Try Not to Breathe (4 page)

Alex wanted to make it clear that she really wasn’t a reporter, but thought better of it.

“What I
can
tell you about Amy,” continued Dr. Haynes, “is that she breathes by herself, she has awake time and she sleeps, she is off the feeding tube and we’ve registered a degree of brain activity that shows she is not ‘brain dead’ as the papers used to love calling her.”

Alex scribbled on her notepad. “So has she done the yes-and-no tennis experiments?”

Peter Haynes frowned a little. “We’ve tried. We registered an ability to imagine, but the brain responses were somewhat haywire, and she became extremely distressed. You certainly couldn’t interview her via an MRI scan, if that’s what you were getting at. Not in her current condition.”

“No, I hadn’t even thought of that at all. I mean, it would be amazing if it could happen but I understand if it can’t.”

“It can’t,” he said emphatically. “Now, we have visitors who come and sit with the patients and talk to them and that seems to have a slight effect on Amy, but having gone through such a high level of trauma, we haven’t run many more tests on her. We’re still taking things slowly, as she’s prone to shock. No next of kin slows things down too.”

Something buzzed sharply on the doctor’s belt.

“Sorry, Alex, but I’m wanted in another part of the hospital.”

“I really appreciate you giving me your time. I’ll let you know when the article is published.”

As Alex shook Peter’s perfectly dry, smooth hand again, she wondered if he ever read his own press, if he would read her piece on Amy Stevenson. If she managed to get it published. If she managed to get it written.

The doctor had bolted in the opposite direction and Alex headed to Amy’s ward before she could talk herself out of it.

The doctor’s office lay at the heart of a coil of corridors, which eventually opened out into a main walkway. The shiny floors squeaked under every footstep, and the smell of chemical hand cleanser prickled Alex’s nose. She couldn’t begin to calculate how many ill people there were right now, all coughing and complaining into this same block of warm air.

As she came to the thick double doors of Bramble Ward, Alex dropped a big glop of disinfectant hand gel so it sat like ketchup in her palm. She rubbed it slowly and carefully into her skin.

She pushed the doors open, passed the empty reception desk and tiptoed quietly up to the open office door. Giving a gentle knock, she waited for the nurses to finish their conversation. Inside, the radio was burbling with mid-morning local news updates. A breezy voice announced the arrest of a wanted rapist, the results of a successful school fundraising event and the timescale for extended roadworks on the A21.

After a minute or so, she knocked again. Eventually one of the nurses came out as Alex had made a fist to knock one last time.

“Oh sorry, you should have knocked,” said the nurse, despite looking straight at Alex’s unfurling fist.

Alex tried to peer into the office to see if the ward manager she’d met last time was in there, but she was nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Alex Dale, I’m a journalist. I visited before because I’m writing about Dr. Haynes’s work.”

“I’m Gillian Radson, and I wasn’t aware there’d be journalists on my ward today,” replied the nurse, pursing her lips.

“I’ve just been interviewing Dr. Haynes and he’s agreed that I can write a piece on one of your patients, Amy Stevenson.”

“I’ll have to check that with him,” replied the nurse.

“Sure,” said Alex, “but while I’m here I wondered if I could sit with Amy?”

“She has someone with her at the moment.”

Alex tried to see into the corner cubicle, but there were pillars in all the wrong places. “I didn’t think she had any relatives?”

Nurse Radson crossed her cardigan over her chest, folding her thick, flat arms. “He’s not a relative. He’s one of our sitters.”

She sighed at Alex’s blank expression. “Volunteers. They come and spend time with the patients.”

“Oh, okay. Maybe I could speak with him?” Alex suggested, opening her bloodshot eyes as widely and innocently as she could manage.

Alex sensed the answer was no, and that if the nurse could speak freely, the answer would be more like “fuck off.”

“Wait there,” she sighed. “I’ll go and ask.”

Nurse Radson, with her apple tummy upholstering the tight, sexless striped blue uniform, marched off toward Amy’s cubicle. Inches at a time, Alex shuffled along so that she could see Amy’s curtains clearly, noticing the man’s foot tapping under the gap.

