The Other Half of My Heart (25 page)

‘Roddy, listen to me.' Howard has waited until Roddy opens his eyes again. ‘The lorry driver said he skidded on the road. He said there was nothing he or you could do. It was wet. He put his hands up, straight away, and no one's arguing. He said he thought you were going to be able to get out of the way, but then he felt the back clip you. There was only a hair in it.'

Roddy cannot think of a single word to say. He looks at Howard, mute.

‘It was an accident, Roddy. Blaming each other, blaming ourselves, isn't going to bring Sam back.'

‘No.'

‘And Sam liked you a lot. He liked the way you were with Tina.'

‘I was going to ask Tina to move in with me,' Roddy says. It seems like another world. Howard doesn't seem to hear. Maybe Roddy didn't speak aloud. He has so many conversations, with Tina, with Sam, in his head that it's quite possible.

‘Your mother and I have been talking a lot.'

‘Yes.'

Roddy has heard them, not their words but their voices, in corridors and round corners, although the way he is at the moment, as good as static and numbed by painkillers and shock where he isn't actually paralysed, means that almost every word that comes his way seems indirect, overheard.

‘The thing is – Alice isn't doing so well.'

‘No.' Roddy remembers his own mother, usually so calm, so steady, so wise and so straightforward, at his bedside, thinking he slept, and making a noise that he barely recognized as human, let alone as a sound made by his mother: a low, aching, discordant strain of sorrow.

‘Alice is—' Howard is fumbling for words, but every time he finds a set that seem to say what he needs to without causing any hurt, he turns them over to discover a barb or a jag.

‘Just say it, whatever it is,' Roddy says. The tiredness that he can't control is coming again. That, and the feeling he had when he saw the dislocated elbow of the lorry coming towards them, a panic that can't be stopped, unpredictable, unbidden.

‘Alice gets upset when she hears anything about you. She's glad you're all right, of course – not all right, but …' ‘Enraged' would have been a better word than ‘upset', but Howard decided not to use it. Every day is like this: picking the least painful from thousands of painful paths.

Roddy would wave his hand, if he had the energy, if the pain would let him. ‘I know. Not dead.'

Howard nods, a small nod that Roddy doesn't quite see, but senses. ‘It's hard for her. She does blame you. She won't, in time, but she does.'

Roddy blinks in reply. Alice, then, has recognized where the blame lies. He's glad, in a strange way. At least someone has seen the truth, instead of reassuring him of his innocence all the damn time. ‘Does Tina blame me?' he asks. It's the most important question of all, for Roddy. His future dangles from it.

‘Tina asks about you,' Howard says.

‘What have you told her?'

‘We've told her the facts. Your spinal cord is damaged, you won't walk again, you will be able to live independently in the right circumstances.'

Roddy thinks about how much he will miss the unthinking actions of his life. Right now he wants to walk over to Howard, shake his hand, clap his shoulder, thank him for just saying it the way that it's going to be, instead of talking about compromised movement and learning to live with limitations.

‘I see,' he says instead, ‘thank you for being honest, Howard.' He wants to say, tell her I can still get a hard-on. I wake up in the morning and it's an embarrassment when the nurses come in and see it. Instead he says, ‘What did she say?'

‘She isn't saying a lot.' Tina says almost nothing in response to questions. She only answers direct, closed enquiries: would you like cheese or beans on your potato, shall I put the radio on, would you like the curtains drawn. If anyone asks how she is feeling or what she is planning, she just looks at them, as if to say, what does that matter, now. The doctors talk about depression being understandable, about the guilt that survivors feel. They suggest antidepressants, but Tina just says no, and closes her eyes.

She does ask a question about Roddy. ‘How's Roddy?' are her first words in the morning. Roddy was the first word she said when she came round. Her mother had run out of the room, in tears. Of course it had been the relief; but it had also been the fact that, as they sat at her bedside waiting for her to wake, they'd talked about Sam, about how they would tell Tina about Sam, about how the first thing that Tina would want to know was how her brother was, and how they would break the news to her.

