Chapter 9
9
Making sure I don’t throw up during the ride to the hospital is an unexpectedly useful distraction.
It forces me to prioritize the physical over the emotional and concentrate on swallowing, breathing, gripping the seat belt, and keeping my feet flat to the vibrating floor of the taxi.
Focus on what’s real and what’s present, worry about the future when it arrives, in a few short minutes’ time.
Once we’re outside the Queen’s Medical Center and start sweeping up the winding roads to the front entrance, and I see the red Accident she didn’t like to discuss it. Her mum died several years ago and her brother lives abroad.
“I had no idea it was that bad,” I say.
“Neither did I... The doctor wants to talk to us together,” Ed says.
The word “doctor” hits me in the gut, and yet part of me is still resilient, even hopeful. Doctors make people better. Ed said dead, but he could’ve meant coma. Her bag was missing, sounds like they could’ve mixed up the files. This remains negotiable.
Look, this is Susie Hart. People die all the time, but Susie isn’t “people.”
“Eve? Is that OK?”
“Yes,” I say, limp, and take Ed’s proffered hand. We have never held hands before. It goes without saying but I never imagined it would be like this, when we did.
Ed guides me through the busy, antiseptic-smelling, brightly lit reception and says something to the woman behind the desk that I don’t hear, I think it’s just his name. She turns away and makes a sotto voce internal phone call.
She doesn’t look remotely perturbed and I marvel at this, that it must be so ordinary for her. She has every day to practice being politely, professionally impassive in the face of people who look as bewildered and shaken as if they’ve stepped out of a time machine.
In the intervening seconds, Ed turns to me and looks like he’s going to say something to me and then doesn’t say anything, because what is there to say? Every single remark, platitude, expression of reassurance or hope, or practical discussion of what’s ahead, is impossible, null. We’ve transcended conversation.
I glance around.
Was Susie rushed through here, hours ago, people in uniform running by a gurney, holding a drip aloft, oxygen mask clamped to her face? Or was she never an emergency?
Ed’s name is called. A late-middle-aged man with a lanyard appears, and we’re ushered through double doors into the rest of the hospital, down a corridor, and into a side room. He wears a fixed expression of rueful, blank respectfulness. Not emotional, but mindful of your emotion. Like the men who drive the hearse, wear white gloves, and never look directly at you.
My stomach muscles seize up as he asks us to sit down, in a featureless room where my sight immediately fastens on the box of tissues on the desk.
When he starts speaking, this will become real. If he tells us it’s all been a terrible mistake and Susie is in a bed with a leg in traction, or they’re operating right now, then that will be the new truth. This man is the Giver of Life or the Grim Reaper, the one with the power to give her back or take her away from us, forever .
As he walks over to shut the door, I fantasize the words he might use. Imploring us not to sue over their grave error.
Now this has never happened before, but I’m nevertheless incredibly relieved, if ashamed, to tell you.
The rush of relief that would knock us off our feet. Or what if she’s injured, but... there’s physio, we could do anything...
“Hello. Ed? Eve.” He nods.
I have never dreaded anyone speaking more in my life.
“I’m consultant Gareth Prentice, I’m one of the medical team who saw Susie when she was brought in by the ambulance.” Brought in. These strange passive terms, as if Susie is a puppet in their play.
“Who called the ambulance?” I blurt.
“A member of the public who saw what happened and called 999.”
I can’t imagine Susie helpless.
“I’m so sorry...,” he starts, after a deep breath, and I fold immediately, letting go a strangled cry.
“Hey, come on, come on, ssshhh,” Ed says, putting his arm around me, and I can tell it’s helping him right now to steady himself, to act as my protector. I’m glad of it. As much as I can see anything of the long road that lies ahead, I suspect we will be constantly swapping these roles back and forth.
“... We saw her during the early hours of this morning with a major trauma to her head. We did everything we could to save her, but her injuries were just too severe. She had a massive bleed on the brain that was simply unsurvivable.”
“How? If she was on the pavement?” I say.
“We won’t know the full details until the postmortem and the inquest.”
There’s so much to come I can’t contemplate.
“... If you asked me to guess, and please bear in mind it’s only a guess, I’d say the car mounted the curb, hit her, and the impact threw her against a wall, which is when the insult to the brain and skull occurred.”
Insult. Unexpected jargon. We’re visitors in a foreign country.
“... The driver is cooperating with the police, as far as I know.”
Dr. Prentice adds, with some understatement: “This is an awful lot to take in, I know. Take your time and ask me anything you want to.”
He is compassionate, but rehearsed. This is an earthquake for us, a conversation we will never forget, and I think—for him it’s the middle of his Friday morning. Something he’ll mention in passing to his wife tonight at dinner. Sad business today, young girl, well, woman, only in her thirties. Friends were in pieces, naturally.
“What did you do, to try to save her?” I say, and I don’t recognize my own voice.
“The paramedics had stabilized her with a neck brace to protect her spine and kept her breathing on the way to the hospital. We put Susie on a ventilator to support her vital functions while we tried to find the source of the bleeding, and ran scans.”
“But she died how long after you did that?”
“She had no vital signs within fifteen minutes of arriving here. Attempts to resuscitate her failed.”
I imagine the unbroken tone from the machines.
There’s no other sound for a few moments, while I heave and weep and Ed makes a gasping noise, like he’s trying to breathe underwater.
“Was she conscious?” Ed says. “When she came in.”
“No, the impact from the crash knocked her completely unconscious,” the doctor says. “She wouldn’t have suffered at all.”
“You don’t know that!” I say, and think, what a time for arseholey teenage Eve to resurface. (Eve Gaddafi, my mum used to call her. “A tyrant.”)
