Chapter Twelve
The taxi pulled up outside our house and no-one seemed to be home. How annoying. I expected a big welcoming like I had just come home from the barracks. I expected everyone to have crowded outside, tears in their eyes, warmth in their hearts and their arms wide open and ready to give me big hugs. When I walked inside I expected to see a huge banner saying ‘Welcome home, Keisha,’ and a gigantic chocolate cake on the coffee table.
No such luck.
No Sam or Jessica either.
Maybe Sam was in bed after devouring a few bottles of red and maybe Jessi was out on a date. A chance would be a fine thing for poor Jessica. She certainly didn’t have the knack for pulling guys like Alex did. Jessica was hardly a magnet, more like an annoying fly that buzzes around and latches onto you when you really don’t need it.
I thought about a time when she arranged to meet a boy at a club (it was her second date) and waited four hours for him. At 3am she walked into the kitchen (I was checking for ants because I had dreamt about them) saying, ‘that’s it, I’m giving up on men. They’re just pathetic and hopeless. I’m going to ring that Chris and give him a piece of my mind.’
I heard her walk into the lounge, call his voicemail and say, ‘I’m really not impressed you didn’t turn up tonight and if you want to continue seeing me you’ve got a great deal of sucking up to do. I don’t tell a guy I’m in love with him for nothing, you know! So you’d better call me back.’
I would’ve stood her up too if she told me she was in love with me after only one date.
‘Where are the others?’ I asked Dad when he finished paying the driver. I wasn’t up to calling him ‘Granddad’ just yet.
‘I don’t know. It’s odd Jessica isn’t even here though. I called when I found you and there was no answer, so I left a message on the machine. I just presumed they were out looking for you.’
‘I hope everything’s okay.’
‘So do I. I thought they’d be home to see you.’
When we were inside I spotted a note with ‘Dad’ written on it in large letters. It was on the bottom stair. Dad ran over to it and opened it up quickly.
His eyes widened.
His face turned almost as white as the meager hair on his head.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
He put his hand over his mouth and said, ‘oh my God, it’s Sam. She’s been sent to hospital. Jessica found her passed out in her room with a broken bottle of Absinthe beside her. She – she had blood on her…’ He couldn’t continue.
‘Where Dad? Where was the blood?’
But he shook his head and the tics started all over again. I didn’t get an answer so I took the note from his limp hand.
Sam had blood on her wrist.
‘Oh no. Poor Sam. We have to get to the hospital now. Which hospital?’
‘It’s in the note. Come on. I’ll just get my keys and we’ll go.’
Sam was linked to a whole chaos of white tubes and monitors when we went in to see her. She was a lifeless body enshrouded beneath mesh upon mesh of thick sterile tubes. I should’ve been happy – in my element – there with all that sanitary equipment but I wasn’t. I would have walked through piles of vomit if it meant Sam wasn’t in this mess. I would have gladly broken my arm, my leg, my heart if it meant Sam didn’t have to hurt like this.
‘She looks awful, Dad. Do you think she’ll be alright?’
‘Of course she will, Keisha. She’ll be just fine in a few days.’
Was he denying Sam’s ill-health for his own benefit or mine?
I wanted to say to him, ‘if you can’t admit it to me at least admit it to yourself. And say it out loud so I can hear!’ but I didn’t.
Jessica sat by Sam’s side. She was crying and holding what looked like one of the tubes but I think it was the closest thing she could get to Sam’s hand.
‘What happened, Jessica?’ Dad asked as she stood up to hug him.
‘I don’t know. I just went into her room because I hadn’t heard her for a while and there she was lying on the bed, the broken bottle in one hand and all blood from her wrist in the other. She – she looked almost dead, Dad.’ Jessi started getting the tics and burrowed her head in Dad’s shoulder.
An unusual display of emotion.
She certainly had mellowed out a lot lately.
‘Come on, Jessi. Sssshhhh… she’ll be fine. You’ll see.’
How many more people could Dad deny it to?
‘Yes – yes, you’re right. She’ll be okay. We just have to look after her.’
Jessica had caught the denial bug too.
You would think Sam was in there for a sprained ankle or broken toe. I was born into a family of brainwashers who chose to repudiate everything in their lives that didn’t go as planned.
Jessi looked at me and smiled.
‘How are you, Keisha? You’re looking well.’
She would say I looked well if I were standing there in front of a hefty man clad in a balaclava and holding a gun to my head.
‘Yeah, I’m fine thanks. Just worried about Sam.’
‘Yes, we all are, but she’ll be okay. We just have to keep willing her to get better, you know.’
Yes, I did know.
I knew that Sam might not make it.
Trouble was, no-one else did.
Then Jessi looked behind me. ‘Where’s Alex? I thought she’d be with you.’
‘No, I haven’t seen her since last night. When did you last see her?’ I asked.
‘I think it was yesterday as well. She must be at her boyfriend’s.’
Alex was definitely the bad egg in our batch – as rude as I was obsessive and as bitchy as Dad was soft. She worked in a fashion shop and I remembered going into the store about six months ago so she could help me pick out some clothes. She said to me, ‘no, Keisha, those pants give you thunder thighs,’ and ‘no, those shoes give you clown’s feet,’ so once was more than enough for me, thank you.
It was bad enough going shopping with myself.
‘Maybe we should call Alex,’ I said.
‘No, she’ll be okay. She never lets us know where she’s going. We have too much to worry about with Sam at the moment. She will call when she’s ready.’
