After he sat down beside me, I gave him a present because he passed the test. I didn’t explain that to him, obviously. I just handed him a very cool, clicky pencil with thick refillable leads that Mum had given me as a “well done for having a lumbar puncture” present a while before. It was red. Abdi was excited to get it because his parents didn’t have much money so they got his pencils from the supermarket and the leads were always breaking.
I tested him lots more times after that. I tested him by not texting first, to see if he would. I tested him by leaving places without saying goodbye to see if he would notice. Sometimes I think he suspected he was being tested, sometimes not. Some of the tests he passed; some he didn’t. When he chose Imran over me or forgot me, I felt useless, and that could make me feel ill. When that happened, I always wanted Abdi to take me to the nurse. I made sure all the teachers knew it had to be him.
It took a while, but the testing worked eventually: Abdi saw that I was right, that he couldn’t be best friends with both me and Imran. It was obvious that Imran would be fine because he’d made lots more friends by then. He spread himself thin. My final proof was when Imran easily found somebody else to play badminton with after Abdi started coming to IT club with me again. I said to Abdi, “That sporty lot aren’t our kind of people, anyway.”
We got close again, after that. We shared homework, projects, and clubs, and everything went back to how it was before my stem cell transplant.
What my parents didn’t know was that before the night of Dad’s gallery party, Abdi and I had made a plan. It was something we were going to do after the party.
Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 8: Experience a rite of passage. (In my head this one could also have been worded “Have a beer with a mate,” but I didn’t tell Dad that, because he suggested I could have a beer with him. It was a nice idea, but really, who the heck goes through a rite of passage with their dad?)
It was an imperfect plan, because I knew Abdi wouldn’t drink alcohol, but I didn’t really see that as a problem. The point was, we were going to sneak out of the house and do something cool together, and I was going to get to feel like a real teenager.
The sensation of heat rising in my body is becoming overwhelming. It’s woozy, baking, oven-hot heat. Randomly, all I can think about is the Cat in the Hat with his fan. I would like him to fan me. I don’t think the ice is working.
I’m aware that there’s silence around me, where before there was talking, and I wonder why I can’t hear my parents and if they’re even here with me.
Panic rises along with the heat. I don’t want to be stuck here alone, even for five minutes. Not anymore. I can’t tolerate the heat. They need to make it go away. My paralysis should be over by now, my eyes should be open, I should be able to speak. I’m afraid I’m getting worse, not better. A death like this, incarcerated in my own body for who knows how long, would be awful.
I’m overwhelmed with a desire to see where I am, who’s around me, and all the familiar things that Mum brings to the hospital to make it nice. I start to list those things in my head, to calm myself down.
My old toy dog from home will be here. I know I’m too big for that kind of thing, but I like to have it with me for luck.
I want to see the tub of caramel chocolate bites on the table beside my bed. My favorites, always there in case I find my appetite. Mum will have put a bag of Pink Lady apples in the fridge in the parents’ room, too, so I can have one if I ever feel like it, and it’ll be crisp and cold in my mouth.
I want to see the nurses and doctors I’m familiar with, not the strange ones who are hovering around me here.
Most of all, I want to see my parents.
I feel very afraid.
I’m afraid that I’ll be stuck like this forever, and afraid that I might die. Not the way that I’ve imagined it would happen, but locked in my own body. With people, but not with them. Not able to say or explain anything. Alone.
“Nurse!” Mum calls. “Nurse!”
I hear rapid footfall.
“He’s crying,” Mum says. “Look. He’s crying.”
“Noah,” says the nurse gently, “can you let us know why you’re crying? Are you in pain anywhere? Can you give us any kind of sign?”
Their voices drift away like small shreds of cloud chased across the sky, and there’s nothing left but a burning white sun, and its heat is everything.
I have to leave for work before Becky wakes up the following morning.
There’s been no update from the hospital on Noah Sadler’s condition overnight, so I plant a coffee on Woodley’s desk and ask him to call Noah Sadler’s ward for me.
“Is this bribery of some sort?” he says, lifting the lid to peer at the cup’s contents.
“Absolutely. It’s a key management tool, I’m told.”
“Works for me, boss.”
A note on my desk tells me that there are some CCTV clips ready for us to look at. When Woodley gets off the phone, we find the officer who’s been poring over hours of footage for us.
“I could only get hold of an agency nurse,” Woodley tells me on the way, “but she said so far as she knows he’s stable, and she’ll get somebody to call us if anything changes.”
The first CCTV clip the detective constable has ready for us shows Noah and Abdi walking past the cathedral, heading west across College Green toward the city center. The boys are together, shoulder to shoulder. Noah Sadler wears a backpack, and it looks weighty. The camera has recorded them from a height, so it’s very hard to see their expressions, but their body language says a lot. They look like partners in whatever they’re doing.
“Did we recover that backpack?” I ask.
The DC shakes his head. “He’s wearing it in every picture I’ve seen, so it must have disappeared nearer the scene or at it. He might have been wearing it when he went into the water.”
“Then he’d have had to get it off in the water.”
The DC shrugs. “Could have, I suppose. By the look of it, if he was wearing it, it would have dragged him under fast.”
Woodley is staring at the frozen image. “They look friendly enough together there.”
“It doesn’t last,” says the DC.
The next clip shows Pero’s Bridge. It spans the floating harbor slap-bang in the center of the city. Fog billows over it: a result of the artist’s installation that the local news has been banging on about for weeks.
“They come out from here,” says the DC, pointing at a small gap between buildings, and I see the boys emerge together and walk toward the bridge. The time gap between this clip and the last is considerable. At least twenty minutes have passed, yet the distance between the two cameras is only about five minutes’ walk, if that.
The boys step onto the bridge and the fog immediately obscures them.
“Frustratingly, you can only see glimpses of them on the bridge, because the fog’s so thick, but they get up to something . . . here . . .” The DC forwards the tape then pauses it. “Watch carefully,” he says. He plays the next bit of footage in very slow motion. Putting the frames together it seems as if Noah Sadler interrupts Abdi as he looks at something and then knocks it from his hand. The DC zooms in on a blurry object caught on the floor of the bridge.
“I think he knocks a phone out of Abdi Mahad’s hand,” he says. “And it goes into the water.”