LITMIR.BIZ

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attended was separate from the boys’, but Beth was almost the same age as Rob Ellis. She knew from somewhere, from long-ago whispered gossip of girls, that there was a strangeness about him. Something to do with his past. The cloudy associations had regathered as soon as her mother had told her who had been driving the van.

      ‘What do you want? What are you doing here?’

      Brusquely he dismissed her questions with his own. ‘How is he?’

      ‘In a coma still. On a ventilator. Do you care, since you put him there?’

      He had almost turned away but now he rounded on her. His face made her step back, wishing she could take back the words as well. But he only said, ‘Yes, I do.’

      Lizzie was sitting beside the bed. The registrar had just made his routine visit to Danny. There was no change. She heard the footsteps and looked up. Rob was standing a yard away from her, wrapped in his jacket, his eyes fixed on Danny. He came closer, until he leaned over him. His hair fell forward over his shoulder and the leather of his coat creaked as he stretched out a hand.

      Beth had followed him in. She signalled to Lizzie, This is him. Lizzie leapt to her feet.

      ‘What do you want?’

      Rob gave no sign of having heard her. He was watching Danny, his good hand resting on the edge of the bed. Lizzie ran round to him and shook him by the elbow. He turned very slowly. He was tall, looming over her.

      She repeated more loudly, ‘What do you want?’

      The boy shook his head. He had long hair in thick coils caught back in a rough tail. She heard the rustle of it against his collar. He was unshaven, his cheeks unevenly pricked with a reddish stubble. His lips were cracked and there were dark patches beneath his eyes. A fresh dressing on one side of his head looked startlingly white.

      ‘To see him. What do you think?’

      His voice sounded rusty in his throat, as if he had not done much talking lately. Lizzie pushed his arm with the flat of her hand.

      ‘You can’t stay here.’

      ‘You can’t tell me what I can do.’

      His effrontery amazed her. There was a glaze to him, a carelessness, that seemed utterly repellent. What if Jess should come back and see him here? Lizzie pushed harder, anger rising up through her exhaustion and anxiety.

      Rob grabbed her wrist. His fingers were like steel, making her wince.

      ‘He’s my friend. See? Who are you?’

      ‘His … aunt.’ She felt frightened now as well as angry.

      ‘Yeah.’

      Beth was at Lizzie’s side, trying to separate them. The Indian family timidly looked on. Rob flung away from the two women and turned back to Danny. He bent over him for a moment, his lips inaudibly moving. Beth saw it and hesitated but Lizzie was already bringing across the Irish charge nurse.

      ‘I’m afraid you can’t stay without the family’s agreement,’ the nurse said. He was much shorter than Rob. Two doctors looked up from the desk in the middle of the ward.

      At the same time Jess and Ian came back.

      Ian recognised in an instant who this was, and saw the way that Lizzie and Beth squared up to the intruder, fending him off.

      ‘Come on. Out of here,’ Ian said sharply. His hand was already raised.

      The director of the unit was on his way across to them, wearing a plastic apron like everyone else who came into the room. Except for Rob.

      ‘I’m sorry, this is too many people around one bed. It’s disturbing for other patients.’ To Rob he said, ‘You are an infection risk. You will have to leave.’

      No one had been looking at Jess. But now she said, ‘Let him stay. Just for a few minutes.’

      She went to the dispenser beside the door and pulled out a disposable apron. She held it out to Rob without looking at him. He took it from her and Danny’s nurse helped him to pull it over his head and tie the strings.

      ‘We can go outside,’ Jess said.

      They went into the empty waiting room. Jess crossed to the high window and stared out unseeingly. It was almost dark.

      ‘Mum,’ Beth began.

      Jess didn’t look round. ‘It’s what Danny would want. What does anything else matter?’

      Rob stood at the bedside without moving. The nurse frowned at him, then returned to writing on the charts. The doctors resumed their low-voiced conversation and the eyes of the Indian family turned back to their child. Rob looked at Danny’s face. In his stillness he seemed hardly recognisable. The tube taped sideways into his mouth looked incongruously like a dog’s bone.

      ‘Dan,’ he said softly. But Danny didn’t turn his head or open his eyes.

      Rob began to shake. It had taken courage to come here and now it was deserting him.

      The hiss and sigh of the ventilator and the flicker of coloured traces across the screen above the bed were nothing to do with Danny. Danny was not here. But all of this hardware was real and present, and the ward and the waiting room and the people trapped in it. And it had taken on its lurid and threatening hyper-reality in the short days since the crash and he could do nothing to banish it again. He closed his eyes and opened them, and bit the inside of his mouth to suppress the groan of horror that rose up in him.

      Wake up, he silently begged. Just for a minute wake up and look at me. Be yourself again and let me not have done this. Or let it be you standing here and me lying with the thing in my mouth and the machine breathing for me instead. Go on. Why don’t you?

      But Danny’s absence and stillness only proclaimed the futility of wishing. Nothing would make the past into the present again. The wasteful truth ignited Rob’s anger. He said more loudly, ‘Danny, mate, can you hear me?’

      Nothing. Rob stepped back from the bed, still staring at the face that injury had unshaped.

      ‘I’ll see you,’ Rob said. ‘I’ll see you around, right?’

      And then he turned and ran down the ward. At the door he tore off the plastic apron and aimed it at the bin but the air caught it and it floated, like a sloughed-off dry skin.

      Rob ran past the closed door of the waiting room and down the deserted tunnel of the corridor towards the lifts. But someone standing in a shallow alcove formed by some cupboards saw him coming and stepped out to block his path.

      Danny’s father. A stocky, sandy-haired man with a freckly tan and gingery hairs on the backs of his fingers. The fingers were balled into fists now.

      ‘Don’t you come back here ever again,’ Ian Arrowsmith said. ‘Don’t you think it’s enough to get pissed and smash our boy into a wall, without coming back to look at what you’ve done?’

      Rob was still shaking. He made an effort to swallow but he was dry-mouthed with anger. He saw red flashes of light around the man’s congested face.

      ‘What do you think it’s like for his mother and sister, seeing you here, knowing what you did?’

      Rob clenched his left fist ready to hit him. But then he made his fingers slacken again. Rob ran away, his boot soles squealing on the polished hospital lino.

      The surgeon asked to see Jess and Ian.

      He said gently, ‘Mr and Mrs Arrowsmith. We are going to perform some tests on Danny. These tests will determine for us if there is some hope of a partial recovery, or if the damage his brain has suffered is irremediable.’

      Jess looked down at her knees, at her hands tidily clasped and resting there. For a panic-stricken instant she thought she couldn’t recall Danny’s voice or summon his face. But then she saw and heard him, and lifted her head.

      ‘When?’

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