Hunger for Life

Chapter 1 - A race to hospital

‘Aren’t we there yet?’ Mum asked, glancing restlessly at the buildings that blurred past our window.

 

‘Be there in a jiffy,’ the driver said. His answer prompted a groan from Mum; he’d said the same thing when she’d asked the question a minute earlier. And the minute before that. Perhaps he noticed Mum’s reaction, because he immediately made an effort to strike up a conversation. ‘You here on holiday, then?’ he asked, cheerily. Then, remembering where we were headed, he pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers and cringed. ‘Ah, bollocks,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, love.’

 

Mum said nothing, just sighed heavily and combed a hand through her hair for the hundredth time that morning. I laid a hand on her arm and, trying to keep the panic from my voice, told her everything was going to be okay.

 

‘Oh?’ Mum said, turning impatiently towards me. ‘And you know that, do you?’

 

My eyes dropped to the floor. The truth was that no, I didn’t. If I’d known for sure, I wouldn’t have felt so much like puking. ‘I’m sure it’s just another false alarm,’ I said. ‘You know how much they love their false alarms.’

 

But Mum’s attention had already strayed once more to the streets outside. ‘For goodness sake,’ she said, pressing her face to the window of the taxi. ‘I still have no idea where we are. Damn it, I knew I should have booked a hotel closer to the hospital.’

 

Actually, we’d tried to do exactly that when searching for a place to stay a few weeks earlier, but our visit had coincided with the year’s Wimbledon championship, and with the courts only a couple of miles from the hospital building all the nearby hotels were either completely full or charging twenty-third century rates for their rooms. Even when we’d started to look further afield, the pickings had been unbelievably slim. We’d eventually been forced to settle for a twin room in some dusty budget hotel on the outskirts of the city.

 

Mum was in no state to remember this fact. She’d been a bundle of nerves ever since the phone call had driven her from her bed earlier that morning. The same call had woken me, and I’d listened groggily as our latest telephone drama had played out a few feet from my pillow. ‘Oh god,’ I’d heard Mum say. ‘And now? Is she conscious?’ When the answer came she put a hand to her chest and breathed deeply, before nodding for me to start getting my s**t together, which I promptly did.

 

Tucking the phone beneath her chin, Mum began fumbling through her suitcase for some fresh clothes, which she threw onto the floor of our tiny en-suite. ‘So, what dosage did you offer her?’ she wanted to know. The muscles in her jaw tightened as the answer came through. ‘You bloody fools,’ she said. ‘Have you already forgotten how she reacted to the Prozac you gave her last month?’ She picked up her clothes from the bed, threw them down again on the bathroom floor. ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Don’t take your eyes off her for a second. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

 

Mum was true to her word. Less than an hour after she hung up the phone, the cab pulled up at the front door of St Jude’s. Mum handed the driver the crumpled banknote she’d been fussing with throughout the journey before clambering outside the taxi and towards the hospital.

 

St Jude’s looked pretty much the way you’d expect it to; a collection of brutal concrete structures that were about as welcoming to patients as the symptoms that had brought them there in the first place. The building that Emma was in, the Victoria Wing, was the ugliest of all, a hideous, out-of-scale monster that had been thrown up with breath-taking clumsiness in the middle of a car park and clad in crusty grey bricks. It was deeply demoralising and barely functional, and it caused my heart to sink whenever I saw it.

 

Inside the building, there was none of the usual light or warmth you generally associated with hospitals. The whole place was dingy and lifeless, its walls covered in dirty scuff-marks and bits of old Blu-Tack. Emma’s ward, the eating disorders ward, did boast a nurse’s station, but the space was forever empty, and there was a so-called common room, but its turquoise chairs all had gashes in their vinyl covers and its television was set permanently to an obscure music channel that seemed to play the hits of Dire Straits on repeat. Put simply, the place was little more than a shithole.

 

Mum and I made our way along the ward’s narrow main corridor, past a ghostly figure who stood with a phone to her ear, whispering desperately for her listener to take her home. A few yards further along, another waiflike girl sat huddled inside a blanket, staring emptily at the wall in front of her. By the time we reached Emma’s door a moment later, we still hadn’t encountered a single member of staff, so we made our way directly into the room. We found her lying beneath a heavy blanket on her bed, her gaze fixed on the ceiling above her.

