Chapter Twenty-Six
Sharon
We Are The Champions by Queen
Tonight is the night.
And Danny is fast asleep.
He wasn’t earlier. When I was running around making space for a dance floor, helping porters string up fairy lights or guiding the DJ and his equipment into his designated spot, Danny was awake.
Sat up in his bed with all his curtains open, he watched me with a bemused expression.
We’d told the boys that something was happening that night. We just hadn’t told them what.
That had been effective enough at getting those well enough to open their curtains, sit up and shout out guesses (“More beds for more sickos?” “Is this ghastly place finally getting a makeover?” “I’ve got it!
They’re building a bowling alley down the middle of the ward…
”) at what was going on as Kate and I, along with most of her staff, set out a buffet table and arranged paper cups and plates on there.
Next, we carried out the food I made – challah, latkes, bourekas, apricot jam hamantaschen – all party foods I associate with the birthdays, Hanukkahs, Passovers, bar and bat mitzvahs of my youth. Foods that make me think of my grandmother. Foods that actually make me proud to be Jewish.
Not that I expect most of it to get eaten. But it helped keep me busy yesterday before visiting hours. Today, I got a special pass from Kate to be on the ward for the whole day and that also has some of the boys calling out as I move around.
“Got a new job, Sharon?” Mr Fredericks had asked as I pushed a trolley past the end of his bed.
“Going to change my bedpan?” Deepak shouted in his still-gravelly voice after I helped the DJ find a power source for his mobile disco.
“Where’s the uniform?” Danny demanded when I first arrived, when he was still awake.
“You all need to behave or I’ll give you all a bed bath, with ice-cold water.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time!” Danny called out and that had everyone laughing.
But now Danny’s asleep.
The ward is ready, the DJ is playing music, albeit softly, the lights are off and disco red, pink, purple, green and blue spotlights dance around the room, but Danny is asleep.
“Should I wake him?” I ask Orla at the nurses’ station where we stand admiring our hard work.
“I wouldn’t,” she says, her Cork accent thick and as always strangely comforting. “He’ll wake up soon enough. Let him have his disco nap now.”
I smile at that. “He was always partial to a disco nap.”
“See,” she nudges me. “It’s tactical, that is. He’s making sure he can dance all night long.”
A groan from one of the few closed cubicles gets her attention and she excuses herself.
After watching her go, I check my watch and realise it’s five minutes after seven o’clock, the time Kate and I agreed we would tell the boys what we were up to.
But Kate’s nowhere to be seen and I’ve not yet changed into the black suit and mask I wore as the Director.
I turn to rush to the staff room and get changed but immediately stop in my tracks. Kate is walking through the double doors, dressed like Lady Phantom again, and my heart stops beating.
When I saw her in the dusk on Shaftesbury Avenue a few weeks ago, I was blown away. Desire tingled in every one of my veins at the sight of her and it had taken considerable effort to school my features and have an almost normal conversation with her in the queue for meeting AJ Ripley.
I’m feeling all those things again as she walks towards me, hair flowing down her back and her dark eyes piercing me with a hot stare from behind her mask.
I’m feeling all those things and a million more sensations.
Because now I know what her body feels like – her skin, her hair, her softest places, the pulse in her neck and the noises she makes when I kiss her there.
Now I know that underneath that Lycra are layers and layers of complexities and contradictions and care.
So much care. This ward is her life. This impossible job that has cost her so much, it’s at the front and centre of everything she does.
It feels like a precious gift that I have become as close to her as I have.
Suddenly I’m bowled over by a realisation that I think I’ve tried to bury for the last few weeks.
I want more from Kate. I want her orgasms to join my own in the magic we make together.
I want her to fall asleep in my bed again.
And again and again. I want to take her out to dinner, hold her hand in the darkness of a cinema and to cook for her when she’s exhausted from a long day’s work. I want Kate to be my girlfriend.
But I also know Kate doesn’t feel the same way.
I can’t exactly determine what she feels for me, but in this moment when she’s approaching me, a small, knowing smile on her face, I know that whatever she feels for me, whatever she has to give me, I’ll take.
I know that whatever she wants to keep for herself, or God forbid, for somebody else in the future when we are no longer a thing, I’ll respect.
Because we have this moment. Or rather, I do. I have this moment where she looks like this – like the superhero she is – lit up by the disco lights that make her skin glow and her hair shine and she’s heading straight for me and only me.
“You’re not dressed,” she barks when she comes to stand in front of me, hands on hips. For somebody else, that would shatter the moment. But for me, it doesn’t; it only adds to it.
“You snuck off and did it without me, leaving me to do all the back-breaking work,” I mirror her posture.
Her features soften and her smile deepens.
“We did it,” she says, meaning the ward, the disco, the night we’re about to give the boys, but her eyes don’t leave my face.
“Yes, we did,” I nod, smiling with her.
Her gaze flits to the side of my face. “Oh. Danny’s still asleep.”
I suck in a breath. “A disco nap,” I explain, holding onto my smile for dear life.
“Smart man,” she says. She finds my hand with hers, offering it a quick squeeze before she lets go. “Go get changed, Sharon. We have a party to start.”
*****
Twenty minutes later I have my suit on, my mask on, and an extra dollop of hair gel combed through the short spikes on the top of my head.
In my arms, I’m carrying a basket of the clothes and accessories I gathered from Danny’s wardrobe and a handful of charity shops in Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill.
