Try Not to Breathe (3 page)

Drinking had cemented their relationship, but it wasn’t everything, and it became less important to Matt over time. They talked and laughed and did ferociously well throughout their courses (his Criminology, hers English Literature), partly through frenzied discussion, partly through competitiveness. From the very first month, it was
them
. Not he or she, always them.

It had been nearly two years since the divorce was finalized, and she still defaulted to “we,” her phantom limb.

Every afternoon, before the first glass touched her lips, Alex turned off her phone. She had long closed her Facebook account, cleaned the web of any digital footprints that could allow drunken messages to Matt, his brothers, his friends, her ex-colleagues, anyone.

Alex had a few rules come the afternoon: no phone calls, no emails, no purchases. In the dark space between serious drinker and functioning alcoholic, there had been no rules. Cheerful, wobbly pitches had been sent to bemused editors; sensitive telephone interviews had taken disastrous, offensive paths; Alex had evaporated friendships with capitalized, tell-all emails and blown whole overdrafts on spontaneous spending sprees. And far worse.

Things were better now. She was getting semi-regular work, she owned her home. She’d even taken up running.

At least once a week she planned her own death, and drafted an indulgent farewell letter to Matt and the child she’d never planned, the child they would now never have.

She sat down at her desk and opened her Moleskine notepad.

“Amy Stevenson.”

Alex had a story, and it was far more interesting than the one she had been sent to write.

J
acob loved his wife, he was sure of that most of the time, but when she talked for forty-five unbroken minutes about an extension they didn’t need and couldn’t afford, the lies felt slightly softer on his conscience.

He watched Fiona’s mouth moving, forming the words so resolutely. There were just so many of them, so many bloody words, that they blended into one, ceaseless noise.

Her pink mouth was now entirely for talking. How long had it been since those lips had softened for a kiss? Or whispered something sweet in his ear?

“Are you even listening to me?” Her fierce brown eyes filled with salt water, ready to burst their banks without notice. How long had it been since they’d made each other laugh until tears squeezed from the corners of their eyes?

“Of course I’m listening.” Jacob pushed his half-finished cereal bowl away, trying desperately not to be outwardly aggressive, or passively aggressive, or break any other unwritten golden rule.

When Jacob and Fiona had first met, they talked about everything. Well, almost everything. She had fascinated him, she always had so much to say and he liked to hear it.

As boyfriend and girlfriend they had sparred, joked, talked into the next morning. On their wedding night, they had failed to consummate the marriage, wrapped in each other’s words until they realized it was the next day, Fiona’s legs tangled in her ivory dress train, faces sore from smiling and laughing, sobering with the sun.

But Fiona had stopped asking about his work, stopped expecting to be told anything. Now they wrangled over inane household topics, and not much else.

When had it happened? At the start of the pregnancy? Before?

She had certainly been myopic about ovulation dates and optimum positions but she had still been Fiona, they had still laughed and talked.

It went beyond disinterest.

Fiona used to grill him, question the who, where, when of meetings and social activities, cross-referencing what she was told with diary dates, previous conversations, outfits he’d chosen, throwaway remarks.

“So exactly who is going to this Christmas party, then? How come it’s not wives and girlfriends? It’s normally wives and girlfriends…are
any
wives and girlfriends going?”

Maybe she didn’t care now. Fiona had her little nugget growing in her belly, and nothing else mattered. If so, that flew in the face of the Fiona he had fallen in love with, the Fiona he had married. And for all the pressure that had led to it, he had been over the moon when the second blue line appeared on that fated stick many months ago. Terrified, but over the moon.

Now sitting at the tired breakfast bar, he watched his wife unsteady on her feet. Her sense of balance had been eroded over the last few weeks as her belly had ballooned with a new urgency.

Jacob sighed. Every conversation nowadays led to this topic: the small, hellish kitchen.

The new kitchen extension would fix everything: the storage problem, the tricky access to the garden, where to keep the pram, tension in the Middle East.

The new extension was everything. And if Fiona didn’t get it, however impossible the sums were, the world would explode. He couldn’t be entirely sure that it was his baby in that cartoon belly, and not a ticking time bomb.

The 1930s semi in Wallington Grove, Tunbridge Wells, had seemed like a palace when they moved in, just two years ago. It had taken prudence, abstinence and overtime to save a deposit, and the newlyweds knew that work and salary had to be the main focus for at least three years; they had to feed the machine. Fiona had agreed wholeheartedly, absolutely, the mortgage was a stretch, it would take two full-time salaries to service it and they both must do their bit.

