Whiskey & Charlie (2 page)

* * *

The first day you do not even experience as a day. There are only minutes knotted into hours in which everything you usually do is forgotten, in which even eating and sleeping are of no importance whatsoever.

They sit in the waiting room, Charlie and his mother Elaine, Rosa and Juliet and Aunt Audrey. There are other people who come and are sent away again—Whiskey's friends perhaps, or colleagues, but afterward, Charlie does not recall who they were. Sometimes he dozes, sitting upright in one of the hard plastic chairs, and when he wakes, he cannot remember where he is or what he is doing there. He looks around, and possibly it is the smell that reminds him, or the expression on Rosa's face: he is at the hospital, waiting to find out whether his brother will live.

By the time Charlie had reached the hospital, Whiskey was already in surgery. Charlie cannot see him while he is being operated on, none of them can; all they can do is sit and wait for a doctor to emerge with a progress report. Charlie does not know how long they have been waiting. There is a clock in the waiting room, but the movement of its hands has no meaning for him.

So far, what they know is this: Whiskey is in a coma. He has a fractured skull, a punctured lung, a broken arm and broken ribs, and one of his feet has been crushed. Charlie has no idea of the implications of most of the items on this list of injuries. He attempts to picture Whiskey's foot. He pictures his own foot, the bones whose names he memorized for his human biology exams in high school and has long since forgotten. “Crushed,” the doctor had said. Other things have been broken, but Whiskey's foot has been crushed. It sounds so much worse. The word
broken
somehow holds the promise of something that can be fixed—taped or glued or pinned back together. But
crushed
sounds beyond repair. Charlie pictures tiny fragments of bone all mixed together, an impossible puzzle. He thinks about gangrene, about amputation, briefly tries to imagine Whiskey with a prosthetic foot, and then just as quickly tries to wipe the image from his mind. He wonders about the impact of this injury on Whiskey's surfing and snowboarding. Then he realizes that he doesn't even know whether Whiskey still goes surfing. He thinks about asking Rosa, but when he looks over, she is crying.

x x x

When at last a doctor comes out to talk to them, it becomes abundantly clear that Whiskey's foot is the very least of his problems. The doctor explains that, during the accident, Whiskey received a blow to the head that caused bruising to his brain, a leaking of the blood vessels that resulted in the brain swelling.

“Unlike other tissues,” the doctor says, “the brain has no room for swelling. It is trapped inside the cage of the skull. The lack of space causes a rise in intracranial pressure, leading to a decrease in blood flow, which in turn impacts on the ability of the brain cells to eliminate toxins.”

Juliet puts her hand inside Charlie's. He tries to think of something to say to her, something positive and reassuring, but nothing comes to him.

While Charlie has been worrying about crushed bones, a neurosurgeon has been repairing the damaged blood vessels in Whiskey's brain, inserting a monitor to track the pressure and a device called a shunt to drain off the excess fluid.

Charlie remembers seeing a documentary in which a ”trapdoor” was cut into a patient's skull to create more space and prevent further damage from the swelling following a head injury. In the same documentary, part of a brain deemed damaged beyond repair was cut away to increase the chance of recovery for the undamaged parts. Charlie supposes they should feel grateful Whiskey has not been subjected to such treatments. He takes it as a sign that things are not as bad as they might be.

That is until he sees Whiskey. For the person whose bed they are eventually led to could be anyone. At least one third of his body is cased in plaster, and most of his head is obscured by bandages. What Charlie can see of his face is so bruised and swollen that no features are recognizable. Worst of all, everywhere Charlie looks are tubes and wires connecting the body to machines, transporting substances in and out, measuring who knows what. Charlie cannot believe that this wrecked and wasted creature could possibly be his brother. No matter how hard he looks, he cannot find anything of Whiskey in that hospital bed. He stares and stares, and then he rushes to the bathroom and vomits so violently he bursts the blood vessels in his eyes.

Charlie's next-door neighbor Alison taught him the words to “Eye of the Tiger” while she helped him make his costume for the play. Alison was thirteen and knew the words to all the songs on the charts. She was good at things like that. It was also an undisputed fact in the village that Alison was the best at costumes. She proved it by winning first prize every year at the Rose Queen Fete.

The year she moved to Everton, she had dressed up as a Rubik's Cube. The rest of the kids paraded through the village in costumes that had been cobbled together the night before. They were ghosts with eyeholes chopped out of old sheets; cats with cardboard ears and ripped stockings for tails; miniature brides in communion dresses, wearing veils cut from curtain netting. The Rubik's Cube caused a sensation and established Alison's reputation.

The idea for the pharaoh costume had come from a picture in Alison's encyclopedia. According to the picture, the pharaohs didn't wear much in the way of clothing. Charlie supposed this was on account of it being so hot in Egypt. All he was wearing was a towel wrapped around his waist. But he had a magnificent headdress and a golden collar, and when he put them on, Charlie truly felt like a king.

