Chapter 38 #2
It seems I haven’t lost my touch. The beans on toast that I whip up for both of us is just as excellent as the creations of my uni days.
I even find a packet of cheddar in the fridge and grate it on top of the steaming beans.
We eat side by side on the uncomfortably saggy sofa, and gradually, the colour returns to her face.
‘I meant what I said,’ I tell her. ‘I’m staying the night.
’ I’m vaguely aware that if we were in an actual relationship, Ivy and I would be far more circumspect about my staying over in front of her sisters.
But given that that’s an impossible scenario, and given that Ivy is essentially in crisis tonight, normal etiquette can go to hell.
‘You should go back to the party and make sure Flora’s okay.’
‘She’s an adult. She can handle herself, I’m sure.’
She laughs. ‘Wow. That’s a big one-eighty.’
‘I’m not that bad.’
‘You really are. But, come to think of it, she has designs on the birthday boy, so you should stay well away and give her some privacy.’ I sit bolt upright on the sofa in horror, and she swats me.
‘Oh, stop it. It’s a birthday party. The worst they can get up to is a quick snog on the dance floor, surely. ’
Even that is a ghastly concept, but I understand that Ivy thinks I’m a chauvinistic prick with double standards when it comes to Flora, so I sink back against the cushions. ‘Sounds like you’ve got a choice to make. Let me stay here, or I’ll go and chaperone my sister.’
Ivy’s room is small. Freezing. My hypervigilance around her wellbeing quickly alerts me that her radiator is turned all the way off. Her bed is a double, its mattress the shitty kind I haven’t encountered since my uni days. Even then, my landlords did better than this.
Still, it’s a miracle, because I’m in this bed with her, wrapped around her as fully as I can be, and this is where I’ll stay until morning.
She’s let me in, figuratively and literally; she’s cracked that door open the rest of the way, even if my ability to get my foot in said door was down to the particular way that tonight’s events played out, and even if she’s tried her damnedest to wedge it shut every bit of the way.
The important thing is that I’m over the threshold, Ivy’s reality laid bare before me in all its shitty happenstance and blistering pain and admirable fortitude, and I now know enough, see enough, that I can truly see her, too. I can truly appreciate the scale of her sacrifice. Of her suffering.
I see her—and I’m falling like a fucking stone.
There’s no funny business tonight, obviously.
For one thing, her sisters are right upstairs.
For another, she’s shattered and emotionally wrung out.
If those weren’t enough, she has on three or four layers of clothes, and I’m in my boxer briefs, socks, and an oversized turquoise sweatshirt of hers that just about fits me.
Sexy. Still, needs must. My blazer, shirt, and jeans weren’t exactly useful attire for a spontaneous, chaste sleepover.
‘How are you doing?’ I murmur into her hair. Her head is tucked under my chin, and she’s clinging tightly to me.
‘Been better,’ she says with a sigh. Such a stoic little sweetheart. I stroke her hair and wait. My only agenda is to be here. Not to push her any more than she’s already been pushed this evening.
After a few moments, she elucidates. ‘I keep going round and round in my head, and I keep coming to the same conclusion. Dawn’s going to die in that place, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I mean, I knew she was going to die in there, obviously.
It’s a one-way street. But I thought maybe things would be…
better? When she moved in there? Easier. Not just for me, but for her.’
‘I know,’ I say uselessly, because what else can I say?
What choice did Ivy have? None. As she said earlier, they were lucky to get a bed at all.
Places like that are holding pens that serve the most perfunctory sort of function: to keep their patients alive and secure, in the most underwhelming sense of the word, until their illness consumes them for good.
There’s no room in the system for anything more than that—for comfort, caregiving, or beauty—and to put the burden for those extras on a family like Ivy’s is unthinkable too, when she’s already providing for two minors and trying to get them through the basics of their education in one piece.
There is no capacity for anything more in their current situation, and if that knowledge is killing me, then I cannot imagine how ferociously it’s eating Ivy alive.
‘But it’s awful,’ she says with a gasp that I feel to my core.
‘It’s so awful in there, and I can’t stand the fact that she’s even the tiniest bit lucid.
Can you imagine, coming to your senses in a place like that?
It must be like waking up to a nightmare, every single time.
And I thought at least they’d keep her physically safe, but no.
What if it keeps getting worse? What if she keeps falling over, and getting more and more broken, and she just suffers more and more until her body finally gives up? I can’t bear it.’
She begins to cry, softly at first, and then with great, heaving sobs, her small body racked with her pain, her compassion.
I wonder how often she breaks down like this, and the knowledge that she doesn’t have anyone else to lean on when life tips over from generally shitty into the realm of unspeakably cruel is doing things to my heart that I can’t recall experiencing.
Ever.
I don’t know how long we stay like this, her tears soaking through my sweatshirt and my feeling the most excruciating mix of heartsick and lovelorn.
I whisper platitudes, words of reassurance and praise that are sincerely meant and still fall short.
Eventually, she twists out of my arms to blow her nose.
‘Would you mind if I put my headphones in? There’s a song I listen to when it all—when I can’t sleep. It’s a bit silly, but it makes me feel better.’
‘Of course,’ I tell her. ‘It’s not silly in the slightest. Listen away, and I’ll hold you until you drift off.’
We settle back down, her on her side and me curled behind her.
True to my word, I hold her until her breath evens out and sleep relieves her shoulders of some of that tension they’ve been carrying.
As gently as I can, I take the top earbud out and follow the wire around with my fingers to dislodge the one under her head.
She has to be the only Gen Z-er without wireless headphones.
When I pick up her phone to turn off the music, I spot the song she mentioned.
The one she’s been listening to on repeat.
‘Silent Night’ by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge.
That’s where she draws comfort from. Strength.
Not from her sisters, nor her neighbours, nor her friends.
Late at night, when it must feel like she’s bearing the weight of this family’s grief and suffering on her shoulders, it’s the choristers who lighten that burden enough to allow her to fall asleep.
I lie behind her, adjusting my breathing to match hers, and I admit a truth to myself.
My family—my brother in particular—may find it amusing to call me Save. Xavier the Saviour. Can’t help himself. Thinks that he can bestow his largesse on one and all and make everything better.
Ben would probably conclude that I’ve fallen for poor, impoverished Ivy because I think I can save her.
Because she feeds my saviour complex. The truth is that she’s stronger than I’ll ever be.
I rabbit on about duty and sacrifice, and I’m so fucking deep in my gilded, entitled existence that I’ve failed to understand what the words even mean.
This is duty.
This is sacrifice.
Ivy goes so far beyond what is dutiful every single day, and she does it gladly, with no pomp or ceremony or need for validation, no demand that her acts be recorded in the annals for future generations.
And it’s the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen.
She is the most inspiring person I’ve ever met.
She’s also the one person I can’t save. Not in the way I want to, a way that, I can admit in the dark sanctuary of this saggy bed, involves a nice coat of shining armour and possibly a white steed.
I may not be able to save her.
But, in these last precious days and weeks before I make my version of a sacrifice for my family and my title and my estate, I can fucking well take this cup of suffering from her.