The Brilliant Light of Amber Sunrise (12 page)

Later that day, once everyone had gone home, I decided once and for all that I definitely wasn't speaking to Amber and probably never would be again. To begin phase one of my plan to demonstrate as much, I walked straight past her without so much as a glance and stood beside Kelly's bed.

“Hi,” I said.

Kelly did not respond.

“Do you want to play my Nintendo DS? I've got a ­double lead so we can both play at once. . . . I've got loads of good games.”

“Have you been sniffing glue?” Kelly asked, staring at me blankly like I'd just mucked up a card trick.

“No. You can have some of my sports drink if you like too. It'll be fun. We can bond and stuff.”

“Go away, Francis,” she said, and carried on reading her magazine.

I didn't dare look over at Amber, who I knew was probably watching our interaction like a hawk, and probably loving every second of it too. I had to admit that Operation Make Amber Jealous wasn't going too well. I glanced over at Paul's bed in the vain hope of scoring some points in extra time, but even I wasn't that ­desperate, so returned to my bed, forlorn, and pretended to go to sleep.

“Are you still cross with me?” Amber asked. I remained silent and wounded, refusing even to glance in her direction. “I'm quite upset too now, Francis, ­especially with you and Kelly getting on so well.”

I still didn't look at her but I knew she'd be smiling. I had never hated Amber more than I did at that moment.

“In fact, I think I might have my yogurt now, to try and cheer myself up.”

I glanced over at Amber as she peeled open the tub left over from lunchtime.

“Do you want to lick my lid?” she asked.

I didn't say anything, so she held out the tub and brandished it at me. She'd spent the whole evening biting at her nails and picking away at her cuticles, so already the varnish was chipped and cracked like army camouflage.

“Finger my pot?”
she said, and laughed. I turned over so that I was facing away from her.

No one said anything for a while, and eventually I felt a weight press down on my bed as Amber sat on it and tucked her legs beneath her. She stayed quiet as I lay there, trying not to turn over and look at her, then suddenly the whole bed started shaking.

“Will Francis and Amber's glorious love story resume?” she asked, shaking the Magic 8 ball over my head.

“It is decidedly so,” she said.

The word “love” certainly made me cock my ears. It
even made me reconsider the possibility that perhaps Amber wasn't the single worst person who had ever lived. But I played it cool and stayed, curled like a fetus, not looking at her, to see where she was heading with her routine.

“Well, that must be right,” she said. “I knew there was something in all this fate business. As far as I'm concerned that was six ninety-nine well spent.”

I smiled but didn't turn around so she couldn't see and it didn't count.

“Tough crowd,” Amber said as the bed started shaking again, harder this time, like we were being mutually ­possessed.

“Will Amber ever say sorry for being a total cow and upsetting her fave?”

I turned my head but not my body so that I could see her, jigging up and down on my bed as she furiously wielded the ball from side to side.

“Come on, Francis . . . almost there . . . rub it for luck.”

I lifted my hand from the bed and brushed it against the ball, still unimpressed.

“The stars say no,” she announced, as the bed stopped shaking. “Suppose you can't win them all.”

I decided to make things slightly easier for her.

“I'm your fave then?”

“Don't be such a woman, Francis,” Amber said, ­rubbing her hand up my back toward the nape of my neck.

Then, with a smile, she started shaking the ball again with all her might.

“Will we ever get out of this ward alive?” she asked, ­waving the ball closer and closer to my face.

“Don't!” I said, pressing it away so that she couldn't see the answer. Unable to gauge the reaction of her audience, she smiled and carried on.

“Will Amber and Francis be immortalized in death like Romeo and Juliet or similar . . . ?” she asked, shaking the ball again.

“DON'T!” I said, getting up and pulling it from her hands.

In fairness she did look like she was feeling sorry at this point, though of course she didn't say so. Amber never apologized. She played games so that you knew she was, and then picked and teased at the word, venturing close though never fully engaging with it, like a fat person with a too-hot sausage roll.

“Will Amber ever learn to give it a rest and let Francis have an easy life?” she asked one last time, shaking the ball furiously. “Concentrate and ask again,” she said, holding the ball up to her face.

Amber slowly moved across the bed so that she was lying flat next to me. I could feel the skin of her arm against mine, and her breath tickling the back of my neck. Because of this I became unable to turn over for all sorts of reasons.

“If I promise to concentrate really hard in the future, will you be my friend again, Frankie?” she asked.

At this point, I decided to relent. Plus my earlier interaction with our companions in the unit had made me realize I really had burned all other bridges.

“All right,” I said. “But I never said I wanted an easy life.”

“Go on . . .” she said, curling closer to me.