“That towel used to be a nappy,” William said when he saw the outfit. Their mum said it wasn't true, that diapers were square and the costume was wonderful, and anyway, she had given all their diapers to Auntie Sue when their cousin Hayley was born. Alison said that William was jealous because Charlie had a better part in the play. Charlie thought hard about this. William was better at soccer, better at telling jokes, better at yo-yoing and marbles. When he added it up, William was better at anything Charlie could think of. It was something quite new for William to be jealous of him, and Charlie found that he liked the idea of it.

Besides, he deserved a good part this year. Last Christmas, when they performed the Nativity play, Charlie had been given the part of an angel. He had asked if he and Timothy could be shepherds instead, but Miss Carty-Salmon had said there were already too many shepherds and that the boys should be honored to play the angels.

“But the angels are girls' parts,” Timothy said.

“If you took the time to read the Bible, Timothy, I think you would find that the angels were men.”

“Well then, why do they have girls' names?”

Charlie's mother had told the boys it was bad manners to talk back to a teacher. Timothy had obviously been given different advice. In the end, it made no difference to Miss Carty-Salmon, but Charlie thought Timothy was right. Gabriel was a girl's name, and if they were supposed to be boys, why did they have to wear costumes that looked like dresses?

This year the play was a shortened version of the musical
Joseph
and
the
Amazing
Technicolor
Dreamcoat
, adapted by their teacher, the beautiful Miss Parker. All term they had been practicing “Any Dream Will Do,” and Miss Parker, who had been to London to see the show, said they sang it even better than the real cast. The main part was Joseph, but the pharaoh was the second best part, and Charlie had spent weeks practicing his lines, shouting, “Throw him in jail!” until his mother said if he wasn't careful, he would wear out the words.

The night before, Charlie was so excited he couldn't get to sleep. He couldn't wait for his mum to see that there was something he was good at; that for once, William wouldn't be the first, the best, the fastest. But on the morning of the play, their mother had a migraine. Their father had a big job to finish. So Aunt Audrey came to watch the play in their mother's place. Charlie was bitterly disappointed.

But as it turned out, Aunt Audrey was a far better audience member than their mother had ever been. She shrieked with laughter at all the jokes, started all the other mums and dads clapping along to “Any Dream Will Do,” and, best of all, when Charlie stepped forward to take his bow, she stood up out of her chair and shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!” Charlie thought he had never been so happy.
Bravo
, he said to himself as he went to sleep that night.
Bravo
was the word that meant there was something Charlie could do better, and he held on to it like it was a life buoy.

x x x

The night before she left for Australia, Aunt Audrey came around to say good-bye. She told the boys she had a special going-away surprise for them, which they couldn't have now, but which would be waiting for them when they got home from school the next day.

Charlie and William ran all the way from the bus stop the next afternoon, rushed out of breath into the house to find their mother sitting in the armchair with Audrey's dog, Barnaby, at her feet.

“Are we looking after him,” William shrieked, “until he can go to Australia?”

Their mother smiled and shook her head. “We're going to keep him.”

“Forever?”

She nodded.

“Does Dad know?”

She nodded again. William and Charlie threw down their schoolbags and did their Zulu warrior dance twice, slapping their thighs and beating their chests before dropping onto the carpet to roll around and bury their faces in Barnaby's fur.

“Let's call him Bravo,” Charlie said.

“No,” said William, “let's call him Tomahawk.”

“His name's Barnaby,” their mum said. “You can't change a dog's name.”

Barnaby was a golden retriever with velvet ears, and his name was engraved on a silver tag that hung from his collar. He held his right paw in the air when his tummy was rubbed, would fetch a stick or a ball no matter how far it was thrown, stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the bench when the boys were putting food in his bowl. He had a leash, but they never used it; they let him run ahead through the fields behind their house, let him get so far away they could hardly see him, and then they sang out his name to call him back.

“Baaaar-na-beeee!” William would call.

Braaaa-vo!
Charlie would silently correct him.

x x x

They had been looking after Barnaby for three months when he was hit by a car. Charlie was walking him that day, and Barnaby was racing ahead as he always did, crossing the High Street, when the car came around the corner from Tempsford Hill. Charlie saw the car clip Barnaby from behind, heard him yelp, watched the car slow and then speed up again. He ran to where Barnaby was lying, panting, his fur already soaked with blood; he knelt down and pulled the dog onto his lap, screaming and screaming until someone came out of the pub to see what the commotion was.

Then they were in Mary Partridge's car on the way to the vet, Charlie in the back holding Barnaby, stroking his head, begging him not to die, while his blood seeped onto the backseat, Mary Partridge behind the wheel, crying so hard she could barely see the road in front of her.

The vet came out to the car to carry the dog inside.

“Hit and run,” Mary said to him. “What a crying shame.”

