I Am Watching You(23)

In the meantime, Sarah’s mother is trying to play down the tests; she keeps using her sing-song voice, saying everything is going to be just fine. But everything is not fine.

Her liver tests are still borderline. It is day four. Day four is apparently a very bad place to be.

They have given her back her phone and so yes, she has looked it up. Loads of people die of liver failure on day four.

Turns out surviving the paracetamol overdose doesn’t put you in the clear at all.

Is my liver going to pack up, Mum?

Stop it, Sarah. You’re going to be fine.

Not true. Her results are so borderline, she might need a transplant; it could go either way. It’s hard to tell with livers, apparently.

She’s had charcoal. And she’s had the drug by drip that’s supposed to help the liver cope with all this. But nothing is guaranteed. It’s a waiting game . . .

What Sarah wants more than anything is her sister. Lily. But her mum won’t talk about Lily, so all she has been able to do is message her on Facebook. But Lily hasn’t replied yet. Hasn’t updated her status for ages . . . The last picture was at some weird yoga retreat.

There is the sound of the curtain around her bed now. Her mother is back from the shop downstairs.

‘I bought you these.’ She has two magazines in her hand and the hospital cliché of grapes.

Sarah looks at her mother and feels a familiar and confusing myriad of emotions. Love. Anger. Frustration.

‘I’d better phone your father. Tell him how you’re doing.’

‘No. Don’t. I don’t want him here. I want Lily.’

‘Now come on, Sarah. He has a right to know the latest and if he wants to come—’

‘Don’t. I said I don’t want him here and I mean it. Why won’t you talk about Lily?’

‘Lily made her own choices. Lily has her own life now. Your dad . . . he’s been very worried.’

Sarah turns away. Bad enough that he had insisted on coming to the hotel in London. To talk with the police. Kept phoning. Checking up.

Maybe he was worried what she might say to the police.

Sarah looks at her mother, fussing with the grapes and the magazines. Moving the box of tissues and pouring cordial from a bottle.

How many times has she tried to broach it? To talk to her mother. To take the pin out of the grenade. But it’s always like this. She is dismissed. Shut down. The pin is popped straight back in. The pretence remains that their family is just a standard broken family. All very straightforward. Sad but neat. Nothing out of the ordinary. Loads of people get divorced after all.

Your father is gone. But we are going to be fine. It is all going to be civilised. We both love you very much still . . .

Occasionally, over the years, Sarah wondered about sharing the truth with Anna. But Anna had such a different life. Beautiful Anna. With her beautiful life.

Sarah leans back into the plumped-up pillows and closes her eyes.

‘That’s it, love. You have yourself a nice little nap. I’ll read.’

They met in the third year of primary school, she and Anna. Back then, Sarah’s dad was a lorry driver and away a lot. Her mother had always wanted to live in the country, so they bought a little two-bed modern terrace on a small estate on the outskirts of the village.

Sarah remembers how very shocked she was when Anna first invited her home to tea. The drive along the narrow lane to the huge farmhouse, with its chaos and its dogs and its line of wellingtons in the boot room which was bigger than her mother’s kitchen. Imagine, she told her family. A whole room just for boots and dogs. It’s nuts.

That first night after visiting the farmhouse, Sarah lay in bed, overwhelmed. Tea at hers after school was tinned spaghetti on toast, or oven chips made into chip butties. Only at weekends was there more effort, and even then it was from packets and tins.

At Anna’s it had been surreal. Her mother made this incredible stew – rich and delicious with herb dumplings on top – and apple crumble with homemade custard. It was a Wednesday, and Sarah had imagined it was a big and special fuss for her, but Anna said no, just a normal tea. Why? What do you like to eat?

Anna’s father came in from the fields to eat with them and was charming and funny, telling jokes, sitting at the table in his thick woollen socks and asking Sarah if she would like to come with Anna to see some of the new lambs.

Sarah looked around the table, watching Anna very closely, and it was like stepping back to watch from inside a strange bubble, realising that this really was their version of normal. Not a show put on for a visitor at all. Anna’s norm. Anna’s very different life.

And it wasn’t exactly jealously she felt, but there was this awareness, a stirring inside that was uncomfortable because it was the first time she had had her own life thrown into such sharp relief.

Anna was so different from her in other ways, too. Beautiful and kind and patient. She had been the first to befriend Sarah when she was standing awkwardly in the playground – the new girl. Anna had invited her to join in with a skipping game. And later to play two-ball against the wall, chanting rhymes as they each took a turn, moving in to juggle the balls without letting them drop.

They were thrilled to discover it was a shared passion – the two-ball. They became known as the best in the school. That’s really how it all began. Anna and Sarah. Best friends forever.