The new one, p.21
The New One, page 21
Like roadkill.
These images were going to be with him forever. His daughter—the girl he did in fact love, the baby he had seen emerging into the world—flying through the air. His wife—the woman he had been trying to leave, but always, always the love of his life—left for dead on the road.
He stared at one and the other, back to one, back to the other. He didn’t have his phone. The car was gone and he hadn’t seen its number plate or even what color it was. He wanted to move Honey from the road, but he thought she was breathing and he knew you were supposed to leave people where they were.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Maud was there, a little bit farther back. He looked at her. She looked at him.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” she said, and she took her phone from her pocket and, looking stunned, tapped a number three times.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Honey and Scarlett were alive, but only just. They were put on the same ward with two other people, and Ed pulled the curtains around them, leaving the one between them open. Scarlett should have been in the pediatric department, but the doctors had put her with her mother instead so he could be with both of them at once. That was better, he supposed, than having to divide his time, running upstairs and downstairs.
He sat on a plastic chair between the beds and wondered what you were supposed to do when the very thing you had wished for was happening in the worst way. He had wanted everything to change, and now it had. He had wanted to leave them, and they had left him.
He was on his own. He had lost his wife and his child.
He waited.
Neither of them woke up. He waited and waited. They both had terrible scores on the coma scale, but Honey’s was worse. His life went to shit. He went home once to get insurance details and a few practical things (he’d had no idea why he was really going to need that overnight bag), and then he lived in the plastic chair between their beds. The guilt ate him alive. If they died, he would die too. He would make sure of it. He slept sometimes in his chair. He lived on the tea and toast that the staff made for him. They were kind.
His brother, Jimmy, came down from Scotland. They had never been close but now Jimmy was all he had, and Ed leaned on him completely. Jimmy looked after the van, paid for food and stopped Ed from falling apart quite as comprehensively as he would have done otherwise. Weeks went past.
A woman called Poppy, who worked for the hospital admin team, came to find him when he was making a cup of tea and said, “I’m sorry if this seems indelicate.”
He stopped, tea bag on spoon in midair, and looked at her. “Indelicate?” He half expected her to tell him he’d forgotten to put his pants on.
Instead, she said: “So, when family members are very ill, and particularly when it’s a child, we encourage the family to make a memory box. In the future, she might want to know about her time in hospital. If the worst did happen, you’d find it comforting in a way to have this most strange of times documented. If you want to keep a lock of Scarlett’s hair— I know it may seem morbid but sometimes people find that photographs of a child, even as Scarlett currently is, help them to process things. We have facilities for that here now. I can set you up with a locker.”
He didn’t want to think about the locker but he knew he should do it.
“Sure,” he said.
She walked him through corridors to a little room with a bank of lockers, where she would set up his fingerprint ID to open one of them. He expressed dull surprise at the high-tech nature of it all.
“I know,” said Poppy (young, redheaded) with a grimace. Was she really young, though, or was it just that he felt older than the universe right now? He looked at her. She was maybe thirty or so. Twenty-five. Forty. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. She was still talking. He tried to focus.
“It was a charity initiative a few years ago. We could use the funding for many things, but we get what we’re given and what we’re given is memory banks.”
She looked exhausted. He let her take his fingerprint and asked her to set it up with Scarlett’s too as a gesture of hope. He put in a lock of her hair, because Poppy had suggested it. He took photographs around her bed and the hospital, and Poppy printed them for him. He wasn’t much of a writer but he sat between the beds and wrote it all down. It turned into a long, long rambling letter to Scarlett, then a series of letters. He told her how sorry he was. He told her what it was like sitting between her and Honey, waiting for them to wake up. He kept starting a letter to Honey but found he didn’t know what to say.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Then, one day, Jimmy walked through the curtain with a serious look on his face, and Ed didn’t want to hear whatever it was he was about to say.
“Bro,” said Jimmy. They had started that as an ironic thing but now it seemed that bro was just what they called each other. “Bro, there’s a woman here to see you. Her name’s Maya. No—it could be good. It’s about a medical trial.”
39
Ed agreed to everything: he never considered anything else. He certainly didn’t agonize over it. Maya and her team were going to take Honey to Switzerland. After about six weeks, the reanimation would be ready and would come over with Maya and Luca. Although he hated the idea of Honey going, he knew this was an incredible, impossible godsend. Switzerland was mainly just a word to him: he pictured a well-funded hospital with efficient staff. He didn’t bother with mountains or cuckoo clocks or any of that. He just wanted the hospital.
He had to give them every chance because it was the only way he could begin to atone for the way he had failed them. He had been about to walk out when fate stepped in and took them from him. He didn’t care about the details of the accident, about who had done this. He pushed the fact that he had seen Scarlett step out in front of that car out of his mind. There was no space for it. Ed tried to override the fact that Honey, and not he, had thrown herself in the vehicle’s path in an instinctive dash to save her child. It was good, he told himself, that he was unscathed and able to sign the paperwork for his wife and daughter.
