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THIS TIME IT wasn’t a child’s cries that disturbed Marion’s slumber, but a loud crash that sent hoofed animals stampeding through the forest of her dreams. After a brief struggle to free herself from sleep’s clutches, she got out of bed and rushed to the window. The uprooted sycamore tree was stretched across the grass, its upper part having smashed a section of the wall that separated their garden from Judith’s. John was lying on the ground next to it.
Marion ran from her bedroom. As she hurried down the first-floor landing she glimpsed a devilish face leering at her through the doorway of the guest room. She let out a little scream, before realizing it was just that pattern on the wood of the old oak wardrobe lit by a flash of lightning. Almost down the final flight of stairs she felt something catch her foot and stumbled forwards. Managing to cling to the banister and save herself just in time, she remembered with a chill that according to Aunt Agnes, Mother had tripped at this exact same spot, on the fourth stair from the bottom, falling, then crushing her baby brother beneath her as she landed on the hall floor.
When she got to John, she saw his clothes were soaking wet as if he had just been washed ashore by the tide and his hair flopped to one side like a clump of matted seaweed, exposing his naked scalp.
“What is it? What happened?”
He grasped hold of her hand so tightly, she thought the bones might break.
“I was trying to move it, to lift the damn tree away from the wall, and I got a terrible pain—down my arm and my chest! Please, love, help me.”
She tried to help him up, but she could no more lift him than the sycamore trunk itself, and the muscles in her back screamed each time she tried.
“I’ll get help, I’ll call an ambulance.”
“No, no, you can’t do that.”
“But, John, what else can I do? I can’t leave you out here in the garden.”
Marion went to the hallway and phoned for an ambulance with trembling fingers. When the operator asked for the address, her mind went blank and she couldn’t remember the number of her own house.
The operator, a man with a very kind voice, told her to walk calmly to the front door and take a look; he said that happened to people sometimes, that they forgot things when there was an emergency. When she gave him the address, he told her they’d send someone very quickly and Marion thanked him.
Marion wrapped her arms tightly around her body as she stood on the doorstep. When she heard the siren, she felt breathless with terrible excitement. Usually that sound made her think there had been an accident somewhere, some poor unknown soul was in dire trouble, but on this occasion she was the one who had called the ambulance. It was coming for her brother.
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WHEN THE AMBULANCE stopped in the street, she waved to the driver to let him know which house to go to. It irritated her to see Mr. Weinberg standing on his step, watching everything.
As the two young men in medic’s uniforms followed her into the house Marion felt her usual shame at the state of everything. As they went through the kitchen Marion noticed the cellar door had been left open, the key still in the keyhole. While the two men were examining John in the garden, she locked it, then placed the key into a biscuit barrel.
Going outside herself, she heard John arguing loudly with the two young men who were trying to move him onto a stretcher. Each time they touched him, he screamed out in pain.
“Who do you think you are? Get your bloody hands off me!”
“Sir, we need to take you into hospital to get you checked out.”
“I’m not going anywhere, you see, I can’t!” said John, slapping the men’s hands away as they tried to move him.
“You’ve got to let us do our job—”
“You buggers need to leave me alone.”
The men looked at Marion for support.
“Please, John, you have to let them help you,” Marion said gently.
He looked into her eyes, and she knew he was afraid. Kneeling down in the mud, she took hold of her brother’s hand. The fingers felt cold and limp.
“I promise it will be all right, love. You don’t need to worry. Mar will take care of everything,” she said.
John squeezed her fingers very weakly, then his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.
HOSPITAL
It was impossible for Marion to make sense of all the words and pictures colliding with one another inside her head. The fallen tree, a blocked blood vessel, and a broken hip: so many awful things at once! Why had this all happened now? The nurse had left her sitting on a small sofa in what was called the “Family Room” (those words made her feel lonelier than she ever had in her entire life), telling her that someone would come and fetch her when John’s operation was over. But she hadn’t said how long that would be, and according to the clock on the wall, Marion had been waiting nearly five hours. She watched the black hands, sharp as scalpels, steadily move around the clock’s cold, white face.
On the other side of the room there was a table with tea-and coffee-making things. A half-used packet of digestive biscuits stood upright, its torn wrapper unspooling across the tray. Despite having had nothing all day, she would sooner have put sand in her mouth than attempted to eat one.
Before the surgery, someone had asked her who was John’s next of kin. She had said that would be Mother. And then, when they asked how to get hold of her, she had told them that Mother was dead, and they looked at her like she was a complete fool. The doctor, a young Chinese woman wearing a pink jumper that didn’t seem very doctorlike, snapped at Marion as if she were a child who had been caught telling fibs:
“Do you realize there is a high possibility that your brother might not survive this surgery?”
The thought of his glasses left folded on the bedside table next to a half-eaten roll of Trebor mints, his cable-knit cardigan hung over the back of a chair like the pelt of a slain beast, ripped her apart. She might never hear him whistling along to the radio again or iron another of his shirts. For all his faults, John loved her and she loved him. Without him there would be no one. He was there on birthdays and at Christmas. He might only buy her something cheap or forget to buy her a present at all, but at least he was there. Someone to get angry with for not doing the right thing was better than no one at all. He was her brother. She had known him all her life. Without John, she felt, there would be nothing to fasten her to this world and she might just float off into the clouds.