Sleight of Hand (6 page)

“Yes, I …” she says, then freezes. She remains totally immobile, staring at me, and then her eyes slip out of focus until she's looking
through
me. I notice that her left arm is trembling slightly.

“God you
are
cold,” I say. “Come inside.”

And then a freaky thing happens. Her eyes roll upwards until I can no longer see the pupils.

“Jenny?!”

Her hand slips from the arm of the chair, and I lurch to catch her as she crumples to the ground.

I couldn't decide whether to hit Mark or hug him. That was my main dilemma. I was feeling raw and emotional, and yet numb and dreamy all at once. My mother was dead and Tom was rabbiting on about some guy he had just met and how he
lived
at the gym which was reassuring I suppose in a
life-goes-on
kind of way. I was part-listening to Tom but mainly I was lost in my own thoughts about whether I should have brought Sarah along to her gran's funeral. She seemed too young to face death to me – I had wanted to protect her. But I was thinking now that I had only put off the inevitable. She would be back at the house soon enough, and I would have to start explaining where her gran was. Or lying.

We both turned around. I don't remember why, but Tom and I both turned around at the same moment, and there he was looking tanned and scared. And my reflex was to bitch-slap him so hard that he would have fallen over. Or to reach out and hug him. I just couldn't decide which.

Tom's presence, his crackling anger, didn't seem to leave the space required for me to work it out. So I did nothing. I just gaped, I think.

My mum was my last family member to go. I once had a brother, Frederic, Freddy, Fred, his name got shorter as the years went by until it vanished all together. He had a motorbike accident when he was eighteen. I was eleven. He died, as they say, instantly.

Dad died a couple of years afterwards. Mum always says … she always
said
he died of sorrow, but he didn't – he died of kidney failure.

And now Mum. She wasn't supposed to go yet. There had been no hint of it. She was one of those super-grannies you see whizzing around, shopping, gardening, walking … Most of the time, she had more energy than me. I honestly thought she would go on forever.

One day she went to Waitrose and when she got back, at the moment she carried the bag of shopping over the doorstep, her heart conked out. Just like that. Like a motor that had run out of petrol. I didn't know heart attacks could happen like that, without warning. A neighbour found her lying amongst her groceries and phoned the ambulance, and she phoned me as well, but by the time I got back she was gone. The groceries had been picked up too. They were all stacked neatly in the fridge. Even the tins and the toilet roll were stacked in the fridge.

I have never felt so alone in my life. If I hadn't had Sarah to look after, I'm not sure what I might have done.

Of course I had faced loss before. Freddy, and then Dad … my divorce from Nick, then losing my boyfriend and best friend both at once because the one ran off with the other … But I still had Mum. And Mum wouldn't leave me, no matter who she met, no matter what I did. The advantage of family. Well, that's what I thought.

With Mum gone that only really left Tom. I don't really know how I ended up with so few friends. Moving around, maybe. Nick drove a few away, as alcoholics do. Of course, I
knew
other people, but they were my daughter's playmates' parents really, my links with them as fragile as my
daughter's own friendships – which at four-and-a-half were
very
fragile.

And Tom, well, he never really stepped that far into my life, not the way Mark did. Tom had always been too wrapped up in himself to really get in there and make a difference, for good or for bad. But he was there for me when I left Nick. And he was there when Mum died, and he was the only person who was. I'll give him that.

It's a terrible thing to admit, but once Mark arrived, all I really wanted was for Tom to leave. I wanted to work out how I felt about Mark, and with Tom buzzing around like an angry wasp it was impossible to even think straight.

I had been in the back garden all day. I couldn't bear to be inside the house because it had death in it. That will sound irrational I'm sure, but I could sense it, hanging like a damp mist in every corner of the house. Everywhere I looked I could see a shadow of that missing person, missing from her kitchen sink, missing at the door to her bedroom, missing from the hall floor where she had, they said, collapsed.