 

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Mum said. ‘How are you feeling?’

 

Emma did not move and made no attempt to answer.

 

‘Emma?’ Mum said, more urgently this time. ‘Can you hear me?’

 

Emma’s head moved, almost imperceptibly, towards us. ‘They fucked up again, Mum,’ she said, weakly.

 

Mum and I both breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Oh, my darling,’ Mum said. ‘Thank goodness you’re alright.’

 

‘I’m really not,’ Emma said, though I think even she knew what Mum meant.

 

‘How’s your head?’ Mum asked.

 

‘It’s okay.’

 

‘Does your chest hurt? Have they checked your blood pressure?’

 

‘Mum,’ Emma said. ‘You don’t have to worry. The panic’s over.’

 

‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Because you still look f*****g terrible.’

 

‘James!’ Mum snapped. ‘Language!’ But I could see my comment had brought its desired result; the hint of a smile on Emma’s lips. ‘Thanks, Jamie,’ she said. Then, pressing a finger to her temple, she lay back down on her pillow and closed her eyes.

 

Feeling suddenly bereft, I sat down on the chair by Emma’s window and looked around her spare, institutionally impersonal room. For the past four months, Emma had been almost entirely confined to this poky little chamber. It contained nothing more than her bed, a battered chest of drawers, and a small television with a crack in its screen. Since she no longer had the energy to watch television and spent her whole time lying in bed, the chest of drawers was her only distraction from the thoughts that plagued her mind.

 

Emma’s doctors back home in Scotland had never wanted to send her to London, had hoped instead to find her a room in Hope Park, the Glasgow clinic where she’d spent her first spell in hospital and where she’d shown some signs that she might eventually want to get better. But Hope Park had remained agonisingly full even as Emma’s health had continued to decline, and eventually the doctors had been forced to shut their eyes and say a silent prayer as an ambulance arrived outside our home to drive Emma the four hundred miles to London.

 

It had been clear since Emma’s first night in the hospital, when the staff had reneged on its promise to offer her one-to-one supervision after meals, that St Jude’s would fail to provide her with the level of care she needed. In the weeks that followed, Emma had frequent panic attacks, but the staff regularly left her to cry on her own. She was supposed to be allowed out for fifteen minutes each day to sit on a bench in the garden outside the ward, but the nurses constantly claimed they were too busy to take her. One morning, when she was told she wasn’t allowed to do her group therapy, she argued back and was locked in her room for an entire day. Any complaints she made about her treatment were taken as evidence of ‘non-compliance’.

 

Emma was terrified. Each night, she’d call home, beg us to help her escape her confinement. ‘You have to get me out of here,’ she’d say. ‘It’s such a terrible place. They’re making me worse.’

 

‘We can’t do that, darling,’ Mum would tell her.

 

‘I’ll try harder. I’ll be good if I come home. Please, Mum. Help me, please, for f**k’s sake.’

 

Emma had never sworn as a kid, but in the past few years she’d been confronted with the full ugliness of life and her childhood cries of darn it and blooming heck had been replaced with f**k and s**t and all manner of other profanities. Mum and Dad had staged a few protests when they first heard her curse, but pretty soon they’d grew so used to it that they’d given up asking her to stop.

 

Besides, who could blame Emma for swearing? Not me, that was for sure. As far as I was concerned, anyone else in her position would have done the same thing. Many would have done much, much worse. Because, truly, the St Jude’s staff were s**t. However bad Emma’s situation got, they always managed in one way or another to make it worse. Even when it seemed that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, they somehow conspired to make it so. It beggared belief, that unswerving ability of theirs to f**k things up completely.

 

So, no, I didn’t blame her for swearing. I didn’t blame her at all.

 

Because I f*****g hated them too.

 

The Edinburgh doctors weren’t happy either. For three months, they’d forced themselves to continue working with their London counterparts, but by early summer the relationship had soured to such a degree that they began making arrangements to have Emma moved from St Jude’s. It was welcome news, but there was a mountain of paperwork to clear before anything could happen, and until then there was nothing for us to do but stand by and watch Emma continue to suffer in the narrow confines of her room.

