When I open my eyes again, she’s clutching armfuls of towels and tugging at my coat. ‘You probably shouldn’t go to sleep,’ she says. ‘Come on, let’s get you up. That was the door.’
I feel dazed and hot, as if everything might be a dream. She hauls me up and we shuffle out to the hallway together. I can hear whispering coming from the wall.
But it’s not the cab, it’s Adam, all dressed up for our date. I try and hide, try and stumble back into the lounge, but he sees me.
‘Tess,’ he says. ‘Oh my God! What’s happened?’
‘Nosebleed,’ Mum tells him. ‘We thought you were the cab.’
‘You’re going to the hospital? I’ll take you in my dad’s car.’
He steps into the hallway and tries to put his arm around me as if we’re all just going to walk to his car and get in. As if he’s going to drive and I’m going to bleed all over the upholstery and none of it matters. I look like road kill. Doesn’t he understand that he really shouldn’t be seeing me like this?
I shove him off. ‘Go home, Adam.’
‘I’m taking you to the hospital,’ he says again, as if perhaps I didn’t hear him the first time, or maybe the blood has made me stupid.
Mum takes his arm and gently leads him back out of the door. ‘We’ll manage,’ she says. ‘It’s all right. Anyway, look, the cab’s here now.’
‘I want to be with her.’
‘I know,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sorry.’
He touches my hand as I walk past him up the path. ‘Tess,’ he says.
I don’t answer. I don’t even look at him, because his voice is so clear that if I look I might change my mind. To find love just as I go and have to give it up – it’s such a bad joke. But I have to. For him and for me. Before it starts hurting even more than this.
Mum spreads towels across the back seat of the cab, makes sure we’re belted up, then encourages the driver to do a very dramatic U-turn outside the gate.
‘That’s it,’ Mum tells him. ‘Put your foot down.’ She sounds as if she’s in a movie.
Adam watches from the gate. He waves. He gets smaller and smaller as we drive away.
Mum says, ‘That was kind of him.’
I close my eyes. I feel as if I’m falling even though I’m sitting down.
Mum nudges me with her elbow. ‘Stay awake.’
The moon bounces through the window. In the headlights – mist.
We were going dancing. I wanted to try alcohol again. I wanted to stand on tables and sing cheering songs. I wanted to climb over the fence in the park, steal a boat and circle the lake. I wanted to go back to Adam’s house and creep up to his room and make love.
‘Adam,’ I say under my breath. But it gets covered in blood like everything else.
At the hospital, they find me a wheelchair and make me sit in it. I’m an emergency, they tell me as they rush me away from the reception area. We leave behind the ordinary victims of pub brawls, bad drugs and late-night domestics and we speed down the corridor to somewhere more important.
I find the layers of a hospital strangely reassuring. This is a duplicate world with its own rules and everyone has their place. In the emergency rooms will be the young men with fast cars and crap brakes. The motorcyclists who took a bend too sharply.
In the operating theatres are the people who mucked around with air rifles, or who got followed home by a psychopath. Also, the victims of random accident – the child whose hair got caught in an escalator, the woman wearing an underwired bra in a lightning storm.
And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won’t go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed.
And then there’s the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.
The room I end up in is bright and sterile. There’s a bed, a sink, a doctor and a nurse.
‘I think she’s thirsty,’ Mum says. ‘She’s lost so much blood. Shouldn’t she have a drink?’
The doctor dismisses this with a wave of his hand. ‘We need to pack her nose.’
‘Pack it?’
The nurse ushers Mum to a chair and sits down next to her. ‘The doctor will put strips of gauze in her nose to stop the blood,’ she says. ‘You’re welcome to stay.’
I’m shivering. The nurse gets up to give me a blanket and pulls it up to my chin. I shiver again.
‘Someone’s dreaming about you,’ Mum says. ‘That’s what that means.’
I always thought it meant that, in another life, someone was standing on my grave.
The doctor pinches my nose, peers in my mouth, feels my throat and the back of my neck.
‘Mum?’ he says.
She looks startled, sits upright in her chair. ‘Me?’
‘Any signs of thrombocytopenia before today?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Has she complained of a headache? Have you noticed any pinprick bruising?’
‘I didn’t look.’
The doctor sighs, clocks in a moment that this is a whole new language for her, yet, strangely, persists.
‘When was the last platelet transfusion?’
Mum looks increasingly bewildered. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Has she used aspirin products recently?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know any of this.’
I decide to save her. She’s not strong enough, and she might just walk out if it gets too difficult.
‘December the twenty-first was the last platelet transfusion,’ I say. My voice sounds raspy. Blood bubbles in my throat.
The doctor frowns at me. ‘Don’t talk. Mum, get yourself over here and take your daughter’s hand.’
She obediently comes to sit on the edge of the bed.
‘Squeeze your mum’s hand once for yes,’ the doctor tells me. ‘Twice for no. Understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shush,’ he says. ‘Squeeze. Don’t talk.’
We go through the same routine – the bruising, the headaches, the aspirin, but this time Mum knows the answers.
‘Bonjela or Teejel?’ the doctor asks.
Two squeezes. ‘No,’ Mum tells him. ‘She hasn’t used them.’
‘Anti-inflammatories?’
‘No,’ Mum says. She looks me in the eyes. She speaks my language at last.
‘Good,’ the doctor says. ‘I’m going to pack the front of your nose with gauze. If that doesn’t do it, we’ll pack the back, and if the bleeding still persists, we’ll have to cauterize. Have you had your nose cauterized before?’
I squeeze Mum’s hand so hard that she winces. ‘Yes, she has.’
It hurts like hell. I could smell my own flesh burning for days.
‘We’ll need to check your platelets,’ he goes on. ‘I’d be surprised if you weren’t below twenty.’ He touches my knee through the blanket. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a rotten night for you.’
‘Below twenty?’ Mum echoes.
‘She’ll probably need a couple of units,’ he explains. ‘Don’t worry, it shouldn’t take more than an hour.’
As he packs sterile cotton into my nose, I try and concentrate on simple things – a chair, the twin silver birch trees in Adam’s garden and the way their leaves shiver in sunlight.
But I can’t hold onto it.
I feel as if I’ve eaten a sanitary towel; my mouth is dry and it’s hard to breathe. I look at Mum, but all I see is that she’s feeling squeamish and has turned her face away. How can I feel older than my own mother? I close my eyes so I don’t have to see her fail.
‘Uncomfortable?’ the doctor asks. ‘Mum, any chance of distracting her?’
I wish he hadn’t said that. What’s she going to do? Dance for us? Sing? Perhaps she’ll do her famous
