Beneath the surface, p.10
Beneath the Surface, page 10
‘Why?’
‘It’s too political.’
‘Then I won’t tell you about Lilly and Cormack,’ says Mia, stubbornly. ‘Strictly speaking, I don’t need you to come into school with me any more.’ She marches across the playground in her clumpy boots, head held high, as if she has suddenly discovered that being the younger sister of Lilly Vermuyden means she is no longer invisible.
By the time she turns into the hospital car park a chill of apprehension has settled in Grace’s bones. It reminds her of the sudden mists that roll in from the Fens and hang over the house, like a veil, so that even the air you breathe inside is cold. It’s the feeling of her childhood. The nerve-jangling sense that something bad can happen at any moment and she is powerless to do anything about it.
I’m losing perspective.
Again.
Impetuously, she decides to give Nuala a call before she goes into the hospital.
Nuala picks up after one ring as if she’s been expecting her. ‘Grace,’ she says warmly. ‘I’ve been thinking about you so much. How’s Lil doing?’
Grace gives her an update. She hears herself speak and thinks her tone sounds shrill so she tries to slow down and ends up too guarded. ‘As well as can be expected. They’re pleased with her progress so far. But it’s early days.’
‘How long do you think she’ll be in hospital?’
‘We’ll know more this morning. I’m on my way to see her right now.’
There’s a lull in conversation. There was a time when Grace and Nuala used to have easy chats over coffee together a couple of times a month. They took Lilly and Hayley to London to see Glee Live and lived close enough to help each other out during the school holidays; a couple of years ago they had even gone to Center Parcs for a family weekend together. But Patrick struggled with Nuala’s husband, George, a property developer, who always drank at lunchtime and became belligerently opposed to anything from paying taxes to migrants, even though most of his workforce was East European. ‘Nothing like a good debate, Patrick.’ The last time they had seen each other, he had argued that history of art should be struck off the A-level curriculum and accused Patrick of lacking a sense of humour when he angrily pointed out it would leave him without a job. After that she had seen Nuala alone or at book club.
Now they don’t see each other often enough to slip into easy familiarity but there is the awkwardness of once having been intimate. Grace imagines Nuala sitting at her desk at the law firm where she works as a paralegal, winding strands of her long straight hair around her finger with the hand that isn’t holding the phone, and wishes she were the one going to work instead of visiting her daughter in hospital. She’s even missing Tony and his aphorism of the week, which he writes on the whiteboard every Monday morning.
How could this happen to us?
‘Are you still there?’
She looks at the phone lying in her lap and is almost surprised to hear Nuala’s voice speaking to her. ‘Of course I’m still here,’ Grace says smoothly.
‘I was just saying we’re here to help,’ says Nuala, nervously. ‘You don’t have to go through this alone, Grace.’
‘That’s very kind of you. And thanks for having Lilly to stay so much in the summer holidays.’ Grace allows herself a brief moment of self-congratulation for splicing the question she really wants to ask so effortlessly on to their exchange. Nuala’s answer is contained in the silence that follows. Grace guesses that she is doing a quick calculation to work out the appropriate ratio of honesty and lie.
‘She didn’t stay with us much,’ Nuala says finally. ‘No more than a couple of nights. But it was always lovely to see her.’
‘That’s what I meant. Thanks for putting her up until she’d got the bus route sorted. It was a big help.’
‘I’m not sure if you know,’ Nuala tentatively adds, ‘but Hayley and Lilly have had a falling-out. Over a boy. You know I try to stay out of these things, but I think it all came to a head at that festival they went to at the end of the holidays. Hayley wouldn’t tell me the details. Sometimes it’s best not to know.’ She gives an overwrought laugh.
‘In my experience, it’s never best not to know,’ says Grace, imperiously. ‘Lil didn’t go to the festival. She was at Mr Galveston’s extra-English course.’
‘I don’t want to make anything more difficult for you, Grace, because I know how you get worked up about these things. And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t realize until after they’d left that Lilly hadn’t told you, but a group of them all went together and shared a tent.’
