WALES 2022
AFTER brEAKING INTO CERI ’ S flat, I didn’t see him again for a couple of days. Not outside the flower shop, not in the cafe reading a newspaper, not in the bookshop’s poetry section.
My insides felt like a beehive, writhing and buzzing with anticipation, though I couldn’t quite ascertain whether I wanted to see him or not. True, a confrontation could be disastrous, but it was Arden .
Arden, less than a mile away, after decades apart. A sweet nectar I had never been able to resist.
Whenever I heard my teenage peers explain that they liked someone because they were funny or smart or kind , it all seemed so reductive, so one-dimensional. Sure, I could ascribe such bland descriptors to Arden – they were poetic, and creative, and stubborn, and reserved, and wise. Gentle with wildlife, tapped into the natural world in some fundamental way. Philosophical, deep, if often melancholic. The embodiment of saudade.
But what I felt for Arden transcended most people’s understanding of love. Their personhood was not as simple as a list of definitive attributes and traits, and they had no fixed body to marvel over. What fascinated me, what compelled me so profoundly, was that theirs was a soul in the truest sense. A way of thinking, a way of feeling, their emotional contours shifting with culture and history and experience but never yielding entirely.
Arden was a vast tapestry that grew more detailed with every incarnation. Perhaps the raw material began as a simple expanse of goodness, of loyalty, of creativity and imagination, but with every life they lived – and every life they took – another section of elaborate beadwork was stitched through the silk. Each piece of knowledge gained was a jewel in the border, each new person they encountered was an intricate patch of embroidery. All this texture made them so endlessly interesting, made me want to run my fingers over every inch so that I could explore it, understand it. Unravel it.
How could anyone who’d only lived one life compare?
But while we had loved each other for centuries, we hadn’t talked in nearly four decades. El Salvador had been so brutal, so breviloquent. I needed more, like an addict craved the poppy. I craved their presence, their conversation, their embrace – even if it would ultimately result in our death.
It was a yearning so complex that it defied all reason.
As I lay in bed each night, I cupped my phone to my chest, trembling with the possibility of it.
Never before in history had I been able to send Arden an instantaneous message. Never before had I been able to tell them I loved them on a careless whim, a flight of fancy, the kind of recklessness a thousand years of living gave you. There was much to condemn about the internet, but there was no denying how flint-fast it made the art of connection. How easy modernity had made it to declare love – a funny video shared with a friend, real money sent to virtual coffee funds, a snap of the flowers your grandmother picked from her garden. The everyday tenderness of ‘I saw this and thought of you.’
Arden and I would never have that kind of casual relationship. Another small alienation from the world around me. Another tiny untethering from humanity.
Instead, we had blades to the throat. Poetry books found frozen in the taiga. Arrows through the heart. Great monuments burned to the ground. A sense of both permanence and impermanence. Transient, ephemeral, but also somehow enduring.
An antique typewriter sitting proudly on a windowsill, waiting.
I typed out and deleted several messages to Ceri about Gracie’s illness, and about how I so badly wanted him to leave me alone until I could donate my stem cells.
He would understand, I was certain of it.
I remembered Algeria, after my father was shot on the beach, how he’d comforted me in the cafe, glass carafes shattered at our feet, my head pressed to his chest, the contours of our bodies lined up so neatly. He knew what family meant to me. He knew how much it destroyed me to lose the people I loved. There was no way he would kill me gratuitously before I could save my innocent sister.
Yet part of me didn’t want to cheapen our love with a collection of pixels on an ambivalent screen. I didn’t want to reduce our symphony to a singular note.
And I certainly I didn’t want to beg.
If he confronted me tomorrow, I would deal with it then.
I would roll the dice on his love for me, and trust that he would not let me die.
At least, not yet.
I tucked my phone away, and instead pulled out Ten Hundred Years of You . I ran my fingertip over the page where Arden described grief as clay – clay that could be used to sculpt something beautiful – and began to sob.
The transplant appointment arrived, and Arden did not, and I could barely believe my good fortune.
Usually I walked the mile from the bookshop to the hospital, but since rain was falling in sheets and the charcoal sky was threatening thunder, Dylan – the farmhand who helped my mum out – offered to give me a lift in the Jeep pickup. He was waiting in the nearest car park in grubby overalls, windows down despite the weather, rapping his fingers on the steering wheel to some indie folk music.
Dylan was a hippie through and through. I’d caught him talking to trees on more than one occasion. Despite his quirks – or maybe because of them – I’d lusted after him since the moment he’d turned up on my mum’s doorstep and asked if she had any work going on the farm. He’d just finished sixth form and wanted to save up some money to go travelling. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time, studying at the kitchen table for my final exams, and the attraction had fluttered pleasantly through me.
He had a kind of natural cheer to him that struck me as so antithetical to Arden. After centuries of running from the dark, his presence was a sudden blinding light. Cheesy jokes and whistled tunes, laughter so rich and raucous that it spread through every room. Bear hugs and buoyant folk music, rugby balls spinning on a fingertip, fresh-baked bread and a window propped open to let in some air. A golden retriever in human form.
