I realized who he reminded me of: the shitbird neurologist, back when I had been in hospital, brushing past my desperate questions like everything about me was too unimportant even to register. “Is he going to—” Going to be OK was wrong, obviously Hugo wasn’t going to be OK, but I didn’t know how else to—
“We’ll have to wait and see,” the doctor said. He punched a code into a keypad by the door, thick blunt fingers. “You can go in and see him now. Second room on the left.” He held the door for me—and for Rafferty, who hung back, letting me go in ahead—before he nodded and strolled off down the corridor.
Rich stench of hand sanitizer and death, a girl sobbing somewhere. Hugo’s room was small and overheated. He was flat on his back; his eyes were a slit open and for a moment I had a wild burst of hope, but then I saw how still he was. His skin was grayish and sagging back from his face, leaving his features standing out too sharply. Wires and tubes poured out of him, fine and flexible and nasty: a tube spilling from his open mouth, another from his bony arm, another from under his sheet, wires sprouting from the neck of his gown. Machines everywhere, beeping, bright-colored zigzags running across a monitor, numbers flickering. All of it was horrifying but I clung to it all the same—they wouldn’t be bothering with all this stuff unless they thought he had a fighting chance, surely they wouldn’t, would they?
A nurse—Indian, soft and pretty, glossy hair in a neat bun—was writing something on a chart. “You can talk to him,” she said, nodding encouragingly at Hugo. “Maybe he can hear you.”
I pulled a brown plastic chair to the bed and sat down. “Hugo,” I said. In the edge of my vision Rafferty moved the other chair into an unobtrusive corner and sat down, settling himself for the long haul. “It’s me. Toby.”
Nothing; not a twitch of his eyelids, not a movement of his lips. The machines beeped away steadily, no change.
“You’re in hospital. You had a brain hemorrhage.”
Nothing. I couldn’t feel him there. “You’re going to be fine,” I said, ludicrously.
“I’ll come back soon,” the nurse said gently, to all three of us, hooking the chart onto the end of the bed. “If you need me before that, you can push this button. OK?”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks.” And she was gone, almost soundless on the rubbery floor, the open door letting in a faint trail of sobbing for a moment before closing behind her with a soft whoosh.
Hugo would hate this place, everything about it. Maybe he was deliberately staying in a coma so he wouldn’t have to deal with it, I wouldn’t blame him— “Hugo,” I said. “The sooner you wake up, the sooner you can go home. OK?”
For a moment I thought his mouth tensed as if he was trying to say something, around the tube, but then it was gone and I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been my imagination.
There were a hundred things I wanted to tell him, ask him. Maybe one of them would reach him, deep amid the darkness and the wingbeats and the swags of clinging cobwebs. I had been there too, not so long ago; if anyone could find the way through that shifting labyrinth to Hugo and lead him back, surely it would be me.
But there was Rafferty, an angular shadow filling up my peripheral vision, turning everything unsayable. “What did he say?” I asked, when I couldn’t ignore him any longer. “At the station?”
Rafferty shook his head. “I can’t go into that, man. Sorry.”
Those golden eyes, on me, giving away nothing. I couldn’t tell whether he knew Hugo had been lying to him and why, or what he might do about it—arrest me, drag me away for questioning, Talk and we’ll let you go back to your uncle? I thought about saying it straight out, simple as that, as if we were just two people together in this room: Look, we both know the story. Let me stay here till this is over, one way or another, and then I’ll do whatever you want. Deal?
I couldn’t trust myself to make it work. Instead I turned back to Hugo. One big hand lay loosely on the sheet beside me, and I put mine over it—it seemed like what I was supposed to do. His was cold, somehow bony and rubbery at the same time; it didn’t feel like human flesh and mine wanted to jerk away from it, but I made myself stay put because maybe he could feel things in there, maybe I had followed my mother’s hand or my father’s back to the daylight, who knew? I sat still, watching Hugo’s face and listening to the endless even beeping and catching Rafferty’s keen split-wood smell with each breath, trying not to move in case it made something happen.
* * *
?I don’t have any clear sense of how long we were in the hospital. I remember bits and pieces, but not the order they came in; there was something wrong with the way time worked there, something had fallen out of it so that events didn’t link together in any sequence but just drifted round and round, disconnected, in the huge humming white-lit void.
My father was there, shirt collar twisted, hand clasping my shoulder so hard it hurt. I remembered him back when I was in hospital, the long-limbed tan creature that had paced in the shadows around his feet; I almost asked if he had brought it this time but luckily it dawned on me that it probably hadn’t been real. The nurse made notes on Hugo’s chart, adjusted dials, swapped bags. I had a go at Haskins’s diary, I told him, while you were gone. I actually found something he doesn’t hate, can you believe it? He loves reading to his kid. I can’t work out what he was reading, though; you’ll have to do it when you get home, I stuck a Post-it on the page . . . Hugo’s face didn’t change. Phil was crying, silently, wiping his eyes with a knuckle again and again.
Two visitors per bed I’m afraid said a different nurse so sometimes I was in a waiting area, rows of black plastic seating and a vending machine humming in the corner, a dumpy middle-aged woman holding hands with a blond teenage girl and both of them staring into space. My mother bent to kiss my head and when I didn’t flinch away she held me close, smell of cut grass and cold air, a deep breath before she let me go.
My family yammering questions at me, Why was he what did he but no no no that’s insane of course he didn’t what the hell— I pictured their faces if I told them the truth: Hey at this stage you should probably know it looks like it was me all along, all my fault, sorry about that guys . . . For an awful second I thought I might be going to do it, or faint, I wasn’t sure which. I sank down into a chair and put my head in my hands, which turned out to be a good move: they backed off and left me alone. Leon stalked the edges of the waiting area, gnawing his thumbnail, not looking at me.
Hugo I meant to ask you, you know what they found down the tree, did they tell you? Leaning in closer, was that a twitch of his hand— Lead soldiers. Were those yours? And my father laughing, a startled crack too loud in the dry air: Those were mine! Oliver was a little brat, whenever any of us had a favorite toy he’d get fascinated by it and try to steal it, so we were always hiding things from him . . . I must have forgotten where I’d put those! And then silence, while we waited for Hugo to smile, tell us all the things he’d hidden from Oliver and where to look for them.
You should go home and get some sleep someone said to me but that seemed way too complicated; instead I dozed on the plastic chairs, woke bleary-eyed with a hard crick in my neck. Susanna was texting, thumbs flying. There was one nurse who was the image of the pretty brunette who had eyed me in the pub that night, scrubs instead of tight red dress now and face bare of makeup but I would have sworn it was her; her eyes passed over me and I couldn’t tell if she had recognized me, I wanted to catch her arm as she went by and ask her but somehow she was always too far away.