People LIke Her(77)

“Sorry?” I say.

“I said, ‘How is it any different?’” she says.

“Different from what?” I ask.

As I’m waiting for an answer, my phone starts ringing and at first I ignore it but it just keeps buzzing and buzzing in my pocket and eventually I take it out to see who’s calling. It’s Irene, and I answer it and say something fairly brusque like, “What?” and she says, “Emmy,” and from the way she says it I can tell she’s trying to keep her voice calm and steady.

“Dan,” she says. “I think something has happened to Emmy.”

Emmy

I think it is possible that I am dying.

Have I said that already?

For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to work out if I’m awake or asleep, watching patterns swirl and dissolve on the insides of my eyelids, trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the conversation I am conducting in my head with somebody who is sometimes Dan, sometimes my mum, sometimes Irene, sometimes a complete stranger. I keep trying to make my thoughts go in a straight line, but it’s like attempting to walk on a dead leg. As soon as I feel I’ve got something straight in my head, I immediately forget it. How I got here, for instance. Where I am.

Have I been in an accident? Has something happened to me? In my more lucid intervals I get the distinct impression I am lying in a hospital bed somewhere. Every so often I seem to sense that I am not alone, that there is someone leaning over me, checking something, making little adjustments to whatever equipment they have got me hooked up to here, inspecting whatever monitors I can hear occasionally beeping. Sometimes I hear them clucking to themselves, muttering, moving things around. Sometimes I can feel them arranging my head, my shoulders, the pillow.

I could be dreaming or imagining all of that, of course. I remember Dan once telling me about the tricks the mind plays when you’ve been alone in the dark too long, when it has been starved of sensory input. The sorts of things long-distance truck drivers start seeing swirling out of the darkness after being behind the wheel for days. For ages, for instance, I was convinced I could hear ABBA’s greatest hits playing somewhere nearby, just loud enough to hear, over and over on repeat until I could have told you without hesitation as soon as one song ended what the next one was going to be.

For ages too I have been sure that I can hear a baby crying, really close and really loud. For a while I was convinced it was Bear, then I remembered where I am and realized it must be someone else’s baby, someone else on the ward, someone in another nearby bed, but by God it sounds unhappy and by God it sounds like mine—so much like mine it is making my own milk-swollen breasts throb and ache. On and on and on it goes. Inconsolable, unbroken howling for what feels like hours with just the occasional intermission while they gulp in more air.

Why is no one comforting it? That is what I don’t understand. Why does no one seem to be to trying to calm it down, giving it a cuddle, taking the poor thing for a quick walk up and down the corridor or into another room for a bit? Here, I feel like saying, let me show you. Have you tried burping them, maybe? That’s the way my little one always cries when he is feeling gassy.

And in my head, I am composing a very long post about all of this, adding in what a fantastic job they are doing, all those nurses and doctors, how wonderful our NHS is, but also mentioning how incredibly thirsty I am and is there not anything anybody can do about this baby . . . and then I realize I am not actually composing a post, I am just mentally dictating it to nobody, and all this time the baby keeps screaming.

And then it stops, in the abrupt way that babies do stop crying, eventually, after they have howled themselves into exhaustion, and in that sudden silence I find myself wondering if I really heard anything, whether there was a baby, whether there is even a ward.

Time passes. The silence continues.

Thank God for that, I think.

Then the screaming starts again.





Epilogue


Dan

I can remember every detail of that phone call as if it happened yesterday. Wandering down the street, not really able to take anything in, asking Irene questions over and over again that she’d already told me she didn’t know the answer to. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Emmy and Bear had never arrived at the retreat. The retreat had never sent a car. No one had seen or heard from my wife or my son for over seventy-two hours.

After that, things get kind of fuzzy, fragmented.

I can remember calling Doreen from the train and telling her not to panic, and she offered to give Coco her dinner and a bath and put her to bed, to wait there until I got home, and then the train went into a tunnel and we lost our connection for about five minutes.

I can remember trying Emmy’s phone, frantically, pointlessly, again and again and again. Then trying the other one, the one she said she was going to try to hide from the hippies and hang on to. Both of them went straight to voicemail.

I can’t remember telling Irene where I was or how long it would take me to get to London, but I must have done, because when I got to the ticket barrier at Liverpool Street, there she was.

She’d just spoken to the hospital, she said. Emmy’s mother was going to be fine. No signs of concussion.

That’s why she’d been trying to contact Emmy, the reason she’d called the retreat. To tell her that Virginia was in the hospital. That she’d tripped coming down the stairs of a Mayfair members’ club after the launch of a limited-edition gin and landed backward on the marble floor of the lobby, knocking herself out cold. Irene told me this in the back of a taxi on the way to the nearest police station, but to be honest, not much of it registered. Every time we hit traffic, Irene would lean forward and enter into a brief exchange with the driver, then we’d pull a sudden U-turn or take a sharp detour. “They let me speak to Ginny half an hour ago,” Irene informed me. “She insists her shoes were the problem.” The whole time Irene was talking, she had one eye on her phone, her thumb constantly moving.