Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Twelve
I wake to the sound of a shutter going up, the warmth of a familiar hand on mine.
‘Nellie?’
My eyes snap open, and almost instantly, they start to water under the harsh, bright fluorescents. There are three more people on the waiting room chairs now, all bright-eyed and awake, smelling of toothpaste and perfume. The fresh faces of people who had a good night’s sleep and got up, washed and dressed ready for their appointments. And it takes a second or two for me to gather my bearings, to realise that Ed is here, stooping over me, scrubs on, his caramel waves arranged in that rough pushed-off-his-forehead quiff I used to love looping my fingers through as he slowly woke up beside me in the mornings. At the sight of him, my heart collapses to my stomach.
‘I got your message,’ he says, brightly. ‘Came in a little earlier.’
I sit up. My neck’s so stiff from napping on this chair, I’m surprised when it doesn’t creak like an old garden gate. ‘Do you know where Mum is? She went for an X-ray, but I’ve not heard anything. I – I fell asleep.’
‘I just got here,’ he says. ‘But I can find out.’
I sit up, my head rushing, starting to thump, right behind the eyes. Ed is already over at the little window, and a receptionist is nodding at him, her hand hovering over the phone, the bangles at her wrists jangling, like keys. I run my hands through my mad curls, try to tame them, because without seeing them, I know they’ve all come together in a mass that looks part Halloween Mad Scientist wig.
‘Receptionist’s gonna call down to A&E,’ he says, striding back to me. He crouches, a hand landing on my arm, his shoes squeaking on the shiny floor. ‘See what happened after the X-ray. Hopefully she isn’t still waiting.’
I nod. He stares at me, and I stare back at him, magnetised. Ed. My Ed for so long that I almost forgot there was ever a time without him. I’d always taken it for granted, that we were together. Other people broke up, not us. Not Ed and Noelle. We were the ones discussing other people’s breakups in the comfort of our safe little indestructible bubble. ‘Did you hear? Such a shame. I really thought they’d go the distance, you know,’ we’d say, while feeling secretly smug that we were the ones who’d done it – been through the mill of life and were still strong and together. I didn’t for a minute stop to think anyone would ever be discussing us one day. We just were. There was no part of me that ever expected us not to be.
‘I shouldn’t have texted you,’ I say.
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘No, I really shouldn’t have.’
‘Seriously, Nellie.’ He looks at me, and silence puffs its way up between us again, an invisible cloud. And as much as I’ve said words to the opposite, I am glad I texted him, and I’m glad he’s here. Because if we were still together, if things were different, this is where he’d be, the way he always was. Sleeping on my floor for fourteen nights straight after Daisy died, crying with me, holding my hand, shushing me to sleep, listening as I relentlessly, torturously replayed that night in words, going over and over what I could’ve done, and what might’ve been. Then as the years went on, cooking my favourite breakfasts to cheer me up on hormonal, PMS-fuelled Saturday mornings (‘A Nutella nightmare,’ he’d grin, placing chocolate-drenched waffles in front of me). Excitedly showing me websites of night schools and workshops in Oregon, streets away from the hospital he’d be working in. ‘Look, Nell. Floristry workshops, business courses … and see, there’re loads of shops and restaurants nearby, for you to get a job while you’re studying, so we can still save.’ All that hope he had for us both – to tick the boxes his brothers and their wives seemed to be ticking with their eyes closed. Dream jobs. Savings accounts. Mortgages – lighting his eyes up. I remember the way it disappeared too, as if I’d blown it out, like candles on a cake, when I told him I had to stay.
‘What’s the time?’ I ask Ed now. A man a few seats away from me coughs into a pale blue handkerchief and a baby starts crying, although I can’t see one.
‘Half seven,’ says Ed. ‘I start at nine. Although, now I’m here, there’s no way I’m going to get away with sitting chilling till then.’ He gives me a wide, cheeky smile. ‘Come on. Let’s get you some breakfast.’
Ed McDonnell saved my life.