Jimmy was against it every step of the way, but he couldn’t stop Ed from agreeing to everything Maya asked.
“Hang on to the paperwork,” Jimmy said, “as insurance,” and Ed agreed.
It turned out, however, that there wasn’t any paperwork. Everything happened electronically. Ed had no record of it at all beyond a copy of the confidentiality agreement he’d signed.
“Then you have to make your own trail,” Jim told him.
Even though it felt weird, Ed started making sure his phone was recording in his pocket every time he spoke to Maya.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
“There’s only one thing,” Ed said to Maya, and he opened up, telling her that he’d been about to leave, that he and Honey had been unhappy for years. “I’m not sure,” he said at the end. “I’m not sure she’d appreciate any of this. She’ll be furious with me for making decisions on her behalf. Being brought back to me, well, that might be the last thing she wants. She might be seeing a coma as a blessed relief.”
Maya looked at him for a long time with a little smile on her face. Then she said, “What do you think Honey would change about herself if she could?”
He started to say Nothing, but realized there was no point. He told her.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Ed said good-bye to his wife and told her unresponsive shell that he would see her soon. Then she was gone and it was just him and Scarlett. He sat with her and talked to her and tried to move away from the voice in his head that just did blame, blame, blame for everything. He couldn’t blame Scarlett anymore, and none of it had been Honey’s fault. He missed Honey, hated it when someone else moved into her bed.
Christmas came and went and he ignored it. A smarmy man called Luca flew over to see him and Scarlett from time to time, sometimes with a doctor who looked as if she had huge reservations about everything. They said that everyone agreed that Scarlett would be an ideal subject and started making arrangements for her to go too.
“What about me?” Ed said. “What do I do when you take Scarlett?”
“Indeed,” said Luca.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Ed couldn’t take it in, but he agreed to everything. He did his best to be receptive to the prospect of the new Honey arriving in Cornwall. He went home and had a shower in the communal bathroom block, hating being away from his daughter. The van was horribly the same as it had been before, filled with Scarlett’s and Honey’s things. Now, though, Jimmy was living in a tent just outside.
Ed knocked on Maud’s door and sat in her tiny camper van, which smelled of incense. With Maya’s script in his head, he asked if she would electronically sign a confidentiality agreement so he could discuss something with her.
Ed had never liked Maud, but she was Honey’s closest friend and she was the one person he was going to bring onside, because he needed someone. Jimmy just told him not to do it, so the two of them were hardly speaking, and he needed another perspective.
Now he looked at Maud, at her short gray hair and craggy face, and tried to order his words. He got it out in the end as she watched with knowing eyes.
Honey had always told him that although he didn’t realize it, he was sexist around Maud. “She’s an older woman and you find her intimidating because she doesn’t care what you think. I admire her. If she was a man and was incredibly kind to us and always said what he thought, then you’d like him.”
He heard Honey’s words in his head now as he looked at Maud, who was petting her horrible dog without looking at it. She was looking at him. Directly into his soul apparently.
She signed the document and he sent it to Maya, waiting for her approval before he started to speak. Maud had agreed that if she told anyone what Ed was about to tell her, VitaNova would come after her and take every single thing she owned (they couldn’t realize how little that was) and take her to court. Then he stumbled through the story.
“So I don’t know what it’s going to be like, but they’re going to bring the new Honey over from Switzerland next week. She won’t be properly conscious before they switch that part on, when she’s with me and Scarlett. She’s going to think she’s Honey, and so we’re supposed to act as if she is. They’ll be monitoring her to see if she truly believes she’s the same person. You’ll meet her, so if you can do it, can you act as if she’s the very same person as before?”
“Does she know she was in the accident?” said Maud.
He shook his head. “She thinks it was just Scarlett. She’ll think she’s been sitting by Scarlett’s bed for months. She’s going to have lost three months, but they say it won’t matter. She’s been set up not to notice that. When they make the new Scarlett, she’ll know she was in an accident. She has to know it, because she’ll be waking up in hospital, I guess. But Honey will just think she’s there as Scarlett’s mum.”
Maud looked at him for a long time and he made himself stay silent. Her face moved as she considered everything. When she did speak, she said: “This is amazing, Ed. Really incredible. I can’t wait to meet her. The things they can do. Who would have imagined?”
He leaned forward. “Really?”
“Yes. Really. I think if Honey was able to take part in this conversation, she would tell you to go for it. Having her back!” There were tears in her eyes. “Having her back, Ed! I don’t care if it’s not really her. It’s going to be the closest anyone has ever come to getting somebody back from the other side. Will she be called Honey?”