But Tina said the wrong thing. And Tina kept on saying the wrong thing. She wouldn't talk about Sam, turning her face away when his name was mentioned, or feigning sleep, although the tears rolled out from the corners of her eyes. Howard kept on telling Alice that the reason for this was that there would be no change in Sam, but that Roddy's condition was uncertain, and that Tina could love Roddy without that making her love for Sam any less. But Alice couldn't see that. She had entered a world that was black and white, alive or dead, done or not done, a stumbling world with no light in it at all.

The two men are silent. Howard's head is full of the gone-ness of his own son; Roddy, however broken, seems like a miracle. The rattle of a trolley in the corridor pushes Tina's father into saying what he has come to say.

‘Your mother and I have been talking and we can take you to see Tina. If you'd like us to. Alice is having an afternoon at home,' Howard says, his voice stumbling a little, ‘doctor's orders. We can take you to see Tina. If you want to.'

‘Really?' Roddy feels the tears come. There's nothing that he wants more, right now, than to see Tina.

‘Really,' Howard says. ‘Apparently I'm not qualified to push you, but I know a nurse who is. Hold on.' And Roddy tries to make himself ready, not that there's a lot he can do other than reach for a flannel and pass it over his face, avoiding the place where the stitches are, push his fingers through his hair, gently at the stiff bits where the scabs have formed. And then he's being pushed along corridors, and then he sees his mother holding a door open, and then, there she is. Tina. The nurse brings Roddy close to the side of the bed, makes sure that the call button is easy for Tina to reach, and then the door closes behind her and they are alone.

Tina is propped up in bed. Everything from her waist down looks plastered and bandaged. She's wearing a pale green nightshirt. She has a cut on the side of her face and there's bruising across her neck, an almost-black line where the seat belt did its best to save her. Her hair is dull and her skin is grey and the bags under her eyes are as purple as thunder. As soon as she sees him she starts crying, violently, her lungs shuddering. And she is the most beautiful sight Roddy has ever seen.

‘Tina—' he gets out, ‘I'm so sorry.' She can't speak but she nods, stretches out a hand to him and it's shaking, shaking. So is his. He only dares lift one hand from the chair, so he takes her hand to the side of his face and he holds it there.

It's a long time before she can calm her breathing for long enough to say anything. When she does, she says, ‘I'm sorry.' She is remembering the moment when she woke, when she had asked about Roddy and her mother had got up and run out of the room and her father had looked so serious that she had thought Roddy must be dead. Later, of course, she'd understood why they had looked so stricken: they had been preparing to tell her about Sam. In the moment of waking, she hadn't thought of Sam at all. She doesn't know why. Probably because he was always just – well, alive. Vibrant. Half of her. Nothing would ever happen to Sam.

Thinking about her twin ought to make her want to cry more but instead it makes her steady, as though the thought of him is giving her roots, strength. She nods to Roddy, as if to say, I'm done. For now. He nods back.

‘I'm so sorry about Sam,' he says. ‘I will never forgive myself.' He had thought that when he saw her again he would say, I'll love you enough for both of us, but now that sounds mawkish, and anyway, he has run out of breath. He looks at her clavicle, where the bruising is a rainbow of black to grey to blue to green to yellow.

‘It's not your fault, Roddy,' Tina says. Her voice is rasping at the edges. Roddy imagines a tube in her throat while they operated. Not you too, he wants to say. But she hasn't finished: ‘It wasn't you. It was me. I distracted you—'

‘It was not your fault,' Roddy says. ‘Please, Tina.'

She looks away. It's as though a lift door is closing and soon she will be gone. Roddy holds her hand tighter, in case she tries to take it away from him.

‘I'm sorry,' she says.

‘We can mend this, Tina,' he says.

‘I don't know,' she says. She's looked back at him, but she's not really looking at him. She's looking at the wheels of the chair, the place where his hand clings to it.

‘It is only,' Roddy says quietly, ‘a fucking wheelchair.'

