The Art of Not Breathing (24 page)

When I get back to the waiting room with two coffees, I notice the room smells of alcohol. I hand my parents the cups and take my seat again by the door.

“Where have you been?” my father asks.

I frown. “To get you drinks.”

My father looks down at the cup in his hand, perplexed. He gulps the coffee back in one go and then grimaces at the taste.

“Look at the state of you, Elsie. What have you been doing?”

My hair is all straggly and salty. I smell of rubber and sweat, and Tay.

“I went for a run.”

He throws the cup on the floor and the plastic crackles.

“For Christ’s sake, I leave you all for a few weeks and look what happens.”

“Not now, Colin. Can we focus on Dillon?”

“Oh, now you want to focus on Dillon?” My father turns his whole body to her so she can’t avoid looking at him. “Now you care about your son? You didn’t seem to care about him earlier when you were
at the pub
.”

“And where were you?” she screams back at him.

Her whole body is trembling. My father storms out.

At three a.m. Dr. Shaw tells us to go home. We have no choice but to stay at my father’s flat in Inverness.

I don’t hold my breath as I lie on the sofa. Instead I take big deep breaths and count them and count them. Mum is on the other sofa, whimpering. I don’t go to her. I don’t even ask if she’s okay. I just stare at her silhouette and try to make sense of everything Dillon said. It can’t be true. Dillon’s brain must have shrunk so much, he’s got confused between his own parents. My father was the one missing that day. Not Mum. She arrived in the car later. I know this. I was there.

When everything is quiet, I get up and wander around the flat. There aren’t many places to wander to—the bathroom, the kitchen, and back to the living room. I prop myself against the kitchen cupboards, and the cold tiles underneath me keep me awake. There are twenty-six large tiles on the kitchen floor. Above the oven there are twelve small ones—gray and white and black. I follow the patterns with my eyes, left to right, right to left, top to bottom, zigzag.

At seven thirty a.m. the phone rings. We need to come in straightaway.

Dr. Shaw greets us in the corridor as we approach the ward. I’m guessing she hasn’t been home to sleep, but she looks as though she has. She tells us that they need to get a tube down Dillon so that they can get nutrients and calories into him. His heart rate is too low, and oxygen isn’t getting to his major organs. They can’t wait any longer. He could die.

“Give him some orange juice,” my mum suggests in a wobbly voice. My father moves me out of the way and grabs her by the shoulders.

“It’s not a fucking cold, Celia.” His teeth are bared, and he snarls through them, spit spraying into the air. “How could you not notice how thin he is?”

“You’re the one who walked out on us.”

“I thought that you might actually get out of bed and start looking after your children. Instead you just shoved your head inside a bottle. And what’s wrong with Elsie? You’ve been letting her drink again.”

“He needs his
father,
” my mother hisses. She doesn’t look at me.

Dad clenches his fists and draws in a very long, slow breath. Mum stares at him, her eyes glistening. Their eyes remain locked until the doctor steps in.

“Excuse me. Your son . . .”

“For God’s sake, do what you have to,” my father says to Dr. Shaw. “Sort out the tube.”

“Okay, the problem is we’ll need to restrain him to do this. We managed to get some fluids in him last night via a drip, but he’s pulled all the tubes out, and now we can’t get near him. He’s very upset,” she says. “We need your permission to restrain him.”

“Restrain? There’s no way you’re touching my son. Let me speak to him. I’ll talk some sense into him,” Mum says.

“I’m afraid he’s asked not to see you. If you’re not able to give permission, we may have to resort to an involuntary admission.”

In the end my father gives permission.

Dr. Shaw explains that they will insert a feeding tube, which goes up his nose and down his throat into his stomach, and then they will pump liquid food into him.

“You’ll be gentle, won’t you?” I ask. Dr. Shaw nods.

The three of us stand in the corridor outside Dillon’s room and listen to Dillon scream and thrash about. Something metallic falls to the floor, and then I hear Dr. Shaw say, “Swallow, swallow. Keep swallowing.”

2

AFTER THREE DAYS, WE’RE FINALLY ALLOWED TO SEE DILLON.
He has his own room away from the younger children so that he doesn’t upset them with his screaming. This means that I can talk to him without anyone listening. I need to know if he was telling the truth. I leave Mum in the hospital gift shop, and I run upstairs so I can get to Dillon first.

Dr. Shaw waves at me as I come up the stairs and takes me into Dillon’s room.

“I went down there,” he slurs. “And it was goooood. Come w’me. . . . And we can eat spaghettiiiii . . .”

I look at Dr. Shaw, confused.

“He’s been sedated, so he’s a bit woozy. It should be wearing off now, though. He pulled out his feeding tube and kicked a nurse in the groin as she tried to restrain him.”

“He’s never been violent, Dr. Shaw.” I feel like a mother defending her naughty child to the headmaster.

“Where’s your mother? Is she coming?” Dr. Shaw asks.

“She’s gone to the shop.”

Dr. Shaw hesitates and pulls me outside into the corridor.