“Because I like having you around. I like having you around more than I've ever liked having anyone around . . . ever. Just don't be a dick!”

“Deal!” she said, and kissed me on the lips.

“Deal!” I said, and kissed her back.

“Hurray . . .” Amber whispered, pushing my mouth into an awkward smile. The Magic 8 ball fell out of her grasp, and rolled into the last few inches of space left between us.

On my last night Kelly had been groaning for hours on end. She had lost her hair too but hadn't learned anything from the experience. She would still try to glance at the footwear or accessories of the doctors and nurses frequenting her bedside, and form all character judgments based on her findings.

“Why don't you ever try with Dr. McCallum?” Jackie asked one day after Kelly had remained mute throughout one of his routine checkups.

“'Cuz he's only got a Nokia 3210 . . .
the loser
,” she said, before snorting a cheap laugh, then returning to her magazine.

In the middle of the night I heard her throwing up in the toilet. She had left the door open. For attention, I thought, and put a relaxing song on my iPod to try and lure me into sleep.

Halfway through the second verse of “Orinoco Flow” I caught a glimpse of a shadow walking past my bed. At first I thought I might have been tripping from the zoned out playlist Chris had made for me. When I realized this wasn't likely I just assumed I was hallucinating. Mum told me that when I had meningitis I'd carried out an entire conversation with a
Sesame Street
poster on my bedroom wall, so I knew I was prone to such flights of fancy.

Then I saw the way the shadow shuffled and slumped down the length of the ward, and realized even a mind as unconventional as mine couldn't have invented a character so formless. It was Amber, I realized, making her way sleepily toward the toilet.

Before I had time to turn off my iPod I saw her go into the bathroom. She was there a while, as Kelly retched and gagged and sniffed back tears. I heard Amber speak but couldn't tell what she was saying. She talked longer than she ever had to Kelly before. Usually they spoke one line at a time to each other. And usually even that was an effort. But
Amber seemed to be talking at length tonight, just quietly whispering things that I couldn't make out. They were in there so long that I thought perhaps she was happy to have finally made a female friend to discuss our blossoming love with. Kelly seemed unresponsive at first, so I assumed Amber was waxing lyrical about our time together. I sat up to try and have a better listen, then slid back down into pretend sleep when I heard Kelly mutter something in response, and then the sound of the bathroom light being turned off.

When they came back they were together. I'd muted my iPod so that I could hear all that transpired, but kept my eyes closed to maintain the illusion.

I heard Kelly being tucked back into bed, and someone filling a cup for her from a jug of water.

“Thanks,” Kelly said tearfully. Then, I assume to maintain the status quo, she added, “I still hate you.”

“Good,” I heard Amber say as she made her way back across the ward. “Don't be getting any funny ideas either. This doesn't make us friends. You haven't even got a library card.”

“You haven't even got a BlackBerry.
Idiot!
” Kelly said, as Amber climbed back into bed.

The day I left the unit Chris helped me make a Get Well Soon card for Amber. We printed it onto a sheet of card backed by a photograph of the constellations. On the reverse we'd printed the poem “Bright Star” in special, swirling writing.

“Is this a thing now?” Amber asked, turning the card over and looking at the poem, bemused. All I could assume was that in her drugged-up state the subtlety of the gesture had been lost on her.

“Yes. I told you about it. Remember? It can be our poem. It is a thing. Honestly.”

“Fair enough. I like it.”

“We invented the font ourselves,” I told her proudly while Mum hovered at the door of the unit, chatting to Jackie. In truth, now that I had found Amber I wanted to stay there, but didn't dare admit as much. Nor did I tell her that when I said “we” had invented the font, I'd really meant Chris, who had brought his laptop and printer to the unit that day so that we could sneak off and make this token of my love in secret. I'd simply stood over him and told him it was rubbish and that he'd have to do it again . . . until I was as pleased with the last-minute effort as I could be. “We named it after you. It's called Amber Sans.”

“I love it,” she said eventually, pulling off a clod of sticky putty and pinning my card to the center of the arrangement above her bed. “I didn't get you anything, though. My presence is a present, I suppose.”

This was true. But a real present wouldn't have gone amiss. I'd mentioned on more than one occasion how partial I was to iTunes vouchers.

“Here, have this,” she said, peeling off her plastic wristband and handing it to me.

“You're supposed to keep that on,” I said, hurriedly shoving it inside my pocket.

“What? For when they identify the body?”

“Don't say that,” I said, and Amber made a joke “sorry” face and then squeezed my cheeks into an uncertain smile.

She seemed to find it amusing when I asked her what she was going to do without me. In fact she laughed solidly for almost a whole minute. I counted. I don't know why. Already I knew that my days would be wasted without her. She was like my strongest limb; without her I would be lost.