There’s a voice somewhere. A woman’s voice. But it’s muffled, echoing, like I’m hearing it underwater.
It’s saying words I don’t understand. Am I in a foreign country?
I try to listen closely and some of the words seem almost familiar.
I hear my name.
A face appears far above me, a blue mask over the mouth. It floats. It blurs and warps.
Something is very wrong, but I don’t know what. I can’t remember what. There’s pain. I can’t breathe. I’m drowning.
I look around for Billie. She won’t drown. She can swim like a fish, like a mermaid. Perhaps she’ll save me if she just takes hold of my hand and doesn’t let go. But I can’t see her and so I am drowning.
I try to move, try to get the attention of the woman, whoever she is, up there floating above the water.
‘It’s okay,’ the voice says.
I force my eyes open again although everything is hazy and too bright and my eyelids are so heavy.
‘Mum?’ I say, or try to, but it bubbles away into the waves. I can see her more clearly now, in her silky, film-star dress, with the tiny buttons all the way up the back, the mask gone. But then she blurs again and her eyes grow bigger and darker, her shining dress turning to sleek fur as I sink deeper and she fades into shadow.
‘Her BP’s spiking,’ Mum says.
‘Clem!’ Someone else is there. ‘Clem, can you hear me?’
A hand on my arm. Dad.
‘Can’t you do something?’ he says. He sounds scared. ‘Please do something.’
‘I can’t, Dad. I can’t do anything. I’m sorry. I can’t do anything.’
But maybe the current is too strong and my voice floats away, out to the deepest sea where no light reaches. I fight against the pull of it.
‘It’s okay, Clem,’ Mum says. But she’s changed. She isn’t Mum now. She takes off her mask and is someone else altogether.
‘Oh, it’s not you,’ and I wonder whether Mum has always been someone else.
‘Hush. You sleep now, Clem,’ the not-Mum says. Her voice is soothing. ‘That’s it.’
I give myself up to the current and it pulls me under, into the darkness, away from them.
‘You’ve been here three weeks,’ Dad says, sitting on my hospital bed, holding my hand. ‘More.’ He has bruised-looking rings under his eyes and greyish stubble. He is thin. Out of the window I can see it’s raining.
‘No,’ I say.
‘They brought you to St Thomas’s. After… Do you remember?’
I remember flashes. Someone carrying me and running, leaning over low, shielding me with their body. A person running in front of us, I could see their legs upside down as my head lolled back; they were holding something white and red-stained up towards the sky, which was below us. There were no birds to wish on in that fallen sky. On the paving stones, above us, blood, a shoe, abandoned placards. And then an ambulance, the driver arguing with someone in army uniform, shouting at them. Sirens. And then screaming. Me, screaming and—
‘Billie?’ I say. ‘Billie. Where is she?’
Dad’s eyes flicker away from mine. Time has shifted. His stubble is now a beard. Sunlight streams through the window.
‘Clem…’ He takes both my hands and looks right at me again.
‘No.’
‘Billie’s here. No, I mean, she’s in this hospital. A few floors up. She’s in a coma. She’s…’ He can’t speak.
I shake my head and take my hands away from his.
‘She’s very ill, Clem,’ he says at last. ‘They say…’
His voice falters.
‘They’re wrong,’ I say.
‘They say she’s dying. That she’s gone already really.’
‘She’s not.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. He is crying. He covers his face with his hands.
I close my eyes.
They tell me I’m not yet strong enough to see Billie but I tell them that if they don’t let me I’ll take out all the needles and tubes and go up there anyway, and then if I collapse and die it will all be their fault. They’re busy, understaffed. They can’t watch me all the time. The consultant says wearily, ‘Well, under the circumstances, I suppose…’ and so they let me go up to see her.
Dad takes me in a wheelchair. I’m still attached to a drip, which has to be wheeled along with us, and its wheels are like the sort on a supermarket trolley that all try to go in the opposite directions from each other and us. The whole thing would have been funny once but now I can’t imagine what laughing feels like.
We get the lift up. I look at us in the endless lift mirrors, the thin, grey man and the pale girl in a hospital gown, sprouting tubes and metal, repeating and repeating into infinity. I don’t recognize us.
Billie is lying in a hospital bed like mine and when I see her I smile and although my voice catches in my throat I call out to her, because the doctors are wrong. She’s not dying! She’s Billie, sleeping, looking like she always looks when she’s sleeping – okay, yes, with lots of tubes and pumps and drips and monitors, but otherwise just as though I’ve finished telling her a story and she’s drifted off to sleep.
I make Dad wheel me right up to her, close enough to reach out and hold her hand. It feels small and right in mine.