 

It would have helped Emma to have us around more, to offer that bit of physical affection she missed so badly. But there was no question of us making a day trip to London all the way from Scotland, and the cost of accommodation in Tooting, even at non-Wimbledon prices, made it impossible to stay in the city for more than a few days at a time. So, reluctantly, we’d been forced to settle for our daily phone call to Emma’s room and a weekend visit at the start of every month.

 

By the time of my fifth visit, there’d come to be a shape and character to the days I spent in London. They were strange days, now I look back on them, built entirely around the hours I spent with Emma. When I wasn’t in the hospital, I could generally be found walking restlessly around the neighbouring streets or reading books in a nearby park. Others might have found it difficult to ignore the grand museums, libraries, concerts, and the whole vast infinitude of cultural opportunities London offered, but I never once considered making u se of its attractions during those trips to the city. I was there for the sole purpose of visiting Emma, and when I wasn’t in her room itself, I simply wanted to remain close by, to feel my proximity to her. 

 

Visiting times were after lunch and dinner. On Emma’s better days, we listened to music and shared gossip as we flicked through the pages of her fashion magazines. On bad days, when Emma refused to rise from her bed, I lay by her side, my head touching hers, and shared whatever thoughts happened to be passing through my head at the time. I took care to make the best of every moment we spent together, though the pleasure of being with her was tempered by the thought that I’d soon be forced to abandon her once more. I tried to forget this during my visits, to remain relentlessly bright and cheery, but the plan never quite worked, and my hours in her room were pervaded by a sense of sadness and panic.

 

I felt this even more keenly than usual in the minutes that followed my early-morning race to the hospital with Mum. Still stoned following her most recent overprescription of anti-depressants, Emma had fallen asleep long before Mum and I caught sight of our first nurse, a large, humourless lady with thin lips and an enormous shock of grey hair. She was clearly surprised when she entered the room to find us sitting with Emma. Mum was furious. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded. ‘Why on Earth was nobody here watching Emma?’

 

There was a long silence. The nurse shifted her eyes nervously around the room, as if she half hoped to find one of her workmates waving to her from the top of Emma’s telly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, eventually. ‘My colleague must have gone on break.’

 

Mum exhaled impatiently. She’d been a nurse herself for longer than I’d been alive and, having spent years caring for patients on busy wards, she was painfully aware of how badly the hospital was failing Emma. ‘Your colleague shouldn’t have gone on break without advising anybody,’ she said. When the nurse simply shrugged, Mum clamped her eyes shut and took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’d like to speak to the person in charge, please.’

 

The nurse sniffed. ‘I’ll go and get her,’ she said.

 

‘No,’ Mum said. ‘I’ll come with you. Emma’s seen enough drama already this morning.’

 

‘I’m coming too,’ I said, standing up from my chair.

 

Mum shook her head. ‘There’s no point in both of us ruining our day,’ she said. As though our days weren’t ruined already. ‘You stay here, keep Emma company. I’ll see you outside in a few minutes.’

 

When Mum left the room, I walked over to the edge of Emma’s bed. My chest, I realised, felt heavy, though what it was heavy with �" sorrow, fear, rage �" wasn’t immediately clear. The way the morning had gone, it might well have been all those things at once.

 

I knelt down beside Emma, and when I placed a hand on her bony shoulders I started to cry. At twenty years of age, she had the body of someone of eighty or more. Her once-soft skin was stretched tight over her face, her hair dull and brittle. It broke me to remember how she’d used to laugh as we played together as children, how deeply in love she’d been with life and the world. Now, lying asleep on a hospital bed hundreds of miles from home, she was too old to be young, and always would be. She’d learned the cruelty of life, and no longer had room in her heart for anything but sadness and pain.

 

I brought my hand to Emma’s face, ran my fingers across her cold cheek. ‘I’ll be back to see you soon,’ I said, my voice shaking. ‘You’ll feel better by then.’ I took a deep, stuttering breath, blew it out again as the next great wave of emotion crashed against my chest. ‘I’m so sorry you’re feeling like this. Remember, though, we’ve been here before. Things will be better. It takes time, but you’ll come home and we’ll get over this. Until then, don’t give up. Please, Emma, don’t give up.’

 

I took in another deep lungful of air, wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my coat. Then, as quietly as I could, I kissed my baby sister on the forehead and made my way from the room.