The nurse pulled the curtain back sharply and Alex could see that a tall, sandy-haired guy was sitting on the bed, holding Amy’s hand. He was wearing a blue hoodie with a hospital-issued visitor’s badge dangling from his neck. As the sitter dropped Amy’s hand, Alex could see the nurse stooping to talk in his ear. The man and the nurse both shot Alex a look at the same time. After a minute, the nurse came back over to where Alex was trying to look nonchalant.

Perhaps weighing up whether to complain about Alex moving from her original spot, the nurse shook her head and said, “I’m sorry but he says the volunteering he does here is personal and he’d rather not talk to you.”

“Can I have a quick word and explain that I can interview him anonymously?” Alex tried.

“No, look…” The nurse took a deep breath, her irritation barely concealed. “I’m sorry, but that won’t be possible. He gives his time out of the goodness of his heart and he’s a nice man.” She rolled the words around her mouth slowly. “I’m not going to risk his goodwill by letting people bother him when he’s already said no.”

Knowing when to call it quits, Alex passed the nurse her card to give to the sitter, just in case, and slinked out of the ward. It was almost noon now anyway, and she needed to get home.

J
acob’s heart raced. He had been sitting with Amy for too long, he knew that. Nonetheless he hadn’t expected that nosy nurse to yank the curtains back so suddenly.

He hoped it wasn’t obvious that he was holding Amy’s tiny hand, something he didn’t do with most of the patients he sat with.

As casually as possible, Jacob uncurled their fingers and dropped her hand, palm facing up, fingers bent.

Gillian Radson was full of her usual bluster: “I’m sorry to interrupt but there’s a journalist over there and she wants to talk to you,” she puffed.

Jacob was still recovering from the interruption. “A journalist wants to talk to me? Why would a journalist want to talk to me?”

“Don’t worry,” soothed the nurse, “she’s writing an article about one of the doctors and she’s interested in this one’s story. She wanted to sit with Amy but I explained that you were with her so she asked to speak to you.”

In unrehearsed synergy, Jacob and the nurse both shot the journalist a look.

Jacob had been thoroughly unprepared for this. He stared at the nurse, waiting for her to tell him what to do.

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to her, I can get rid of her.” Nurse Radson smiled.

“No one knows I come here,” he faltered. “Volunteering is a private thing and, to be honest, I come here in work hours and I could get in a bit of bother if it got back to my boss.”

The corners of Nurse Radson’s mouth twitched.

As he watched her thick buttocks heave up and down like piston engines, marching back to the visitor, Jacob finally exhaled. He stood up, and slowly and quietly tugged the curtains to a close again. Then he sat back down, picked up Amy’s skinny hand and pressed its cold skin to his face.

He said nothing because there was nothing new to say, but he closed his eyes and drank in her almost vanished smell. With the lightest touch he kissed her paper-thin skin and slowly laid her hand palm-down on her stomach.

After stroking her newly brushed hair and coughing away the lump in his throat, Jacob backed out and took a long blink.

He was ready to leave, but Jacob couldn’t let Amy be his last patient. There were currently nine patients, so he let Amy be his seventh and chose the two nearest the door as penultimate and final.

There was an extra incentive to do it this way; patient number eight—Claude Johnson, sixty-two—had an incredibly devoted wife. Nine times out of ten she would be there, holding Claude’s red raw hands, talking to him about yesterday’s
Quincy
or rolling her eyes about the neighbors. Jacob would offer to sit with Claude, to give Julie Johnson a break, but she never accepted.

Patient nine, Natasha Carroll, was a happy ending. She was forty-two, and still striking. Her hair was a light gold, with delicate graying strands that sparkled silver in the sunlight.

Natasha had been in this ward for a few years and before that she had been in intensive care. Jacob remembered the day she was transferred in. At the time, he had been sitting with Joan Reeves, since deceased. It wasn’t long after he and Fiona had returned from their honeymoon and the fading tan on his hands had looked ridiculous against Joan’s lilac-white skin.

Today, Jacob sat down on the chair next to Natasha’s bed. He placed his vending machine Dr Pepper bottle—its inch of brown liquid now warm and unwanted—on the small beech bedside cabinet.