‘Who?’ asks Grace, abruptly.
‘Lilly, Hayley, Jordy and the boy they fell out over. Cormack.’
As Grace walks into the hospital, brief vignettes of Lilly’s life flash past. She remembers teaching her to read and the way she tore words apart with such savage intent that Patrick described it as a crime against consonants. She finished the entire series of Biff and Chip in less than a month and was appalled at how boring their life seemed, which, perhaps, was a clue to some part of Lilly’s personality that Grace had overlooked. With Mia it was completely different. Patrick patiently drew the letters in the air like a conductor. ‘B is big stick down, circle away from my body.’ But even after months she still couldn’t recognize the second letter of the alphabet.
Any setbacks only renewed Grace’s determination to give both her girls every opportunity that she had missed out on. She took Lilly to swimming lessons almost as soon as she could walk, before she could intuit Grace’s own terror of water. When Lilly declared that she felt more at home in water than on dry land, Grace cried so much that she had to pretend she was overcome with chlorine fumes. She was elated. History would not repeat itself. For years they got up together at six o’clock in the morning three times a week so that Lilly could train in the pool before school. Mia lacked Lilly’s co-ordination but not her energy. Her crawl was frenetic but unproductive, as if she was swimming on the spot. ‘I’ll never be as good as Lilly at anything,’ Mia used to sob. Grace urged patience, promising Mia that one day she would make her mark.
When Lilly was little, Grace used to record everything, from what she ate to how many hours she slept. No one had worked harder to make life secure and predictable for her children. Patrick teased her that there were schedules of schedules. Repeat orders of repeat orders. Direct debits of direct debits. And still it wasn’t enough. Because when it came to the big stuff, like Lilly’s first boyfriend, Grace hadn’t even clocked his existence, let alone that she had obviously spent every Saturday night at his house throughout the entire summer holiday.
She needs to apply the same level of forensic attention to Lilly’s life now as she did when she was a baby. She resolves to find out everything that has been going on. Who Lilly has been spending time with. Where they have been hanging out. She needs to know everything about Lilly that she doesn’t know.
6
Lilly feels like a fraud. She’s the only person in the room who doesn’t have a proper illness. The curtains that close around each cubicle give the illusion of privacy but she can hear everything that is said. So she knows the woman in the bed next to her has an incurable disease that makes her speech slurred and her eyelids droop like a bloodhound’s; the girl opposite became paralysed over a two-week period, like she was being slowly encased in plaster of Paris (her words); and the teenager in the corner can’t stand up without falling over. Two other women are unable to speak because they have holes cut in their throats in order to breathe. Unlike these patients, who are literally dying, she’s lounging in bed, wondering where her mobile phone is; worrying about the Beowulf essay – ‘Morality is a veil that can be dropped at any second’ – that she was meant to hand in this morning, especially because her grades have tanked this term; and imagining the swimming gala next week where she’s doing front crawl and butterfly.
She wants to message Hayley about the weird illnesses she has seen on the neurology ward. She knows she would be irresistibly interested because Hayley loves a bit of gore. She remembers when Emma Vickers once sliced her finger to the bone with a scalpel during a DT class and Hayley held the two flaps of skin together, squealing until the first-aider arrived, whereupon she pretended to faint in Jordy’s arms.
Now she’s stuck in here, Lilly misses her more than ever. She’s hoping her collapse might make Hayley feel sorry for her or at least soften the hard shell she has built around herself. The way Hayley cried yesterday when she thought she was dying gives her hope. Lilly half wonders whether, if she told her everything, Hayley might find a way to forgive her. But no matter how she tries, Lilly can’t get Cormack out of her mind, which means that whatever she said would be a lie and there are already too many of those.
