Let's Get Lost (30 page)

“Is! Just hold on!” he pleaded, seizing my wrist and pulling me toward a deserted row of chairs.

Whacking someone with your plaster cast hurts you a lot more than it hurts them. I really wouldn’t recommend it.

“I mean it!” I shouted, struggling in his arms and making no effort to lower my voice, despite the goggle-eyed looks from a couple of cleaners desultorily mopping the floor. “I can’t bear it! This place . . .

the smell. The walls are closing in on me.”

“Stop it!” Smith said, giving me the tiniest of shakes. “Just stop it and come here.”

He pulled me down onto a seat and held me tight so I couldn’t wriggle free. I stilled instantly; it had been so long since he touched me like that. But his words weren’t as soft as his hands, which gently turned my head so I had no option but to stare deeply into his pretty blue eyes.

“You tell me everything right now. Or I’m going to leave you here and I’m never going to see you again.”

His voice crackled with ice, ready to break under the slightest pressure.

So I started to talk. It was hard at first—the truth. I was rusty. But I found that it got easier and easier. I started on the small stuff. School. From bullied to bully and back again. That led on nicely to the Guantánamo regime at home, the school brochures, my study-trashing exploits and why I could never go home again.

It was as if Smith had sneakily arranged for that doctor to inject me with a truth serum, so I even told him about Rob, and his hand tightened painfully on my shoulder, but he didn’t say anything; just let me carry on with the whole digging-my-own-grave soliloquy.

“. . . and I threatened her until she agreed to call you, and then you were there and now you’re here and

that’s everything,” I finished miserably, my throat aching from it all.

“It’s not everything,” he reminded me, shifting me in his arms again so he could get another look at my face; so I couldn’t hide. “Haven’t told me about your mum, have you?”

“Please, don’t . . .” I begged, shutting my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

“Tell me.”

So I did.

What I remembered more than anything was the beep of the monitors and the blinking numbers
that measured her heart rate and her blood pressure. The plastic drips arranged next to the bed.

One for drugs, one for fluid, and one containing this sickly-looking brown liquid feed that was
connected by a tube to her stomach.

She couldn’t feed herself because she wouldn’t wake up. But she wasn’t asleep. Sleep was
peaceful and she wasn’t. Her mouth was stretched wide open for the tubes, her eyes open and
unseeing, although we told Felix that she was looking at him.

We told Felix a lot of stuff. That she could hear him when he said that he loved her. And we told
him that when she had one of the periodic fits, she was squeezing his hand tight because she knew
he was there.

I don’t think she knew anything. I think she’d already gone and all that was left was a body that
had become a battlefield, that was fighting itself for each minute, each second that she stayed.

And Felix and Dad . . . it was like that bit in
Peter Pan,
“Clap your hands if you believe in fairies,”

because they were so sure that she was going to get better. Even as her kidneys weakened and her
liver packed up so her pretty face became a gruesome shade of yellow that clashed with the
purple bruises dotting her skin.

They wanted him to sign a DNR
—
Do Not Resuscitate. Do not recover. Do not return. He said,
very calmly, that they wanted him to sign her life away and he wouldn’t. Not even when those
numbers on the monitors kept dropping, and the fits became more frequent, and she didn’t open
her eyes anymore.

I couldn’t even sit in the Intensive Care ward. Couldn’t watch her try to die. So I hung out in the
relatives’ room with its stale gray carpet, nicotine-colored walls, and the faint smell of rotten food
from the fridge. Marie gave me a pile of magazines and I waded through them, filling in every
cross-word and puzzle I could find with a leaky felt-tip that Felix lent me. There was this lame
picture of a sunset on the wall, with a verse from the Bible scrolling over it in a cursive script: “

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

He sat there with his head in his hands after another showdown with the doctors and I read it out
to him. “It’s pointless and cruel, what you’re doing,” I said. “She doesn’t want to be here
anymore and you have to let her go.”