Our paths hadn’t really crossed in school, since he was a couple of years older than me, but I’d always admired him from afar. Yet despite the occasional flirtatious glance in the early days, he treated me with a kind of respectful distance.
It was probably for the best. My attraction had always been wrapped in a suffocating layer of guilt, as though I was betraying Arden in some way. I couldn’t imagine them turning up in my life to discover me in love with someone else. The way that would forever alter the dynamic between us.
In any case, Dylan had truly become a part of the family – a warm patchwork square in our emotional support blanket. And although he had worked on the farm for two years now, he still showed no sign of travelling any further than Bwlch. Judging by the soft, almost narcotic glow he got after a day tending to the land, I suspected the Welsh wilds had burrowed under his skin.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked as I climbed into the front passenger seat. His dark shoulder-length hair was pulled back in a low knot, accentuating the sharp lines of his squared-off jaw.
‘Fine,’ I said, tucking the seatbelt around me. It had been chewed by a goat and was frayed to a worrying degree. ‘Excited to finally get this done.’
‘I really admire you. You know that?’ Dylan said, spinning the steering wheel and exiting the car park. His forearms were rippled with sinewy muscle, and he had several strands of twine and string knotted around his wrists. ‘You’ve taken all of this in your stride.’
‘It’s Gracie you should be admiring. She’s the one who has somehow become more herself through a life-threatening illness.’
I pictured my bald sister defacing a grave with a can of spray paint and stifled a laugh.
I adored that girl.
‘I can admire you both, can’t I?’ Dylan looked at me affectionately, like he might want to reach out and ruffle my hair, but decided against it.
For the thousandth time, I felt beyond grateful that even if the worst should happen to me, he would still be here to pick up the pieces. That he could make my mum pot of tea after pot of tea, ensure she was eating, resting, healing.
‘Thank you,’ I said simply.
‘For what?’ he asked, smiling that broad, infectious smile, but I didn’t need to answer. He knew.
There had been a time when I’d suspected Dylan of being Arden, if only a little. He’d been two years above me in school, so we couldn’t have shared a birthday, yet the tingle in my fingertips, the flutter in my lower belly, the love he had for the earth … they were hard to dismiss as adolescent lust and simple coincidence.
So I’d set tiny traps in every conversation we had, sprinkling them with historical details from times I knew we’d lived through together, searching his face for the faintest glimmer of recognition. Misquoting lines from Arden’s favourite poets – Keats, Byron, Coleridge – to see if he could resist correcting me. Using obscure words from extinct languages, expecting him to pick up on them.
I’d even once called him Arden, to see if his head would snap up from the kitchen sink in surprise, but he’d barely registered the slip of the tongue.
Gradually, the paranoia had faded, and something like kinship had knotted in its place.
As we drove to the hospital, I stared out to the arcing hills, their peaks disappearing into an ominous mist. Foreboding traced its gnarled finger down my spine. I couldn’t fight the feeling that something awful was about to happen. That Ceri was about to leap out from behind a tree and stab me before I could explain Gracie’s predicament.
Arriving at the hospital felt like floating on a cloud of disbelief, but that sense of disquiet followed me through the corridors like a shadow.
Too good to be true , purred a silky voice in the back of my head, but I tried to ignore it. I’d lived so many lives, and I’d been a blind optimist in almost every single one. Why change now?
The final hurdle was a blood test to make sure my blood contained enough stem cells to make the transplant viable. A matronly nurse with close-cropped grey hair took the vials in stilted silence, with just a ‘sharp scratch’ warning right before the stinging needle pierced my skin.
While they took my sample away to be examined, I hung out in Gracie’s room with Dylan, eating fizzy sweets and watching episodes of the lesbian vampire show she was obsessed with. Mum dozed off in a high-backed armchair, the back of her head periodically sliding sideways down the padded fabric before jolting back up again. She’d been sleeping here a lot. The whole thing had aged her exponentially. There were pronounced bags under her eyes and a fresh spray of silver-grey hair around the coppery crown of her head.
‘Has she made any more jokes?’ I whispered to Gracie, gesturing towards Mum.
Gracie nodded gravely. ‘She handed me a baseball cap and called it my “egg cup”. It was embarrassing for everyone involved.’
‘At least she’s trying.’ I felt a pang of affection for our sad, lovely mum.
‘She’s a good egg,’ said Dylan, deadpan.
Gracie groaned.
‘What?’ Dylan looked fake-affronted. ‘I really thought that would crack you up.’
‘I hate you,’ Gracie said, which was her way of insinuating the exact opposite.
‘On that note, I brought you something,’ he said, scooping his backpack off the floor. Unzipping it carefully, he pulled out something wrapped in brown parcel paper, tied with a frayed length of twine in a clumsy bow. There was a mud print on the front that looked suspiciously like a pig’s hoof.
