Neither of us says anything as we grip onto each other and I find that, instead of the familiar sense of loneliness where my hope used to rest, I can feel something else there, a feeling of possibility for change, a spark of something different.
Moving away from this terrible routine scares me less than being locked in it, and although it feels blasphemous to even think, I realise I’m ready to wave a white flag, ready to surrender to the truth that my body can’t carry our child.
We stay in bed for the whole day, taking it in turns to cry and soothe, until David falls asleep again by my side, and I listen to the rise and fall of his breath and hope for sleep to come.
20
Frank
Lucy’s kept her promise; she’s visited every afternoon since my first scan four days ago. Today she’s curled up in my visitor’s chair chewing her fingernails, her feet tucked underneath her. She’s flicking through a glossy manual for a rehabilitation centre in Birmingham.
‘It says here, Dad, that they’ve got a special swimming pool to help residents regain muscle strength.’ She looks at me. ‘Ooo eerr,’ she says, like I’m headed to a decadent spa. I imagine people like me floating around like jellyfish.
I’m trying to blink twice for ‘no’ because I can’t blink ‘never, ever put me in a bloody swimming pool’ just yet, when Lizzie approaches the bed.
‘Hi, Lucy. Hi, Frank,’ she says. ‘This is Dr Sarah Marsh, our senior speech therapist. She’s going to introduce you both to the blinking board I was telling you about.’
An older woman with wiry grey hair and glasses that look like they’re about to slide off her nose and fall on me smiles down.
‘Hello, Mr Ashcroft. May I call you Frank?’ she asks.
I blink once and she shakes Lucy’s hand.
I zone in and out of Sarah Marsh’s instructions. The blinking board is an A3 piece of plastic with the alphabet divided lengthways into different colour bands. Red for letters from A – D, yellow for letters from E – H and so on. Sarah Marsh gets really excited when she tells us that soon Lucy can personalise the board for me, adding words I commonly use so I can just look at them without having to blink through the whole bloody board.
‘I hope you don’t mind swear words!’ Lucy says brightly.
Sarah Marsh frowns and says, ‘Let’s just try, shall we?’
She positions the board right in front of my face and in an overly loud voice that makes my skull vibrate she calls out, ‘Red.’
I blink.
‘Right, so that means his letter is in the first row of letters,’ Sarah Marsh says in a normal voice to Lucy before booming back at me, ‘A.’
I blink.
‘A. So we know he wants his word to start with “A”.’
I get over excited and fluff the next letter, blinking too soon on ‘K’ instead of ‘L’ so the next letter ‘I’ makes no sense.
‘A, K, I?’ Sarah Marsh sounds uncertain.
‘Aki, Dad? I can’t think of any word that begins with Aki …’
They both turn to me, confused, worried perhaps that I have lost it after all.
I try a double blink for ‘no’ but I’m too exhausted so I just let my eyelids glide shut.
‘I think it’s knackered him out,’ Lucy says.
‘It’s a big step.’ Sarah Marsh sounds disappointed although she’s pretending not to be. ‘Best to take it slowly. Today was just a little taster.’
Sarah Marsh leaves and I hear Luce mutter, ‘Aki, A.K.I’, quietly to herself a couple of times.
In the blackness, I worry that Lucy will question whether I am getting well or not, that she’ll start to think my blinking was just muscle reflex after all.
But then a consultant I don’t know comes to the bed and tells us a recent brain scan was encouraging, that there seem to be some small shards of light in the pulpy mess in my head.
There’s something very intimate about having a brain examination. I hope they’re not too accurate; I’d hate to think what they’d see. I imagine the white coats wincing over the results: ‘Oh dear, look, purple there for regret and those big flashes of red? Rage. Frank Ashcroft is not a peaceful man.’
Lucy gives me a peck and says, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow, Dad. We can try again with the board then. It’s so exciting to think you might say a word soon!’ I hear her smiling, a big smile to egg me along, to keep our spirits up.
I listen to her walk away and wonder where Alice is. She’s been gone for three days now. I overheard Carol telling Lizzie it was ‘one of her migraines’, which is news to me; Alice never said she got migraines. My plan is to sort this ‘AKI’ mess out, to blink what I obviously meant to blink, that’ll cheer her up, make her forget her migraine, if that is what’s wrong.
The last four days have been busy. I try to keep my eyes open now as I’m wheeled to my daily scan. I need to get used to people staring at me. Even after all of this, I’m surprised to find I still care what strangers think. When I’m not being scanned or with Lucy, I’m being prodded and pushed by an energetic physiotherapist, or my pupils are investigated by some visiting consultant. The main difference is that now they tell me where they’re going to prod or poke instead of just cracking on like before. Small mercies. They ask me before every session ‘How are you, Frank?’, which is bloody annoying because I’m still strictly a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ man.
Just as things have heated up for me, they have cooled for my neighbour. The reporters, it seems, have mostly lost interest, for now anyway. They’re pointing their cameras and microphones towards a local radio presenter who it turns out is overly fond of young girls.
Jack comes every day. He sits by his wife’s side, plays her music, calming classical stuff mainly, or reads her the newspaper. He only reads political and sports updates out loud for her. All the war and misery he keeps quietly to himself. I’m grateful for that.
Charlotte comes every day too. She likes to keep herself busy. She files Cassie’s nails, washes her hair, but sometimes she just waits – hands poised over Cassie’s stomach and her eyes fixed on Cassie’s face – for any sign from the baby. She cried the first time she felt the baby kick. They’re so consumed with their Cassie, I don’t think they even know I’m here; I could turn bright purple with pink spots overnight and they wouldn’t notice. Fair enough.
The lazy February sun has long gone and I’ve had a sleep since afternoon rounds, so I reckon it’s early evening when Alice arrives. She pauses by Cassie’s curtain before coming to me. My head is tilted forward so all I can see is the thin outline of my useless legs, but holding both sides of my head, she pulls my gaze up so we look directly into each other and I know as soon as I see her; it wasn’t a migraine.
She’s gaunt, as though she’s been emptied drip by drip of spark, her Alice-ness. She looks me straight in the eye and I see her eyes swell behind her eyelids. She bites the skin that peels painfully away from her bottom lip, looks deep into me and shakes her head a couple of times and that’s all it takes. I know. I know it’s happened again. She wipes an escaping tear from her cheek and lowers her eyes for a second before we both hear the rattle of Cassie’s curtain opening.