Some eighteen months later, after a concentrated campaign veering from the subtle to the tearful, they had started to try for a baby and conceived almost instantly. And now the baby needed an extension.

“Fi, look, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be shitty but I really have to go. I’ve got some awful meetings today and my head’s all over the place.”

“Sure,” she said, “whatever.”

She didn’t ask for more than that. Why didn’t she ask for more than that now?

They both needed to leave. Fiona for work as a graphic designer, Jacob for the hospital, where he did not work.

A
my buckled in to the passenger seat and looked across at him. He caught her looking and smiled, just briefly, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked back to the road. As he changed gear, he brushed her skirt farther up her thigh with the palm of his hand, sending a shiver across her shoulders.

Amy wasn’t used to such direct attention. Jake would skirt around while he built up courage until the frustration became so loud in her head that she had to make the move instead. What she really wanted, what she was pretty sure she wanted, was for someone to desire her, to really want her. Someone to just
take charge
.

She looked at his hand clamped on her knee as he stared dead ahead at the road. Dark hairs were peeking out from the end of his shirt cuff and his fingernails were clipped into perfect straight lines.

He had been her knight in shining armor just weeks before. Appearing around the corner and whisking her away from that bloody man. Jake had already zipped past in the backseat of his mum’s car, strapped in tightly. Her friends had gone off cackling about something and she’d been left to run the gauntlet of that creep and his pleas. Again. Amy had sworn at him and told him to leave her alone. Eventually he’d slunk away, hissing under his breath and kicking loose pieces of grit into the road. Her shoulders had sagged with a mixture of relief and regret, tears falling hot.

And then her secret had appeared, right there in the street near her school, bold and tall and striding toward her. He’d swept an arm around her waist and led her into a gateway, brushed the hair out of her eyes and asked, “What’s wrong? Can I help?”

“It’s my dad,” she’d said, and started to cry.

“What about your dad?” he’d asked, gently lifting her chin so her wet eyes were gazing up at his frown. “Does he hurt you?”

“No,” she’d sobbed, “no, it’s nothing like that. It’s not my dad I live with.” She’d wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “Bob’s my step-dad. I’m talking about my real dad.”

“Listen, fathers are complex beasts. It’s not your fault, okay? Let me give you a lift home and you can tell me all about it. All right, Amy?”

“All right.”

He’d opened the passenger door for her, and she’d melted into the seat.

He hadn’t laid a finger on her that day and she’d not stopped wishing he had.

A
lex Dale woke up with dead legs and a clammy forehead. She didn’t remember throwing her duvet off the bed but it was discarded between the mattress and the wall.

She was lying on the side nearest the door. Matt’s side.

In the abandoned space next to her was a dark, wet oval, sharp to the nose. She was wearing her pajama top, not her bottoms, which lay farther down the sheet in a wrinkled dank pile. She had absolutely no recollection of putting them on, or taking them off.

Alex didn’t feel ashamed anymore, it was too commonplace to keep reacting. As long as she was correctly “managing” herself, no one would be in her bed, so there were no reflections of disgrace to worry about.

The morning routine of stripping the bed, binning the DryNites pad, bundling everything into the washing machine, double-dosing the fabric conditioner, padding naked back up to the bathroom to flannel wash her legs…it was normal now. Autopilot.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she pulled her running things over still-damp skin, grabbed her water bottle, tucked her key into her bra and ran out the door.

Putting one leg in front of the other, then the other leg in front of that. If she could do it once then she could do it for half an hour.

As the morning grew in front of her, she jogged slowly and steadily along the narrow pavements of her quiet corner of Tunbridge Wells. Little dogs skittered out of her way and she jumped into the road to avoid pushchairs dangling with changing bags and other weaponry.

She’d done 5Ks, 10Ks, even half-marathons. Never a full marathon though. Those deserved respect. Sobriety. On jogs and races she ran slowly and steadily, competing against no one but the desire to stop. Her name was listed on hundreds of race results. Alexandra Dale, unaffiliated senior woman.

Back home and showered, Alex made poached eggs on toast for breakfast. Lunch would be liquid, and dinner would be light. Sometimes, dinner was whatever she could tear with her hands and shove into her mouth, swaying in the kitchen.