Frowning as though he’d presented her with her own obituary, Gracie tore open the paper and stared at the contents. I could make out the back of a large photo frame, but not what was inside.
‘Erm, thanks,’ she said slowly, unconvincingly. ‘What – erm – what is it?’
Dylan’s cheeks flushed red, and he suddenly became very interested in the label at the corner of her blanket. ‘Well, you’re not allowed to bring flowers into hospital these days, so every time I saw one on the farm that reminded me of you, I took it home. Dried it and pressed it. And, erm, there you go.’
Curious, I peered over Gracie’s shoulder at the pressed flowers. Dylan had arranged the petals – pink and blue and violet and yellow – into the shape of a violin. Except he was not a particularly gifted artist, and the shape was clumsy, the bow too small, the body too wide.
And yet it was perhaps the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.
‘That is unbelievably tragic,’ said Gracie, stuffing it under her pillow, but she had to clear her throat shortly afterwards. I didn’t miss the way she looked up at the harsh ceiling light, blinking furiously. ‘Now, if we can all stop acting like I’m already dead, that would be fantastic.’
‘Far from it,’ replied Dylan with an earnest beam. ‘I don’t know anyone more alive.’ He reached out a hand, then withdrew it again. ‘I was going to ruffle your hair, but you don’t have any.’
‘Twat,’ snapped Gracie, but she was laughing once more.
Eventually two doctors entered the room. One was Dr Onwuemezi, the oncology consultant overseeing Gracie’s treatment, and the other was a medical student with floppy blonde hair and the general aura of the very hungover. As he fumbled with his stethoscope behind Dr Onwuemezi, her impatience wafted off her in such severe waves that I was genuinely quite fearful for his safety.
They stood at the end of Gracie’s bed, holding clipboards and looking generally grim. Anxiety gripped my stomach like a noose. There was still a strip of gauze taped to the crook of my elbow, the adhesive pinching at my skin.
‘I’ll get right into it.’ Dr Onwuemezi pushed thick-framed glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘Despite our best efforts with the booster injections, Branwen’s blood doesn’t contain enough circulating stem cells to make a transplant successful.’ Despair plummeted into my stomach like a stone. ‘This doesn’t mean it can’t work, but it means we’ll have to extract bone morrow from the hip instead, if that’s something she’s willing to consent to.’
‘Of course,’ I replied quickly, pulse pounding. It wasn’t over yet. ‘Anything. Let’s do it right now.’
Another grimace from Dr Onwuemezi. ‘Unfortunately –’
‘Let me guess. I’ve got an infection,’ Gracie said, her tone flat, her brow clammy in a way I hadn’t noticed until now. ‘Again.’
‘Yes. Thankfully, it is minor and under control, but it does mean that we won’t be able to go ahead with the transplant while the infection is still active. So our plan is to treat the infection first, go through another round of chemotherapy conditioning, and then proceed with the harvest and transplant in two weeks’ time.’
My heart fell through the floor.
I turned eighteen in ten days.
Which meant I’d likely be dead in two weeks.
‘More chemo.’ Mum’s voice was pained, tense. ‘Is that really necessary? It makes her so sick.’
‘It’s needed to destroy her existing bone marrow cells and make room for the new ones, as well as to destroy any existing cancer cells, and to suppress the immune system.’
Dylan chewed his lip worriedly. ‘Why do we want to suppress it? You just said she’s getting infections as it is.’
‘Because if we don’t,’ said the med student, looking up at his mentor for approval, ‘there’s a much higher chance her body will reject the transplant?’ Dr Onwuemezi nodded reluctantly.
After answering a few more medical questions from my mum, the doctors left the room.
Gracie, who had been sitting cross-legged in the centre of her bed, threw herself back against the stack of pillows. ‘Remember when we were little, and Mum used to put Sudocrem on literally everything? Whatever insect bite or rash or scratch or bruise we had? And she said it was magic cream and it could fix anything?’ She puffed the air out through her nose in a half-scoff, but I could see the pain behind it. ‘What a load of shit.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Mum sniffed. ‘I shouldn’t’ve made you believe –’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mum, it’s not an apology thing.’ Gracie yanked the zip of her hoodie all the way up to her chin. ‘Just something I remembered.’
‘Don’t swear at me, Gracie.’ Mum dabbed at her eyes with her cardigan sleeve.
Gracie laughed bitterly. Her maple violin lay on the bedside table next to a bunch of red grapes and the poetry book. ‘What are you going to do about it? What could you do to punish me when things couldn’t possibly get any worse?’
But they could. Arden could kill me any moment now, and my sweet, foul-mouthed sister would never get the transplant.
No. I wouldn’t let that happen.
I had to take matters into my own hands.
I had to live past the age of eighteen, no matter what.
Pulling out my phone, I finally typed a message to Ceri:
let’s have that date x