I drop the post I was flicking through onto the counter and bend down to take my trainers off. After the break my feet hurt more than usual.
‘Busy,’ I say, ‘but fine. You know, Mary’s been at Kate’s for twenty years now? Seriously, that woman’s got stamina. I don’t know how she’s done it. That’s another resolution actually: I need to make a plan, think about what I’m going to do next.’ I’m pleased I keep my voice breezy. Our first few years together in our tiny Hackney basement flat – me as a newly qualified, overwhelmed nurse, David finishing his architecture training – we’d talk over pints in our damp local about the future; Hackney at that time was more associated with ‘Murder Mile’ than flat whites and pop-up restaurants. In my plan, we’d have kids in our late twenties and early thirties, I’d stop nursing while they were tiny and maybe do something completely different when they went to school, like working in an art gallery or designing jewellery, something creative that would allow me to always be there for any sick days and holidays, by which point, David would have his own flourishing practice. We’d live in a rambling farmhouse near the sea and our kids would grow up with dogs, chickens and goats and they’d be the boisterous, ruddy-cheeked type, unafraid of adults and the future. I had it all figured out.
David turns to hug me; he probably knows what I’m thinking. I fit perfectly under his shoulders and instinctually he bends to kiss me somewhere on my face. His lips land near my eyebrow.
‘How was your day?’ I ask, my voice muffled against his chest. He kisses me briefly on the lips this time before we let each other go.
‘Oh, fine, you know. I did some more drawings for Jess and Tim’s extension; it’s starting to come together pretty nicely.’ David’s charging our friends a mates’ rate but it’s worth it to get his name more visible locally.
‘That’s exciting!’ I say, opening a mobile phone bill and immediately putting it back on the counter top without looking at it. ‘I just texted Jess actually. I invited them over on Thursday next week. I thought you and Tim can geek out on the drawings and Jess and I can have a proper catch-up.’
David rinses out his glass. ‘Sounds good, I’ll make one of my famous lasagnes.’ He winces into the fridge. ‘What shall we have for dinner? God, it’s a jungle in here.’ He’s talking about the bushels of spinach and kale I bought. Resolution number five: actually use the juicer I bought David for Christmas. David pulls all the green stuff out of the fridge until he finds an old block of cheddar, which he starts chopping directly on the counter top and eating in chunky pieces. Through a mouthful of cheese he puffs his cheeks out and nods. ‘Looks like it’s going to be good old kale with lettuce on the side and spinach for pudding tonight. God, I miss Christmas.’
I laugh as he drops his head dramatically down onto the wooden counter and I pinch the last bit of cheese as he murmurs in an injured voice, ‘Promise me the year is going to get better than this.’
I grin at him, but I don’t reply. I start walking upstairs towards our bedroom instead, because I don’t want to make David any more promises I can’t keep.
2
Frank
When I was a kid, around six or seven maybe, my mum got ill. Nothing too serious it turns out but she had to go away for a couple of weeks and me and my brother went to stay with our grandparents. They were nice enough to us, but the point is, it’s the first time I can recall missing someone. Not a vague everyday kind of missing, but a sort of reverse umbilical wrench. Without my mum I felt embryonic, incapable on my own; every instinct wanted to be back inside her, where it was safe, where I couldn’t be alone. Then we went home and everything was normal again and in the way of kids, all the crying and calling out for her, well, it was as if it never happened.
Without Alice, I remembered that time, how I felt when my mum was ill. I’ve been panicky these last few days, scaring myself imagining her never coming back. She told me she wouldn’t be around for Christmas but I thought it’d just be a day or two. There were a couple of bank nurses over the holiday who didn’t even bother to learn my name. To them, I was just ‘the patient’.
That new one, Lizzie, tries the odd joke with me.
‘It’s turkey flavour today, Mr Ashcroft,’ she said from under her Santa hat on Christmas Day as she emptied a syringe into one of the tubes that spools out of me, pumping brown ICU mush directly into my stomach. Nice of her to try, but she should know I couldn’t tell the difference between turkey and tarmac. Lizzie’s new to us veggies as well; it’s obvious. She moves my head in hesitant, cautious jerks. It’s quite sweet really. She doesn’t want to hurt me, but she could take a cheese grater to my chest and a lighter to my balls and I’d feel it, every grate and burn, just like anyone else, but I wouldn’t be able to scream. I wouldn’t even be able to bat an eyelid.
I often wonder if Sharma had believed Alice and her diagnosis of ‘Locked In’ rather than ‘Persistent Vegetative State’ how different things would be for me here. PVS, as far as I can gather, is a pretty way of saying dead in all ways that count for the living. The PVS patient is balancing between life and death, their brain empty as a cloud but their lungs pumped with oxygen. The docs keep the patient going, like kids with a butterfly on a piece of string, they will not let go, but stick grimly to their game, because to turn off the machines, to let go of that string, would be to lose the game, to let the butterfly float away, and that can’t happen. It can’t be helped though, I suppose. The living are usually obsessive about life.
So that’s PVS, lights on but no one home. My situation is a little different, I’m home but my fuse has blown to the ‘off’ setting, Alice calls it ‘Locked In Syndrome’. An itchy nose, a sense of humour, sex drive, a voice in my head, needing to shit, regret, I’ve got it all, all those urges, needs and desires, as clear, prickly and torturous as ever. But I’m stuck, I can’t ‘do’ any of them. There’s no scratching, laughing, shagging, chatting, crapping or crying. It’s all done for me or over me, apart from the shagging.
Alice is still the only one who can sense me in here, trapped in my body, like a straitjacket.
This morning, I hear her before I see her; I know her step anywhere now. Her walk sounds like a pianist’s fingers across the keyboard. She lifts and lilts, the heel notes low and the toes higher. Relief pulses through me and crests as she comes into my line of vision.
Alice is back. She’s here.