Chapter 19 #2
Ten minutes later, after I’ve finally understood that a “non-emergency” ambulance will be upwards of four hours, I’ve got both of them in the car; Edwin in the passenger seat with a sick bowl just in case and poor Sean lying in the back because he can’t even contemplate a seat belt.
“Can you help me navigate, Edwin?” I ask. “I’ve never been to this hospital before. Can you get the map on your phone?”
Of course I’ve been to Forth Valley Hospital, but I’m hoping giving him a job will take his mind off feeling faint and ill, and guilty, and embarrassed. I wish I knew more about boys. A few weeks with Zak and Nicky haven’t trained me for this kind of advanced situation.
“Mmmnnhmm,” Sean murmurs from the back seat as we go over a speed bump. I slow until I have to change down into third gear. And thus we make our stately way to the big road.
I try David every few minutes because his “hour tops” is nearly up, but he’s still not answering.
So, when we’re almost there, following the red H signs, I finally say it.
“Edwin, can you phone your mum, maybe?” This is met with total silence.
Sean’s breathing quiets too while he waits to hear the response.
“She’ll kill both of us,” Edwin says. “Maybe all of us. I’ll phone Dad.”
I swing into the hospital car park and head straight for the big doors to A&E.
“No answer,” Edwin says.
“Then your mum it is,” I say. Edwin jumps out as I park, going to open the back door for his brother, preferring squeamishness to Aileen, it seems. He has left his phone on the front seat, but I pocket it before I get out to help.
Thank God it’s a quiet night in Casualty. From the ambulance wait time I thought it would be pandemonium, but it’s mostly muddy men in sports kit and a couple of drunks. Sean gets whisked off into a cubicle as soon as a nurse takes a look at him.
“Looks like he’ll be in overnight,” she calls back as she disappears. “Have you brought anything for him?”
Edwin follows, disappearing behind the curtain with his brother. He’s over the shock and is now being quite sweet. I shift from foot to foot, wondering whether to follow too, until the nurse pokes her head back round and stares at me. “Are you coming?” she says. “Never mind your phone!”
“I’m not their mum,” I tell her. “I was babysitting. So—”
“You’re a childminder?” she says in a tone that reeks of being about to call social services as soon as she’s settled her patient.
“I’m their dad’s girlfriend,” I say, hoping the boys can’t hear me. “I need to let their mum know.”
“Ya think?” says the nurse. She rolls her eyes and disappears again.
I try David one last time. His hour is long gone, and I can’t believe his phone is still off. I try to get angry at him—what kind of dad would do this?—but what I really think is that something must be wrong. Something else, in this shitshow of an evening.
There’s no other way but still I walk up and down the waiting room a couple of times before I start trying to get into Edwin’s phone. Thankfully, either David or Aileen has made sure it’s not locked and I swipe it open and click his calls app without any trouble.
Mum is saved, of course, and I click on it. It rings three times and a woman answers.
“Ed?” She sounds unlike herself.
“Aileen?”
“Who’s this?” she demands. “And why do you have my son’s phone?”
“It’s Lindsay,” I tell her. “Look—”
“Who?” she says.
So this must be “Medusa” and Aileen hasn’t told her David’s seeing someone. It’s sweet that she calls Edwin her son but I wonder what David thinks of it.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Look, don’t worry but I need to tell you that Sean fell over, and he seems to have broken his arm. He’s in A&E at Forth Valley and he might be getting admitted.”
She starts squawking when I’m only halfway through all of this. “What? What are you telling me? Sean is in the hosp— Jesus Christ! Mike! Michael! Where’s Ed?”
I try to break in but I don’t think she’s got the phone to her ear anymore. I can hear her rushing about, still calling for “Michael” who must be . . . I have no idea. Her son?
“Edwin is with Sean,” I say as loud as I dare speak in the waiting room. “I can’t get hold of David but I’ll go in and stay with—”
She is listening. She answers this bit. “Look, you,” she says. “I don’t know who you are or how you came to let my son break his arm, but you stay away from both of them, you hear?”
I hang up without another word. She’s being pretty unreasonable, in my opinion, even if it is coming from shock and fear.
I get myself a cup of disgusting tea out of the vending machine and choose a seat where I can see the door to the car park and the corner of the curtain round the cubicle they took Sean to.
My ears crackle from straining to hear if he’s crying, if Edwin is retching.
That same nurse who rolled her eyes comes out but doesn’t speak to me as she swishes past, her uniform trousers buzzing as her thighs rub.