I know if I were to mention this to someone, say it out loud, they would either a) assume I was ill, or in some sort of freak accident, and he was all doctory and heroic and literally saved my flailing heart, or b) assume I’m one of those gooey, twee sort of people who collect sickly Pinterest quotes and say things like ‘You saved my life, the day I met you.’ But I don’t mean it in either of those ways. I mean it literally. Because Ed did save my life. Without Ed, I wouldn’t be alive. Because fifteen years ago, on January ninth, Ed stopped me getting into a car that would’ve killed me. Into a car that killed my best friend, and soon after, Lee, the driver, the boy she fancied, from the plumbing course. The one she’d whimsically daydream about, collecting his secret smiles and flirty looks in her diary (and texts to Charlie and me.) And regardless of how inadvertent, how by chance, every day that I have lived since then, feels as if it’s owed in some small way, to Ed. I’m here, because of Ed. And I kept living, after Daisy, because Ed gave me reason to. So when I’m thinking about him too much, when I’m scrolling his Twitter page, squashing cereal straight from the packet into my mouth while zooming in on that photo he had up of the pretty auburn-haired woman with the good eyebrows and bad breath, and when I reach out and know, against my better judgement, that I shouldn’t, I give myself a little pass. A little, ‘Well, yes, you really shouldn’t be lying awake at midnight torturing yourself with images of Ed in an open white shirt, hair blowing in the wind, and whoever that pile of auburn waves is draped across his lap, but who can blame you, Noelle Butterby? It’s Ed. The man saved your life.’ And I know many would advise against this, sitting opposite him in this bustling hospital canteen that smells like crispy bacon and filter coffee. But I can’t help it. There’s a huge part of me that’s more than happy to be sitting in front of him. It feels safe. It feels like home.
‘It’s shit you had to deal with this alone last night, Nell,’ says Ed gently. ‘But at least it’s nothing major.’ Mum has a fracture, and was taken up to a ward at five a.m. They tried to find me, but couldn’t, and also tried to call me, but my phone has no signal and they never do, I find, in hospitals. She’s in Marx ward, just upstairs from where I was sitting with Sam, and I can visit after nine. ‘So, where’s Dilly? On the road?’
‘At home, till Tuesday,’ I tell him. ‘I didn’t really want him coming, to be honest. I think he would’ve done my head in. Plus, he’d been out, came home drunk and stinking of burgers.’
Ed shakes his head and laughs. ‘Everything changes and nothing changes, eh? At least if he’s at home, Ian next door won’t freak out when he knocks and nobody answers. Do you remember when we went to the cinema …’
I giggle, lips at the warm ceramic of my coffee mug, because I know the story before he’s said it.
‘… and your mum was in the bath and he pulled that community copper off the road to investigate and your mum thought someone was dead when they eventually got her to come to the door?’
We both laugh, then Ed throws a quick glance to his side at the busy cafeteria, and bites his lip as if he shouldn’t be.
‘Ian’s moved actually,’ I say. ‘Not far, over in Kingswood. Met someone. At the squash club. Pam.’
Ed’s green eyes widen and brings a mocking hand up to grasp at his chest. ‘You’re kidding me. Tell me he at least confessed his undying love for your mum before he went?’
‘Nope,’ I say.
‘What? But the man worships her.’
‘Ah, but she knows. Because he already sort of had told her, you know? Without saying it, all the little things he used to do for her. And I know Mum misses him. I just wish – oh, I dunno what I wish.’ I sip my coffee, the tingles of caffeine like sparks of electricity, slowly firing up my brain. ‘I wish they’d get together I suppose.’
Ed nods, wordlessly. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I guess he didn’t want to wait around though. You can’t blame him for that.’
I smart at that, shame blooming hotly across my cheeks. Is that how Ed felt, when the job offer in America came up? When I stalled. When I knew I couldn’t go with him, had to stay to look after Mum, and I’d danced around it, avoided the subject as if it was even possible to, until he had no choice but to ask me outright. ‘So, are you coming with me, Nell?’ Ugh. He called me a door mat. He called me ‘truly pathetic’, for letting my mum rule my life, at thirty. But then we both threw them – harsh, sharp knives of words, as if it would help, as if hurting each other would shock us into changing into what the other wanted, or something. We are both guilty.
‘So come on,’ Ed says, patting the table with his hand, ‘talk to me. How’s Dill’s band? What are their latest stage names? The Broom? The Blender?’
I smile. ‘Dwayne’s latest one is The Storm.’
Ed gulps down a mouthful of coffee and laughs, his hand flying up to his mouth as if to stop him spraying it everywhere. ‘The Storm,’ he repeats. ‘Seriously? More like The Bit of Wind.’
‘The Light Breeze.’
Ed laughs. ‘The Very Small Almost Unnoticeable Gust of Wind that Doesn’t Even Disturb the Empty Recycling Bins.’
Being with Ed, I realise how much his voice has been living inside my head for the last two years – that teasing, sarcastic tone, with the tiny Cheshire twang he’s never been able to lose despite it being somewhere he hasn’t lived since he was sixteen. I suppose when you share twelve years with someone – almost a third of your life to date, and most of your adult years. You grow up together – you grow together. Your thoughts and their words and your anecdotes and their views and jokes, all sort of weave together, until you’re one, and you have no idea where you end and they begin. I knew he’d understand why I left Dilly at home. I knew he’d laugh at Dwayne’s new stage name.
