WALES 2022
AFTER TOSSING AND TURNING for what felt like hours, I eventually slept in fits and starts until I was awoken by a yell of agony. I sat bolt upright, forgetting that my wrist was cuffed to the headboard – I winced as it yanked at an awkward angle. My eyes strained against the darkness.
Arden was roaring raggedly, almost feral, as though some invisible hand was peeling the very skin from his chest. The sound grabbed me by the ribs, a lit match held to every nerve ending.
‘Arden,’ I said urgently. ‘Hey. Arden .’
Still he screamed.
‘ARDEN!’ I yelled, tugging futilely at my bonds, so intense was the urge to go to him.
He awoke, the sound dying suddenly in his throat, his body jerking and starting.
Breathing heavily, he stayed perfectly in place.
‘What was that?’ I asked, flopping back on to the pillow, my own heart thudding.
A brief pause, and then quietly: ‘Just a nightmare.’
I’d seen this before, on a fishing trawler off the coast of sunset-drenched Nauru, right before I’d killed Elenoa on a jutting reef. Mangos and pawpaws and sour toddy, red light washing over her soft, tanned body, my eyes stinging from sun and salt. Limbs juddering against the wooden deck. My body pressed to her back, hushing.
I rolled over the revelation in my mind, unsure how to broach it. If I went in too hard, Arden would clam up. And yet it felt important, somehow. As though it might have something to do with us.
‘You have them a lot,’ I whispered into the night.
‘Yes.’
Still his body lay unmoving, just the soft rise and fall of his chest. Now that my eyes had cleared of sleep, I saw from his outline that he was facing me. A shard of silvery moonlight sliced through a gap in the curtains, illuminating the hard ridge of his jaw. A tangle of dark hair on a cream jumper pillow.
The screams still echoed in the caverns of my mind.
‘Is it the same thing every time?’ I asked, trepidatious.
A single nod.
‘The asylum? The trenches?’ I fought back a shudder. ‘They haunt me too.’
Another beat, then the shutters went down.
He rolled over to face the window.
We both lay awake – albeit in fraught silence – until the sun rose orange over the valley. The peach light washed through the curtains, pouring over Arden’s tensed body. He was covered in goosebumps. Sharp shoulder blades protruded from the tanned skin on his back, which I noticed was cross-hatched with pink-red scratches. They were fresh and bright.
Had he been clawing at himself during the nightmare?
‘Do you want some coffee?’ he asked gruffly, as though he felt my eyes on him.
‘Yeah. Thanks.’
He sat up and rifled through his drawers, pulling out a plain white T-shirt. He tugged it over his head, then grabbed his jeans from the crumple on the floor and started working them over his ankles.
I rattled the handcuffs pointedly. ‘Take your sweet time, by all means.’
‘Shit. Sorry.’ He clambered to his feet and shuffled awkwardly to the bed, trousers still around his knees.
Don ’ t look at his boxers don ’ t look at his –
‘Remember the coffee in the Ottoman Empire?’ I asked, in a bid to distract myself.
For some reason, this was also the wrong thing to say. Fresh tension built in his arms, and something untraceable flickered behind his eyes.
‘We probably shouldn’t talk about Constantinople,’ he said, every syllable measured carefully.
‘Why –?’
But before I could finish the thought, I remembered something suddenly and vividly – our naked perfumed bodies, both of us male, a rough hand at my waist in the sweet steam of the hammam, a desperate tongue flickering over mine, the desire so raw and intense that my entire body was flooded with heat. I tried to clutch at the memory so it wouldn’t disappear, but in a moment it was gone, leaving only my blushed cheeks in its wake.
The cuff loosened around my wrist, his fingers delicately brushing my palm, and I was agonizingly aware of how close he was to me. How I could rest my hand on the narrowest point of his waist, how I could bring the other to that clenched jaw and tug him down towards me.
But he turned away, leaving the air around me cold.
Arden remembered it all, and I did not. For a fleeting moment, I understood the walls Arden had built up. How much must it hurt, that I had forgotten so many intimate details of our lives together?
And more importantly: why did I forget, and he did not?
Why did the past come to me in fractal shards, while he held the vast and complex landscape of our existence in his memory? I remembered the broad strokes for the past hundred or so years. From the asylum onwards, my memories were dull but distinct, yet before that was murky, patchy, blurred with old age. Entire lifetimes swallowed by fog.
Was that a natural effect of living for so long? Or had the brutal experiments in the Vermont asylum wrecked my head more than I’d ever realized? Were my suppressed memories a trauma response?
So many questions, and never any answers.
For now, I just had to focus on the only thing that mattered: saving Gracie’s life.
