Chapter Four
Anika’s eyelids fling open as she hears someone enter the room. It’s the nurse from earlier, holding a bag. Glancing at the clock on the wall, Anika realises she must have only been asleep for twenty minutes or so.
‘I think this is from your friend,’ the nurse says with a smile, holding up a Louis Vuitton leather duffle that could only have belonged to Shamz.
‘Yeah.’ Anika croaks out the word, sagging with relief. ‘Thank you.’
The nurse hands it to her before checking on the IV drips hanging next to the bed.
Anika rummages in the bag Shamz has sent and sees pyjamas, a wash kit, several packets of the fruit Mentos that Shameeka knows are Anika’s favourite, a square Alexander McQueen skull-print silk scarf and a phone charger, alongside a scrawled note from Shameeka written on King’s College headed paper.
Babes, my freedom is being curtailed, they won’t let me up. Be there 1st thing tomorrow tho. Sorry about the scarf, was all I could find – Mai seems to have hidden her bonnets. Smh.
Love you. You’re gonna be fine xx
Anika smiles, then holds still for the nurse to take her temperature and check her blood pressure. After the nurse leaves, Anika contorts to reach the socket at the side of the bed to plug in the phone charger and then taps out a message of thanks to Shameeka, and asks if she could fill Tina in.
Although she’d initially been Shamz’s close friend, Tina has become one of Anika’s best mates too.
Sweet, funny and loyal, not to mention five feet and ten inches of stunning St Lucian beauty, she was one of the few people where it seemed believable that she chose to be single and play the field.
Anika feels bad for not getting in touch with T directly, and even more guilty at not yet calling her mum, but she still feels too weak to make any more revelations tonight.
A couple of hours later the sky outside the small window has deepened with the night’s darkness, but Anika’s fitful slumber is interrupted by the nurses checking her vitals.
Much as Anika is grateful to have the room to herself, as she lies awake she finds the quiet that has descended around her increasingly troubling.
Locating her headphones, she connects them to her phone, nestling the buds into her ears.
The shows on the radio-player app remain available for thirty days and she’s been re-listening to one recent episode of Cam Asiedu in the Morning in particular over and over again.
Shuffling into the stiff cotton sheets of the mechanical bed, she turns her head so that the earbud is pressed in between the pillow and her ear.
Forwarding to the part that she’s been listening to repeatedly, she concentrates as the final strains and piano notes of a beautifully meandering song by Sampha fades out.
There’s a beat before Cam’s voice comes in again, low and rich as usual, but with the threat of a break in it.
He speaks into silence rather than over the rumble of hip-hop beats he normally uses between the songs.
‘That one … that one hits me differently, I’m not gonna lie,’ he says slowly.
‘I dunno, man. Sometimes it’s just out of nowhere, you know?
Tell you what, it’s important to remember that this can all just “poof”.
’ She imagines him miming something disappearing, then exhales shakily.
Anika keeps listening. ‘I heard that song for the first time seven years ago …’ He sighs hard, regret sinking into the microphone as he does.
‘On a really significant day. We sometimes just assume we’re going to be here for ever, man, and that everyone around us will be, too.
Just … Like I was saying earlier, the film has a lot of deeper meaning for me.
’ He laughs incredulously. ‘Still sounds mad talking about this, you know. Like, it’s very mad that I’ve written a whole movie!
But shout to everyone who worked on the soundtrack and to Sampha for letting us adapt this beautiful song over the credits, man.
It’s been a long road, but it’s kind of perfect that we’ll be hitting screens end of next month.
’ Cam pauses and then sucks in a long, trembling breath, his next words bathed in forced levity.
‘Oh, man. So. Thanks a lot to everyone who’s been reaching out, who’s been hitting me up to let me know you’re planning to go and see End of the Day.
My bredrin Maxwell Lumumba has directed the hell out of it, trust. The next few weeks we’ll have lots coming up on it, so keep an eye out.
Uh, thanks to my producer, Shan, for allowing me for a second here, I know that was mad sentimental, far as our usual radio fare goes … ’
He laughs more heartily and the J Dilla instrumental kicks in as the bed of music resumes under his voice.
The show recovers some of its usual morning pep, but the moment still hits Anika with a wave of emotion.
Cam’s vulnerability draws her to him, but also triggers in Anika the question of her own mortality.
We sometimes assume we’re going to be here for ever.
But what if this, now, in this hospital, is going to be the full stop to her life?
Would she be happy with it, her relationships?
She thinks about her friends. Her mother.
Her father … Her half-brother, Kwesi, who she could have tried so much harder with.
If things ended now, would she be happy with what she’s achieved?
What has she achieved?
Could death suddenly be so close at hand without her having realised it?
The thought saps the moisture from her mouth and leaves her heart racing.
Lying there listening to Cam speak, the thing Anika knows with absolute certainty is that she’s nowhere near ready to relax into surrender.
Even at almost thirty years of age, she’s barely even started to know what she wants out of life, or how to get it.
The word No rattles her brain. This isn’t her time – she feels it soul-deep. It can’t be.
This has to be a beginning, not an ending.
Tuesday 3rd July
Weak summer sunlight struggles in through the dirty window of the sparse hospital room the next morning as Anika sits up in bed.
Shameeka is at her bedside, leaning forwards on the plastic chair they managed to pilfer from the ward, elbows resting on her knees.
As promised, her friend had been straight back first thing this morning.