“We are as sure as we possibly can be,” says the doctor, evenly, completely unperturbed by my snapping at him—prepared and trained for it, just like the unstartled receptionist. “Brain function after that kind of trauma is akin to a deep coma state.”
“Was the driver of the car OK?” Ed says, in a clipped voice, and he reaches over and squeezes my sweaty, freezing hands. The idea there is a murderer in this story, a flesh-and-blood still-living person who’s violently wrenched Susie from us... I don’t know how I feel about them yet. I haven’t even started trying to work that out. My shock can barely recede an inch to start letting in the ocean of grief, let alone rage.
“He was treated at the scene for his injuries. The police will know more about that.”
“Was he drunk?” Ed says.
“He’ll have been breathalyzed, I don’t know the result.
“Police officers have been to see Susie’s father, he seemed in a confused state?” the doctor continues.
“He has dementia,” Ed says. “We’re not sure how advanced.”
The doctor nods. He bows his head, slightly. “We were wondering if, in light of this, you’d be able to identify the body?”
Ed and I look at each other with bloodshot eyes. “No” does not seem an acceptable answer.
“The body.” Susie is not Susie, she is an artifact. She has left it behind. She is a thing.
There’s a soap opera, unreal quality to this experience, as if everyone other than myself and Ed might be an actor. The phrases we’re being given about take all the time you need and we’ll be right outside and come out and take a break if you need to and there’s no pressure if you’re not sure.
I feel as if I’ve seen this scene in blue-light procedural dramas that I had half my attention focused on while shoveling my tea. Except this body will not sit up when someone shouts, “Scene.”
I can’t accept Susie has consented to leave her body anywhere that her personality isn’t. It runs completely contrary to her nature.
Part of me feels defiant—yes, show us this impossible thing you keep saying you have hidden behind a curtain. Death is physical; perhaps it existing in a purely intellectual realm is too much to reconcile. Susie losing her life has been only words, wild claims. Knowing someone wouldn’t lie to you, and actually believing them, are two different things, it seems.
I have a firm conviction that if I ignored them, broke free and ran away from this bleach-sluiced place that I shouldn’t be in, hailed a taxi and went to Suze’s, she’d be there looking baffled at me in the doorway, hair back in one of those cotton Alice bands she uses to keep it off her face.
What’s up with you? Course I’m here. I always work from home on a Friday.
The ease and clarity with which I can picture her makes this seem entirely feasible. She’s at my fingertips.
They take us into an empty room, with a long, shallow curtained window across one wall. Ed and I hold hands, not looking at each other. My heart is thundering.
“Are you ready?” the doctor says, quietly, more to Ed than to me, and he nods.
On the other side, they briskly draw back the curtains.
I give an involuntary gasp at the sight of her. Ed and I grip each other’s hands so hard it feels like it could snap bone.
It’s her.
She’s there.
Susie’s lying on a gurney with a dark blue sheet pulled up to her neck, her long hair pooled around her head, some of it spilling over the edge, her eyes closed.
I expected Susie to look asleep, as much as I could picture this at all.
She doesn’t look asleep. She looks like a sallow waxwork of Susie, with a slack expression. Like someone has made a model of Susie Hart from plaster of paris, like something they might put in a modern art gallery.
I’ve never seen a dead person before and I didn’t know that I’d know they were dead, if that makes any sense. If I’d suspect a heartbeat hiding under that sheet. But I can tell for sure Susie is dead, that this is what death looks like. If I’d been the first to find her like this, I’d have understood she was gone. We’re still mammals, we instinctively know.
Her face—her regal, prom-queen face I know every detail and shadow of—is without animation. I can see the edge of a huge spreading purple bruise at her temple. I guess they have shown us her this way around so it’s at the far side.
I turn to the doctor, who’s standing with his hands behind his back and his chin respectfully on his chest.
“That’s her,” I say, voice full of water, and pain. “That’s Susie.”
The doctor nods.
“I’ll give you a moment,” he says, and leaves.
I look back at Susie. This is the last time I will ever see her in person, I realize. I try to take every detail in, the extravagant shape of her nose and lips, the brown-blond treacly colors in her hair. I always envied those thick handfuls of her hair, and now it’s going to waste? Parts of her are still perfect and she’s going to be... thrown away? How can her body not be in use, and of use? We’ve not been asked and I’m not going to ask.
I see her in my mind’s eye, in the pub last night, raising her eyebrow at me. Sardonic, witty, unstoppable Susie. From that, to this. How?
“This isn’t real, Eve,” Ed says to me. I sense it’s his turn to break down and mine to keep it together. “This is like a fucking nightmare. What is going on? Why did this have to happen? There was no reason for this to happen...” His voice breaks. I look at him and he’s crying, screwed-up-face crying.
“It’s not right,” I say, putting my arms around him. “This is not right.”
I am holding on to Ed and Ed is holding on to me and I think we’re holding each other up.
He strokes my hair; the gesture is so clumsy in his distress that he’s catching great hanks of it and vaguely pulling, but I don’t care.
Somewhere outside this building, I think, people are having normal Fridays. But there’s been a switch around: it’s not Susie dying that feels impossible, for as long as we’re looking at her dead body—a corpse, she is a corpse ?—but that ordinary world that is the impossibility now.
I gaze at her for the last time. There’s an emptiness to her. The snap-crackle of her, gone, vanished, flown. Her body is a vacated premises. It’s like turning up to a house you know well, and finding it emptied and stripped to the fittings.
Have we had enough time with her, we’re asked. Yes, we have, we say, blankly.
They close the curtains.
If there’s something I am sure of, it’s that I will never think I’ve had enough time with her.