“Yes, I did get the itching, actually,” Mark says.
Imagine! Fran thinks as she listens — imagine itching under all those tattoos! Your real self itching to get out!
Listening, she realises that she herself has started to itch.
“Have you got rid of your itch?” Penny asks Craig.
“Yes,” he says crossly, unsurely.
“I got some stuff on prescription,” she says. “You have to paint your whole body covered from the neck down.”
Craig laughs. “Did he do it for you?”
“Oh, man,” Penny curses. “We only shagged once.”
At this the taxi wobbles slightly on the road.
“How’s my mam?” Craig asks.
“Marvellous,” says Penny. “Apparently she’s brought my mam back from the dead. She’s like bloody Jesus round here, your mam.”
“Maybe now,” Mark butts in, “we can ask Liz who got to her. Who beat her up in the first place.”
For a moment — a shattering, self-condemning moment — Craig hesitates. Then, flustered, he says, “Anyway, Penny, it’s all true. Andy has got a baby. He’s got himself a baby from somewhere. He’s not making it up.”
Fran twists round. “He’s got a baby?”
“He says it’s his own.” Craig nods to Mark. “And his.”
Penny starts. “Are they all right?”
“Fine,” Craig says. But the car has pulled up in the dark hospital forecourt. Here already.
“Seven quid fifty,” the Tiger Taxi man tells Fran. “Make it six. You lot are better than the telly.”
They bundle out into wind and rain.
“What a night to come back on!” Fran whistles.
That cold is coming off the fields and the open country. She realises that she too is talking as if Liz has been on a journey. As if she has been in outer space. She’s talking like one of the superstitious ones. With her rational, everyday mind she knows Liz has lain still in the same place for month upon month. But how seductive it is to believe her to have been submerged in another world. Vital and living all the time, translated elsewhere. And now returned and full of news.
Mark is standing alone for a moment. I have a baby, he thinks. He looks to where north must be. Tomorrow he will check that he has money for the train fare. He is sorely tempted. If he can, he will go to Edinburgh.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tom is furious. He has appealed to the doctors and nurses and they brush him off. They are in the room now, shutting green screens around Liz. Putting the machines back on her. Surrounding her with the menacing paraphernalia of care. Tom is used to people playing doctors and nurses.
He kicks against the door they pushed him through. Nesta and Elsie are sitting back down. Elsie even has her knitting out.
“We are responsible!” Tom cries. “It was we who provoked her back into life! How dare you — how dare they shut us out now?”
These are the crucial moments, when Liz has feet in both worlds. Maybe several worlds. Tom feels he is missing something he has striven all his life to be near. Beyond that simple grey swing door there are mysteries going on. They’re keeping him out again. People with more money, more qualifications, more confidence than he has.
“They won’t let me in, Elsie,” he says. His own defeated tone surprises him. He doesn’t sound half as angry as he feels inside. She puts down the yellow baby booties she is knitting and pats the chair beside her. Come and sit, she tells him with one of those easy, eloquent quirks of her mouth. Then she mothers him.
He folds into her usual embrace and closes his eyes. They won’t let him in.
“I tried, Elsie. I tried to get in. I tried to find out.”
“I know,’ says Elsie. “But they’re busy in there, looking after Liz. You have to let the experts in. You wouldn’t want to get in the way, would you?”
“No,” he murmurs into her woollen breast, while all his thin insides cry out, Yes! Yes!
Minutes pass. He gets back his calm. He thinks. Mulls over.
“Liz is at that special edge,” he says. He can sense Nesta listening from across the room. “We all work to our own edges. Beyond which we can’t go. Liz has gone further than any of us.”
Elsie smiles embarrassedly.
“It’s the edge,” he goes on, “at which we become unconscious or go mad or depressed or get sick. There we are hopeless. It’s where we end up when we can’t pull ourselves together any more.” He looks up into Elsie’s eyes. “I had to see what was there. I had to see Liz at that edge.”
She looks sadly at her Tom. This isn’t proper religion. It wasn’t what he was like before. What’s he been reading while he was away? This sounds American. Like those clean-looking young men who come round the doors in nicely pressed suits.
He also makes Liz’s struggle for life seem like something she’s best off losing. He even sounds as if he wants her to go further over that bridge. Funny thing to want. You want people to come back from the edge, don’t you?
Elsie sees in a flash that Tom wants more than anything a glimpse of another world. He’d ruin anything to see that.
Elsie turns cold. She’s besieged with worry. Across the way, Nesta looks as if she has fallen into a trance of her own. Elsie thinks that Liz might be better off not coming round. Not if she has to live like a vegetable. That’s the worst thing. Not being able to see to yourself.
The best thing would be going in and out of consciousness for ever. A gentle up and down. Elsie could imagine ebbing and flowing and feeling happy. Sometimes you’d have to take responsibility, take a grip…other times let it go and let your nearest and dearest gather round you to take care. Liz is better off now, doing this hokey-cokey with her coma.
To Elsie, Liz is a porpoise, a dolphin, a mermaid.
Once, Elsie’s doctor
