The Other Half of My Heart (26 page)

‘Could I ride a horse, Dad?' he asks Fred, one day. His parents are valiant in visiting, even though the rehab unit is a three-hour round trip for them. He has tried to persuade them to come less often, unsuccessfully, and stopped when one of his fellow patients pointed out that maybe they came as much for themselves as they did for him.

‘Well, best to learn how to ride a wheelchair first,' Fred says.

‘Fred!' Fran had said, half horrified, then half laughing when she saw her son's tired smile. And the next day, when Fred arrived, he told Roddy how he'd had a look online and made some calls and had found out about adapted saddles and carriage-racing. He hands over the printouts, tells Roddy there is more to come, with brochures in the post. Roddy knows the slowness of their internet connection, and how temperamental the printer is, too. The pages in his hands represent hours of his father's life, on top of the driving from here to home and back again. But he can't stop himself from asking the next question:

‘Could I drive a car?'

‘Would you want to?' Fran asks. She finds herself flinching every time she gets in a car, whether she's driver or passenger. She's being fearless with almost everything that life is hurling her way, and there's a lot coming at her. There's the sight of her non-stop son pale in a wheelchair, there are calls from journalists, and the long conversations with so many people who need to say something about Roddy, his potential, what a shame it is. There are tears from grooms, there is the thought of Alice's devastated face on the first day after the accident as she waved her away from Tina's room: I'm sorry, Fran, I just can't look at any of you. But she cannot deal with anything to do with Roddy's cut-about, twisted car. When the insurance company had called about it that morning she'd handed the receiver to Fred, mute and pale, and gone to stand in the yard until the conversation was over.

‘I don't want to drive,' Roddy says, ‘but I don't want to have you drive me around either.'

‘You'll never get up the hill in a wheelchair,' Fred says with cautious, make-the-best-of-it cheerfulness, the sort that comes in handy when one of the horseboxes breaks down or a regular client decides to move their horses closer to their new home. Fran is starting to think that it might be just what they need now, too. Roddy pants out a laugh.

Fred finds out about adapted cars with automatic gearboxes and handles for pedals.

Roddy's next question is ‘Could I live on my own? I mean, independently.' He has no intention of living on his own, but he wants to be able to assure Tina that she won't be his nurse. Fred finds an architect who can adapt one of the barns.

‘Isn't this all going a bit quickly?' Fran asks, having just come from tea with Howard, who seems able to construct a sentence but not a conversation, and who says that Tina is saying nothing, being cajoled into movement and eating, being medicated into sleep. Roddy's therapist talks about shock, and delayed reaction, and a high brought on by surviving. Fran is waiting for the crash. The second crash.

‘I'm alive, Mum. I can't think of a thing that I won't be able to do if I put my mind to it.'

‘Of course,' Fran says. She pretends not to notice Roddy's long pauses to gather his breath between sentences, which give the lie to his brave words.

‘We need to get things organized so that they're ready when I get out of here. Apart from anything else, I can't live in the farmhouse again, unless I live in the kitchen.'

‘No,' Fran says. She is looking at everything on the farm in a new light, from the height of latches on stalls to the way that tack is stored and the three steps from the kitchen followed by the narrow turn that leads to the rest of the house.

‘I'm talking to the insurance people. We're nearly there,' Fred says. The lorry driver's firm has admitted liability. Now it's a question of damages, which means putting a price on Roddy's needs. No one has any idea how long it will take. Howard and Alice have opted to negotiate their case separately. Fred cannot imagine how you begin to put a price on the loss of a son.

‘I'm very proud of you, Roddy,' Fran says. She has tears in her eyes, although she always seems to, these days.

‘Don't be,' Roddy says. ‘If I was anything to be proud of we wouldn't be in this situation.'

‘It wasn't your fault.'

‘You weren't there.'

Fran has tried before to tell Roddy that it's not his fault. She takes a different tack. ‘It takes time.'