‘It's not the wheelchair,' she says, ‘you know that, Roddy. It's—' She shakes her head, because she can't think. There are painkillers and steroids and sleeping tablets in her system, there's a mother who cries at the sight of her and a father who's being so stoical that it physically hurts her, makes her chest clench, to look at him. There's the place where Sam is not, which she touches, gently, the way the tongue goes to a site where a tooth's been extracted: and when she does it there's a shiver and shock of loss so deep that she knows she can't stay there for long, not yet. ‘I don't – I can't – I have no idea about anything. I don't know which way is up, Roddy. I've always been a twin. And if—' But she stops. When she catches herself thinking of an if – if only I'd not asked, if I'd not mentioned Aurora to Sam – she simply stops, stops thinking, stops talking. She lets the ‘if' fill her head or her mouth but she refuses to let it go any further. It's something that sometimes helps, in the hole of an afternoon when she is listening to her mother weep, or when she's alone and she feels as though she is experiencing every painful click and stitch of her bones knitting together.

Roddy kisses Tina's hand. She looks away. He wanted to see her so much, but hasn't really thought about how it will be to look at the damage he's done. He needs to put it right. And he realizes that he isn't going to be able to do it here, now, in a conversation. He can't pull Tina to him, he can't tilt her chin so that she looks at him, he can't talk her into being OK. He had thought – assumed – that they would suffer their losses together. He sees that Tina is locked into something, alone, and that he must wait and be ready when she is ready to come back to him. This isn't what he wanted, but it's what he's got. He looks at his legs, then up at Tina's face. When he speaks she turns towards him. ‘I have to spend about six months away,' Roddy says, ‘in rehab, learning how to manage. When I come back I'm going to come and see you.' There's none of the love that he feels in his voice. He keeps forgetting that his lungs lack power to send air across his larynx, and so any attempt at intonation yields nothing.

Tina nods. ‘I think,' she says, carefully, knowing how much these words matter, how she will think about them later, wonder whether she got them right, ‘that seems like a good idea. I don't think I've even absorbed everything yet. Sam. You. Me.'

Roddy asks, ‘Will you call me?'

‘I don't know, Roddy.' Tina thinks of long silences stretching out, of how hard it was to talk even when there was nothing serious to talk about.

Roddy nods. Tina closes her eyes. The tension in her hands says that she wants him to let go. He can see that she's fighting sleep, and that sleep is winning.

‘Do you want me to go now?' Roddy asks.

‘Will you stay until I've gone to sleep?' she asks.

‘Of course I will,' he says. But he stays longer, watching her face, staring at the cut and the bruises until he can do it without flinching from what he has done.

Roddy, who has never been static for more than the time he needs to sleep, throws himself into rehab, giving it all he's got at the gym, with the physio, and over the flat paved paths in the grounds that he practises steering himself along in his wheelchair. The mental recovering he's expected to do he finds more difficult. He knows that he will never walk again. His spinal column was twisted to snapping when the driver's seat was wrenched round by the impact of the lorry, an absolute that meant that his future is like a triple-jump, nothing to be done but getting into your stride and going for it. He doesn't know whether he's entitled to think about even so much as a metaphorical stride. He has killed someone, and he has injured someone he loves more than he loves his own life. He knows this for sure, because the thought of Tina being opened up and sewn and pinned and bolted back together still makes him feel worse than his own prospects. Her skin, her encased frame, her bruises are images that he keeps coming back to. The thought of them is worse than the many small humiliations that come of learning to adapt to this new way of living.

Thinking and talking about Sam is harder, but Roddy forces himself to do it, with his counsellor and with his fellow rehab inmates. Although everyone whose opinion is supposed to matter – including the lorry driver, the police and, later, the judge at the inquest – says that Sam's death was accidental, Roddy knows better. He knows the shock of a life being there then not there, from being in the stall when a horse has to be destroyed. The animal will be present and then gone, something too momentous to happen in an instant, but something that cannot happen any other way.

Tina hasn't called, but he knows that even if she doesn't, she'll wait for his promised visit. He needs to be ready to give her a life that will make up for their shared loss, his stupid complacency. Roddy Flood vows that he will never be complacent again. He'll be hard-working and devoted and matter-of-fact and strong.