“Susanna?”
“‘He didn’t have your back when Dominic was giving you shit, and now he’s all fucked up we don’t know what he might do, just watch yourself around him . . .’ Was she doing it to you too? About me?”
“Pretty much,” I said. I couldn’t even be angry. Whatever Susanna’s game had been, she had in fact been right about me: I had been frantically flailing for ways to dump the whole thing on her and Leon. It was nice that at least one person had had a clear sense of what was going on here.
“‘Just trust me, I know what I’m doing . . .’ Look how that turned out.” Leon drew zigzags in the condensation on the glass. “At least it should be over now. Shouldn’t it?”
“What?”
“If Hugo confessed. That’s the end of that. They’re not going to keep hassling us.”
“Probably not,” I said. I had no idea—whether Hugo had been convincing enough to fool Rafferty, or what Rafferty could do about it if he hadn’t, or what I was going to do either way. I knew I had to come up with some kind of plan, fast, but—in that place, with every remaining brain cell taken up by listening for the alarm—I could no more have done it than I could have flapped my wings and flown away.
Holding up crossed fingers, both hands: “God, I hope. I can’t take much more of him.” A violent back-flick of Leon’s head, towards THE BELLS and Hugo’s room. “I can’t believe he’s actually hanging around here. We’re in with Hugo, saying good-bye, and he’s sitting there listening to every—” His voice cracked. “I really need a smoke,” he said. “Do you want to come for a smoke?”
“No,” I said. The hospital seemed to have sent my body into some kind of unnatural suspended state; I hadn’t wanted anything to eat or drink since I got there, never mind a cigarette.
“I should have got a vape,” Leon said, “or those patches, or— Ring me if anything happens,” and he was out the door at a fast scuttle, already fumbling for his smokes. I kept staring out the window. A cyclist had got into a yelling match with some suit in a Range Rover; the suit was out of his car and they were making sweeping arm gestures at each other. Another cyclist was about to flatten the pair of them.
A swelling, shameful part of me was screaming for this to be over. My father leaning against a wall with his face white and strained, staring at nothing, his hand tense in my mother’s: I wasn’t sure how much longer he could take. I wasn’t sure how much longer any of us could take, come to that. All my circuits were so overloaded with suppressed fight-or-flight that I was practically locked in spasm. My leg was wobbling and I wanted to shift my weight to the other one, but it was like the thought couldn’t reach my muscles, nothing happened.
Rain on the window. Nurses coming and going, incomprehensible color-coded scrubs, brisk soft slip-slap of their shoes. The heat had dried out my eyes till I could barely blink.
“Is Melissa coming in?” my mother asked. She had a bunch of cups of coffee in a complicated cardboard holder.
“She’s back at her place,” I said. My lips felt numb. “It’s a long story.”
For an awful moment I thought my mother was going to go off into some spiel, Oh no Toby what happened?! are you two OK? you’re so wonderful together I know whatever happened you can work it out you’ve both been under so much stress, or even worse try and hug me. Instead she said, after a second’s pause, “Here. Have one of these. It’s not the horrible stuff from the machine; I went out for it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe in a minute.” We stood there in silence, side by side. Susanna sang a lullaby, very quietly, into her phone.
When the alarm finally went, it was me and my father in the room. I was past being able to come up with words but my father was leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, talking, a low even monologue, very calm. I don’t remember most of it—my mind was severing itself from all of this, I felt like I was bobbing somewhere near the ceiling and my body was some bizarrely shaped pouch full of wet sand that had nothing to do with me—but bits drifted across my mind: . . . let us eat dessert first, always apple crumble because Phil hated Christmas pudding, we’d sit under the tree and . . . followed the music downstairs and found them dancing together, cheek to cheek, I turned around very quietly and . . . And that boat, remember? the old man who would let us take it out every summer, and we would row to the middle of the lake and fish? Never caught anything because Oliver wouldn’t stop talking, but I still remember the light, the haze of it over the far edge of the lake, and the sound of the water against the side of the boat . . . When the alarm started howling, when my father jerked like he’d been electrocuted and Rafferty’s chair scraped back hard, it took me a moment to find my way back into my body and realize what was going on.
Rafferty was up and out the door: getting the others, but he wasn’t fast enough. It was so quick, after all that waiting. “Hugo,” my father said, loudly, grabbing his shoulder. “Hugo.”
More alarms, battering at me, taking my breath away. “Hugo,” I said, “can you hear me,” but his gray face didn’t change, he didn’t move, only the lines on the monitor scribbling out of control to give us a glimpse of what was going on in secret, in the dark inside him.
The nurse was there. She turned the alarms off and stood back from the machines, hands cupped together loosely in front of her, in the sudden ringing silence.
I swear, even though I know it can’t be true I swear he smiled at me, that old wonderful smile rich with love; I swear he winked one slitted eye. Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.
Eleven
The house was freezing, a solid, all-pervading, damp cold like it had been empty for months instead of a couple of days. I hot-showered myself raw and threw everything I had been wearing into a boil-wash, but I couldn’t get the hospital stench out of my nose. Everything smelled of it: the water from the kitchen tap, my shampoo, the inside of my wardrobe. I kept catching the monotonous beeping of the monitors, somewhere just beyond the edge of my hearing.