I was right, but it didn’t give me any satisfaction. Not even when he borrowed the leaky felt-tip
because he’d left his fountain pen at home and signed the forms with an angry flourish and a
bleak look.

But still she lingered on, and my whole world narrowed down to hurried meals from whatever
takeaway was open when we left the hospital. Snatches of sleep. Grabbing clothes out of the
laundry basket. Sneaking outside the main exit for sly cigarettes and nicking packets of gum from
the hospital shop. The phone ringing and ringing: her blood pressure was up, her clotting rates
were down . . . “We just called to see how Faith is, any news?”

He almost didn’t make it. He had to go into the University to see the dean when the numbers on
the monitors went into freefall. They made me go and sit with her and hold her hand because they
were still pretending that she could hear my voice. That she could feel my hand clutching at her
fingers as her body shook with involuntary tremors. I had to keep asking Marie to give her
another injection to make it stop.

Felix was clinging to my arm, hiding his face in my shoulder and crying, when he stumbled
through the big swinging doors, tie undone, jacket half on, half off.

“Is she . . . ?”

“No, she’s still here,” I said, and he darted off to find a chair because there were never enough
chairs.

We sat there, three wise monkeys, with the curtains drawn around us, the monitor beeping and
occasionally stuttering, which didn’t mean anything because a nurse would always come and reset
it.

The numbers kept dropping, and the doctor came and told us that the kidneys and the liver “were
no longer viable” and her heart simply couldn’t take the strain. She didn’t even look like her
anymore—she was exanimate, which means without animation. It means dead. Almost.

I could hear two people talking outside our cubicle, laughing about their plans for the weekend. I
turned my head away from the monitor, started torise so I could tell them to shut the fuck up
because there was someone dying and we didn’t want to know about their ten-pin bowling
tournament, when the beeping became one long, continuous punctuation of noise.

It was a terrible sound. Not the worst, though, because he moaned, this gut-wrenching exhalation,
and gathered up her broken, no longer viable body and started to cry. “My darling girl, my love,
my love, don’t leave me.”

I think Felix was huddled under the bed, because I could hear him sobbing, and then there were
doctors, nurses swooping down, but it was too late and I couldn’t stand it for another second.

The big swinging doors made this satisfying bang as I sent them crashing back into the wall. All
the way down that long, cruel corridor were more and more doors and they all banged as I pushed
through them. It wasn’t enough. There was a neat row of chairs lined up outside the relatives’

room, but they scattered like birds flying south for the winter as I kicked them— picked one up
and sent it hurtling into the air.

All I could feel was this suffocating, blinding rage, which made me want to lash out and scream
because it was too big to be contained.

But when I got out of the ICU there was nowhere to go. I crawled into this tiny alcove behind the
lifts, and that’s where Marie found me an hour later, banging my fists into the wall.

“And she took me back to the relatives’ room, and Dad and Felix were in there because they were tidying her up, and I just sat in this chair, next to him, and I couldn’t speak. ’Cause I knew that if I opened my mouth, I’d start screaming and I wouldn’t ever be able to stop.” I paused to take in a few, deep breaths. “He was sitting next to me, hunched over, and I remember thinking that he hadn’t shaved in days, and then he turned and he said in this really quiet voice so Felix couldn’t hear, ‘I will never forgive you for this.’ ”

Smith had been silent up until then, holding my hand and squeezing my fingers, but now he let go and I was adrift. “Why wouldn’t he forgive you? For making him sign the DNR form?”

I shivered inside my borrowed jacket, which was this horrible shade of puke green. “I guess, it didn’t really feel appropriate to ask him to go into details, y’know?” I sat up straight because I didn’t have him to lean on. “So is it my turn yet?”

He slumped back in the chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Your turn for what? Do you want a tissue or have you still given up crying for Lent?”

“Don’t change the subject,” I hissed, because if he thought he was going to get tears on top of everything else then he could bloody well think again. “It’s my turn to get you to be honest with me!”

