Try Not to Breathe (2 page)

T
he hospital ward was trapped in a stillborn pause. Nine wordless, noiseless bodies sat rigidly under neat pastel blankets.

Alex Dale had written about premature babies, their seconds-long lives as fragile as a pile of gold dust.

She had written about degenerative diseases and machine-dependents whose futures lay in the idle flick of a button. She had even detailed every knife-twist of her own mother’s demise, but these patients in front of her were experiencing a very different living death.

The slack faces in the Neuro-Disability ward at the Tunbridge Wells Royal Infirmary had known a life before. They were unlike the premature babies, who had known nothing but the womb, the intrusion of tubes and the warmth of their parents’ anxious, desperate hands.

The patients weren’t like the dementia sufferers whose childlike stases were punctuated by the terror of memories.

These rigid people on Bramble Ward were different. They had lived their lives with no slow decline, just an emergency stop. And they were still in there, somewhere.

Some blinked slowly, turning their heads slightly to the light and changing expression fluidly. Others were freeze-framed; mid-celebration, at rest or in the eye of a trauma. All of them were now trapped in a silent scream.

“For years patients like this were all written off,” said the auburn-haired ward manager with the deepest crow’s-feet Alex had ever seen. “They used to be called vegetables.” She paused and sighed. “A lot of people still call them that.”

Alex nodded, using scrappy shorthand to record the conversation in her Moleskine pad.

The ward manager continued. “But the thing is, they’re not all the same and they shouldn’t be written off. They’re individuals. Some of them are completely lacking awareness, but others are actually minimally conscious, and that’s a world apart from being brain dead.”

“How long do they tend to stay here before they recover?” Alex asked, poising her pen above the paper.

“Well, very few of them recover. This summer we had one lad go home for round-the-clock care from his parents and sister but that was the first one in years.”

Alex raised her eyebrows.

“Most of them have been here for a long time,” the manager added. “And most of them will die here too.”

“Do they get many visitors?”

“Oh yes. Some of them have families that put themselves through it every single week for years and years.” She stopped and surveyed the beds.

“I’m not sure I could do that. Can you imagine showing up week in, week out and getting nothing back?”

Alex tried to shake images of her own knotty-haired mother, staring blankly into her only daughter’s face and asking for a bedtime story.

The ward manager had lowered her voice, there were visitors sitting at several beds.

“It’s only recently that we’ve realized there are some signs of life below the surface. Some patients like these ones,” she gestured to the beds behind Alex, “and I’m talking a handful across the world, have even started to communicate.”

She stopped walking. Both women were standing in the center of the ward, curtains and beds surrounding them. Alex raised her eyebrows, encouraging her to continue.

“That’s not quite right, actually. Those patients had been communicating all along, the doctors just didn’t know how to hear them before. I don’t know how much you’ve read, but after a year, the courts can end life support if they’re being kept alive by machines. And now with the hospital funding cuts…” The nurse trailed off.

“How terrible to have no voice,” said Alex, as she took scribbled notes and swayed, nauseated, amongst the electric hum of the hospital ward.

Alex was writing a profile piece for a weekend supplement on the work of Dr. Haynes, the elusive scientist researching brain scans that picked up signs of communication in patients like these. She hadn’t met the doctor yet and was skidding toward her deadline. A far cry from her best work.

There was one empty bed in the ward, the other nine quietly filled. All ten had identical baby blue blankets within their lilac-curtained cubicles.

Inside those pastel walls, nurses and orderlies could hump and huff the patients into a seated position, wipe their wet mouths and dress them in the clothes brought in from home and donated by arms-length well-wishers.

A radio fizzed from behind the reception area, as chatter and “golden oldies” alternated with each other. The barely audible music jostled with the sighing breaths of patients and the beeps and whooshes of machinery.

A poster in the farthest corner of the ward caught Alex’s eye. It was Jarvis Cocker from Pulp, limp-wristed and swathed in tweed. She strained to see the name of the magazine from which it had been carefully removed.

Select
magazine. Long dead, long forgotten, it had been the magazine of choice throughout Alex’s teens. She’d deluged the editor with unanswered letters begging for work experience, back when music seemed to be the only love anyone could possibly want to read or write about.

The dark blue uniformed manager who’d been showing Alex around had been snagged. Alex spotted her talking quietly and seriously with the watery-eyed male visitor of a patient in a stiff pink housecoat.

Alex soft-shoe shuffled closer to the corner cubicle. Her shins seared with pain from her morning run, and she winced as she quickened her steps. The thin soles of her ballet pumps ground into her blisters like grit.

Most of the patients were at least middle-aged but the cubicle in the corner had a queasy sense of youth.

The curtains had been half pulled across haphazardly and Alex stepped silently through the large gap. Even in the dark of the cubicle Alex could see that Jarvis Cocker was not alone. Next to him, a young Damon Albarn, the lead singer from Blur, mugged uncomfortably at the camera. Both had been carefully removed from
Select
some years ago, dust tickling their thumbtacks.

The scene was motionless. The bed’s blanket covering a peak of knees. Two skinny arms lay still on top of the starched bedclothes, tinged purple, goose-pimpled, framed by a worn-in blue T-shirt.

