My mum died six years ago. I was twelve at the time, and Finch was eight.
The children we were died with her.
I know now that the ambulance journey didn’t take all that long – with the siren on and the emergency lights flashing it probably only took about half an hour – but my senses were so mixed up that minutes seemed like hours and hours seemed like minutes. For all I knew, I could have been in the ambulance for days.
The place I was taken to seemed like an ordinary hospital at first – a big grey building, long white corridors, people in hospital-type clothing – and it wasn’t until I’d been there for a while, and my strange sleepiness had begun to wear off, that I started to realise there was something different about it. The room I was put in, for example, had all the same stuff as my room at BPG – same hospital bed, same monitors and equipment, same tubes and wires all over the place – but it also had a CCTV camera on the wall, the lens pointing directly at me, and a swipe-card entry system on the door. If you didn’t have a key card, you couldn’t get in or out.
And another thing I realised was that I hadn’t seen any other patients. Or visitors. Just medical staff – doctors, nurses, porters . . .
I tried to think about it, to work out what it meant, but I was starting to feel really strange again, and I kept forgetting what I was thinking about. It was a different kind of strangeness now. Worse, far more intense. My whole body, everything about me, felt alien. Even the pain felt wrong. It was like a living thing growing inside me . . . a clawing spread of living hurt eating its way through my flesh. My skin felt sick – clammy, raw – and I could feel my muscles beginning to twitch. It wasn’t too bad at first – just a faint kind of fluttering beneath the skin, mostly in my arms and legs – but it rapidly got worse, and in no time at all my entire body was shuddering so violently that the bed was rattling beneath me. I tried to grab hold of something, desperately trying to steady myself, but my arms didn’t belong to me any more . . . they were just there, shaking uncontrollably at my sides . . .
Something happened in my head then.
I still can’t remember exactly what it was.
A sound, perhaps . . . but not a sound.
The feeling of a sound.
A flash of black lightning?
No . . .
I don’t know.
All I can really remember is a sense of people hurrying into the room, a blur of voices – urgent but calm – then firm hands taking hold of my convulsing body. I couldn’t see who it was, because for some reason I couldn’t see anything at all. I didn’t understand it, but it was too much to think about. I was still shuddering and twitching, still wracked with pain . . .
I closed my eyes and tried not to feel anything.
After the shaking had eventually stopped, and after I’d opened my eyes and shut them again for at least the fiftieth time, I finally had to accept the truth.
I was blind.
I lost track of time after that.
I lost track of everything.
I remember floating – blind, paralysed, senseless, timeless – and I remember the hurt inside me, its blunt teeth grinding and wrenching . . . and the cold sickness in my bones . . . and the shearing pain of skin being stripped from flesh . . .
And I remember the nothingness too.
The nothingness of not knowing.
I didn’t know who I was or where I was or what was going on . . . I didn’t even know what I was. All I knew was the hurt. But at the same time there was something in an unknown part of me, something I can’t explain, that somehow knew – or at least sensed – what was happening to me. It knew there were at least two doctors working on me all the time – examining every inch of me, taking samples, measuring, scanning, listening, talking. It could sense their hands on my skin, their probing instruments, the stinging stab of their needles . . . and it knew all these things for what they were. But there were other things happening to me, other sensations, that it sensed without understanding. A soft and slightly ticklish feeling on the top of my head and the back of my neck . . . and later, in the same place, the gentle brushing of a hand. Movement . . . quiet and smooth . . . a rubbery hum . . . a machine starting up . . . something spinning around my head . . . the rapid whirr of an electric wheel . . . then silence again, and movement again . . . quiet and smooth . . . a rubbery hum . . . then more silence. A covering . . . a feeling of lightness being laid over my skin . . . arms, legs, body, face . . . a shroud so delicate it’s almost weightless . . . and then the same silky lightness being slipped onto my hands . . .
I slept and dreamed.
My body dreamed.
It was a dream of presence – no sight, no sound – just a knowing. It was in my every element – bone, blood, flesh – the knowing and the presence together. It was one thing and many things.
It was me – and somehow the possibility of something of me . . .
It was Finch – connected and disconnected . . .
And Mum – alone in a sad silence . . .
And her mum, my nan – old and blind, her blindness trailing through Mum’s heart to touch upon my eyes . . .
And there were others too – uncountable others, nameless but not unknown . . . mothers and daughters, mothers and daughters . . . a son, a brother . . .
Mothers and daughters.
They were me.
And I was them.
It was the silent scream that finally woke me.
I was dreaming a dream of spinning and whirling, going faster and faster all the time, and there was something inside me – a feeling in my chest – screaming silently for the spinning to stop. It was a feeling of life, this screaming thing, and the spinning was tearing it apart.
It didn’t want to die.
It screamed, desperate to break the silence.
The spinning roared.
The scream swelled, filling my lungs, my chest, my throat . . .
I couldn’t breathe.
I opened my mouth and screamed.
It wasn’t much of a sound – more like a strangled whimper than a scream – but it was enough to break me out of the dream and jerk me awake. I woke instantly, sitting bolt upright and gasping for breath, and I knew straight away that everything had changed. The different world had gone. There was no invisible barrier, no distortion, no sense of otherness.
I could hear normally again – voices, urgent movement, someone saying my name . . .
And I could see.
The room was dim, the light pale and low, but I could see my immediate surroundings. I could see the grey-haired man standing beside me, his hand reaching gently for my shoulder, and I could see the olive-skinned woman on the other side of the bed, leaning over to straighten out the bed sheet. The sheet wasn’t covering my feet, both of which were covered up by long white socks, and I could see that the sock on my right foot had slipped down and was half hanging off . . .
I could see.
And in the moment before the sheet was pulled down over my feet, the moment before the grey-haired man began easing me back down to the bed, I saw a flash of red . . .
The red of meat.
‘Can