“Well, they will make me march up and down like an ape, you see. And I will be an idiot with nothing else to do and nothing else to think about except for you. Shhh, boutchou. Shhh. We will be together again, you see.”
“I love you,” said the girl. “I will never love anyone so much my entire life.”
“I love you too,” said the man. “I care for you and I love you and I shall see you again and I shall write you letters and you shall finish school and you shall see, all will be well.”
The girl’s sobs started to quiet.
“I can’t…I can’t bear it,” she said.
“Ah, love,” said the man, his accent strong. “That is what it is, the need to bear things.”
He buried his face in her hair.
“Alors. My love. Come back. Soon.”
“I will,” said the girl. “Of course I will come back soon.”
My two brothers stopped coming to visit me the instant it was clear I wasn’t actually going to snuff it—I loved them, but at twenty-two and twenty, you have a lot of other things to do that aren’t talking to your weird big sister about her weird accident in the hospital. Cath, bless her, of course, she was brilliant—I couldn’t do without her, but she worked really long hours at the hair salon. It was a forty-five-minute bus ride from the hospital, so she couldn’t come that often, though I so appreciated it when she did. She liked to tell me who won hideous hairstyle of the week and all the times she tried to convince them to make it less hideous but they fought on regardless, desperate to emulate a Kardashian, even though they had short, greasy brown wisps that wouldn’t take an extension. They’d be back in a week shouting and screaming and threatening to sue because what was left of their hair was falling out.
“I tell ’em,” said Cath. “They don’t listen. Nobody listens to me.”
She’d made me look in the bathroom mirror and told me I’d be all right. I looked absolutely hellish. My blue eyes were bloodshot all the time from the antibiotics and looked a bit yellow; my curly pale hair—normally blond with the help of Cath, now all growing out—was frizzy and all over the place, like a crazy person; and my pale skin was the same color and texture as hospital porridge. Cath tried to say encouraging things, mostly because she’s like that and also because she has to say encouraging things in the salon to sixty-year-old women who are two hundred pounds overweight and come in asking to look like Jennifer Lawrence, but we both knew it was a vain effort.
A lot of the time, though, it was just me and Claire. It was a weird situation, in that we got to know each other a lot faster than I supposed we would have otherwise. But I also realized, with a bit of a shock, that I was kind of glad, really, that I wasn’t with Darr anymore. He was a nice bloke and everything, but not one for conversation. If he’d had to come and see me every day, it would have been a disaster—we’d have been talking about nothing but fries and his favorite football team by day three. I don’t know how we’d have carried on exactly, without the possibility of a snog. (I still had a tube in my arm and a tube up my pee hole—sorry—and even if I didn’t, there was something about the idea of only having eight toes that made the idea of ever feeling sexy again rather unlikely.) Being sick gave me a lot of perspective; I’d been gutted when we broke up—he kept trying to be unfaithful, and in a town the size of Kidinsborough, that didn’t stay secret for long. His defense—that he’d been serially unsuccessful—didn’t help him, although I had liked the little flat we’d rented together. That was my one regret, even now. I missed that flat.
But he gave my brother Joe a box of chocolates to pass on to me (which Joe promptly ate, being twenty) and texted me to see if I was okay. I think he might even have taken me back, toes or no toes. I had heard his dating had been about as successful single as it had been with me, though that might just have been Cath trying to make me feel better.
But, oh, I was glad to have Claire. I’d bought a cheap smartphone six months before and now cursed my luck for not having something to play with that had anything better than, basically, Snake on it. I grumbled aloud at hospitals not having Wi-Fi connections, even when they told me they would interfere with the machines. (I’m not a scientist, right, but I bet that is totally, like, not even true.) I read lots of books, but there’s a difference between reading a book when you’re tired after working all day (desperate to get into the bath and enjoy a few pages with a cup of tea, even when Joe is banging on the door shouting about hair gel) and having nothing else to do.
Plus, I was on lots of medication and it was a bit tricky to concentrate. There was a telly in the far corner blaring away, but it was set to the same channel all day and I got really tired of watching loud, fat people shouting at each other, so I kept my headphones on. It was kind of great to see people, except I had nothing to say to them except how much fluid my wound was draining and other fricking disgusting things, so I didn’t really like chatting.
The nurses were a great laugh, but they were always in a rush, and the doctors were always knackered-looking and not really interested—they were all interested in my foot, but it might as well have been connected to a cat for all the interest they showed in me above the ankle. And everyone else on the ward was old. Really, really old. Really “Where am I? Is this the war?” old. I felt sorry for them and their anxious, exhausted-looking families coming in every day to hear “no change,” but I couldn’t really communicate with them. I didn’t realize young people—youngish—don’t often get that sick. Or if they did, they were over in surgery, having glamorous bits chopped off, or in accident and emergency recovering from a fabulous night out that got a bit out of hand, not over here in medicine, which was aging patients with a million things wrong with them and nowhere else to go.
So it was an absolute relief to sit calmly with Claire and repeat, steadily, rote memorizing avoir and être and the difference between the recent past and the ongoing past and learning how to roll my r’s properly. (“You must,” she said, over and over again, “work so hard on your accent. Be French. Be the Frenchiest French accent of anyone. Do a massive Inspector Clouseau and wave your arms about.” “I feel like an idiot,” I said. “You will,” agreed Claire, “until you speak some French and a French person understands you.”)