WALES 2022
I AWOKE TO THE sound of Arden muttering softly to himself. As my bleary eyes sharpened into focus, I saw him hunched at the writing desk, fully clothed and poring over Ten Hundred Years of You .
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, stretching my loose arm above my head with a stiff, twisted wrench.
‘There wasn’t supposed to be a line break there.’ He made a furious mark on the page with a fountain pen. ‘It was just where I ran out of space in the journal. It totally alters the cadence of the piece. They’ve absolutely bastardized it. And look, here. They’ve added a comma. The original didn’t have one, I’m sure of it.’
I snorted. ‘Heathens.’
Such a small thing, but his pedantic grouching made me laugh. We were about to die because of some fatal curse that had dogged us for a thousand years, and yet he still had the capacity to be irritated by comma placement.
Only Arden.
But his irritation mounted as he flipped through the pages, raking his hands through his dark, messy hair. ‘And this translation – it’s just woeful. Here I used toska , and they’ve translated it into boredom , but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s … melancholy, longing. Spiritual anguish. Nabokov described it as “a dull ache of the soul, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning”. And, in particular cases, “the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness”. I’ve never found a word like that before, that so perfectly sums up how I feel about us.’
‘Why –?’
‘Actually, that’s not true. There’s yuánfèn , from Mandarin – a tragic fate between two people. Oh, if only I could find the poems from Algeria. Ya’aburnee was a favourite. It means “may you bury me”. It’s the idea that one person in a pairing longs to die before the other, because living without them would be too excruciating. I wrote about how we’ll never have to worry about that.’ A bitter bark of laughter. ‘Silver linings, I suppose. Maybe I should rewrite it. How good is my Arabic these days?’
His words took on a muttered, frantic quality, as though he was talking to some goblin in the back of his brain instead of me.
I left him to it, after that.
Later that day, I sat on the front seat of the bobbing tractor beside Arden, rubbing at my exhausted eyes. The sky was an apathetic grey over the rolling land, and the fields were a muted patchwork of brown and gold and green. In the middle distance, a stream burbled.
‘What am I going to do?’ I sighed. ‘I can’t just spend the next few days hoping someone decides not to go through with their donation.’
Arden steered the tractor over a ditch with a thump. Now that we’d fed the livestock and sprayed the crops, I wasn’t entirely sure what we were doing other than driving aimlessly around the wheat fields. ‘First of all, it’s we . I’m going to help you as much as I can.’
‘My hero.’ The words dripped with sarcasm.
I’d spent the morning calling all the private practices within a hundred miles of Abergavenny, trying desperately hard to arrange a new marrow harvest, but the very few who were accepting new patients wouldn’t do so without pre-existing medical insurance – which took weeks to apply for and process. And with that door closed, I was firmly out of options.
The tractor slammed to a sudden stop. Arden picked a small, rumpled notebook out of the front pocket of his half-zip red fleece and jotted down a few farm-related numbers with a blue biro. ‘I don’t suppose we could find a list of the patients with earlier surgical procedures than you, and tie them up like you did Ceri? Then you’ll get their slot.’
I stared at him as he tucked the notebook away again. ‘I can’t tell if you’re joking.’
‘Why not?’ He shrugged. ‘You’ve already crossed that moral line. What’s once more?’
‘We can’t,’ I insisted, trying to persuade myself as much as I was him. ‘It’s not right. What if someone else on a transplant waiting list dies because we’ve abducted their donor?’
‘I’m sure they’ll be able to take your slot when you …’
‘Are brutally murdered, yes.’ I folded my arms across my chest, angling my body away from him. ‘But what if that’s too long for their recipient? I can’t let anyone else die, Arden.’
He made a pfft noise, as though my moral concerns were trifling and inconvenient. ‘Bribery?’
‘Of another donor?’ I shivered at the bitter breeze drifting through the tractor’s open window. ‘Same issue. Another innocent person might die.’
He leaned back in the driver’s seat and kicked his feet up on to the dashboard. Dried mud flaked off his boots and into the footwell. ‘What about bribing Dr Onwuemezi? Or the receptionist, or whoever’s in charge of appointments?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s all the same problem. The slot has to come from somewhere.’
He picked up his sky-blue coffee flask from the cup-holder and took a swig. ‘So, in summary, we’re fucked. Gracie is fucked. And you’re just going to let that happen.’
This insinuation that the whole situation was my fault made me finally crack.
‘I would dearly love some other suggestions that don’t involve kidnap and possible manslaughter,’ I retorted, anger rising in my voice. ‘And I would also love it if you could stop treating me like a complete moron for having a heart.’