At 10:20 a.m., Alex pulled her Polo into the Tunbridge Wells Royal Infirmary car park and found a space in the farthest corner, under the shadow of an old oak tree. Still seated, she dug around in her bag, enjoying the smell of rich leather that rushed to greet her.

She controlled her condition fairly successfully now but the divorce two years ago had thrown her from the wagon and straight onto the center of the tracks, where she stayed for three or four weeks.

Several spending sprees had ripped through the last of her savings before she finally grabbed the reins back, although the Chloe Paddington handbag was one drunken Harrods purchase she didn’t regret so much, it was beautiful.

Alex blanched as she flicked the driver’s mirror down to reflect her gray face. She rubbed a palm’s worth of moisturizer into her sallow skin and painted on a complexion. She added a rosy blusher glow along her sharp cheekbones and used a pink and brown eye shadow palette to fool the mirror that she had warm, sparkly eyes rather than black holes.

Lip gloss, powder and paint, she was ready to do her job.

“Alex, thank you so much for your patience, I’m sorry we’ve had to break arrangements the last couple of times.”

More like five times,
thought Alex, as she smiled warmly and shook Dr. Haynes’s hand.

His hands were perfect doctor’s hands: cool and soft.

“No problem, I know you’re very busy.”

Dr. Haynes, the leading expert on vegetative states, closed the door softly, and gestured to a battered leather chair in front of his paper-strewn desk.

Alex sat down, jumping as a rush of air trumpeted its way out of a hole in the upholstery.

Dr. Haynes’s office was the professional equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom. On a sagging office chair in the corner lay a pile of abandoned, crumpled clothes. A CD player perched precariously on a shelf, its drive drawer open like a yapping mouth. Various certificates and awards were dotted around the walls, the crooked frames taking the edge off any gloating.

On the dark wooden desk sat a dusty laptop with a tangled cable and a photo frame with its back to Alex. Piles upon piles of paper teetered like jerry-built skyscrapers.

Aware that she had been staring while Dr. Haynes sat waiting, Alex hurtled into her prepared spiel.

“Dr. Haynes—”

“Call me Peter.”

She smiled. “Peter, the hospital was kind enough to send your biography over and, of course, I’ve read up about your work. But I’d love to know what drives you to explore this area of medicine?”

Peter Haynes exhaled and leaned back in his own battered leather chair. He looked Alex in the eyes, breathing deeply before raising both his elbows and cupping the back of his own head.

Alex knew that the doctor was forty-one, but he looked older. He had deep rivulets under his bloodshot eyes and his eyelids were a translucent dove gray. His sort-of-curly, sort-of-straight hair resembled a guinea pig sitting on his head, digging its paws into his face.

“The thing is, Alex, I don’t really think about my work as an area of medicine to be explored. I think it’s more about exploring people. It’s important because people are important and you don’t become a doctor if you don’t value human life.”

Alex nodded and gestured for him to carry on.

“The stuff I’m doing now fascinates me because it challenges our understanding of the line between consciousness and death.”

When he spoke, the twitching and awkward grimaces that had punctuated his small talk disappeared. Peter Haynes lowered his hands again and flexed his fingers on the scratched desk.

Alex wondered if this was a rehearsed monologue. She didn’t care if it was, so long as she got the quotes she needed and could push on to asking about Amy Stevenson.

“When it comes to our understanding of the mind, we’re doing a poor job. I don’t mean psychology, I mean the nuts and bolts biology of the brain and how that governs behavior, thought and communication. There’s so much we don’t know but as soon as someone loses the ability to communicate in the ways that we’re prepared to accept, they’re lost to us.”

The fire in Peter’s eyes cooled, he slumped back in his chair and seemed to look through Alex to the door.

“Is it true that about forty percent of diagnoses of vegetative states are incorrect?” Alex asked, hoping to show that she had done her research.

“Oh numbers, you journalists are obsessed with headline numbers.” He waved his hand dismissively through the air. “We don’t know. But we do know that a large chunk of people who used to be called ‘vegetables’ actually have functioning minds. Maybe a fifth, maybe more, for every scientist you find that thinks it’s a fifth, you’ll find another who dismisses the whole damn idea.”

“I’d love to understand how you actually recognize communication. You say they can communicate but not in the way we’re accustomed to, so what does their communication look like?”