 

* * * * *

 

The rain continued to beat down as Mum and I made the short walk from the hospital to breakfast at a small café on Tooting High Street. We’d made regular visits there since our first visit to London some months ago, not because the food it served was particularly good, but because we wanted to establish some kind of routine during our trips to London, and a regular eating place seemed central to this plan. 

 

The café was called Marvin’s Mochas, for no good reason at all. For one thing, its owner’s name was Giovanni, and for another the only coffee they sold came out of the industrial-sized bucket of Nescafe that stood behind the counter. It was a proper greasy-spoon café, the kind that cooked everything in lard and served its drinks in stained, chipped mugs. But while it was far from sophisticated, it suited our needs perfectly. Giovanni and his waitresses were polite, the screwed-to-the-floor chairs were pretty comfortable, and the food cost hardly anything at all. This final perk was of the utmost importance, as neither Mum nor I ever left St Jude’s with anything close to an appetite and weren’t remotely keen to spend money on food that wouldn’t be eaten.

 

‘I’m sorry, James,’ Mum said, after a silence that had lasted through our attempts to make a dent in our very full English breakfasts. ‘I know this wasn’t the kind of celebration you expected when you graduated last week.’

 

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘There’ll be plenty of time to celebrate when Emma’s out of hospital.’

 

Mum looked at me, sadly and with great sympathy. ‘Why don’t you go into the city tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘You could go and visit the art gallery. You like galleries. Or take a ride on that big wheel of theirs.’

 

‘The London Eye,’ I said.

 

Mum chuckled. ‘Well, okay,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want to call yourself.’

 

I let that one go. The morning had been difficult enough already.

 

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But I’m fine here.’

 

Mum looked disappointed. ‘I’m happy to visit Emma on my own you know.’

 

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I want to see her.’

 

We fell into another silence, more awkward this time. No stranger to awkwardness, I knew the best way to shake off an unwanted silence was by pretending to text a friend, so I reached for my phone. However, my hand had barely found my pocket when Mum caught my attention with a well-timed cough. When I looked up from the table, I found her smiling sadly at me. ‘James?’ she said.

 

Oh dear. We were about to have one of our little conversations. Our little conversations always began with those sad little smiles. Sighing discreetly, I offered Mum a little smile of my own, inviting her to continue.

 

‘Have you considered taking that little holiday now you’re finished with your studies?’

 

‘Oh, Mum,’ I said, pushing my plate away from me. ‘Please. Not today.’

 

‘I know. But… have you?’

 

‘Mum,’ I said, with an angry little frown. ‘I already told you I have.’

 

Despite the angry little frown, Mum relaxed slightly in her chair. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good. Because, you know, you have a chance to really do something this year.’

 

Mum had been talking like this for some time now, talking about the possibility of my travelling in the months after I graduated. It would be good to broaden my horizons, she said, to meet a few new people, see a bit of their world. On every occasion I’d nodded thoughtfully, told her what a good idea it was. In truth, though, I had no intention of broadening my horizons any further than my own back garden.

 

Perhaps I could have risked a week away, but I knew Mum wasn’t just talking about a few days in Paris; she was talking about a month in Canada, or a winter in Australia. There was no way I could do that. Canada was hours from home, Australia an entire day. That was way too far, Emma was way too sick. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to her. There was just no way I’d forgive myself.

 

I don’t know how long Mum had known that I was anxious, but she was certainly aware of it now. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ she said. ‘Your dad and I will look after her.’

 

I raised a cynical eyebrow. ‘Dad will look after her, huh? Like he’s looking after her now, you mean?’

 

Mum shook her head sadly. ‘Oh, James,’ she said, without looking at me. For a long moment there was only the sound of the rain outside the window. Then, finally, Mum raised her eyes and said gently, ‘Listen to me. I know things aren’t easy at the moment, but you can’t miss out on life because of your family. Please. None of us want to hold you back.’

 

‘I know, Mum.’

 

‘Especially Emma.’

 

‘Jesus, Mum, I know!’

 

Mum checked the bill that sat on the table, counted out some pound coins and dropped them onto the Formica. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I think we both need to go back to the hotel, get a bit of rest. Let’s just drop the subject for now, shall we?’

 

That was fine by me. I hadn’t wanted to speak about it in the first place.