‘Come on, petal. Time to dry that hair and get you to bed.’
He bundles the towel around her so that her body is cocooned in thick cotton, picks her up as if she were a baby, and carries her towards her bedroom where her mum will blow-dry her hair and put her to bed.
Jess nuzzles against her father’s neck, her nose filling with the familiar smell of grown-up offices, salted peanuts, and the last residue of aftershave her dad puts on every morning. On the short walk from the bathroom to her bedroom, she burrows into his shoulder and thinks – as she so often does – that when she’s older she is going to live in the house next door so that she can always stay close to her mum and dad.
Jess blinked and shook her head, conscious that she was staring at the driver in the next car. As he turned towards her and smiled she saw that his eyes were too deep-set, his chin too large, his lips too full. Jess turned away, her cheeks hot, as though that man must know she did this all the time: that she was always seeing traces of her dad where there were none.
The traffic began to move and Jess eased her foot off the brake. Overtaking the car in front, she swerved into the outside lane and put her foot down hard on the accelerator, only slowing down each time a yellow speed camera loomed into view. When she finally pulled up outside the Notting Hill address her mum had given her, a sign informed her that it was residents’ parking until 10.00 p.m. Jess peered up and down the street but could see neither meters nor traffic wardens. She wouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes anyway.
Pulling down the sun visor, Jess looked at herself in the mirror, running a finger across her eyelid where the remnants of that morning’s eyeliner had collected into small, soot-like particles. She turned her head sideways, studied her long nose – the one part of her body that made her understand why rich people resorted to plastic surgery – and practised smiling at herself, wondering if it was true that you could alter your mood just by changing your expression. But the smile reflecting back at her was like a window onto the past through which Jess didn’t want to look.
It was her sister’s smile, always had been. For years, when she was little, Jess had taken such pride in her smile being a facsimile of her sister’s. She had loved how strangers’ heads had turned in the street to stare at the similarity between them, how she had felt the world to be a less frightening place with her sister by her side. And then, one day, the resemblance had disappeared, as though a wizard had slunk in during the night and cast a spell over them both. Jess had known – even then – that it hadn’t really been that swift, that the change had occurred over days, weeks, months. But to her it had felt sudden, abrupt. Now she had no idea if she and her sister would still look similar if they stood side by side, no longer knew if strangers’ heads would turn if they walked down the street together.
Jess stared at herself in the mirror and something about her reflection – perhaps the unkempt hair or the smudged make-up, or perhaps just the look of weary uncertainty – caused a shutter to open on a memory she rarely dared view.
Chapter 9
October 1987
Her hand is hot and clammy, squeezed tightly inside her mum’s. They walk briskly, side by side, her mum’s stride too wide for Jess to keep pace with, so that every other step she has to improvise a small half-skip, an unintended jauntiness she knows is inappropriate given the circumstances. Her mum looks down at her and smiles as if to say that everything will be OK and Jess tries to smile back but her attention is focused on the ward three floors above where the two of them are heading, just as they do almost every day after school.
It seems to Jess that they have been coming to the hospital for ever even though she knows, really, that it is only a matter of months since these visits began. She can still remember when the time between the end of school and the beginning of dinner was filled with chocolate Nesquik and bourbon biscuits, Hartbeat and The Really Wild Show, games of Connect 4 and Guess Who?, which Jess would invariably have lost had her sister not occasionally let her win.
Now Jess no longer knows which is preferable: to be at home in a house filled with anxiety or to be here, where the collective fear is so great that she sometimes imagines it gobbling her up – head, shoulders, knees and toes – until there is nothing left.
They hurry along the corridor towards the lift, Jess unsure whether she wants to rush or not. She both wants to be there and yet wishes she weren’t. It is a familiar feeling but one she still hasn’t got used to: the wanting and not wanting at the same time.
The smell clings to the hairs in Jess’s nose, a smell of counterfeit healthiness. Jess knows it to be a sham. There is no healthiness here. This is where people come when they are really sick. This is where some people come to die.
The thought knocks inside Jess’s head, trying to get out, but she knows there is no escape.
They wait for the lift to arrive, Jess watching the illuminated digits signal its slow descent. She glances up at her mum who smiles at her again, the pad of her thumb running along the back of Jess’s hand. Jess senses her mum’s need to reassure her but can’t decide whether it makes her feel better or worse.
The lift doors open and Jess catches sight of them both in the mirror on the lift’s far wall. There are dark rings under her mum’s eyes and strands of hair sticking out from Jess’s two plaits: they look to Jess like a messy version of the people they once were, before this all began.
The lift ascends and when the doors open at the third floor they are greeted by the sound of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ drifting from the nurses’ station along the corridor. The tune attaches itself to Jess’s ears and she knows she will be unable to shake Rick Astley’s voice from her head for the rest of the day.
Walking onto the ward, Jess feels hope burning in her chest, the same hope she has every time she comes to visit: that perhaps today they will discover that a full recovery has been made and that everything can go back to normal.
And then they are there, standing at the end of the bed, looking down at a body so familiar and yet so disturbingly changed that Jess has to fight the urge to scrunch her eyes shut: sallow skin, closed eyes, bones rising from hollow cheeks to greet them. Hope plummets in Jess’s stomach, the muscles in her tummy shrivelling to greet it.
It is the tubes that distress her every time. One tube in the nose, the very thought of which makes Jess want to gag. Another tube in the back of the hand, which makes Jess scratch herself as though it is her own flesh that is being pierced. A third tube emerges from underneath the sheets into a see-through bag of mustard-yellow liquid that Jess knows is darker than it ought to be and which she would rather not think about at all.
As Jess stands by the bed, trying to remember what the face in front of her looked like before the flesh began to melt away from the body, before the bones jutted out from beneath the skin, she thinks about all the weeks they have been going through this cycle of hospital admissions, temporary recoveries, discharges back home. This carousel of fear, limbo and relief that has become the emotional rhythm by which they live their lives.
Mostly what Jess thinks, as she stands at the foot of the hospital bed, is that if only life can go back to normal she will never ask for anything again.
Then the sunken eyes flutter open and a face Jess loves more than any other in the world smiles at her and she feels, all at once, that her prayers are being answered.
Chapter 10
Jess