Kate is waiting for me at the nurses’ station, signing paperwork, which looks a little bizarre in her Lady Phantom outfit.
But when she notices me approaching, she drops the clipboard and turns to face me.
It’s then that over her shoulder, I notice that Orla, Joanna, and the other nurses and a couple of porters are all wearing masks.
I recognise them immediately as handmade by Kate.
“Well, we’re all superheroes here, aren’t we?” she asks as she follows my eyes.
“You all look…” I pause, gathering my emotions and trying to keep them contained. I am dreading whatever moment will be the time when I feel everything I want to feel, but it’s not now. “Fucking brilliant.”
“Let’s go make the boys look pretty.” Kate nods at the basket in my arms and then she turns and leads me towards the beds.
Dressing up the boys is enough fun to have me questioning if even the DJ, lights and food were necessary.
A basket full of sequins and feathers and neon-coloured Lycra were apparently enough to bring smiles to faces, the like of which we don’t see often enough on this ward.
At each bed, Kate and I explain what’s happening: “We’ve brought the disco to you!
” “It’s party-time!” “We’re your resident superheroes and we’ve magicked up a dance floor for you to tear up! ”
There are mixed responses. Some squint at us, disbelieving. Others clap their hands and immediately move to get up out of bed. Most teeter on the edge between smiling so hard it hurts and having their eyes fill with tears.
Kate waves to the porters when one of the boys needs a wheelchair, and the masked nurses aren’t far behind, helping those who are attached to IVs or catheters to also become mobile.
I hadn’t thought about this side of things.
About how not all of the boys would just be able to throw off their bed sheets and get to dancing.
But Kate did. Florence Fucking Nightingale, she thinks of everything.
When all the patients who can or want to are upright or in wheelchairs, I wave my hand at the DJ and he turns the volume up. Slowly, very undeniably slowly, the boys move to the space we cleared in the middle of the room.
That’s when I turn and walk to Danny’s bed.
Inside the basket is the pink feather boa I know he loves the most. I fought off Deepak and Jonathan to keep it for him, just in case he was awake and ready to join the party.
But much to my great disappointment, even with the DJ blasting out Queen’s We Are The Champions – one of his favourite songs – he remains unmoving in a deep, deep sleep.
I pick the feather boa out of the basket and arrange it around the metal bars above his head.
“He’ll wake up when the party is really getting going,” Kate’s voice comes from behind me. She’s practically shouting over Freddie Mercury’s singing.
“He was never one to arrive early,” I step closer to her so she can hear me.
“And I bet he didn’t like to leave early either.”
“Never. He was always the last to leave.”
It hits me then that we’re talking about him in past tense. It feels like every single hair on my body stands erect at the shock of it, the wrongness of it.
But again, I box all that fear and rage and discomfort up and I look over Kate’s head at Orla dancing with Mr Fredericks and the kind Jamaican porter, Winston, is wheeling Deepak around, both of them with wide matching grins.
Joanna, who is holding Jonathan’s hand, waves at me to come and join them.
I’m about to give them a gentle wave of refusal but a loud cough has me turning back to Danny.
“What the…” He coughs again as he pushes himself up in bed with great effort. “What the fuck is going on?”
“You thought only good nights out happened in the West End or Vauxhall?” I fold my arms as I feel my smile grow at the sight of him taking it all in, pink and purple lights flashing over his face.
With the overhead fluorescent lights off, his lesions are barely visible. “Well, we’re here to prove you wrong.”
“I hope you’ve got your dancing shoes ready.” Kate moves to stand next to me, adopting the same pose. “I’ve heard big things about your moves. You have a reputation to maintain, Daniel Morgan.”
Danny’s eyes look Kate up and down before doing the same to me. “Are you two high?”
His words make me still. I have felt high many times this week and over the few weeks before since Kate and I…
started doing whatever it is we’re doing.
I have felt high today transforming the ward.
I felt high watching Harvey Jeffries, a fifty-eight-year-old patient who is completely blind from CMV, stroking a sequinned beret and smiling at its textures or maybe some memory it provoked.
“We’re superheroes. We do not mess around with narcotics,” Kate says, fully in character.
“Well, maybe I’m high,” Danny shakes his head. “Maybe the drugs you’re giving me are finally doing something.”
A spark of hope lights up inside me. What if they were? What if it was just a matter of time and now the tide is going to turn? What if all this sleep was actually what he needed, and now he’s waking up, his body finally strong enough to fight back?
“Are you ready to party, or not?” Kate asks, her hands unfolding so she can prop one on a cocked hip.
“Doesn’t look like I have much of a choice,” he nods at the space at the end of his bed which is even busier now, with more bodies slowly moving to the music.
“Attaboy,” I say and I move to unwrap the feather boa.
“Looks like I could teach them a thing or two, as well,” he is saying as Kate pulls his sheets back and finds his slippers.
The spark of hope explodes into a flame, warming my insides.
It’s a full-blown fire when Danny dismisses the arm Kate holds out to help him stand up and he takes the feather boa from me, arranging it around his neck like it’s something he does every single night, or rather like he used to do most nights of his life.
“Out of my way,” he extends both of his arms and pulls his shoulders back. “I have a dance floor to own.”
And then he’s gone. His blue and grey plaid pyjamas hanging from his skinny frame, and a fuchsia pink feather boa dangling down his back. He doesn’t take long strides – there’s caution in his shuffle – but he has his head held high and his fingers move, having already found the beat.