It had been just an ordinary evening at home. I remember watching TV and walking into the kitchen to make a hot drink.
I was probably thinking about the things I needed to do before I could go to bed. Stack the dishwasher, turn off the lamps, organise Evie’s clothes for the morning, when the kettle slipped from my hand.
The boiling water splashed onto my arm and I screamed.
Everything sounded so loud. The noise from the TV and the kettle clattering to the floor were like cymbals being repeatedly bashed, close to my ears.
No sheet of blackness fell. There were no flashing lights nor vivid dreams. I didn’t float up to the ceiling and look back down on myself.
There was simply a nothingness. A gaping void where I used to be.
I woke up in here.
I’d suffered a stroke, I heard them say as they scribbled on their clipboards. A bad one. Lots of things can happen to a body after a stroke, I’d seen lists on the ‘Raising Awareness’ posters at the doctors’ surgery. The doctors here knew a lot about what strokes could do.
But there is something else, too, something they don’t know.
Something else that happened to me, after the stroke. Something that trapped me inside myself like a bug in amber.
A tube travels up my nose and down my throat. Feeds me. Another tube in my side takes away the waste.
There are plenty of things I can do for myself, but only inside my head.
Clock on the wall, I can’t move at all.
I know I am still alive because I can still make up stupid rhymes, mainly about the clock. I can clearly remember Evie’s tinkling laughter, the soft contours of her face.
That’s something the machine can’t do.
The clock is just about the only thing that changes in here, and most of the time it’s the only blurred shape I can see.
My heart is pumping harder, thumping faster. The machine isn’t doing that either; the thoughts in my head are making it happen.
Because I’m alive.
I’m alive.
I.
AM.
ALIVE.
I scream out the words again and again but the silence around me remains.
4
Three Years Earlier
Toni
‘Your furniture’s arriving at one,’ Mum called from the other room. ‘You can start unpacking the boxes, if you like.’
I didn’t like. I didn’t feel like unpacking boxes or doing anything remotely physical at all. I didn’t even feel like driving over and picking up Evie from the crummy council-run holiday club in our ten-year-old Fiat Punto. It had been desperate for a new exhaust for over a month but was still putt-putting out clouds of illegal emissions while I tried to find funds.
But I had no choice in the matter.
‘I’ll go and pick Evie up now,’ I called to Mum, snatching up my car keys off the side. I didn’t wait for her reply. I suddenly felt like I had to get out of the house, just for a while.
A radio outside, turned up far too loud, blasted crackling pop music out onto the street. I looked around to identify where it was coming from and saw the downstairs window of the house next door was propped open. The offending radio was perched on the sill.
So, we were to have anti-social neighbours to boot. It just kept getting better.
I averted my eyes and headed for the car which, in the absence of any driveway or garage, would have to continue to be parked on the road.
I’d just belted up when a tap on the window gave me a scare. A thin woman with stringy, over-bleached hair and a missing front tooth grinned at me and raised her hand.
I lowered the window slightly as the odour of stale cigarettes filled the car.
‘Hello, neighbour.’ She grinned, the gap in her front teeth like a magnet to my eyes, although I did make an effort not to stare. ‘I’m Sal. Me and my two lads live next door.’
She nodded towards the blaring radio house. I lowered the window a little further.
‘Hello.’ I smiled, extending my hand awkwardly through the gap. ‘Me and my daughter, Evie, just moved in today. I’m just off to pick her up from playgroup.’
Sal ignored my hand so I pulled it back inside.
‘Just you and the little ’un, is there? No bloke, like me? Better off without ’em, love, that’s what I reckon, what d’ya say?’ She spoke via a constant string of rhetorical questions.
‘Yep, just me and my daughter,’ I confirmed, choosing one to answer.
‘My two, Ste and Col, they’re all grown up now. I’m not one of those mothers that thinks the sun shines out their backsides, if you get my drift, Toni? They can both be swines at times and if you get any trouble from ’em, then I want you to let me know straight away, right?’
‘Trouble?’
‘Oh, you know. Lads will be lads, yeah? Always up to their daft tricks and they’re noisy little boggers at times. Our Colin’s just spent a short time at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Spent his nineteenth birthday inside, he did. He’s a nuisance at times but I’m glad to have him back. They’ll always be our little babies no matter what though, eh, Toni?’
‘He’s been in prison?’ I tried to keep my face impassive but I felt the horror of her words settling over it like a fixed mask.
‘Course it woren’t his fault. Just a little misunderstanding with some youths out in town one night, you know? First sign of trouble round here and the coppers come looking for our Colin. They like having someone to blame, don’t they?’
The realisation that I’d dragged my daughter from a respectable neighbourhood to live next to a convicted criminal made me sick to my stomach. I was sick of the stuff Sal was telling me and sick of the smell of smoke that hung around her like an odorous fog.
‘Well, I’d best be off,’ I muttered hastily before she embarked on another disturbing tale. ‘I don’t want to be late picking up Evie.’
‘OK, love, pop round for a cuppa and a chat once you’re settled in.’ Sal raised her hand by way of saying goodbye and walked away from the window.
Quickly, I started the engine and pulled away from the kerb before Sal remembered some other worrying detail about one of her sons that she felt compelled to tell me about.
Although Sal and I had zero in common, her invite to pop round for a chat had managed to shake up my memories a little, feel the weight of what life used to be.
I valued my close relationship with Mum, I really did, but I suppose what I missed was having a really good, impartial friend to talk to. I missed the release of unburdening myself, perhaps over a glass of wine, to someone who wouldn’t judge me. Someone who understood.
There was nobody like that left in my life. My best friend, Paula, had moved to Spain five years ago, and although we’d Skyped at first, contact had dwindled to a Christmas card each year, in which we’d both write, without fail, ‘Must get together soon’, in the full knowledge it wouldn’t happen.
Then there had been Tara. We used to meet up as a foursome for drinks and meals out when our husbands were home and get a film and a takeaway in when they were working away.
Her husband, Rob Bowen, had been with Andrew on duty that day. He’d died instantly at the scene.
Tara had been four months pregnant at the time of the accident and I heard she’d lost the baby. Our loss should have bonded us together, but instead it seemed to force us apart.
I sent a condolence card in the midst of my own grief, but what good was that? I remember struggling with what to say to her, settling on ‘I’m so sorry’. It had felt woefully inadequate.
Needless to say, I wouldn’t be ‘popping round’ next door any time soon. Sal was a nice enough woman but her use of bad language was terrible, and not something I wanted Evie overhearing. And although I believed everyone should be given another chance in life when they’d made a mistake, I didn’t like the sound of her older son, Colin, one bit.