Page 112 of People In Love
He’s had a headache for a few days and he was going to meet me at the registry office, Nora says, and her voice is measured, somehow, robotic, but then they called me here.
Is he … all right?
I don’t know, she says. And then she says it again, less measured, this time: I don’t know.
Bren’s frown deepens. Please go, she is about to say,please, Robin cannot see you here, today of all days – but it is as she is about to say this that a doctor comes down the hall and her heart is in her mouth with her stomach, because his eyes are not the eyes of a person who has something good to share.
She floats out of her body as she decides this.
Out of her embroidered wedding dress.
There is a slow, illuminated moment as realisation dawns, as it had on Robin yesterday in their garden shed. As he saw, finally, what she’d wanted him to see – but with eyes that have not been his own, these past few weeks, now that she thinks about it. The way they’d look at her, sometimes, like he did not know her.I don’t recognise you, Nora. Angry outbursts,you’re being a child, extreme exhaustion,he’s out cold. But things have seemed hard and strange of late, weddings are hard, relationships are hard, and he is stressed and tired and she’s both these things too, and that’s normal, isn’t it, that’s life. This is ablip. A story they will tell on their anniversaries, remember when you got a headache and it turned out to be a brain bleed, madness, total madness, I love you, d’you want the last dumpling, and the doctor looks at her as she thinks all of this and confirms her name, are you Nora, and then he clarifies Robin’s name, too.
He looks at her, this doctor. As he stands there in his surgical scrubs.
Looks at her and says that after the scans they took him straight into surgery, but there were complications, that the bleed on the brain was more significant than they had anticipated, and he is so very sorry, but that despite their best efforts, Robin has died.
There is a moment where nobody moves.
The baby cries. The mother soothes.
Bren touches her, on the elbow.
No, says Nora, shrugging him off. It was just a headache. He said he had a headache.
I am so very sorry, the doctor repeats.
No, she says, he was fine.
I understand this is a tremendous shock, the doctor says. Do you have someone I can call, or is your friend here – he glances at Bren – are you able to see her home? We can –
But we’re getting married, Nora tells the doctor.
She turns to Bren, who is white, and she says it to him, too, as if he needs reminding: we’re getting married.
There was a trauma, the doctor is saying, a trauma that must have occurred days, maybe even weeks ago? It caused a chronic subdural haematoma. And they could have drained the bleed, they did try, it’s so rare, with a bleed that severe, that he was able to walk himself into A and E like he did, and do you know anything about that, Nora? What might have caused it?
No, Nora is saying, there was nothing, but the truth is she wasn’t paying attention when it mattered. None of us do, she will realise later, when her world is not falling into the black hole of itself, and this all runs through her head, the reality of what could and might occur because while the small dramas unfold – the family arguments and passing comments and daily pressures of not-dones and what-ifs and maybe-tomorrows – while that all plays out, the big things, the unnamed storms, the unexpected rolling darkness could be hurtling your way and you wouldn’t even know it, wouldn’t ever – until that frozen, light-switch moment standing in a hospital, wearing your wedding dress beside the wrong person – see it coming.
TWENTY-SIX
This is what Nora imagines.
What she sees happening, as if on film, as she floats out of her body, time paused but also on fast forward as the doctor comes down the hall.
In reality, he stops in front of her, this doctor in his scrubs who confirms her name and then Robin’s. He says what he says about the brain bleed. He says what he says about the trauma occurring, several weeks ago, and she sees Bren’s staggered white face, she sees that he is hearing what she is hearing, but not imagining what she is imagining, that’s all owed to her deep-set, private panic that does not actually come to pass, time frozen, worst-case scenario, flooding like a burst bank in her head.
What he actually says is that the procedure went well.
That it is a waiting game, now, to see how he recovers, that the anaesthesia will wear off soon, and then Robin will be awake.
Alive.
Are you all right, Miss Harper. Do you need to sit down. Do you understand what I’m saying, here; this really is the best we could have hoped for, at this point, he’s so lucky he got here when he did, a marvel, really, that he was still walking and talking with that build-up of fluid in his brain. It’s sorare, in a man his age, quite something – if he’d been a year or two younger, even, it could have been a different story, something to do with the space between the skull and the brain, widening with age – it’s lucky, again, so lucky.
Lucky.
The only word that makes sense in her head.