“Well, they have the capacity to think and to want to project those thoughts. It’s a little like a computer intranet, do you know what I mean by ‘an intranet’?”

“Yes,” Alex said, hoping the explanation only involved a very basic understanding.

“Okay, so within an intranet you have information moving around and you can interact with that data—or memories, thoughts—but you can’t share that data outside of the intranet, it’s a closed loop, if you will.”

“Got it,” Alex said.

The doctor paused. “Have you? Yes, well, these patients have data in there, they have memories, and they have a network of thoughts whizzing around, they just can’t share them outside of that closed loop. So it’s down to us, if you’ll pardon the stretched analogy, to hack into that network and see it working for ourselves.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Brain scans, MRIs mainly. We take a look at the patients’ brains at rest and we capture which parts of the brain are lighting up. Very few of them, generally. So then we start to ask things of the brain. We ask it to imagine and to remember. We ask simple things that will be easy for even a mildly functioning brain with some everyday memories to work from. Sometimes, especially in the younger patients who were active more recently, we’ll ask them to imagine playing a sport, such as tennis.”

“And can all the patients do this?”

“No, and it’s really sad when you see that all the lights are out. But on the other hand, you can’t imagine the sheer joy of seeing a supposedly vegetative brain light up and show imagination, memory and willingness to take part. And you see, Alex, that’s what I’m in this for.”

“So can you tap into any of their original ideas and memories or just watch them reacting to stimuli?”

“Well, here is the really exciting stuff, especially for the patients’ families. Once we establish a number of different parts of the brain and how to generate a response in those, we can start to ask questions and tell them to imagine playing tennis for ‘yes,’ or lying in warm water for ‘no.’ Essentially, they can have a conversation with us, albeit a simple one.”

“That’s incredible. So can all the patients that show this cognitive function communicate like this?”

“Sadly not; in fact, very few can, but the more we understand about the process, the more we can help the others.”

Alex bit her lip and the tingle of blood helped to focus her mind. “Peter, I’d like to ask about a specific patient of yours. When I was last in the ward, I noticed that you were treating Amy Stevenson.”

She glanced at his face for signs of a reaction, but he remained impassive.

“I’m the same age as Amy,” Alex continued, “and I grew up here, so I remember her abduction really vividly. I feel bad admitting it but I had forgotten all about her.”

“That’s perfectly normal,” the doctor said abruptly, “all life can possibly do is move on around these patients.”

“Well, yes, I suppose…But when I left here the other day, I couldn’t stop thinking about Amy and her situation. I’d really like to write a follow-up piece on her case and I’d love to ask you or your staff some questions about her story.”

Alex held her breath.

“That wouldn’t be a problem in theory.” He paused, looking briefly at the door. “There are lots of limitations on what my staff could tell you about Amy, though; she’s protected by confidentiality like any other patient.”

“I’m not interested in muckraking or upsetting her family. In fact, if you’ve got contact details for her parents, I’d really like to talk with them too.”

Dr. Haynes fixed his eyes on Alex. Tilting his head slightly quizzically, he said: “Amy doesn’t have any family.”

Alex sat back in her chair. She had hoped the hospital staff would act as a go-between and give her a leg up with the relatives.

“I remember her mother on the news though. What happened to her?”

Peter stood up suddenly so that the wheels of his chair squawked sharply.

“Her mother died some years ago, not long after Amy was attacked. Maybe a year…”

“Oh…Oh I’m sorry,” Alex said, offering condolences to no one. “What about the stepfather?”

“I have no idea. But if you’d been accused of trying to kill your stepdaughter, would you stick around?”

The doctor was blunt, but he was absolutely right, precious few families could survive having a child torn from them, much less like that.

“Would you be able to pass my details to her next of kin?” Alex asked, reaching into her bag for a business card.

“Amy doesn’t really have a next of kin. She’s the responsibility of the hospital trust and, ultimately, the local authority.”

The more Alex learned, the more crushed she felt. Amy had been a normal, healthy teenage girl, walking back from school to her family home.

“God, this is just so sad,” Alex blurted. “I suppose you become desensitized to these sorts of details in your job?”

Peter Haynes was edging closer to his door, work clearly on his mind, but he seemed affronted. “I don’t think you become desensitized. I haven’t anyway. There are weeks I want to lock myself in my office and not face them.

“You keep things in boxes though. You have to or you couldn’t do your job properly. I suspect being a reporter is much the same, psychologically speaking…”