Sarah thought the hotel was a great adventure, and seemed to assume that it was normal for Mummy to behave this way in the new environment. We lay on crisp white sheets with their memories of men on business trips and young couples and secret affairs, but not death. At least they didn't smell of death.

We zapped through a thousand channels of rubbish TV and shared chocolate from the mini bar. And I felt like a passer through. I felt like everyone else. I felt like
anyone
else. And that was a huge relief. If we could have stayed there forever, I think I might have done so.

I thought the house would be OK after the funeral though. Well, I didn't really, but I
hoped
it would.

It was a hellish day of course. I hadn't seen Mum die, so the vanishing coffin was my moment. It happened during prayer, but I opened my eyes and peeped through tears as it vanished from view, and I thought,
“Who will catch me now? Who will catch me if I fall?”
and then wondered if that wasn't a song lyric. It sounded corny enough. But true.

When we got back, the house didn't feel better, in fact, I couldn't even step inside the hall. Her shadow lay there strewn across the tiles like a police outline and I simply couldn't step over it so I went around the back and sat in the garden instead. I decided that getting really drunk would probably make stepping inside an achievable goal.

The air still crackled with Tom's irritation and then later, once he was gone, with Mark's simpering need for forgiveness and I still couldn't tune in to how I felt because I was busy thinking about my mum being dead, and someone somewhere burning her coffin, and Sarah coming home, and stepping inside the house, and having to overcome my own fear for her sake, and I just didn't seem to be able to find any spare brain capacity to decide whether to hit Mark or hug him. I think I slipped into my bitchy-and-aloof routine instead.

When Mark stood to lead me inside, I couldn't find the words to tell him how afraid I was of the shadows in the house. My drink tasted of Fairy Liquid – it suddenly reeked of the stuff – and my skin prickled with the cold. The garden looked, for some reason, fluorescent and blue tinged and it sounded, as if I had taken acid, like it was speaking to me – a deep incomprehensible voice coming
frighteningly from the lawn. I wondered if someone had drugged my drink, and then wondered
who
had drugged my drink.

And then I felt Mark's arms around me and wondered if and when I had taken the decision to hug him.

Penny comes running from the house, drying her hands on her pinny as she runs. “What's happened?” she asks.

As if
I
know. I am crouched beside Jenny; her head on my lap. The left side of her body, just the left side, is twitching. Her eyes are open, but her pupils have rolled out of view.

“Some kind of fit,” I say. My voice sounds calm, which surprises me. “Call an ambulance.”

“Perhaps she's fainted,” Penny says. “She's had a hard day. I haven't seen her eat …”

“She
hasn't
fainted,” I interrupt. “Call a bloody ambulance.”

Penny stands, hesitates, and then runs back inside, leaving me cradling Jenny in my arms.

I watch as she starts to foam at the mouth, a mixture of vomit and saliva. I tilt her head sideways so that it runs from her mouth onto my trousers. I wonder if I should slap her. People always seem to slap people who have fainted in films. Would that be the thing to do?

“Jenny? Jenny? God, I don't know what to do Jen,” I tell her, casting around in case anyone else is present, in case someone
else
knows what to do here. But we're all alone at the bottom of the garden.

A lump forms in my throat at the realisation that Jenny might actually be dying here – dying in my arms because I simply don't know what is wrong, or what to do.

Our lives have been so intertwined, almost obscenely so. Twenty years ago, Jenny was my last
ever attempt at dating a woman; her daughter was conceived on the day Steve and I had the car crash – the day Steve died. And Tom and I saved her from her violent ex and gave her a new life in France, for a while. I took that life away by running away with Ricardo. It almost seems logical, unsurprising even that she might die now with her head on my knees. “Please don't go, Jenny,” I say, stroking her hair, tears sliding down my cheek. “Please hang around. I need to make it up to you.”

Penny returns, the cordless phone in one hand. “She's twitching,” she says into the handset. “Yes. Like electric shocks. She's being sick too. Vomiting, yes. Drugs? I don't think so. Has she taken any drugs?”