“What's his name?” the vet asked.

“Bravo,” Charlie said. “His name's Bravo. Is he going to die?”

“We'll see what we can do.”

Mary sat with Charlie in the waiting room and held his hand until his mother arrived, and then all three of them sat, and the waiting went on and on.

When the vet opened the door to the examination room, Bravo was lying on the metal bench with his eyes closed, breathing slowly. Charlie stood beside him and stroked his ears and said his name, over and over, so he wouldn't have to listen to what the vet was saying to his mother. When they came over to the bench, Charlie's mother put her arm around him, and Charlie held his breath.

“One of his hind legs is broken,” the vet said, “but otherwise the damage isn't too bad. He's badly bruised, but that'll heal. We can have a go at pinning the leg—he'll never run like he used to, but he'll get by.” The vet paused. “There's a small chance of gangrene setting in, in which case we'd have to amputate. Your mother thinks we should give it a go, but she said it's up to you.”

The whole time the vet was talking, Charlie had been stroking Bravo's ears, looking at his dry black nose, his whiskers twitching. He had thought Bravo would die on the road where the car hit him. He had thought Bravo would bleed to death in the back of Mary's car. He had sat for a long time on a hard chair, waiting for the vet to come out and tell them Bravo had died on that cold metal table while they were trying to put him back together. He had wondered how on earth they would tell Aunt Audrey.

He couldn't believe it was only a broken leg. He was so relieved he couldn't speak. Even if they had to cut it off, it would be all right. Three legs were enough; Charlie had only two, and he found it plenty. He was laughing or crying, or laughing and crying; it didn't matter which. Bravo would still be there, wagging his tail, pushing his wet snout into their hands when they got home from school. He'd still be able to catch a ball and hold a stick in his mouth and gulp his dinner down in five seconds flat. Broken leg or not, he'd still be their very own dog, their Bravo.

For a long time, Charlie had wished he wasn't called Charlie. In his school class alone, there were three other boys with the same name. His mother, who loved the royal family, who years later would cry uncontrollably when Princess Diana died, said it was a fine name, a strong name, the name of the Prince of Wales, the man who would be King of England. Their father said Prince Charles was a pompous, jug-eared fool, but your name was your name, and once you had it, you were stuck with it.

But Charlie knew that wasn't true. After all, it was only a few months ago that Bravo used to be called Barnaby, and no one ever called him that name now. And if a dog could have a new name, then why couldn't he? The name Charlie had chosen for himself was Steve, after Steve McQueen, with whom Charlie had been obsessed ever since he and his dad had watched
The
Great
Escape
one Saturday afternoon when his mother was at the theater.

It was Buddy who made Charlie change his mind about his name. Buddy had lived next door to Charlie's parents when they were first married, and he was stationed on the air base at Chicksands. Until Buddy came to visit them, Americans had existed for Charlie and William only on television. They were enthralled by Buddy, by his accent, by his strange habit of eating with his fork in his right hand, the way he said, “Aw, c'mon, guys,” or “You betcha!” No one had ever called them
guys
before.

Since Audrey bought them the walkie-talkies, the boys had put away their LEGO space station and their Playmobil fort, their
Star
Wars
figurines, and their Scalextric. Instead, they played at being cops and robbers, private detectives, or secret agents. They used phrases they had heard in films and on television, words they didn't even understand, but had used so often in their games they had come to have a real meaning. They said, “Do you read me?” and “Get the hell out of there!” They said, “Meet me at the southwest exit at eighteen hundred hours.” They said “roger” and “niner” and “over and out.” They said these things without embarrassment, with that nine-year-old conviction that they were saying all the right things in exactly the way they should be said. But when Buddy overheard them, he started to laugh.

“LAPD, twenty-six hundred!” Buddy repeated, slapping his leg as he laughed. “What the hell kind of crap are you guys spouting into those damn things?”

So Buddy had taught them the two-way radio alphabet. And that was how Charlie found out that his name was a useful one, that it stood for something. That it was the third letter of the NATO phonetic alphabet, established in 1955 and approved by the International Civil Aviation Organization. It had represented the letter
C
to the U.S. Navy, the British Army, the RAF, and, best of all, it had been used on board the aircraft in the Dambusters raid.

William was put out that his name wasn't part of the phonetic alphabet. To compensate, he started calling himself Whiskey. Their father, whom they had always called Dad, became Papa. Their mother, of course, remained simply Mum, and Bravo, lucky Bravo, was spared a second name change, since his name was already part of the alphabet.

Knowing the alphabet made the walkie-talkie games even better, though William could never remember the whole thing and would make up his own words under pressure, saying silly things like
Mouse
instead of
Mike
and
Lulu
instead of
Lima
. Charlie never corrected him, but he remembered the words William could not, learned to recite the two-way alphabet backward as well as front ways, and his command of it, his place in it, was one small thing he had that his brother did not.