‘Time,' Roddy says. He's never been patient. He's having to learn. He doesn't like it. He checks his phone for messages, three, four times a day, although the one person he wants to hear from is Tina. She has a mobile phone now, Fran has told him, via Howard: she has his number.

Fred says, ‘That's what we all need. It will come right. As right as it can.'

They are adding a Sam-coda to every conversation. Anyone who says ‘life goes on' or ‘we just have to get on with things' must add, via words or facial expression, the understanding that they accept that for Sam Randolph, life is not going on; Sam is not getting on with things; Sam was not lucky, and it could have been no worse for him. It's exhausting. Sam would give anything to be exhausted right now.

On the day Tina is supposed to go home, after two months in hospital, she has a panic attack on the hospital steps. The nursing staff and her parents say that it's too soon, and not to worry, and they re-admit her.

It is too soon. The thought of being out in the world stops time and her faltering feet and her breath. But also, she's pushing so many things out of her mind. It's as though hospital life has given her a pass to ignore the big things she needs to think about: Sam, Roddy, her own stupidity, her own wretched lack of trust. When Roddy came to see her, she had been shocked by his cut-about face and his heavy legs locking him into unfamiliar stillness. She had wanted nothing more than to go back to the tumult of his homecoming from Devon, and his easy belief in her. If she had trusted her instinct, the way he looked at her, touched her, she would have known that Aurora was nothing for her to worry about, not for a minute. In her hospital room there was no mirror. When she got back home she knew she would have to look herself in the face.

If someone had offered her the chance of staying in hospital for ever, she would have taken it. She likes the idea of having to do nothing, ever again, except eat the food put in front of her and be examined from time to time, walking on a treadmill and doing her physiotherapy to make her strong, and then sitting in a chair in the dayroom watching the television jabber without taking anything in, to make her weak again. She likes it more than she likes the idea of going home, anyway. She has refused all visitors except Fran, and of course her parents, who she feels she can't say no to, as they have already lost one of their unmatched pair.

The day comes when she is driven home, though, to the place where she's lived all her life with her brother, to try to work out how to live without him, without Roddy, with her mother's soft sobbing, with her father's obsessive gardening the only movement in their new, static world.

The doctor has prescribed sleeping tablets, and she can't get used to being the last one to wake in the house. Her mother has refused medication and seems barely to sleep at all, sitting at the kitchen window, Flora always on her lap, the two of them watching the birds come and go.

But waking late is just one item on the long list of things that Tina can't get used to. There's the fat her body is gathering because she moves so little, for a start. She does her physiotherapy without fail, but barely leaves the house otherwise. Her shoulders, stomach, thighs, once hard and taut with muscle, are slackening.

She can't get used to the closeness of the air inside the house, or the dampness in the garden in this wet, subdued summer, or how long the days feel, with nothing to fill them.

She can't get used to Katrina's brave discomfort. Her friend refuses to be turned away, and then spends half an hour apologizing for almost everything she says, for fear that the mention of boyfriends, horses, even clothes would upset Tina, as though Tina has somehow forgotten everything that has happened since she got into Roddy's car with Sam and they set off for the Flood Ball, and one wrong word from Katrina will prostrate her again.

Most of all, because she was immobile in hospital when Sam was buried, she can't get used to the idea that he isn't going to drop in, call up, invite her to Oxford for something, pull her hair. It's not just because she wasn't there when he was buried, of course. It's because he has always been there. No other reason. Just that. Twins don't say goodbye to each other as much as other children, she remembers her mother saying, once, as the train pulled away from Oxford, and Tina had tears in her eyes. You went to school together, you went to clubs and choir practice together, you played together. Until you found horses and Sam found football, you were together most of the time. No wonder it feels strange to you to be without him.

The months go by, both dragging and flying, Tina in one room, her mother in another, not enemies, not at all, just too afraid to look at each other, to see each other's grief. Howard goes between them, a sad messenger, and then goes back to work, and shops in the town and brings the groceries in, so that Alice won't have to leave the house. And every evening the three of them sit around the television.