Usually Jessica had the patience of an irascible driver behind a herd of dawdling cows, but now she was one of the cows. Not a care in the world.
I sat beside the bed and put my hand on Sam’s two end fingers. That was the only skin I could find to touch.
Poor Sam.
She looked so fragile yet so serene.
Her skin was pale; her veil was off.
I loved her so much.
I started to cry. The tears poured effortlessly down my face and my body strained under the pain of letting them free.
‘Come on, darling, let it all out. It’s okay,’ Jessi said, coming over to hold me. I let her, and clung to the back of her jumper. Dad reached out and hugged us both. I listened to the breathing machine. It sounded like inaudible bagpipes, repetitious and unchanging.
We stayed like that for ages.
We wanted Sam to join us.
But her eyes didn’t even flutter.
‘How much Absinthe did she have?’ I asked, finally pulling away from Jessica to wipe my eyes.
They looked at me and paused.
‘It’s okay, I know what she tried to do.’
‘She had almost a full bottle and cut her wrist,’ Jessi said.
That was a lot of alcohol.
She must have cut right deep into her veins to be this sick.
‘How did she cut herself?’ I asked.
‘She broke the bottle and cut herself with the edge.’
‘It’s all my fault,’ I said shaking my head and starting to cry again. Now I had been blessed with the tics too.
Jessi put her arm around my shoulders. ‘Don’t you dare say that, Keisha. It’s not your fault at all. You
had absolutely no idea Sam would do this, did you? You just needed to see your real father, that’s all.’
‘Why did she do it then? Why do you think she went that far?’
‘I really don’t know, Keish. All I know is she must’ve felt unhappy and depressed, like she couldn’t do anything to change her life. Maybe she thought she made some wrong turns and thought she was doing everyone a favour if she ended her life.’
‘But surely she would’ve had more sense than to think that.’
‘Yes, in a normal state she would’ve done but Sam was so depressed she couldn’t see outside the unhappiness in her head.’
It was strange but Jessi was sounding like me.
God, please help me; don’t let Jessica be my mother too.
Some people think suicide is a selfish act but I was disinclined to agree. I defined selfishness as greediness. How could suicide be defined as this? And when people say suicide is an attention-seeking act, what attention do suicidals receive when they’re dead? It would take a hell of a lot of guts and fearlessness to push yourself over that final edge.
Although I often considered suicide as a way out, I had never come so close that I wasn’t able to pull myself away from the edge. When people do reach it they are so caught up with their self-loathing and depression they become deliriously sad and have to set their pain free. There is no way back to reality.
I imagined it like someone standing on the edge of a very high building in front of a huge, black velvet curtain. In the crevices of this curtain, blind and searching fingers poke their way through trying to find something to latch onto. The fingers would know they are searching for someone to save – someone to save from pain, from the world, from themselves.
Jessi turned to Dad and said, ‘do you think she really meant to um – you know?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think she was in her right mind at all though.’
‘Why do you think she drank Absinthe and then cut herself?’ I asked.
‘Because she wasn’t in her right mind.’
‘And cutting herself with glass. Why did she do that?’ Jessi asked.
Dad looked at the ground and whispered, ‘she wasn’t in her right mind.’
Now he was like a broken record and couldn’t get off that one line.
Combine that with the tics, beetroot face and lockjaw and he was well on his way to a mental institution to be stuffed into a straight jacket.
‘Come on, Sam, please wake up,’ I whispered as I stroked her fingers and looked at Dad. ‘Can you please go and ask the doctor how she’s doing? They’re not giving us any feedback at all. We don’t know what’s going on.’
‘You’re right. I’ll go and find someone who can help us.’
He came back after fifteen minutes exactly.
I watched the hand travel every second.
It seemed like fifteen hours.
The doctor came into the very small cubicle. There was only a thin blue curtain surrounding us and Sam. The room was no bigger than your average sized bathroom. The doctor matched the room the way miniature dolls match miniature dollhouses. He was a tiny man, probably in his forties, with dark teased up hair. The high hair did nothing for his height, only made him look more like a dwarf than he would have already.
‘Samantha is stabilised. We’ve done tests on her and as far as we can see there’s no damage. We were particularly concerned about her brain but as her CT scan predicts, we suspect no permanent damage.’
He shined a torch in her eyes.
‘She is still comatose but we think she will pull out of it soon. We are hoping it is just temporary damage to the brain caused by her very large intake of alcohol and blood loss.’
He looked at Dad, said, ‘she’s very lucky, Mr Morgan,’ and left.
‘Well, he was forthcoming,’ Jessi said.
‘He’s a busy man, and he said Sam is going to be okay. She’ll be out of the coma before we know it.’
‘Dad, he didn’t say before we know it. He said soon,’ I said.
‘Alright, Keisha, but we have to remain positive.’
It was one thing to be positive but another to be so positive you deny the truth to yourself. Then again I was so negative I looked for things that weren’t even there.
‘I agree, Dad, but I also know that something bad could happen.’
He shook his head. ‘No, nothing is going to happen to her. You wait and see.’
‘If it does, it’ll be my fault.’
‘Keisha, I don’t want you to ever say that again, you hear. Like Jessica said, you had no idea what would happen when you went to see Stan. Sam probably didn’t even know herself.’
‘Then why did she do it? Was she so scared and depressed about it that she had to try and take her own life?’
‘As I told you before, Keisha, she wasn’t in her right state of mind. You know what Sam can be like when she worries about something. It completely weighs her mind down.’
Well, that was one thing I got from my mother.
*****