“I know exactly what I’m saying. I’m not a fucking vegetable. I’m not drooling into my puréed prunes. Is that what you’re telling people, that I’m not myself? Is that why no one’s been in? Susanna and Leon haven’t even rung me—”
My mother was blinking rapidly, staring past my ear into the light from the window. I had a horrible feeling that she was trying not to cry, and an equally horrible one that if she pulled that crap I was going to throw her out of my room. “All I’ve said is that you might not be feeling well enough yet. You haven’t seemed like you want to talk to people.”
“You didn’t bother to ask me what I thought? You just decided that I was too not myself to make a great big decision like that all on my own?” It was a relief to be able to blame this on my mother. I didn’t in fact want to talk to my cousins, but we had grown up together, and although by this stage we weren’t living in each other’s pockets any more—I saw Susanna a few times a year at Christmas and birthdays, Leon maybe once a year when he was over from Amsterdam or Barcelona or whichever city he was currently drifting around—it had still stung when they didn’t bother.
“If you want to see everyone, I can—”
“If I want to see them, I can tell them myself. Or do you think I’m too brain-damaged for that? You think I’m basically a toddler now, I need Mummy to set up my playdates?”
“OK”—with maddening care, hands clasped tightly in her lap—“then what would you like me to tell them, when they ask about you? They’ve all been Googling head injuries, and of course there’s such a wide range of outcomes that they have no idea what to—”
“Don’t tell them anything. Nothing.” My family swarming and picking like ants over my carcass, I could just see it—my aunt Louisa pulling soppy compassion-faces, Aunt Miriam debating which of my chakras would need unblocking, Uncle Oliver pontificating about some blather he’d picked up on Wikipedia and Uncle Phil nodding sagely through it all— It made me want to punch someone. “Or I know, I’ve got a genius idea, tell them I’m fine and to mind their own fucking business. How’s that?”
“They’re worried about you, Toby. They just—”
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, is this hard on them? Are they having a hard time with this?”
And so on and on. I had never been cruel before, never, even in school where I had been one of the cool kids and could have got away with anything, I had never once bullied anyone. Finding myself doing it now gave me a rush of savage, breathless glee and of wretchedness—glee because it was a new weapon although I’m not sure exactly how it was supposed to protect me (next time I ran into burglars I could totally flay them with sarcasm, I suppose) and wretchedness because I had liked being a kind person and now I couldn’t find my way back to that, it seemed lost for good in some dark expanse of smoking rubble, and altogether by the time my mother left every day both she and I were exhausted.
In the early evenings my father came. He was a solicitor, always up to his ears instructing barristers on some impenetrable financial case; he came straight from work, bringing with him the same unflappable, esoteric atmosphere of expensive suits and half secrets that used to sweep in the door with him every evening when I was a kid. Unlike my mother, he could tell when I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat, and unlike with my mother I had no urge to goad him into no-winner fights. Mostly he would ask a few polite questions about how I was feeling and whether I needed anything, then pull a rolled and battered paperback from his coat pocket (P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Keneally), settle himself in the visitor’s chair and read quietly for hours on end. If I had been capable of finding anything restful or comforting, I think it would have been that: the regular rhythm of his page-turning, the occasional soft huff of laughter, the clean lines of his profile against the darkening window. Often I fell asleep while he was there, and those were the only sleeps in that place that weren’t ragged and precarious, shadowed by tainted dreams and by the possibility of never waking up.
Melissa came whenever she could find someone to mind the shop, even for an hour, and again in the evenings. To be honest, the first time she came, I was horrified. Even to myself I reeked of sweat and nameless chemicals, I was still wearing a hospital gown, and I knew I looked like shit. When I had dragged myself to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, it had been a shock. I was used to being, frankly, good-looking, in an easy, straightforward way that didn’t require much thought from anyone concerned; I have thick smooth fair hair, very blue eyes, and the kind of open, boyish face that instantly makes both guys and girls want to like me. The guy in the flyspecked mirror was a whole other story. My hair was a stringy, dirty brown and there was a big shaved patch on the right side of my head, with an ugly red wound-line running across it, studded with thick, brutal staples. One eyelid had an ugly, stoned droop, my jaw was puffy and mottled with purple; a big chip was missing from one of my top front teeth, and I had a fat lip. Even in those few days, I had lost weight; I’d been on the lean side to start with, and now there were hollows under my cheekbones and jaw that gave me a startling, starved urgency. Several days’ worth of stubble made my face look unwashed, and my eyes were bloodshot and had an unfocused middle-distance stare that put me somewhere halfway between dumb and psycho. I looked like the lowlife in a zombie movie who isn’t going to make it past the first half hour.
And there was Melissa, airy gold head and whirl of flowered dress in the opening door, a fairy creature from some faraway world of butterflies and dewdrops. I knew she would take one look at this grim place and me—anything worthwhile deliberately, methodically stripped away, nothing left but the basest mechanics and fluids and stenches of life obscenely exposed—and she would never see me the same way again. I didn’t expect her to turn and run—for all her softness, Melissa has a straight-backed, unwavering code of loyalty that I knew would not include dumping your brain-injured boyfriend before he even got his IV out—but I braced myself for the jolt of horror across her face, the clench of determination as she set herself to do her duty.
But instead she came flying across the floor without even a second’s pause, arms reaching—“Oh Toby, oh darling—” just stopping herself at my bedside in case she hurt me, hands fluttering inches from me, white face and round stunned eyes as if she had only that moment heard what had happened—“Your poor face, oh Toby—”
I laughed out loud with sheer relief. “Come here,” I said, managing not to sound too thick-tongued, “I’m not breakable,” and I wrapped my arms around her (shot of agony through my ribs, but I didn’t care) and squeezed her close. I felt her tears hot on my neck, and she laughed through a sniffle—“So silly, I’m just so glad—”