“How are things at home? Are your parents separated?”

She studies my face. I know she’s looking for clues, just like the doctors did when Dillon and I stopped talking. She wants to know if Dillon stopped eating because of my parents. She won’t find anything in my face or in my voice. I keep my jaw clenched shut.

Before I have a chance to speak to Dillon alone, Mum walks up the corridor with a white carrier bag full of sweets and magazines.

“Mrs. Main, I’m sorry to say that we’ve had to sedate Dillon. I have to let you know that the CAMHS team will send him to a more secure unit if his behavior continues to be unmanageable without medication.”

“The
what
team? Can you speak English, please?”

“Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.”

“Dr. Shaw,” my mother says loudly, “you’re part of this
team,
are you?”

“I am,” Dr. Shaw replies. “Look, spend some time with Dillon, and then perhaps before you leave, we can have a chat?”

“Fine,” Mum says, but I can already tell she has no intention of staying for a chat. She heads into Dillon’s room and starts talking nonstop about completely pointless stuff, like how warm it is, what a nice day for a walk in the glen it would be, how the birds have taken over the cathedral ruins.

Dillon barely looks at her. He lies in the bed, measuring his arms with his fingers and sighing. Eventually, he interrupts her to ask me how school is.

“It’s holidays,” I say.

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” he replies. “Happy holidays.”

Later that night, I sneak out of my father’s flat and get a taxi to the hospital. I have to hide in the toilets for half an hour, but eventually I get into Dillon’s room and shake him awake. He smells of vanilla and stomach acid. The skin around his nose is red from where he ripped the feeding tube off.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” I whisper. “They’re going to lock you up.”

Dillon looks at me wearily. The blue light of the moon shimmers through the window, making everything look dusty gray.

“I’m already locked up,” he replies, rolling away from me. I walk around to the other side of the trolley bed.

“What you said before about Mum, is it true? Did you just make it up? Do you mean Dad was having an affair?”

Dillon’s eyes focus for a few seconds.

“Forget I said anything. I think I was a bit delirious.”

“You think? So you remember what you said?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I want to grab hold of him and beg him to come home, but I’m too afraid of breaking him, too afraid of everything that will happen after now.

“It matters,” I hiss. “It matters for Eddie.”

“I saw Eddie,” he croaks. “I saw him in the water.”

“I see him all the time. In the street, in my bed, in the sky.”

“In the water.”

He splutters and his breathing gets heavy. I watch him for a couple of minutes, wondering what to say.

“Dillon,” I say softly, “Dr. Shaw says you’re unmanageable. What happened to you, Dillon? What made you break?”

But he’s no longer awake. In his sleep, he smiles.

3

AS JUNE TURNS INTO JULY, THE WEATHER REMAINS HOT AND STICKY,
and the only respite is the cool water around Sandwich Cove. I see Tay as much as possible, but he’s being difficult. But then he gets mopey when I leave him to visit Dillon, and says he misses me. I don’t mention the drop-off to Tay, but I still think about it every day. As soon as Dillon is well again, I’m going down—I just hope Eddie waits for me. He’s been quiet since Dillon’s been in hospital, and he’s started ignoring me when I call for him. Deep down, I suspect his silence has more to do with what I did with Tay than with Dillon being ill. Eddie will never get to have sex, or even have a girlfriend. I’ve never felt so far apart from him as I do now.

The tube is working. Dillon has gained some weight, but it’s put him in a foul mood.

“How can you do this to me?” he yells. “You’re just trying to make my life difficult.”

“We’re trying to help you,” I say. I can’t keep the annoyance from my voice. It’s not really fair that I’m spending my summer holiday visiting him in hospital, trying to cheer him up, and he’s so ungrateful. How dare he blame me for all of this when he’s the one keeping secrets all the time?

I’m sent home to pick up some more of his clothes, under instruction from Dr. Shaw to bring loose-fitting ones—nothing that Dillon wore when he was at his lowest weight. She says it like that—“lowest weight” rather than “skinny as fuck” or “at death’s door.” I’m used to all the hospital-speak now. I can read between the lines of everything they say and everything they mean.

Dillon’s bedroom still smells vomity, even though I squirted air freshener all over it. I peer down into the garden and look at the spot where I found him. The orange cones are still there, rolling gently on their sides in the breeze.

I grab a bag and start shoving old T-shirts into it. Trousers are harder to select. I can’t choose the baggiest ones, because they won’t stay up and the hospital doesn’t allow belts. In the end I put in tracksuit bottoms that have an elastic waist and some shorts that might fit. The sock drawer sticks, and when I yank it, the whole chest of drawers wobbles, sending Dillon’s collection of swimming trophies and science awards crashing to the floor.

Exasperated, I kick one of them and it breaks. I don’t even care. I flick the socks out of the drawer and into the bag. A small piece of folded-up paper flies out. It’s probably a love letter from Lara. I put it in my pocket to read later. Then I’ll tear it into tiny pieces and post them to her letterbox.