Abdi was the first friend to visit me in hospital since Matthew, and when he came he had the right attitude.
It was the end of the spring term of our second year at school. Abdi and me were best friends by then. We did everything together: We were seat buddies on the bus to the sports grounds, we did chess club and IT club together, we sat together at lunch and we hung out together at break. I helped him with English homework and he helped me with maths.
Abdi arrived at the hospital one evening after I’d been there for about a week. He had a chessboard and a stack of graphic novels tucked under his arm.
I was in a room of my own. You get one if you’re a baby or if your treatment is very harsh.
“Don’t you think chess is a bit much?” Mum said.
Abdi looked at me. “I don’t mind. We can just talk,” he said.
“I want to play,” I said.
We had to do some complicated rearranging of my tubes and machines, and it took a while to prop me up, but we got there. Abdi perched on the end of my bed and set up the chessboard on a pillow between us.
“I think this might wear you out,” Mum said.
“We can stop if it does.” Abdi laid out the chess pieces with neat movements.
“You could go and get a cup of coffee if you like?” I said to Mum.
For a moment, I thought she might refuse, because she looked so surprised. She said to Abdi, “If he looks any more pale than this or if his breathing gets ragged . . .”
“I’ll call the nurse,” Abdi said. “I promise.”
Mum knew that Abdi was trustworthy, because I told her he was, loads of times, even though, ironically, I wasn’t being a hundred percent honest about that, because who is?
“Okay, well, I think I’ll just sit outside the door here, so you can call me if you need me.”
“Mum, I’m fine.” That wasn’t totally true either, because I had some pain in my back that the morphine wasn’t touching and a wee bit of visual disturbance, but I wasn’t going to admit to that.
When we were alone, Abdi started the game with a move that I’d never seen him make before.
“Are you taking advantage of a sick boy?” I asked him.
“I’m not going to let you win just because you’re in here.”
I made my move.
“Feisty!” he said.
He didn’t once mention how sick I looked. He didn’t stare. As we played, I was concentrating so hard I stopped hearing the hiss of the oxygen and the sounds of the ward.
Abdi cracked open the window after a while. The sounds of a rained-on street came into my room with the cool air. He persuaded the nurses to bring us a glass so he could put his phone in it and improvise a speaker. He’d made me a playlist and we listened to it as we plotted the destruction of each other’s chess pieces. It was the most fun I’d ever had in hospital.
I lasted about forty-five minutes before the pain got to me and I had to re-dose on morphine. When I came around, Mum was back in her chair beside me and Abdi had gone, but the chessboard, with the pieces in place, had been moved to the windowsill, and it stayed there until he came back the next time and we continued the game.
And the best bit? Abdi came back whenever he could. It wasn’t all that often, because he needed to be collected by his dad, who was fitting it in around his shifts, but he was the first and only friend to visit me regularly.
I’m aware that there’s a lot of noise going on around me. Machinery noise and music, as if through headphones. I think I’m having a scan.
Scans make me panic. I’ve had to be sedated in the past. It’s the claustrophobia. I feel it now, but I can’t do anything about it apart from wait, watching the blackness, hearing the noises, feeling the fear rise. For the first time, I wonder when they’re going to bring me out of this coma, and exactly how sick I am. I am desperate to be able to ask my mum. She would have the answer.
I have a sense of motion, of turning wheels and a few bumps, and then we must be back on the ward because I hear Dad: “Did they say anything?”
“They’ll speak to us after they’ve reviewed the scan with the consultant.”
“I got you a tea.”
“Thanks.”
I hear them drinking their tea.
Mum says, “That Asian registrar said that if the bleeding in his brain has stabilized they might try to bring him round tomorrow.”
“And if not?”
“I don’t know. Let’s not go there.”
I hear Dad crick his fingers and groan as he stretches. He yawns very deeply and says, “I still can’t believe neither of us heard them leave the house.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it. There’s no point.”
“I shouldn’t have tied one on.”
“It was your exhibition opening. You were allowed a drink.”
Here’s what I want to say to Dad: “Boy, did you drink!” Because he did: one fancy bottled beer after another while we were at the gallery.
Woodley meets me at the entrance to the intensive care ward in the Children’s Hospital.
Inside, it’s as grim as you might expect. The children and babies are sicker than you ever want to see. Directed by the nurses, Woodley and I walk up the ward toward a bay at the far end. On either side of us, the beds are occupied for the most part by still bodies. Parents sit beside them, cloaked in anxiety.
Cast a cold eye, I think to myself. Dr. Manelli and I share an enthusiasm for poetry by W. B. Yeats. She told me to use it if it helped. I need a cold eye to keep moving between these beds, or I’ll have to turn around and walk out of there.
At the far end of the ward, a woman in scrubs pulls back a curtain just as we’re approaching, and I see a woman who must be Noah Sadler’s mother.
She sits in a chair on one side of his bed. She looks collapsed somehow, as if she’s missing something vital. On the other side of Noah’s bed there’s a huddle of machinery and a knot of plastic tubes and wiring.
Noah Sadler looks very sick. His eyes are closed and he’s motionless, just as Abdi was, but unlike his friend, Noah exhibits no hint of life at all. I try not to be transfixed by the small veins running across his eyelids. I already know that I’ll remember this, that the sight of the prone body of Noah Sadler has worked its way under my skin.
Fiona Sadler doesn’t want to talk beside Noah’s bed.
“I don’t know how much he can hear,” she says, “but I don’t want to be away from him for long.”
She confers with the nurses before leading us out of the main area of the ward into a small lobby.
“There aren’t any rooms available,” she tells us. “Will this do?”
We sit on plastic chairs in a row. Opposite us, nurses prepare meds in a brightly lit room with a half-glass door. A solid door beside it is labeled PARENTS’ ROOM.
Fiona Sadler is physically slight, as if she hasn’t eaten a decent meal in a long time. Woodley and I, sitting on either side of her, dwarf her. It’s not my preferred way to conduct an interview, but I dive in.
“Do you have any idea why the boys might have been out last night?”