Shamz’s short hair is divided into neat cornrows that end above the shaved sides of her head, her slender frame draped in a casual dark-brown linen trouser suit that offsets her warm brown skin, a Janelle Monae tee beneath it, relaxed but meaning business.
Anika is glad her friend is there to hear Dr Elachy explain his plans.
A small gaggle of trainee doctors look at their tablets so that they don’t have to look at her while the older man breaks the news that they’re planning an operation to remove the ‘indeterminate mass’ from her guts before it …
perforates them and ends her life? Less than twenty-four hours earlier she was buying coffee and trying to avoid annoying workmates.
It is extremely surreal to find herself now in an uncomfortable hospital room while a machine drips liquid medicine directly into her veins.
‘And … and you don’t think it’s …’ Anika can’t finish her sentence.
Dr Elachy waves his hand in the air. ‘The only thing we think at the moment is that we need to remove this mass quickly. What has caused it, we do not know, and this is not too important right now. We will know more once it is done.’ He looks her in the eyes, his shining with kindness.
‘Do not worry. Remember, we conduct operations of this nature all the time.’
‘But it’s serious, right?’ She glances around at the others in the room, then back to Dr Elachy. ‘Like, dangerous?’
The doctor makes an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace, then nods. ‘But, trust me, you are young, fit, healthy …’
Anika snickers softly at the assertions sounding like an out-of-context compliment. She and the gym are hardly well acquainted.
‘The percentages of things going wrong are small, I assure you, Anika. The risk is much, much bigger if we do not do this as soon as the antibiotics have done their work.’
She swallows, taking in the serious knit of his brows. The doctor is out of his scrubs this morning, wearing tweed trousers and a green knit tie like a 1970s professor.
‘But I go in, whip this out, no problem.’ He gesticulates in the air like he’s pinched the thing out of her with his fingers, then gestures quickly to one of his juniors for some notes and begins to discuss the procedure involved.
Anika feels Shamz reach out to squeeze her hand. She turns to look at Shameeka’s face, which is stony and impenetrable – her no-nonsense look. In this mode, she’d kill whoever was required with her bare hands to get Anika the treatment she needs. Anika squeezes her hand back.
‘I suppose I’d better call my mum, eh?’
Nella sounds like she’s just woken up when Anika calls her, and says she’ll ring back in a few minutes. The delay forms a tight ball of irritation in Anika’s guts and she imagines it sitting somewhere near the ‘blockage’ that nestles there.
Just as her phone starts to ring, Anika realises that she’ll be spending her thirtieth birthday in the hospital. Happy fucking birthday.
‘Hello?’
‘Anika?’
‘Hi, Mummy.’ The seldom-used word slips out on Anika’s latent vulnerability. Shamz had to head home a couple of hours ago, leaving her with the beep-beep-drip of the machine she’s hooked up to and the nurses coming in to observe her vitals on the hour.
‘Are you OK?’ her mother asks quickly. She sounds more alert now and Anika feels guilty that her calls are infrequent enough for Nella to know something is wrong.
Then she suddenly remembers that her mother and Philip, her new(ish) husband, are in New York.
Something about him having a conference and her mother accompanying him for a shopping trip.
It’s only six in the morning over there.
‘Shi—’ She still avoids swearing in front of her mother.
‘Sugar. Sorry, Mum, I forgot you were away …’ Anika sucks in a breath and quickly gives the step-by-step of her afternoon yesterday as a lead-in to the ‘I require life-saving surgery’ finale of the anecdote.
Nella listens quietly, but Anika can hear her mother’s breathing growing increasingly shallow on the other end of the line.
‘It’s OK, though,’ Anika says unconvincingly.
‘I mean, they’re going to do the surgery by tomorrow and the doctors are confident about how it should go, so … ’ She finally peters out.
‘Anika,’ her mother says softly. Anika reaches for the tepid water in a cup by her bedside, swallowing some thickly. ‘Let me look for flights. I can be there first thing tomorrow.’
‘No, it’s fine—’
‘I’m coming.’
Anika feels an unexpected wave of relief that allows Nella to really be her mother in that moment.
They can ignore the complexities of their relationship – of Anika’s itinerant childhood, Nella’s serial relationships and her desperate need for her daughter to cement protection of her own through a marriage or job that would make Anika ‘secure’.
Her mother only really nailed that for herself when Philip came along – long after Anika had flown the nest and landed with a thud.
Right now, though, they settle into a simple bottom line: love.
‘OK. Sure. Thank you,’ Anika says quietly.
She hangs up after discussing a few more arrangements, but then sees a message alert in her work’s group chat.
It’s from her line manager, Kate, making some tentative enquiries about how she’s doing, probably not realising she’s doing so for all to see rather than directly to Anika alone.
Anika remembers that she hasn’t called in today to explain she won’t be coming to work for …
well, who knows how long? Since Kate says she didn’t want to disturb, Anika decides to just type back a brief response.
Yeah, sorry, got a life-threatening blockage in my guts, so won’t be in today.
She stares at the words on the screen for a moment, amused at the liberation of it, but then chickens out and deletes it.
Instead, she writes a long-winded, apology-laced message about what’s happened.
She hits send and then waits. Sorry to hear thats and oh my Gods flood into the chat before she puts the group on mute.
Now that she thinks about it, the only time she knew someone who reacted to sudden awkwardness with calm reassurance was that night thirteen years ago, trapped in a laundry room.