‘And how’re your parents?’ I ask, and I see pinkness, just slightly, spread across his cheeks. Ed’s parents were always nice, but I don’t think they ever fully approved of me. A family of doctors and vets and university professors never quite warmed, I don’t think, to me, someone who wanted to travel – and who then didn’t go any further than Sainsbury’s most days, and spent her life cleaning other people’s houses and checking in on her mum. ‘So, what’s the plan?’ Ed’s mum Helen would say to me often, as if I was in a sticky situation and not just, you know, living my life.
‘They’re good,’ Ed says. ‘No, really good.’ He cycles through, about his Dad retiring after forty years, about his Mum stopping lecturing and obsessing over organising his Dad’s seventieth instead, about his brothers. National Parks in Borneo. Private practices. Awards.
‘Wow,’ I say, and I think of how typical an Ed response that is. Factual. Career and achievement focused. No information on how they actually are.
We drink our coffee in silence, and I pull off a piece of the bacon roll, put it in my mouth, let it disintegrate. I don’t feel like eating. The exhaustion, the churning adrenaline of ambulances and hospitals and all things middle-of-the-night. I feel – and almost definitely look – as though I’ve been found during a river dredge.
‘It was weird seeing you,’ I say. ‘In the street.’
Ed nods, reluctantly, looks down at the mug in his hand. ‘Yeah, I know. It’s been a long time.’
‘Two years and two months.’
‘You’re counting,’ he says, with a sad smile. ‘It doesn’t feel like that long. Does it?’
I shake my head. ‘Sometimes it feels like forever and yesterday all at once,’ I want to say, but I don’t, and a silence drifts over our little round table like a cloud.
We finish our coffees and walk back through the hospital. It seems to have woken up fully now, bustling with people and telephones and the rattle of wheeled-along hospital beds, and I pull my cardigan around myself, as we walk, to hide the big Moomin peeping out at everyone on my stomach like a spy.
A doctor passes us in the corridor, takes Ed’s arm, slaps him once on the back.
‘Ay, it’s the runaway,’ he grins. ‘Didn’t fancy Virginia then? We should catch up. Few drinks?’
‘Sure.’ Ed laughs, nods, slaps him back in that over-the-top masculine sort of way, and the doctor strolls off, shoes squeaking on the hard floor.
‘Virginia?’
‘Fuck knows,’ he whispers. ‘Probably meant Oregon.’
Ed grabs a sheet of visiting times from the receptionist and hands it to me. The first visiting slot is at nine. I’ll go and see Mum, and then I’ll go home, get some sleep. I need it. I feel wobbly, like I’ve had too much of Charlie’s mad home brewed beer.
‘How do you think Bel’s going to handle being in a ward?’ Ed asks, as I scan the paper in my hand.
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Yeah? What, really?’
‘She’s getting better,’ I lie, ‘doing more.’
‘Really? Well, that’s good.’
And I’m not sure why I say it. I suppose, to show him things have changed, to give the impression that things are different now, that I am different, no longer that person he stared at as he pulled a suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and called me – what was it? Shackled. ‘You’re shackled to other people’s problems,’ he’d said angrily, ‘and what makes me so pissed off, Nell, is that you have absolutely no motivation to change it. Do you? And I try. I try to understand why you insist upon shouldering it all. But …’ And that was when he said it. ‘It’s becoming pathetic, now, Nell. You’re becoming pathetic and in turn, so am I.’ I cried then. And eventually, so did Ed, the pair of us sitting on the edge of his bed, a suitcase, empty between us.
At the elevator, we say goodbye and as the doors slide closed, he says, ‘Be good, Nellie,’ as he always did, and as he flashes me a wide smile he’s given me a thousand times before, I see an image of him in my mind: seventeen and handsome, throwing that lopsided smile across college corridors, Daisy rolling her eyes, me melting to girl-syrup beside her. And as I walk away, I’m almost grateful for the interruption to the cauldron of thoughts and feelings and emotions bubbling in my brain. It feels like they’re all there, happiness, excitement, fear and worry and all their counterparts, all simmering away, a confused soup.
‘Excuse me? Miss Butterby?’
I turn. It’s the receptionist Ed spoke to.
‘A doctor would like to speak to you. Just in here,’ she says kindly. ‘In private.’
Doctor Henry sits in a tiny room with milky blue walls and a fluorescent light that flickers above our heads like in a locked room in a horror movie.
