask over her mouth, both hands resting beside her. Her left leg was braced with a foam and metal contraption. The line of a drip was connected to the back of her right hand, and a series of round discs were stuck below the neckline of her hospital gown. She was still under the anaesthesia, but there was a serene expression on her face that he recognised. He knew then that she would be okay. He allowed himself to breathe out.

Mrs Bellwether had said nothing in the surgeon’s presence. Now, her eyes swelled and she seemed to sniff back an emotion that was rising in her—Oscar couldn’t tell if it was sadness or exhaustion. Then she turned to Theo: ‘Do you think the Mulgrews found it strange, the way we ran out like that?’

‘I’m sure somebody will have told them it was an emergency.’

‘I don’t want them to get the wrong impression. It was such a lovely benefit. I hope we didn’t put a dampener on things.’

‘Darling, that
really
doesn’t matter right now.’

‘We should go,’ Mrs Bellwether said. ‘It’s four in the morning.’

‘Are you staying, Oscar?’ Theo asked.

‘Just a bit longer,’ he said.

They said goodnight to him, and went down in the lift. Oscar stood at the window, peering in at Iris, soothed by the regular noises of her monitor. He watched her until he could hardly keep his eyes open any longer. On his way out, he gave his letter to the nurse. She told him she’d leave it on Iris’s bedside table.

    
P
ETRICHOR

Oscar didn’t go home. He went to Cedarbrook and slept on the futon in the staff room, because it was only four hours until the start of his shift. He took a shower and changed into a spare uniform, then ate breakfast with the early-bird residents in the day room with the sun half-risen. Somehow he managed to mumble and stagger through to lunchtime without anybody noticing his tiredness, until Mr Cochrane on the second floor asked him, with a tone of contempt, whether he was taking any recreational drugs. On his lunch hour, he went to talk with Dr Paulsen, who was eating his meal alone in his room, as usual. The word from Deeraj was that the old man wasn’t in a fine mood—he’d barked at one of the agency nurses when she tried to change his duvet. But Oscar saw no signs of Paulsen’s foul temper when he went in to say hello. The old man was standing at the bookshelf, reading
The Girl With the God Complex
. His body was leaned awkwardly—one hand gripping the book, the other gripping the shelf—and his cane was lying by his feet. ‘I don’t remember this book being so
interesting,’ he said, turning a page and peering at him. ‘Thanks for bringing it back.’