She can still remember the exact expression on Hayley’s face when she discovered what had been going on between her and Cormack at the end of the holidays. It was the final evening of the music festival and they had slipped away from Jordy and Hayley before the end of Waze and Odyssey to go back to their four-man tent. Why not four-woman? And why man and not men? Lilly kept asking. Every time she said this they all giggled as if she were the main act on Saturday Night Live. The laughs came easily because they were all baked on some weed Cormack had scored from the pub and she no longer cared if Grace found out she had ditched Mr Galveston’s holiday course.
Now she finds it difficult to explain why she went along with Cormack’s insistence that no one should know about their relationship or how they managed to keep it under wraps. Usually at St Edith’s even the most inconsequential hook-up made headlines. At first it seemed immaterial. Lilly couldn’t believe Cormack was interested in her, and she convinced herself that the inevitable end would be less humiliating if no one else knew. Besides, she quickly learnt that the secrecy heightened the excitement.
Lilly couldn’t quite believe that she could simultaneously deceive her mother into thinking she was spending the night at Hayley’s, while Hayley assumed Cormack was dropping her home. It was so easy. She never felt bad about misleading her parents. Especially her mum. There were very good reasons not to be home that summer. But as the weeks turned into months she felt increasingly guilty and anxious that Hayley didn’t know. Then it became too late to say anything. At least, this was Cormack’s view. The realization that he got off on the deception crept up slowly. He would Snapchat her when they were all together, sending her filthy messages that turned her into a hot mess; touch her when the others weren’t looking; and put her on edge by revealing things about her that only Hayley should know.
That night they hadn’t bothered to zip up the tent. This oversight was less about risk-taking and more about when they had sex the rest of the world receded, until it almost felt as if they were visible only to each other. Lilly had always imagined she would share every detail of her first boyfriend with Hayley but there was something so mysterious about the pleasure they could give each other that she didn’t want to put it into words.
Hayley came back to look for them all before the end of the DJ set. Her head poked round the tent flap. Cormack was on top of Lilly, his back to Hayley, jeans and pants halfway down his thighs. Lilly’s dress was ruched up around her waist. The soft familiar features of Hayley’s face, the smudge of lips, the almond-shaped eyes and snub nose that usually worked in flattering unity fragmented as she took in the scene until she was all flashing eyes, twisted mouth and flared nostrils. Cormack turned round, saw her, and kept going. Lilly tried to push him off. She thinks he asked Hayley to join in. ‘Fuck you. Fuck both of you,’ Hayley said. Those were the last words she had addressed to Lilly until yesterday. Hayley left and they kept going.
Lilly’s mind turns to the present. She starts prioritizing everything she needs to do. She’s behind on her background reading for English and hasn’t revised for her biology test on homeostasis. Going to university is more important than ever now that there is nothing else left. She has to escape. From her mum. From Hayley. From the new house with no history. And from Cormack because there’s too much history. The knot in her stomach tightens. She can’t afford to waste any more time in here. She looks at the clock on the wall and estimates that she has already lost seven hours of study time. She needs her phone. She wants to contact Jordy to check if he has the notebook. And she wants to reiterate to her little sister that if she mentions the pregnancy test to anyone, she will definitely tell her parents Mia stole the iPhone from Bea Vickers.
Yesterday, Mia had waited until Grace and Patrick went to the hospital shop to tell her that half of Anglo-Saxon women died during childbirth. ‘Is that why you had an abortion? Were you scared you might die?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Lilly had hissed. ‘But you’ll be dead if you mention it again.’
Lilly spots Grace and Patrick hovering in the side room, waiting for the afternoon ward round to finish. She is dreading seeing them. Her dad waves through the glass window and she gives a half-hearted wave back. She can almost tolerate his false cheer and effort to pretend everything is normal. Her mum, however, is a different prospect. She could tell yesterday that she was itching to ask her questions, which was why she pretended she needed to get some more sleep. Some kind of inquisition about Cormack is inevitable. She could kill Mia for opening her mouth about that.