‘So, Mrs Belinda Butterby, your mother,’ she says, looking down at papers in her lap. Her smart paisley trousers are covered in navy blue swirls, like milky ways.
‘Yes.’
‘And you are Noelle Butterby. Address, number eight, Levison Drive.’
‘Yes. That’s me.’
She dips her head once in a stiff nod. ‘It’s nothing alarming,’ she says. ‘We just have some concerns for your mother and would like to discuss them with you. How is her health generally? She keeps up with her hospital check-ups?’
I nod.
‘And she is generally well? I know she had the liver trouble, but that’s been rectified with a change of statin medication, yes?’
I nod again.
‘OK.’ She laces her fingers together. ‘Miss Butterby, the paramedic mentioned the panic your mother displayed in leaving home and we witnessed the same when she was admitted into a ward. Is there anything we should know? So we can help?’
I pause. There’s a right and wrong answer here, or at least there would be if Mum was sitting beside me now. ‘What does she say?’ I ask.
The doctor hesitates, leans back in her chair. She has dark curly hair, and smooth brown skin. She’s about my age, perhaps a little older and something about her calm manner and slow breaths makes me want to tell her everything, spill it all in front of her, watch her gather it all up, fix it, put it all together. Although some people in her position have already tried. ‘Your mother says she suffers occasionally with panic attacks.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, she does. She’s – since the stroke, she’s lost confidence and she goes out less and less and …’
‘You live with her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just you two?’
‘And my younger brother, but he’s away a lot.’
Doctor Henry nods, sits back in her chair. ‘Do you think she needs help with her mental health? Her anxiety?’
I’ve tried. I’ve tried so many times. I’ve called Mum’s GP, I’ve self-referred her for CBT therapy with a local NHS mental health scheme, I’ve found forums for her to join, online courses. I even spoke to Tom, Ed’s brother, when we were together, and he was a junior in A&E and he’d given me a list of things to try. Physio, he said curtly. Counselling.
‘I’ve tried,’ I tell Doctor Henry. ‘She – she doesn’t think she needs the help. Because she’s fine if she’s at home. She has her routine at home, she cooks, she bakes, she cleans, and every day she sees people. Me. Our neighbour Ian. My brother …’
‘And you – you’re her carer.’
‘Well, I’m not her carer really, I …’ I trail off and the doctor waits, until she realises I’m not going to say any more and she nods and takes a big breath.
‘We can talk to her about beta blockers which may help––’
‘She won’t take them. She doesn’t think she needs them. It’s her confidence, as I said, since it happened. She was so busy all the time before. She was a singer – worked in clubs, at holiday parks, in local shows. She was a workaholic, really. And then it happened and … she’s just lost herself, a bit.’
‘I see,’ she says, nodding. ‘I understand.’ She leans over to her desk and hands me two leaflets. ‘Your mother is asleep. You may visit, but she let us give her a sleeping pill at least, so she might be sleeping for some time.’
‘OK. Thank you.’
She looks down at her notes. ‘And you are feeling OK?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes … ’ She looks down at her notes again, as if to double-check my name. ‘Noelle. How are you? You’re coping?’
‘Yes. Yeah, I’m fine––’
‘And your mental health?’
My heart stops its galloping – a rabbit in headlights.
‘I can see on our notes that you––’
‘I’m fine,’ I cut in. ‘I’m fine now.’
The doctor lingers on the page in her hand for a moment then looks back up at me. ‘All right. OK, then,’ she says, and I find myself breathing a long, hot sigh of relief. She doesn’t want to talk any more. I can go home. Mum can go home. Everything can go back to normal.
‘There is a support line here,’ she says, stretching out a hand and running a lidded biro across the leaflet in my hand. ‘For you. For your mum. For various things.’
‘Thank you.’
The doctor smiles gently. ‘Great.’
Doctor Henry follows me out and whisks off in the other direction, someone else to fix, to survey, to observe, and I walk down the corridor that I saw Sam disappear down hours ago. Was it even real? Was any of it? It’s bright outside now. Through the large, square windows, the sky is a brilliant tropical blue, and a fresh Spring breeze laps through the crack at the top of it. When I saw Sam, the night was black, the air was freezing cold, the corridors silent. It feels like a different place altogether.
I get to the end of the corridor; push through the sticky doors I saw Sam arrive through. And that’s when I see it. A leaflet balled up on a bench. I almost don’t want to reach out and pick it up, but of course, I do. And I don’t want to open it up either, but of course, I do that too. Because there it is. My three a.m. old-fashioned ‘like Candice and Steve’ scrawl. My phone number on a blood donation leaflet, written down for Sam. Who screwed it up and dumped it on a bench, like rubbish.