‘Yeah, yeah.’ Rosie rolled her eyes, but she was smiling too. ‘And don’t you forget it.’ She folded her hand twice in a wave. ‘See you.’
For the rest of the evening my family dropped in and out of my room while I drifted in and out of drug-assisted sleep. Tarin painted my nails a hideous shade of luminous green – ‘Because you can’t stop me!’ – and told me stories about when she’d been hospitalized around the time of her diagnosis. Mum flapped and faffed and arranged the flowers she’d brought, talking mainly to herself about the dangers of inadequately protected buildings and teenagers with ‘absolutely no sense’. Dad stood for a while in the corner, studying my chart, glancing at the various machines around me, nodding every now and then to himself.
When he left, he kissed my forehead for the first time in about ten years. ‘Get some rest. The morphine will help you sleep. I’m on shift tonight, so if you need me, just buzz and one of the nurses will come and get me, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said, touched.
But then he paused in the doorway and looked back at me. ‘Ah, I do mean only if you really need me, you understand? I will be working, after all.’ He smiled at me and then left without waiting for a response.
The drugs sent me into a strange, uneven sleep, where my dreams were spongy and featured morphine-induced reimaginings of some of my most random memories. I kept falling asleep and waking up with a start, shocking myself each time with the unfamiliar room and how empty it was.
Until it wasn’t.
‘Hey.’
Suzanne was wearing an old pair of grey jogging bottoms and an oversized black hoodie. Her hair was haphazard around her face, unbrushed and wild. I had no idea how long she’d been there, but there she was, standing so close to the door she was almost pressed against it. Her voice, even on the short word, was shaky.
‘Hey,’ I said.
She crept closer, her fingers clenched together. Her eyes were scanning my face, and she looked so agonized I wanted to cry.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked finally, still a couple of steps from the bed.
‘Yes,’ I said, as definitively as I could, waiting to see her face relax into a smile.
‘Caddy –’ she took another step and reached for the bedpost, her fingers gripping so hard I could almost feel it myself – ‘I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Her voice broke, and her free hand flew to her mouth. ‘They wouldn’t let me see you last night, they wouldn’t let me stay, I wanted to come. And today, oh God it’s been so awful, today, everyone said no, they said I shouldn’t, that I’d make it worse.’
‘Suze—’
‘But I couldn’t not come, I had to say sorry, because it’s all my fault, I ruin everything.’
At this I gave up trying to break into her frantic monologue and reached out my uninjured arm, curving it towards me in a hug gesture. Suzanne hesitated for just a moment and then bolted around the bed. At first she half crouched, half leaned into the hug, but it was so awkward she eventually sat her full weight on the bed, and then climbed on completely.
It occurred to me as she curled herself carefully between me and the edge of the bed, her limbs a tangle above the covers and mine stretched out clinically straight, that Rosie and I weren’t really huggers. Even when we were very young we hadn’t been the type of twosome who shared changing rooms at the swimming pool or beds at sleepovers. I wasn’t sure which one of us had the greatest influence on this facet of our friendship, but I did know that Rosie would never have even thought to climb up on to my hospital bed beside me.
‘You don’t ruin everything,’ I said inadequately.
‘Are you basing that on the evidence, or . . . ?’
‘I think you’ve just been unlucky.’ I injected as much cheer and positivity into my voice as possible, hamming it up to show just how OK it was. ‘The only way is up. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.’
‘It’s always darkest before dawn?’ At last I heard a smile in her voice.
‘Things are never as bad as they seem.’ I tried to think of some more. ‘Uh, que sera, sera.’
There was a pause and then, at exactly the same time, we both said, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ And then we both cracked up.
‘Shhh,’ Suzanne said through giggles. ‘I’m not supposed to be here, remember?’
‘Oh yeah, what are you doing here? How did you get in? And what time is it?’
‘Nearly midnight. I had to wait until Sarah went to sleep.’
My heart sank, the laughter gone suddenly. ‘Suze. Really?’
‘I told you, I needed to see you,’ she said, and even though her voice was calm there was defensiveness there. ‘I haven’t told you about today yet. You’ll get why when I’m done.’
‘So you sneaked out of your house – again – and then sneaked into a hospital?’
‘It wasn’t hard,’ she said dismissively. ‘That kind of thing is always so much easier than people think.’
‘Didn’t anyone see you?’
‘Sure they did.’