Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Ten
Dilly doesn’t come home much. He pretty much lives on the road, playing guitar and singing backing in his band, Five Catastrophes. And while Dilly has the responsibility and common sense of a shelled walnut, I’m always relieved when he comes home for a bit. I don’t have to rush back from work. I can go to the market on a Tuesday, browse the weird, vintage clothes stall on the corner. I can visit Charlie in her studio, take lunch in for us, both of us eating it sitting on the leather, hydraulic tattoo chairs. When Dilly is home, my time is – however fleeting – mine. Except for today, that is. I planned to meet Candice at a tea room next to Jetson’s to talk about her wedding, help her plan the flowers. I planned to spend a birthday voucher I’ve had since last February. But then Dilly texted: ‘Could you come back sooner rather than later?’ and then he’d sent a long meandering voice note that started ‘Do you mind popping back and taking a look at Mum’s ankle?’ and I’d cut it off before he went on, and tossed it in my bag. A walnut. That’s what happens when you leave a walnut in charge.
I find Mum sitting in the living room with her leg up on the sofa, a bag of frozen sweetcorn around her right leg and a tray of frozen sausages on her foot. Dilly is on the armchair, his hands splayed and holding the edges, as if he’s just finished counselling her, his white-blond hair sticking up like frosting on the top of his head.
‘W-what is going on?’
‘We’re just doing some meditation,’ says Dilly. ‘Help with pain levels.’
‘Pain levels?’
‘Did you not listen to my voice note?’ he asks.
Mum is taking deep breaths through her nose and whimpering every time she exhales, but she is rigid, as if there is concrete poured into her joints.
‘Yes – well, no, not all of it, it was like a bloody podcast, Dilly, just tell me what’s happened?’
‘Oh, Noelle.’ Mum opens her eyes and looks at me, like a scolded puppy. ‘I fell.’
My heart drops to my arse. ‘Fell? Where did you fall?’
Mum starts to cry and holds her face in her hands, tears sliding between her fingers. ‘I was up the ladder,’ she explains, her voice shaky. ‘Trying to get into the loft. I’ve got so many records up there, so many things I don’t use any more, microphones and all sorts, and I thought – well, Ian is always banging on about eBay, and seeing as we were talking about money the other night, I …’ My heart aches then, like there’s a fist wrapped around it, squeezing.
‘Oh, Mum. Why on earth did you attempt to climb a bloody ladder – Dilly, where were you?’
‘I was in the bath,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Watching Gilmore Girls.’
‘I was just lucky I didn’t fall down the bloody stairs,’ Mum carries on. ‘I fell onto the landing. But my leg got caught in a rung and … oh, Noelle, it’s really, really hurting.’
I rush over to the sofa, and carefully peel back the bag of frozen peas on Mum’s skinny ankle. There’s a patchwork of purple and blue, that seems to be getting darker just as I sit, staring at it.
‘Is it bad? I can’t look.’
Dilly leans over and winces. ‘It’s uh, yeah. That’s fine, I reckon.’
‘Fine? Dill, it’s black and purple.’
Dilly cocks a single sad eyebrow at me as if to say, ‘Well, you can be the one to tell her we’ve got to go to the doctor then, ’cause I’m not.’
‘I think maybe we need to try and get someone out to look at this, Mum.’
Mum goes white almost instantaneously. She hates hospitals. She was in one for four weeks after her stroke, and begged me daily to break her out, as if she was being imprisoned and not cared for. ‘You come in here with something as simple as a bloody gall bladder problem and come out with MRSA. And that’s in a coffin and with “My Way” playing on the sodding organ. Don’t look at me, that’s just what Sheila says. Her, in bed four. She used to be a dental nurse.’
Mum sniffs, straightens in her seat and shakes her head, as if shaking off the worry like raindrops. ‘No. It’s a bruise,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She stretches over to take a look, but I can tell by the way her round eyes widen, that she’s alarmed at the sight of it, growing, like a marbled island across her skin. ‘Just get me some painkillers, and maybe call round to Gary at twenty-one. See if he’s got ice packs or something in the freezer. These sausages are beginning to defrost. You’ll have to cook them, though, Noelle. Don’t waste them. Do a nice casserole. A nice sausage toad.’