I even drink the tea. Taking a sip, then trying David, then taking a sip again. He must be back at the house by now, but he can’t be because, coming home and finding it empty, the first thing he would do is phone me. I can’t even remember if I locked the front door.
After the last sip of tea, powdery and lukewarm, I finally think of phoning Chloe.
I want to be comforted. A babysitter doesn’t have to be in the same room as twelve-year-olds.
Sean was larking about. A broken arm isn’t an aneurism.
I know Chloe would tell me all of these things, and I need to hear them, but the fact is I don’t want to tell her that David blew out on our date and went to work.
While I’m still going back and forth, I see a woman in business clothes but ballet flats come striding in through the doors and march up to the desk.
“Aileen Prentiss,” she says, very clipped. “You’ve got my son, Sean Prentiss, in here with a broken arm.”
So this is the wife, I think, gathering courage to go and introduce myself.
She’s terrifying enough to explain the “Medusa” nickname but she’s just lied to the nurse—claiming to be Aileen—and that gives me a bit of a boost. Mind you, if Aileen changed her name when they got married and changed the boys’ too, this woman must be as formidable as she sounds.
I still make my way towards her, but pretty slowly.
A man barges past me and joins her. “Aileen?” he says. “Is he okay?” He turns to the nurse. “Michael Prentiss, I’m Sean’s stepfather. Can we see him?”
What the hell? Who are these people? I start forward to tell the nurse that this woman is not Aileen Prentiss and God knows who the man is, but I hear Edwin’s voice, wavery and higher than usual.
“Mum?” He comes loping along from the curtained cubicles and throws himself into the woman’s arms. “Mum,” he says. He either doesn’t see me or doesn’t care.
“Let’s go and see the wounded soldier, shall we?” says Michael and the three of them make their way towards Sean’s cubicle as I slip out.
Okay, okay, I say to myself, out in the car park.
If this is . . . If this is another . . .
whatever those things are, when I know strangers and don’t know friends, when I hear what no one’s saying and my world flaps and flutters again like when I was a kid .
. . then it’s the worst one yet and no way I should have been in charge of kids or—God knows—driving them.
I’m in no fit state to drive even myself but I can’t face staying here, so I head off out of town, joining the motorway to Glasgow, in exactly the opposite direction from home, from anywhere I need to be, or should be.
Exactly the opposite direction from David.
Because I can’t even begin to straighten out what just happened.
I must be going mad. Or something is pressing on some bit of my brain.
Aileen and Michael Prentiss can’t be real.
What have I done, leaving the boys there at the mercy of two strangers?
Because I saw David pick the boys up from Aileen Murdoch that I was at school with, who lost all the weight.
I saw it with my own eyes, in the walled bit of the garden centre that day.
And I met Aileen Murdoch, outside the nursing home.
Something shifts.
But Edwin threw himself at that woman and called her “Mum.” And she answered when I dialled Mum on—
His phone! It’s still in my pocket. I pull over onto the hard shoulder and swipe it open again, not even caring how wrong this thing is that I’m doing.
I go to his pictures and scroll through rugby, rugby, rugby, McDonald’s, two pretty girls, rugby, rugby and then I find them.
Michael and Aileen Prentiss, with Sean and Edwin, muffled up in scarves standing in front of a tall municipal Christmas tree with Stirling Castle just visible in the background.
I am not hallucinating. The world is still and stable and whatever’s going on, it’s outside of me, not in my mind or my brain.
I rejoin the motorway, come off at the Haggs roundabout, go right round and get back on again, headed for where I’ve just been.
And now my head is completely empty. No, not empty, but still.
As if someone has put a nozzle in my ear and filled my skull with expanding foam, muffling every thought, deadening every nerve.
I drive at a steady seventy. Fifty on the slip road, forty on the street, fifteen in the hospital grounds, five in the car park, and stop.
I step out, still unthinking, still filled with wadding that’s blanketed my brain and left me moving like a zombie.
Which is lucky, because that way I miss running into David, who is flinging himself out of his car and running full pelt for the double doors.
He doesn’t turn his head, doesn’t see me.
And, given my tortoise plod, he’s cleared the desk and gone into the cubicle before I get there.
“Sean Prentiss’s brother’s phone,” I say to the nurse, a new one, when I get to the front of the short queue. It’s hotting up in here with the approach of closing time.
“Are you all right?” she says, giving me a sharp look.
“Fine,” I tell her. “Nothing wrong with me.”