Natasha had been propped on her side slightly, her eyes open and peaceful. Her knees pointed toward Jacob’s chair. Golden hair lay slightly matted at the back but curled in waves around her neck and mouth. With the sunlight oozing through the nearby window, she looked like a stained glass Madonna.

“Hello, Natasha,” Jacob said in a hushed tone. He pulled the curtains casually, leaving them askance so that the nurses could see him going about his business, behaving breezily.

He knew more details than he wanted to about some of the patients’ backgrounds, mainly from their abandoned partners. About others, like Natasha, he knew very little.

She looked so peaceful bathed in the pastels and whites of the hospital. She wore a dressing gown that looked like cashmere or something similar, and silk pajamas from a collection of similar pajamas that he knew was several pairs deep.

Some of the patients Jacob had sat with over the years had faces filled with trauma. Gargoyles bearing the weight of witness. Not Natasha, she looked like a contented house cat, totally assured of comfort and safety.

Over the years, Jacob hadn’t seen anyone else visit Natasha, but every once in a while a new vase of incredibly expensive-looking flowers would appear at her bedside and birthday cards would tumble over themselves annually.

He talked in his hushed but singsong hospital voice, telling Natasha all about Fiona’s baby bump, and his job. Talking to her about things he never broached with Amy.

Natasha lay coiled, silently purring while Jacob listed the names Fiona was currently favoring for the baby (Archie and Harry for a boy, May and Elvie for a girl). Time passed easily, and the steady flow of one-way conversation and the simplicity of Natasha’s expression helped take the weight out of the overall hospital experience.

It was past noon and his time was up. Smiling at Natasha a final time, Jacob swept up his Dr Pepper bottle and breezed to the clunky yellow bin, swinging its lid up and dropping the bottle inside with a thud.

Attracted by the noise, Gillian Radson bustled over, cardigan flapping.

“Jacob,” she puffed. “I’m glad I caught you.”

She smiled knowingly into Jacob’s frown, waiting just a few seconds too long.

“The journalist left this card for you, she seemed quite insistent that you might change your mind about talking to her.” The nurse pressed the sharp corners of the business card into Jacob’s sweating hand.

“Well, okay. I’ll see you next week, then.”

As Jacob paced out, pushing the double doors of the ward with some force, he looked down into his palm. The card was thick with slightly embossed lettering in a heavy black typeface.

ALEX DALE

Freelance journalist

Tel: 07876 070866

Email: [email protected]

15 Axminster Road, Tunbridge Wells TN2 2YD

A
my bit her lip, tasting the tiniest trace of cherries. She stared up at him from under her hair. Still wearing her uniform, she could feel her knickers cutting into her leg where they’d been pulled out of shape, a new sting between her thighs, the smell of rubber and sweat on her fingers. Under her legs she felt a baby-soft duvet.

This was without a doubt the worst thing she’d ever done. The meanest, the most secret.

Poor Jake. He didn’t deserve this, he was such a gentle, trusting boy. Just a kid, and she punished him for not treating her like a woman. She hadn’t really enjoyed being treated like a woman.

She heard the soft patter of socked feet in the hall and gasped. A shadow crept under the door and scurried away, and the distant sound of bedsprings twinkled. Amy looked up at him for reassurance.

“Don’t worry,” he said, in his deep drawl. “The others won’t be back for hours.”

Amy sat up, snapping her knees together. “I thought we were alone.”

“Don’t worry,” he smiled, “he knows what’s what. We won’t be disturbed.”

Her secret was out of place in this room. A dog-eared box of LEGOs sat on top of the wardrobe, a framed
Star Wars
picture hung above the bed. It was pretty neat, and smelled like sweet musk mixed with a tinge of new sweat.

Amy stood up with a sigh and straightened her skirt. It had happened. Finally. And now she just really wanted to be with her mum, to have a bath and pretend to be a kid for a little longer.

“I need to get home or I’ll get in trouble.”

“Let’s get going, then.”

“It’s fine, thanks. I’d like to walk.”

“No, Amy.” He shook his head. “Let’s give you a lift.”