as they always said on the TV?
Helen had recognised from that first trip with them to Mr Eklund that Neil was finding the hospital difficult, that he felt out of his depth and – there was no other word for it – terrified. She still had hope that her dad had just had a panic, that she’d get there to be told it was a fuss about nothing, and her parents would be sitting in the cubicle happily watching some quiz show or cookery repeat on the mini bedside TV.
She found a parking space near the main door – she’d already bought a weekly permit for her own car and insisted on doing the same for Neil’s – and hurried in.
They weren’t watching TV. As soon as she entered the ward, she could see the hubbub of people around Barbara’s bed. There were eight or nine of them clustered into the little room, some bent over her, two holding IV lines, and Neil standing a couple of footsteps outside the door, looking smaller than she’d ever seen him.
‘Helen!’
She gave him a hurried hug, and then turned to look through the glass at Barbara. If she’d looked bad before, she looked deathly now. Her skin was chalk-like, paler than the white sheets that she was lying on. She was wearing a breathing mask, which seemed to cover most of her face, but her eyes burnt out above it, bloodshot, widened and, above all, scared.
Neil pulled Helen back when she tried to step into the room.
‘They said not to. They need the space.’
She was still taking it in as she stepped back – the extra lines now attaching her mother to various machines, and the ominous red-brown stains on the bed. Then a woman in civvies – an open-neck shirt and some tailored trousers – turned away from the bed and stuck her head out of the room.
‘You must be Mrs Marsden’s daughter? I’m Rebecca Evans. I’m a consultant here. There’s a trolley on its way to transfer your mother to the intensive care unit. She should be fine, but we need to take the precaution. I’ll have to ask you and Mr Marsden to stand back please.’
The woman gestured towards some chairs by the nurses’ station, but Helen had no intention of being herded off into a corner.
‘First, tell me what’s going on? This morning she was doing fine. They said she just needed to get the last of the anaesthetic out of her system. Surely she can’t have had a reaction this late?’
The woman shook her head. ‘It’s not the anaesthetic. I can’t—’
She stopped speaking as the main ward doors opened and two men wheeled a trolley through at speed. She waved her hand towards the chairs again and this time Helen stepped backward. Without even bothering to check if she’d gone, the consultant turned back to the bed, barking out incomprehensible instructions to the nurses and porters. The transfer was made in seconds, despite all the tubes and wires that Barbara suddenly seemed to have coming out of her.
Three or four of the nurses hung back. Barbara was out of their hands now. The others advanced down the ward together, surrounding the trolley like it was some kind of battering ram, with Ms Evans setting a brisk pace in her low heels.
The eldest of the ward nurses came over to where Neil and Helen were standing.
‘They’ll let you know when you can see her,’ she said. ‘Come into the office; that way we’ll be ready when they buzz for you.’
She had a kindly, grandmotherly way about her, and they followed meekly, walking the length of the ward with the eyes of all the patients and visitors moving silently with them. Geranium Ward clearly wasn’t used to seeing much in the way of medical high-drama.
Helen and Neil sat down and the nurse quickly left, saying something about getting someone to make them a cuppa. She seemed to recognise that they needed a bit of privacy. The office smelt of mints and bleach, with just the faintest trace of cigarette smoke. I’d take one, Helen thought, if someone offered. She’d not smoked since her teens.
The wall was decorated with a single, faded Monet print in a Perspex frame that reflected all the movement from the ward. Life didn’t stop because of a visit from the crash team. There were still bedpans to be dealt with, antibacterial protocols to follow and endless charts to be checked off and stuffed back into their clipboards.
‘She was bringing up blood, Helen.’ Neil’s voice was low, and he looked at the floor rather than her. ‘Not just a bit – it was just gushing out of her. Coming from her nose as well, even one of her ears at one point.’
Helen thought back to the stains she’d seen on the bed. How awful.
She just couldn’t understand it. There had been no suggestion of any cancer in Barbara’s digestive system. No one had mentioned any side effects or surgical complications that could look like this. And it had all seemed to be going so smoothly, completely ‘by the book’, as they’d all been saying yesterday. She didn’t know what to say to Neil. She was the one who had read all the leaflets, gone online; she was the one who was meant to know what to expect, and nothing had – nothing could have – prepared her for this.
There was a niggling voice in her head that said maybe there was a reason for that. Could it be that this was something more sinister than a symptom or a side effect? Jennifer, whoever she was, had promised to make Barbara suffer. And Helen doubted she’d suffered anything in her life like the last few hours. What if the notes weren’t just empty threats? What if this time Jennifer meant it for real? Helen felt giddy. Was she putting two and two together and getting eleven? Or should she listen to the instinct screaming at her that this was anything but an accident?
She reached out for Neil’s hand, and he let her take it, though his eyes remained fixed on the tight brown weave of the carpet tiles.
Helen
Spike Island wasn’t actually an island. It was a bit of land jutting out into the Mersey estuary, with the St Helen’s canal slicing down one side and a great view of a power station. Helen’s heart thrilled with anticipation for the gig. The thing about Stone Roses songs was that they were totally different to any other music she’d ever heard. The guitar riffs didn’t play in her ears, they flowed through her veins.
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