I wipe my eyes with my free hand. “No, just alcohol,” I say.

“Just al … yes. Yes, quite a lot. Is she diabetic?”

I shake my head. “No, I don't think so. No, definitely not.”

“Or epileptic?”

“She's not anything. What we need is a fucking ambulance.”

“He says she isn't anything and that we need … yes.”

“It's on its way already,” she tells me. “OK. Yes. Yes. Hang on.” She crouches beside me and touches my shoulder. “He says to roll her on her side so she doesn't choke. Like they do on television. The recovering position.”

I move from beneath her and lower Jenny's head to the ground and do as I'm told. With her right arm bent upwards and her legs splayed, she looks like one of those crime scene outlines. And then I sit and push on her back to keep her in the recovery
position despite the violent twitching of her entire left side.

For ten minutes, nothing else happens. It's the longest ten minutes of my life.

Jenny continues to jerk and vomit and I sit and hold her.

“Nothing bad can happen to her like that,” Penny says. “That's what the man said.”

And then suddenly, the twitching stops and Jenny starts to snore as loudly as I have ever heard anyone snore.

I frown for a moment, and then look up at Penny. “I think that's better, yeah? That's got to be better.”

Penny nods at me wide eyed, and then after a moment's thought, she says, “She probably
needs
a kip after all that twitching,” and we both laugh stupid, nervous laughs.

As the sirens near, Penny runs to the front of the house to welcome them. Two guys in uniforms jog impressively around the side of the house looking like something from a TV documentary.

A forty-something neighbour in shirtsleeves appears over the fence. “Is she all-right?” he asks me.

I don't bother to answer, so when Penny arrives, he asks again. “Is she all-right?”

“We don't know love,” she says.

“She had a fit I think,” I tell the ambulance men. “She was twitching. All down her left side. And vomiting.”

“She's had a little accident as well,” Penny says, nodding at Jenny's stained dress.

“Is she on any prescription drugs?” one of the guys asks as the other checks her pulse.

“Not that I know of, but I wouldn't really know.”

“Recreational drugs?”

“No.”

“She had a bit to drink,” Penny tells them. “And a lot of stress. Her mother died.”

“Is she diabetic, do you know?” he asks.

“No, I don't think so. Almost definitely not,” I answer.

“Epileptic?”

“No, no. I don't think so.”

The older of the ambulance men lifts her head and pushes open her eyelids. “She's out. A seizure.”

“So we're taking her in?” his mate asks.

“Yep.” He lowers her back to the ground and then unrolls a stretcher beside her.

“What does that mean?” I ask. “Is she OK?”

“She's top of the world,” the older guy says.

“No, I mean …”

“She's had a seizure mate. But she's breathing,” he says. “Which is always a good start.”

They lift her onto the stretcher and then march off towards the front of the house. I start to follow them, but then pause. “I don't know where Sarah is,” I tell Penny.

“I'll stay. In case she comes home,” she says. “You go with her. Call me when you get there. Call me here at the house when you know something.”

“Thanks,” I say.

I squeeze her shoulder, and then, in a blur, I'm jogging to the front of the house and I'm sitting in an ambulance and I'm watching Camberley spin by and I'm thinking,
“Life! Jesus! You just never know what it's going to chuck at you next.”

Jenny comes to precisely as the ambulance pulls into the hospital. She opens her eyes, looks around and says, “I … Um. Mum?
Mark?”

“Hello sweetie,” I say, stroking her hand. “We're just arriving at the hospital.”

“Hospital?” she repeats.

“You had some kind of fit.”

“You're going to be fine,” the ambulance man says, bursting the rear doors open and jumping down.

In the emergency ward, they check her blood pressure and ask strange questions designed to test whether Jenny can still move and think: can you touch your nose with your left hand? Who is the prime minister of England at the moment?

Jenny's sassy, “Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, surely?” seemingly convinces them that her brain is still functioning. She is moved to a wheelchair and driven to a curtained enclosure.