I flit around the kitchen, gathering everything I can find for an injured ankle – ibuprofen, Deep Heat cream from 2003, KitKats for the shock – and Dilly manifests ten minutes later with multiple ice packs he’s sourced from Gary’s freezer (and an addition of a fine sparkling piece of bullshit plucked freshly from his own arse).
‘That was a bit embarrassing,’ he laughs, ‘talk about awkward. Ol’ Gary. He was a bit starstruck.’
‘What?’
‘Well, he’s not seen me since we performed on Radio Rock Gloucester. I dunno, his face when he opened the door and saw me. He was sort of … starry-eyed. I suppose that’s how I was in Waterstones. When I met Brian May.’
I want to tell him that there’s as much chance of Gary (who practises hooligan chants before the football season) listening to Radio Rock Gloucester as there is of Mum and her leg exploring Asia with nothing but a compass and harpoon, but I’m trying to find the heating pads, pulling open every kitchen cupboard, as if they’d ever be nestled in with the chocolate Hobnobs and cans of Big Soup.
‘Do you think we should call 111?’ I ask Dilly. ‘For medical advice.’
Dilly reappears in the doorway after delivering the ice packs. ‘Nah. I reckon the ice will sort it. Plus. She hates the fuss.’
‘Do you suggest we just leave it then?’
He doesn’t respond, and instead, starts tapping away on his iPhone, swiping through photos of multiple swollen ankles and calves on Google Images, and disappearing into the living room.
‘Dilly?’ I call out. ‘Dilly, do you have that hot water bottle you got for Christmas?’
‘What?’ Dilly pokes his head around the door, phone flat to his ear.
‘Hot water bottle?’
‘Don’t have one of those. Oh – hello, mate, how’s it going? Nah, just chilling with the fam, what’re you up to? It’s The Storm, Mum. Yeah, Dwayne, but he goes by The Storm now …’
I sigh, hold the counter, look around our pokey little kitchen that in this moment feels so empty and so suffocating all at once. I wish there was someone else here, someone I could talk to lean on. When I was with Ed, he witnessed so many times like this. He’d sit calmly at the kitchen table, his analytical brain looking for and compiling a solution as chaos ensued around him. ‘The GP could prescribe sertraline,’ he’d say, or, ‘You could employ a carer, Nell.’ If he were here now, he’d be doing the same. And then we’d both secretly laugh together at Dwayne’s new stage name. Dilly’s band always change their stage names. They’ve been everything from cutlery, to different types of sediment.
‘Elle?’ calls Dilly. ‘Where’re these heat pads? No, no, Storm, I’m still here, mate.’
Dilly is horrendous in a crisis. He melts down. Purely because he’s been protected from them all his life, by Mum. Dilly was born with a hole in his heart. He’s fine now – it closed up over time, something doctors always hoped would happen. But sometimes I think Mum gives her best self to Dilly, so as not to put any strain on it. My heart can take it, I suppose she thinks, and I wonder how often the pair of them think, ‘Noelle’ll sort it. Noelle’ll deal with it.’ And I wonder what would happen if I said, ‘No. Noelle won’t actually. Noelle is sick of dealing with it.’ But I don’t. Because I love Dilly. Because I love Mum. And isn’t that why we do anything, at all? However directly or indirectly. Love.
‘Noelle?’ Mum calls now. ‘Noelle, darling, are you there?’
‘Yes,’ I call back. ‘Yes, I’m right here.’
It seems incomprehensible to me that not even an hour ago, I was asleep in my bed, and now, I’m in a silent hospital waiting room in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, a coat, and an old tatty pyjama top which is printed with the big, rounded, and somewhat inappropriate-for-hospital-emergency-rooms face of a Moomin.
Mum’s leg swelled up in the night and by the early hours, she was in agony. Dilly was still up, having got back from the pub at midnight, drunk and smelling like beer and kebab shop burgers. He’d met up with a guy he dates on and off called Matt, who works there, behind the bar.