Luckily, the consultant, Dr Santini, leaves her till last. Even though the medical students who accompany him are embarrassingly close to her in age, Lilly tries to be as interesting as possible so that they don’t want to leave. When one asks whether she could sense the seizure was about to happen she goes into a long description about the sickly-sweet smell and the sensation of being dragged backwards into a dark tunnel. In hospital you’re only as interesting as your illness, and in the hierarchy of disease on this ward, Lilly realizes she is definitely at the bottom of the ladder. Dr Santini simply lists the tests she is due to have today. But just as he finishes herding his students towards the door there is a reprieve: he unexpectedly turns back towards her. ‘I’d like a quick word, Lilly, in private, before I speak to your parents. Is that okay?’ He smiles. He has no hair on his face and his skin is as smooth and burnished as the Etruscan statues her dad lectures about. She fights the urge to reach out and stroke his cheek.
‘Sure,’ she says.
‘I’d like to know exactly what was going on in the hours before the seizure. Describe everything. I’m interested in all the details. Even if they seem boring to you.’ He sits on the chair, pen poised. ‘In my experience, the first time an event like this occurs is always the most illustrative.’ He stares at her for a beat too long.
Lilly describes the classroom, the discussion about Beowulf and the heat. She mentions the feeling of nausea, the electric-shock sensation in her arms and legs and the feeling of detachment. The doctor commends her precision. He lets her talk. It’s like writing an essay, really. Point, evidence, conclusion. When she finishes, he puts the lid on the pen, tucks it into his pocket and lays down the medical notes on the bed beside her. She waits for him to congratulate her because hospital seems to be the one place you get praised for everything. Even peeing into a bottle. He pauses again.
‘Lilly, do you understand what patient confidentiality is?’ he asks.
‘It’s like being a Catholic priest and hearing confession, isn’t it?’
He laughs. ‘Something like that. It means that anything you say to me is completely private. You’re seventeen years old and I don’t need to tell your parents everything you tell me. The reason I’m asking is that I want you to feel that you can be completely honest with me.’
‘Fire away.’ She shrugs. ‘In the interests of honesty.’
‘Has anything like this happened to you before?’
She stares into his dark eyes. His eyebrows are now arranged in a sorrowful shape so they arch up in the middle and down at the sides. He licks his lips nervously. She knows right away that he knows.
‘No.’ He looks disappointed and she feels bad because she wants to please him.
‘Are you sure about that?’ he doggedly continues.
‘I am.’
‘It’s just I can see you received medical treatment at a festival in the summer. Six weeks ago, I think. The notes are a little sketchy, but if that was your first seizure, it would be even more useful if you tell me about what happened then.’ His face is so kind that she is almost tempted to tell him everything. He wouldn’t be judgemental. She remembers Jordy recounting his favourite Buzzfeed story during an English class when they were meant to be composing kennings. A series of X-rays titled, ‘Objects people have lost in their arse’, including a Buzz Lightyear figure and a light bulb. Gives new meaning to infinity and beyond, she had joked, making Jordy laugh so hard that Mr Galveston sent him out into the corridor. There’s nothing that can shock a doctor.
‘There must be a mistake. And please don’t mention the festival in front of my parents. They don’t know I went.’
‘I’m not here to judge you. I’m here to give you the best possible treatment. And to give you the best possible treatment, I need you to tell me everything.’ He looks at her so earnestly that she feels sorry for him. It must be terrible to care so much about people you don’t even know. It’s painful enough caring about the people you do know. Like her mum.
She glances at the window of the small side room attached to the neurology ward where her parents are waiting and sees Grace staring at her. It will take too long to explain to him and Grace will get suspicious and ask questions. Besides, Lilly is almost positive her mother can lip-read. She can certainly read documents upside-down because she once told her it was a key journalistic skill, albeit not very relevant when your main beat is lost cats and giant marrows. That’s another thing she’s never going to do that her mother has done: step back from her career and live through her children. Grace has crushed her with the weight of her expectation.
‘This isn’t the first time this has happened, is it?’ Dr Santini asks one last time.