Despite the hot snap of my tone, he handed me the coffee. ‘Honestly, I would kidnap quite literally anyone to save that kid. But I respect that you won’t.’
I took the flask, letting the warmth seep into my frigid hands. ‘Do you actually?’
‘What?’
‘Respect me.’ There was an insistent thrust to the words, underpinned by rage but also deep insecurity.
He pursed his lips. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘No, I’m serious.’ I took a sip from the flask. The coffee was sweet and milky, warming down my gullet. Arden usually took it black, but had made it how I liked it. I was once again wearing his plaid lumberjack coat with the vial of sugar water tucked into the pocket. ‘Do my rigid morals seem absurd to you?’
He drummed his fingers on the gearstick. ‘Mine are just as rigid. They’re just different.’
‘In what way?’
He considered this for a moment, as though it were a mathematical equation to balance. ‘If a hero is someone who will give up love to save the world, then a villain is the reverse. Someone who will give up the world to save love.’
‘So you’re a villain. You admit it.’
He shrugged. ‘There’s no line I wouldn’t cross to keep a loved one safe.’
I laughed, albeit bitterly. ‘By design, you don’t have any loved ones.’
There was a heavy pause, in which I feared I may have wounded him too deeply, but then he muttered, ‘I have you.’
He was under there, somewhere. The Arden I had loved again and again and again. The frostbitten boy in deepest Siberia. The one who’d changed his mind, the one who’d decided to let me live, only too late. And as long as that Arden was still in there, I had hope. Stupid, defiant, illogical, furious hope.
The wind through the valley intensified, carrying the scent of hay and manure, of fresh leaves and crystalline rivers. A few spots of rain dotted the windscreen before deciding against it, as though a cloud had sprung a leak then promptly patched it back up. The conversation felt charged and ripe and urgent, like the sky just before a thunderstorm.
I turned to face him. His hair was pulled back in a low bun. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of mornings, and his sharp jaw was shadowed with dark stubble. There was a practised stillness to his posture. I’d known him long enough to know that he wanted to say something – or ask something.
Resisting the urge to rest a palm on his knee, I asked, ‘What is it?’
‘Why did you come back for me?’ he said stiffly, staring straight ahead at the corrugated iron siding of the goat barn. ‘In the asylum.’
‘You were aware of what was going on?’ I’d thought Augusta was pumped so full of crude drugs that she had no idea what was happening. The vacant stare, the rod-straight back, the patch of drool on her collar.
‘Barely. But enough. You escaped, and then you came back.’
I leaned my temple against the headrest. ‘I did.’
‘Why? You had me beat.’
‘In that moment, it didn’t feel like a game.’ I drained the last of the sweet coffee and stuffed the flask in the glovebox.
‘It doesn’t make sense.’ His grip tightened on the steering wheel, and I tried not to think about how beautiful his hands were in this life: broad palms, short nails, sun-golden skin stretched over the peaks of his knuckles. Those twines and ribbons tied around his wrists. My gaze hitched on a piece of narrow red, though I couldn’t say for certain why. Only that it yanked a cord somewhere deep in my chest.
‘Love rarely does.’ I smiled ruefully. ‘And you’d have done the same for me.’
‘That was one of the worst deaths.’ His eyes fluttered closed, the dark crescents of his lashes stark against tired skin. ‘Killing you after what you’d done for me …’
‘Still a better alternative than those therapies .’ The ice baths and the starvation, the endless spinning and the cold steel bars, the crackling electrodes, the sterile brutality, every day bleached white and cruel.
Then, through the heavy black clouds of the conversation, a fork of lightning. A realization so obvious it felt like a physical blow.
‘That’s it!’ I said, thumping a palm on the seat.
Finally his eyes snapped to me, a look of absolute bewilderment on his face. ‘What?’
‘ Therapy. ’
An eye-roll. ‘Oh yes, now everything makes sense.’
I shook my head passionately. ‘When Gracie was first diagnosed, Mum found me a therapist. I had a lot of shit to work through, what with that and my dad being crushed to death. I haven’t seen Dr Chiang for months – it was tiring having to skirt round the truth of what was going on in my head, since I could hardly tell her I was being hunted by a supernatural killer.’
He gritted his teeth. ‘That’s how you think of me?’
I waved my hand impatiently. ‘It’s just a pithy way of describing the situation, isn’t it? Anyway, she’s married to a surgeon at a private practice.’ I felt jittery with the realization, with the sliver of hope. ‘I wonder if I could convince her to give me an emergency referral.’
He frowned. ‘How on earth are you going to do that?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
A smile spread across my face – always the optimist, even when it was downright absurd to be so. Even when another life was reaching its crescendo.