Dr Onwuemezi peered over her glasses. ‘You want to do the bone marrow extraction this week?’
So many fates depended on what happened next.
Mum, Arden and I were sitting by Gracie’s bed. My sister was dressed, inexplicably, in a three-piece suit, a monocle notched on the breast pocket. There was no discernible reason for her dress other than keeping things lively, and for that I loved her even more. Even as she’d gone on a long diatribe about how if anyone should be sick it was me, because I’d spent far too much time in the sun as a child, when she had sensibly spent her youth playing video games with the curtains drawn.
‘You have a unique worldview, kid.’ Arden had chuckled at the sight of her. ‘You know that?’ His tone had been a curious blend of wistful and admiring.
It was strange watching him interact with Gracie, knowing who he really was. It should have made me feel anxious, on edge, afraid for her safety. But instead, it was oddly touching.
As we spoke to the consultant, we sipped cappuccinos from the hospital cafeteria. I could feel the heat of mine on my tongue, but it tasted of nothing. Not like the rich, dark coffee in Constantinople, bitter and potent and delicious. I tried to root myself back there, tried to access the memories my mind held in a locked vault, but I couldn’t grasp them in full, couldn’t peel them back, like the skin of a ripe fruit, to expose the core.
I nodded in response to Dr Onwuemezi’s bemused question. ‘I’m nervous about the giant needle of it all.’
‘I see,’ said the doctor, betraying no emotion, and I hauled myself back into the room. Her hapless med student wasn’t with her today. She laid down Gracie’s chart on top of a medicine cabinet and leaned back against the wall, folding her arms over her neat white lab coat. ‘Your mother informs me you’re allergic to anaesthesia, and so we’d likely be performing the procedure while you’re awake.’
Gracie took an enormous crunch of apple. ‘First time in my life I’ve ever respected my sister.’
I laughed, but it was a brittle, unconvincing thing.
The doctor kept her eyes on me. ‘Is that a source of worry?’
In truth, it was. I’d found out I was allergic to general anaesthetic the hard way. At the age of six, I’d gone to have a ruptured appendix removed and ended up in anaphylactic shock. The doctors had almost missed it, and I’d been a hair’s breadth from death. I had made it through, thanks to a vigilant nurse and a curious ability to stay alive when others would not, but my parents had been thoroughly traumatized.
We weren’t sure whether the condition extended to local anaesthesia, but on our way to hospital that morning, Mum had talked me into doing the procedure without any pain relief, because she couldn’t risk losing us both. I had nodded in quiet devastation, knowing there was a decent chance that would happen anyway.
‘Yes,’ I mumbled, embarrassed at the admission.
‘Well, I can’t lie to you.’ Dr Onwuemezi’s mouth pressed into a flat grimace. ‘There will certainly be some pain involved.’
Arden’s hand went protectively to mine, squeezing it almost imperceptibly, and I hated how good it felt. Both Mum and Gracie watched the gesture with small smiles on their faces.
‘You’re a brave girl,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s clear you love your sister very much.’
Gracie rolled her eyes, but her cheeks pinkened and she stared down at her lap.
I chewed the inside of my mouth. ‘I do, but I’m still worried. Struggling to sleep, too. I’d rather do it sooner, so that I can relax and just be here for Gracie and Mum.’
Please say yes. Please say yes. Please say yes.
‘Well, I certainly understand that instinct.’ Dr Onwuemezi rubbed at her temple with the tip of her forefinger. ‘The storage of the marrow is not an issue, in itself – we can easily preserve it until required. And in an ideal world, the health service would be able to accommodate such things. But we’re understaffed, and I don’t think there’s going to be another surgical slot available until at least the week after next.’ She grimaced apologetically. ‘Would you like me to try and pull it forward to the Monday or Tuesday?’
Better than the two weeks originally planned, but still not fast enough.
I turned eighteen on Saturday.
Swallowing roughly, I pulled my hand away from Arden’s. It was his fault I was in this awful situation to begin with. I had to remember that. Let the resentment calcify inside me, so that I might have the strength to see all of this through.
‘Is there a chance someone might cancel their appointment before then?’ Arden asked the doctor, his voice oddly gruff.
She gave a semi-nod. ‘Of course, although it’s uncommon. I’ll make sure you’re the first person we contact if that happens, but I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.’
As the doctor left the room, I looked across at Arden. His tanned face had taken on an ashen pallor, and he was staring at Gracie as though willpower alone could cure the cancer roiling in her innocent blood.
Arden wanted to save her almost as badly as I did, but unless I found a way to give my marrow before Saturday, he would have no choice but to kill me anyway.