‘I got home and was taking a wazz,’ he’d said, ‘and I could hear her, as I come out, crying in her bedroom.’ Then he’d woken me up. And Mum asked – she actually asked – for us to call her a doctor, and relief and worry washed over me like a wave. But then she’d started the freaking out. The panic, the hyperventilating, the anger, the nasty words. ‘Why on earth did you call an ambulance? Why? They’ll make me go in, Noelle. They’ll make me go in.’ I calmly told her it would be fine, pretended the words she threw at me bounced off, like rubber bullets, but I took deep breaths when I got into my ice-cold car, stopped myself from crying. I’m doing my best, I wanted to say, that’s all I’m trying to do.
Dilly looked haunted at the front door, biting the cotton of his sleeve, the lights of the ambulance painting blue ominous stripes across his pale face. I’d told him to stay at home. He’d be no use to anyone, rile us up, both me and Mum. Plus, he was drunk. The last thing I needed was him throwing up in a hospital bin and trying to keep a Lucozade down.
The ambulance arrived and left quickly, and I followed in the car. Mum was taken off, checked over by nurses who took her blood pressure and temperature, before she was sent down for an emergency X-ray. She shook the whole time, holding an oxygen mask over her face, her eyes wide like dinner plates, her face stone, despite my fake, encouraging smiles from the plastic orange waiting room chair. She’s been gone for half an hour now, and I don’t even know how anyone is going to know where to find me. They plonked me here, on these benches outside a silent rheumatology wing once I followed Mum in her wheelchair as far as I could, and before I could ask what I should do, where I should wait, they wheeled Mum off to the top of the corridor, and into an elevator. The corridor is silent now, save for the whir of two vending machines, and the traipsing back and forth of doctors and nurses, squeaky shoes on polished floors. I think of Ed. Of him walking these corridors as a kid, the night Daisy died, and of him walking them now, an adult. A doctor. This, his workplace, somewhere he comes to make a living, while others’ lives fall apart.
The clock on the wall ticks. 2:45.
That’s the thing about the middle of the night and its loneliness and bad memories. It makes you clamour for comfort and safety. And it’s why I texted Ed in the car park, as I steeled myself to go inside. This is the hospital we came to when they called us about Daisy. I remember everything about it – the car parking space, the overpowering rose-water perfume of the nurse who greeted us, the agony in Daisy’s mum’s face, the man with the huge red umbrella who blocked the entrance way, how the colour felt too bright for my world where everything was fading to grey …
I’d opened Ed’s message in the car, as rain spat against the glass from the black sky then I’d saved his number in my phone, pasting over the old number that I’d never had the heart to delete.
‘Mum’s in hospital,’ I’d texted him. ‘I’m here on my own. Are you working now? Noelle x’
While a part of me hopes he never sees it, another part of me – a slightly larger part, that sits in my chest, an open chasm, would give anything to see him push through the two double doors now, scrubs on, cheeky grin. A familiar face. The face of someone who knew me. Who knows me. Knows us, Mum, Dilly and me, and our little clockwork life that was part of his for twelve years.
An elevator bell sounds, and for a moment, I think it’s Mum, but it’s a group of nurses, and a frail, tiny woman, who barely looks alive, being wheeled silently on a bed. Red polished fingernails peep from beneath the crisp, white sheets. I wonder if she had any idea those fingers would be resting on a stretcher, while strangers push her down a corridor, wires snaking from her skin, as she painted them. And I understand why Mum hates hospitals, why so many people do. No other place has that feeling of otherworldliness, and that heavy static air it always has, of lives ending and changing and beginning, all at once. And I suddenly feel alone. And I suppose that’s because I am alone. With all of it.
I bring my coffee to my lips, just for something to do with my shaking hands, when the double doors open – a sound like something stuck, unsticking. And it takes only a second for him to stop in his tracks, at the same second my heart does the same behind my ribs, as if someone pulled the power cord.
It’s – no. No. Way.
Sam.
American Sam from the motorway. Right in front of me. Tall. Real. Here.
He freezes, his mouth gawping open, the same as mine, a takeaway coffee cup still in his hand.
‘Oh my God.’ Each tiny-sounding word catches in my throat.
‘Noelle,’he says. ‘Noelle, are you – God, are you OK?’
And it’s then, finally, that I cry.