Try Not to Breathe: A Novel Read online

“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.

  Drinking had cemented their relationship, but it wasn’t everything, and it became less important to Matt over time. They talked and laughed and did ferociously well throughout their courses (his Criminology, hers English Literature), partly through frenzied discussion, partly through competitiveness. From the very first month, it was them. Not he or she, always them.

  It had been nearly two years since the divorce was finalized, and she still defaulted to “we,” her phantom limb.

  Every afternoon, before the first glass touched her lips, Alex turned off her phone. She had long closed her Facebook account, cleaned the web of any digital footprints that could allow drunken messages to Matt, his brothers, his friends, her ex-colleagues, anyone.

  Alex had a few rules come the afternoon: no phone calls, no emails, no purchases. In the dark space between serious drinker and functioning alcoholic, there had been no rules. Cheerful, wobbly pitches had been sent to bemused editors; sensitive telephone interviews had taken disastrous, offensive paths; Alex had evaporated friendships with capitalized, tell-all emails and blown whole overdrafts on spontaneous spending sprees. And far worse.

  Things were better now. She was getting semi-regular work, she owned her home. She’d even taken up running.

  At least once a week she planned her own death, and drafted an indulgent farewell letter to Matt and the child she’d never planned, the child they would now never have.

  She sat down at her desk and opened her Moleskine notepad.

  “Amy Stevenson.”

  Alex had a story, and it was far more interesting than the one she had been sent to write.

  Jacob loved his wife, he was sure of that most of the time, but when she talked for forty-five unbroken minutes about an extension they didn’t need and couldn’t afford, the lies felt slightly softer on his conscience.

  He watched Fiona’s mouth moving, forming the words so resolutely. There were just so many of them, so many bloody words, that they blended into one, ceaseless noise.

  Her pink mouth was now entirely for talking. How long had it been since those lips had softened for a kiss? Or whispered something sweet in his ear?

  “Are you even listening to me?” Her fierce brown eyes filled with salt water, ready to burst their banks without notice. How long had it been since they’d made each other laugh until tears squeezed from the corners of their eyes?

  “Of course I’m listening.” Jacob pushed his half-finished cereal bowl away, trying desperately not to be outwardly aggressive, or passively aggressive, or break any other unwritten golden rule.

  When Jacob and Fiona had first met, they talked about everything. Well, almost everything. She had fascinated him, she always had so much to say and he liked to hear it.

  As boyfriend and girlfriend they had sparred, joked, talked into the next morning. On their wedding night, they had failed to consummate the marriage, wrapped in each other’s words until they realized it was the next day, Fiona’s legs tangled in her ivory dress train, faces sore from smiling and laughing, sobering with the sun.

  But Fiona had stopped asking about his work, stopped expecting to be told anything. Now they wrangled over inane household topics, and not much else.

  When had it happened? At the start of the pregnancy? Before?

  She had certainly been myopic about ovulation dates and optimum positions but she had still been Fiona, they had still laughed and talked.

  It went beyond disinterest.

  Fiona used to grill him, question the who, where, when of meetings and social activities, cross-referencing what she was told with diary dates, previous conversations, outfits he’d chosen, throwaway remarks.

  “So exactly who is going to this Christmas party, then? How come it’s not wives and girlfriends? It’s normally wives and girlfriends…are any wives and girlfriends going?”

  Maybe she didn’t care now. Fiona had her little nugget growing in her belly, and nothing else mattered. If so, that flew in the face of the Fiona he had fallen in love with, the Fiona he had married. And for all the pressure that had led to it, he had been over the moon when the second blue line appeared on that fated stick many months ago. Terrified, but over the moon.

  Now sitting at the tired breakfast bar, he watched his wife unsteady on her feet. Her sense of balance had been eroded over the last few weeks as her belly had ballooned with a new urgency.

  Jacob sighed. Every conversation nowadays led to this topic: the small, hellish kitchen.

  The new kitchen extension would fix everything: the storage problem, the tricky access to the garden, where to keep the pram, tension in the Middle East.

  The new extension was everything. And if Fiona didn’t get it, however impossible the sums were, the world would explode. He couldn’t be entirely sure that it was his baby in that cartoon belly, and not a ticking time bomb.

  The 1930s semi in Wallington Grove, Tunbridge Wells, had seemed like a palace when they moved in, just two years ago. It had taken prudence, abstinence and overtime to save a deposit, and the newlyweds knew that work and salary had to be the main focus for at least three years; they had to feed the machine. Fiona had agreed wholeheartedly, absolutely, the mortgage was a stretch, it would take two full-time salaries to service it and they both must do their bit.

  Some eighteen months later, after a concentrated campaign veering from the subtle to the tearful, they had started to try for a baby and conceived almost instantly. And now the baby needed an extension.

  “Fi, look, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be shitty but I really have to go. I’ve got some awful meetings today and my head’s all over the place.”

  “Sure,” she said, “whatever.”

  She didn’t ask for more than that. Why didn’t she ask for more than that now?

  They both needed to leave. Fiona for work as a graphic designer, Jacob for the hospital, where he did not work.


  Amy buckled in to the passenger seat and looked across at him. He caught her looking and smiled, just briefly, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked back to the road. As he changed gear, he brushed her skirt farther up her thigh with the palm of his hand, sending a shiver across her shoulders.

  Amy wasn’t used to such direct attention. Jake would skirt around while he built up courage until the frustration became so loud in her head that she had to make the move instead. What she really wanted, what she was pretty sure she wanted, was for someone to desire her, to really want her. Someone to just take charge.

  She looked at his hand clamped on her knee as he stared dead ahead at the road. Dark hairs were peeking out from the end of his shirt cuff and his fingernails were clipped into perfect straight lines.

  He had been her knight in shining armor just weeks before. Appearing around the corner and whisking her away from that bloody man. Jake had already zipped past in the backseat of his mum’s car, strapped in tightly. Her friends had gone off cackling about something and she’d been left to run the gauntlet of that creep and his pleas. Again. Amy had sworn at him and told him to leave her alone. Eventually he’d slunk away, hissing under his breath and kicking loose pieces of grit into the road. Her shoulders had sagged with a mixture of relief and regret, tears falling hot.

  And then her secret had appeared, right there in the street near her school, bold and tall and striding toward her. He’d swept an arm around her waist and led her into a gateway, brushed the hair out of her eyes and asked, “What’s wrong? Can I help?”

  “It’s my dad,” she’d said, and started to cry.

  “What about your dad?” he’d asked, gently lifting her chin so her wet eyes were gazing up at his frown. “Does he hurt you?”

  “No,” she’d sobbed, “no, it’s nothing like that. It’s not my dad I live with.” She’d wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “Bob’s my step-dad. I’m talking about my real dad.”

  “Listen, fathers are complex beasts. It’s not your fault, okay? Let me give you a lift home and you can tell me all about it. All right, Amy?”