‘I’ll wash it for you soon, Cassie. I always feel better with clean hair. Maybe you will too.’
I try not to be selfish, and try not to think that if Cassie’s baby survived then maybe … maybe one could survive in me? I feel my lower stomach, and feel for any change there, some hope, but it’s frozen to me, and I make myself remember my promise to David. So, as I wait for Paula to arrive, I just hold Cassie’s hand and hope she knows she’s not alone.
5
Frank
Cassie’s bloke and his mum were all degrees of gutted to see their girl black and blue, pierced by tubes and surrounded by screens, only just on the right side of life’s line. They kept on hugging and whispering soft words to each other. There’s nothing performative – nothing awkward – in their intimacy. I like to think we were like that, Ange and I, as a couple, even if only for a short while.
We met at her sister Abi’s wedding. At twenty-seven I was seven years older than Ange. Abi was marrying an old mate of mine, Phil. Me and my mates couldn’t believe Phil with his trophy ears and hook nose had bagged petite, blonde Abi. I didn’t even know she had a younger sister until an even better-looking version of Abi was in the queue next to me at the buffet table.
‘What’s that?’ she said pointing to a jelly dessert, wobbling with the movement of the trestle table.
I had no idea, but didn’t want to seem thick, so I just blurted out, ‘Tiramisu.’
She made a face. ‘Bless you!’
I’m not sure it was even a joke, but I laughed like it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, and she started laughing too and licked a puff of cream off her finger, which I took to be a good sign.
‘You’re funny!’ I said and tried to avoid looking at her breasts as I asked her to dance. Two hours later I was in the pub car park with Ange’s tongue in my mouth and her hands at my fly. Six months later and Ange and I had a smaller reception in the same pub, the life growing in Ange’s tummy, and my thinly disguised terror now undeniable. She seemed happy enough then, as if a pub car park and a half hour chat with me spilling my coke over our shared chips when she said, ‘I’m pregnant, Frank,’ was the way she always dreamed she’d start a family. I told her I’d support her through an abortion, and she’d snarled like a dog snapping at a fly and told me never to say that word again. She looked frightened, unmasked for the first time, and I thought in that moment that I loved her, but I didn’t tell her. We were always like that, Ange and I, keeping our words sealed and packaged up within our own heads, worried that if we ripped ourselves open the truth would spill out between us, make a mess that neither of us knew how to clean up.
Without telling Ange, I gave up my place for a managerial placement with an American-based construction company. A few years later Ange called my giving up the placement her ‘first disappointment’ – she’d always wanted to move to America, apparently – but there was a baby on the way. I thought I was doing the right thing.
That was the first time I felt it: something dark and predatory in my shadow, waiting for me to stumble so it could pounce, and when it did, I didn’t come home for three days. I ended up in Reading, miles away from home, by the bins at the back of a pub I didn’t recognise, my mouth just an inch away from a thick, acidy pool of my own vomit. Once I compressed my shame, like a wrecked car at a scrap heap, and squeezed it small enough to swallow – a painful, metallic-tasting pill down a dry throat – I thought about how close I’d come to death, how easily Lucy could have lost her dad. Anything could have happened: I could have fallen onto a train track; had I been an inch or two closer to my puke my lungs would have filled and that would have been that. I promised Ange it wouldn’t happen again and for a while I think we both tried to believe it. But being addicted to something is like being constantly stalked. It’s always there, sniffing out weakness, licking its lips, braced and ready to spring from the shadows.
Eventually the creature would always find me. It pounced when I was made redundant. It pounced when I heard Ange telling the other hairdressers at the salon where she worked that she should never have married me. And it pounced when Ange finally chucked me out.
After that it seemed to take up residence within me, switching places with the man I tried to be, consigning Frank to the shadows, meek and withered as the beast gnawed my bones, sucking out the marrow of my life with every bottle of whisky. I managed to keep myself away from Luce when the beast was in control; I wouldn’t let her see me rabid with booze … couldn’t do that to her. I’d watch her sometimes; I got myself on a bus to the airport when she came back from a holiday in Spain once, and a couple of times I followed her home to make sure she was safe after a night out. I think she sensed me keeping an eye on her; I watched her stop and listen, but she never saw me, thank god, grizzled and stinking. I wrote to her instead, told her how proud I was of her, how I was going to get better, make it up to her and her mum. I told her I was going to get myself on a detox programme as I swigged straight from the bottle.
When my eyes first slid open after the coma, and my brain finally clicked into place with my body, it was as if the world had been submerged in water. What I soon discovered were ward lights spun a kaleidoscope of colour, until my eyes settled enough for shapes to form. Ghostly figures darted around, fast as silverfish. My body lay before me, where it should be, but it was covered in white, contours, soft as snow. The air pressed down on me, so heavy I thought it would surely crush me.
Not dead then, but not exactly alive either.
My mind reeled, trying to find the thread of my last conscious thought, but it was like trying to figure out where I was before I was born.
With effort, I focused my gaze higher and I saw a bed opposite, just a few feet away. The bed had high, plastic sides and propped up in it was something that looked like it had fallen out of a formaldehyde jar. Tubes and cables cascaded out of the specimen like slides at a water park.
Poor bugger.
I tried to call out to the person in the bed, but it was like trying to make someone else speak. I was fairly sure I wasn’t dead because my internal voice was still clear as a bell, and my mind felt sharp, nimble with fear and confusion but my body was swollen and familiar with shame. It must have been quite a bender.