Alex had avoided looking directly at any of the patients so far. It seemed too rude to just stare into the frozen faces like a Victorian at a freak show. Even now, Alex hovered slightly to the side of the Britpop bed like a nervous child. She gazed at the bright white equipment that loomed over the bed, and scribbled needlessly in her notepad for a bit, stalling until she could finally let her eyes fall on the top of the young woman’s head.

Her hair was a deep, dark chestnut, but it had been cut roughly around the fringe and left long and tangled everywhere else. Her striking blue eyes were half-open and marble-bright. With Alex’s long, ponytailed dark hair and seaside eyes, the two women almost mirrored each other.

As soon as Alex let her eyes fall on the full flesh of the woman’s face, she recoiled.

Alex knew this woman.

She was sure of a connection, but it was a flicker of recollection with nothing concrete to call upon.

As her temples boomed with a panicked pulse, Alex built up the courage to look again, mentally peeping through her fingers. Yes, she knew this face, she knew this woman.

It wasn’t that long ago that Alex’s powers of recall would have been razor sharp, a name would have sparkled to light in a blink. A mental Rolodex gone to rust.

Alex heard thick flat soles and heavy legs coming toward her apace. The penny dropped.

“So sorry about that,” the ward manager was saying as she puffed over. “Where were we?”

Alex spun to look at her guide. “Is this…?”

“Yes, it is. I wondered if you’d recognize her. You must have been very young.”

“I was the same age. I mean, I am the same age.”

Alex’s heart was thumping, she knew the woman in the bed couldn’t touch her, but she felt haunted all the same.

“How long has she been in?”

The manager looked at the woman in the bed and sat down lightly on the sheets, near the crook of an elbow.

“Almost since,” she said quietly.

“God, poor thing. Anyway…” Alex shook her head a little. “Yes, sorry, I have a couple more questions for you, if that’s okay?”

“Of course.” The nurse smiled.

Alex took a deep breath, gathered herself. “This might sound like a silly question, but is sleepwalking ever a problem?”

“No, it’s not a problem. They’re not capable of moving around.”

“Oh of course,” said Alex, pushing strands of hair away from her eyes with the dry end of her pen. “I guess I was surprised by the security on the ward—is that standard?”

“We don’t sit guard on the door like that all the time, just when it’s busy. Other than that, we tend to stay in the office as we have a lot of paperwork. We do take security very seriously though.”

“Is that why I had to sign in?”

“Yes, we keep a record of all the visitors,” said the manager. “When you think about it, anyone could do anything with this lot, if they were so inclined.”

Alex drove slowly into orange sunlight, blinking heavily. Amy Stevenson. The woman in the bed. Still fifteen, with her Britpop posters, ragged hair and girlish eyes.

As Alex slowed for a zebra crossing, a canoodling teenage couple in dark blue uniforms almost stumbled onto the bonnet of her black Volkswagen Polo, intertwined like a three-legged race team.

Alex couldn’t shake the thought of Amy. Amy Stevenson, who left school one day and never made it home. Missing Amy. TV-friendly tragic teen in her school uniform; smiling school photo beaming out from every national news program; Amy’s sobbing mother and anxious father, or was it stepfather? Huddles of her school friends having a “special assembly” at school, captured for the evening news.

From what Alex could remember, Amy’s body was found a few days later. The manhunt had dominated the news for months, or was it weeks? Alex had been the same age as Amy, and remembered the shock of realizing she wasn’t invincible.

She’d grown up thirty minutes away from Amy. She could have been plucked from the street at any time, by anyone, in broad daylight.

Amy Stevenson: the biggest news story of 1995, lying in a human archive.

It was 12:01 p.m. The sun was past the yardstick, it was acceptable to begin.

In the quiet cool of her galley kitchen, Alex set down a tall glass beaker and a delicate wineglass. Carefully, she poured mineral water (room temperature) into the tall glass until it kissed the rim. She poured chilled white wine, a good Reisling, to the exact measure line of the wineglass and put the bottle back in the fridge door, where it clinked against five identical bottles.

Water was important. Anything stronger than a weak beer or lager would deplete the body of more moisture than the drink provided, and dehydration was dangerous. Alex started and finished every afternoon with a tall glass of room temperature water. For the last two years, she had wet the bed several times a week, but she had rarely suffered serious dehydration.

Two bottles, sometimes three. Mostly white, but red on chilly afternoons, at home. It had to be at home.

As Matt had stood in the doorway of their home for the last time, carrying his summer jacket and winter coat, with pitch-perfect finality, he had told Alex that she “managed” her drinking like a diabetic manages their condition.

Alex’s rituals and routines had become all-encompassing. Staying in control and attempting to maintain a career took everything. There was nothing left for managing a marriage, much less enjoying it.

Alex hadn’t expected to be divorced at twenty-eight. To most people that age, marriage itself was only just creeping onto the horizon.

She could see why Matt left her. He’d waited and waited for some inkling that she would get better, that she would choose him and a life together over booze, but it had never really crossed her mind to change. Even when she had “every reason” to stop. It was just who she was and what she did.

They had met during Freshers’ Week at University of Southampton, though neither of them could tell the story. Their collective memory kicked in a few weeks into the first term, by which time they were firmly girlfriend and boyfriend and waking up in each other’s hangovers every day.