“I have been honest with you!” he protested indignantly, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with that crock of shit.

“Did you get some freshman pregnant so she had to have an abortion? Is it true you’ve shagged half the campus? Did you ever see anything in me other than some skanky little ho-bag who’d let you get some touch because Molly wouldn’t?” I could have carried on until it got light, but he clamped his hand over my mouth.

“You meant more to me than that and you know you did, so don’t rag on what we had,” he said harshly, and I could have pushed out my lips so I’d be kissing his palm, but I didn’t. “If I take my hand away, will you shut up and listen to me?”

I raised my eyebrows meaningfully, but Smith wasn’t fluent in eyebrow, so I had to give him a muffled

“yes.”

“I love Molly,” he said, and I realized my heart still had a bit of breaking left in it. “I know it’s never going to happen, but she’s my friend and I care about her deeply and if you can’t handle that, then it’s your problem. And for what it’s worth, Is, despite all the crap you’ve piled on me, I care about you, too, despite what I said that day by the swings, but I’m not going to help you destroy yourself.”

I opened my mouth to demand a retraction, but he held up his hand warningly.

“Thank you,” he said ironically when I pouted but kept my lips together. “As I was saying, I won’t be that guy. And really you deserve better than me. You really do.” He smiled faintly. “Okay, you can say something now.”

“I don’t want anyone but you, why can’t you see that?” I tugged at his shoulder so he had to look at me, even though I was wailing loud enough to be heard in Hove. “You hate me!”

“I don’t hate you . . .”

“And I don’t care what my so-called friends think of you, I never did and even if all those stories were true, they didn’t stop me, did they? I still loved you.”

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he smirked a little at that and his arm crept around my shoulders.

“Is, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I’m not the low-rent, coffee-bar Casanova that you seem to think I am. Sorry about that.”

“I don’t believe you,” I insisted doggedly. “I mean, you said you’d only wanted this no-strings hookup with me . . .”

“Yeah, because you blew hot and cold the whole time,” he snapped. “You didn’t exactly act like you were after a relationship, and then you’re declaring your love for me and going into a full-blown hissy fit when I won’t say it back. I should have known you were only sixteen, you sure acted like it.”

It was really mean of him to twist the facts like that, especially when I wasn’t at fighting weight. “When will you stop hating me because I told you some stupid lies that I regret more than anything?”

We were locked in this verbal Ping-Pong match and just when I thought I’d slammed the ball over the net and had the advantage, he snatched it away from me.

Smith cupped my face in his hands, and because I was a sucker for all the things that weren’t to be, I leaned forward so he could kiss me. But kissing wasn’t on his agenda. Instead he moved in for the kill.

“And when are you going to stop hating your mum because she left you when you needed her most?” he whispered right in my ear.

I guess he thought it was game, set, and match or whatever you have in Ping-Pong. But he should have known better. Should have known
me
better.

Now it was my turn to stroke his cheeks, rub my thumbs over the sharp planes of his cheekbones so I could get close enough to . . .

“Fuck you, you bastard,” I said sweetly, and while he was still reeling from that blow, I swung out my hand and slapped his shocked face hard enough to make him jerk back from the impact.

Smith touched the hot red mark on his cheek wonderingly and then shut his eyes like he was exhausted.

“You know something, Isabel?” he asked in a gravelly voice. “You make it impossible to love you.”

27

I don’t think I’d ever felt as unlovable as I did at that moment. I felt ugly, inside and out.

Smith slid one seat over to make absolutely sure that I wouldn’t accidentally touch him, and yawned as if all the drama of the last half hour had wiped him out.

I craned my neck to look at the clock. It was edging toward three-thirty A.M. “It’s late,” I muttered.

“You should go.” I’d learned my lesson now. Blabbing out your darkest secrets just gives people the knife they need to stab you in the gut. First Dot, now Smith . . .