He shook his head. “We need to give her another name, because the real Honey still exists. There can’t be two of her. I’m thinking Tamsyn.”
“Yes. Her given first name. Still her but a different part of her. It couldn’t have been anything else, could it?”
She stood up, so he did too. When she hugged him, he realized that Honey had been right. He had been dismissive because she was an old lady. He wouldn’t do that anymore. He needed her at his side through all this. She had come on board as fast as he had, because she loved Honey and Scarlett too.
“Thank you so much,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears for the first time in ages. “You’re her best friend, you know, and this means everything to me. It would to her too.”
“Anything I can do,” she said. “I mean it, love. Anything at all. Just say the word. Oh, my days, I can’t wait to meet her. Can’t wait. Even if it’s only a shadow of a shadow of her, it’s our Honey, darling. We get our Honey back. I’d have done anything to have them do that with Ally.” She hesitated and looked into his soul again. “Forgive me if this is a tasteless thing to say right now, but you two hadn’t been getting on these last few years.”
He couldn’t meet her eye. “It’s going to be different,” he said. “That’s what they say.”
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
He told the restaurant he wasn’t going back. They tried to offer him more wages and extra vacation because no one had a clue what was really happening. The apprentice Jasper was so tense, he was hardly breathing when he asked after Scarlett, and Ed remembered introducing them a year or two ago. It was nice of him to remember her, but really, people had no idea. He told everyone that things were looking bad for Honey and Scarlett and that, when the worst happened, he was going to move away.
He sat at Scarlett’s bedside, studying her face, the parts of it he could see. He looked at her short hair, partly covered by a cap. He looked at her young skin and thought about the short amount of time she had been in the world, and he wished he’d been able to keep her safe. It was what fathers were meant to do. Perhaps, he thought, she would wake up and tell him what had been going on.
He couldn’t begin to imagine a new Scarlett. He had to get his head around the fact that there was a new Honey, a Tamsyn, first. He just sat there and waited.
40
Ed didn’t meet his new wife for a couple of days after she arrived. Maya told him again that although Tamsyn could walk and talk, she wasn’t conscious yet. He had no idea how a thing like that worked, but he didn’t understand anything anymore. He had known his world before, but now it had expanded beyond death into afterlife. Nothing made sense, and he was a passenger.
There were four people from Switzerland here in Truro, and Ed was self-conscious about them seeing his life, even though none of them came to the van park. He knew that even the hospital was shabby. He knew it wasn’t his fault, but he felt that he was less than them because of it. You generally stayed where you were born, socially (in his world at least), and this was him. This was where he had been born, and it was where he had always thought he would stay, even as life became more and more difficult.
Maya, however, explained that the next stage of the plan would change things.
“So how are you feeling about relocating to Geneva?” she said casually, sitting with him in the most expensive of the hospital cafés, sipping peppermint tea.
Ed gave her a little smile and took a gulp of coffee. It wasn’t very nice: Maya was right to have the tea. He felt that the two of them were kind of friends now, and all he could really think about was his new wife, Tamsyn. Would she be a lifeline, like Maud had said?
“Me?” he said.
“Yes.”
He wondered why her lipstick was so shiny. Did she put glossy stuff on top of it, or was it just a shiny lipstick? He remembered the times he’d found Scarlett in the pub, her lipstick rubbed away on the rims of glasses. He remembered introducing her to Jasper that time. She’d come to his work, back when she’d still been straightforward. She’d been only just thirteen, but she’d twiddled her hair and smiled, and Jasper, who must have been fifteen, sixteen, had grinned and leaned forward to talk to her.
Her trouble had a boy at the center of it. He knew that. Whoever it was, there was some bastard out there who had led his precious baby astray. If he ever found him, he would kill him.
He thought about Jasper. He dismissed it. Scarlett and Jasper had met only once.
“We’re excited to introduce you to Tamsyn tomorrow. But we can’t move Honey back from Geneva in her current state, as the first flight was difficult enough and her doctor is refusing to authorize any further travel, and so we’d like to bring you and Scarlett over there. The whole VitaNova family is there. We’ll rent you an apartment to live in. You’re already an integral part of our program and I think—” Her eyes darted around the room. “I mean, there would be lifestyle benefits. No more money worries. A change of scene.”
He nodded. Nothing could make life any weirder than it already was.
“Sure,” he said. “Move to Geneva. Why not?”
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
He had never felt so alone. Scarlett was the same as ever, and Honey was in Switzerland. Jimmy was still at the site, and although he was hostile to the project, he had sent a text to say that he would come to the hospital and support Ed while Tamsyn woke up. Maud was excited and positive (though she was going to be gutted when she discovered they were moving to Geneva; he wondered whether she might be able to come too), and that was all he had.