‘You know the doctors did say that when you're ready you can ride,' Howard says, one day as the two of them sit in the kitchen, drinking tea. Alice is dozing in the garden.

‘I can't ride,' she says as firmly as she can, so firmly that she doesn't think her father will feel it's worth arguing. The thought of getting on a horse appals Tina.

‘It might help you,' Howard says.

‘It won't,' she says. She gets up, such an ungainly effort that it makes the point better than words could. Horses aren't mentioned again.

Tina's first real walk is to the graveyard where Sam is buried. She goes as darkness approaches, her father silent at her side. Her bad leg drags and the muscles reknitting themselves in her hip, unused to slopes, pull and moan. It takes twenty minutes to get to the grave, which is a mound of weathering earth, a scattering of irises on the top.

Howard gathers them together again. The graveyard is flat, utilitarian, an extension from the churchyard where the graves are laid with, it seems now, no thought of how many were to follow, each death marked by space and grass and a headstone unlike any of the others. Sam, in contrast, lies behind rows that are much more uniform, granite and marble slabs for the most part, the occasional heart-shaped headstone, only now and then a flamboyant, showy angel.

‘We have to wait a while longer. For the headstone. It's not ready,' Howard says, uncertainly, not sure whether to be silent or interrupt his daughter's thoughts.

‘OK.'

‘The earth, I mean. The earth's not ready. Not – not settled.' Her father is twitching at her shoulder, worried. ‘Don't get cold, Bettina. Don't overdo it.'

‘It's OK, Dad.' She had hoped that knowing Sam was close to her again would make her feel comforted, peaceful, or as though she had made a step towards the thing that she refuses to call acceptance. But he doesn't feel any closer. The ground feels too dense, too final.

‘Why did we bury him?' she asks. ‘Why not cremate him? Then we could have scattered—' Her voice hesitates when she has to choose between saying ‘him' and ‘his ashes'. She can't manage to say either, so she stops. And she wonders: where? In their garden, on the Isis, in the pub?

‘I think your mother wanted him to – to be somewhere,' Howard says quietly.

‘But …' Tina puts her head in her hands. The pressure from tilting her body forward is making her pelvis ache. Sometimes she thinks she can feel the metal pins grating against her bones.

She can't articulate what she's thinking without it sounding terrible, and they are all of them cautious, now, of saying things that may add to each other's burdens. But what about when you die, she wants to say, will you still want what you've always said you wanted, to be scattered in a woodland? Will you feel you have to be with Sam? Does this grave mean that you're trapped here now, and can't go anywhere else?

‘We bought a plot for four,' her father adds, ‘although you might not want to be here. That's a long time away.' This last is more of a plea than a statement of fact. Tina thinks of how nothing from before Sam's death counts, now. Everything needs to be renegotiated and rethought.

Her father is there, hands extended, ready to bring her to her feet.

‘I know this is hard for you too, Dad,' she says, and her father nods, and they start the walk home, slowly, quietly, arm in arm. Tina thinks of how downhill ought to be easier than uphill, but it isn't.

Roddy has worked hard at getting well. It's a lot of work. There's more to being in a wheelchair than being in a wheelchair. He needs upper body strength, of course, but not just in his arms and shoulders. For the first six months the muscles in his neck ache constantly as they adapt to holding his head at a different angle. He has done exercises to strengthen his trunk, so that he can be stable without his lower body to help and support him in all the invisible, unappreciated ways that he no longer has at his disposal. His lungs no longer have the space to expand as they used to, so he has learned to breathe anew, and to think about his words before he says them, in case he wastes some of his diaphragm's forced energy and his lungs' great effort. He has taken a course in using a wheelchair on rough terrain, and after six months, when he is strong and safe enough to do everything he needs to do in a day, from getting out of bed into his chair to making a meal to taking a shower, he goes back to Flood Farm to start life in his new home.