I shouldn’t have let go. I don’t understand how I let go.
‘Billie,’ I say. ‘I’m here.’
And although she doesn’t reply I know she knows.
‘Don’t let go,’ I whisper.
I sit on the edge of Billie’s bed, as I do every day, waiting to catch my breath after the short walk from the lift, watching her face.
I wonder where she is. Far, far away. I remember how it felt, being under the water, seeing not-Mum through the water. Billie is deeper than that. She is in the depths near the seabed, I think, where the fish glow because it’s darker than night down there. She can’t see me. But I think she can hear me. They say maybe she can, the nurses – they say, ‘Go on, Clem – talk to her. Go on. It might help.’
I take a deep breath and I try to find the right thing to say.
‘It’s me,’ I say, heart thudding. ‘Billie, it’s me. Clem.’
Then silence, except for hospital noise. Beep, hiss, thud. I have nothing to tell her.
‘There’s a man on my ward who snores like a pig,’ I say. ‘And there’s a woman who cries. Especially at night. Nice and quiet here though. We’re a lot of floors up. Really high. We’re looking out over the river.’
The Thames is silver-grey today, like the sky. It’s always surprising when you see it from above, the way it loops and bends, twists of satiny ribbon dropped across a toy city.
‘You can see the London Eye,’ I tell Billie. It’s not turning though: it’s like a stopped clock, which seems right. The glass pods are all empty. No tourists now. No day-trippers.
Everything is quiet. There are no buses today. No traffic on the bridge. No queues for the London Eye or the Aquarium. No joggers, no buskers. Everything is still, slick with rain. No passenger boats either, only a police boat – or army maybe. A boat with armed officers onboard anyway. The breath seems to stick in my throat as I watch it patrolling up and down, cutting through the dark water in a straight line. The police boats are like cats, seemingly lazy and indifferent, advancing slowly, but in reality watching, always on the alert and ready to pounce. Shadow, our old cat would sit for ages in the garden, patiently watching the birds flying back and forth to their nest. And then he’d rattle in through the cat flap and deliver limp, fluffy-feathered baby birds at our feet, tiny burst cushions, all the life gone. The patrol boat passes right in front of me, so I can see each uniformed figure, each hand, each weapon. I press the glass with my hands to convince myself that it’s really there and then lean my forehead against it because it’s cool and close my eyes again.
The silence presses in, suffocating, and I need to break it.
‘Remember Shadow?’ I say. ‘Remember how he used to lie on your head and purr during the night.’
Billie never fully forgave him for the baby birds, despite loving him intensely. When he met his own demise, under the wheels of a Tesco delivery van, she cried. But after we’d covered over the shoebox containing his remains she stamped down the earth forcefully with a wellied foot and said, ‘The birds will be safe now.’
I turn around to Billie.
She’s still exactly as she was: expressionless, calm, far, far away.
If I could only find the right thing to say, the right story to tell, perhaps I can bring her back.
‘Clem?’
Billie’s voice.
I fight to get to her, force my eyes open, push myself up through the dark to reach her. It should be hard to sleep on the too-loud, too-bright ward but one of the pills or tubes sees to that and blurs the time I’m awake.
When I open my eyes, I see Billie standing there in her nightie, holding Luna, just like that night after Claudia left, just like I will see her many times on many nights to come, when I will wake in the dark and hear her say my name.
‘B?’ I say, hazy with sleep and painkillers. ‘Can’t sleep? Come on. In you get.’
She just smiles.
‘I’ll tell you a story,’ she says.
And she does, a story that makes me laugh and cry and reach out to hold her hand. But by the time she finishes it I find it’s gone from my mind completely, like words written in wet sand washed away by a wave.
‘Now go to sleep,’ she says.
I slip into blank emptiness.
When I wake up, she is gone. The bed is cold.
Dad’s there. He is crying.
‘Clem,’ he says. ‘Oh, Clem.’
‘No,’ I say, my voice sticking in my throat. ‘I just saw her. She was here.’
‘I’m sorry.’
No.
I close my eyes.
This is the ending.
Once there was a girl who died.
As the girl ran into the castle, the sound of birdsong grew louder and louder. She found a courtyard, with a fountain at its centre and flowers growing about it. There stood the witch, still as young and beautiful as ever. All around her were hundreds upon hundreds of golden birdcages. They hung from every branch of every tree, and in every cage was a bird singing its own sweet, sad song. The girl knew she must destroy the witch before she could find her sister and free all the other birds.
The witch sprang towards her. At once the girl took the blood-red flower and touched the witch with it. As soon as the red petals touched the witch’s skin she began to wither like a rotten apple, shrivelling and crumpling, then collapsing into dust.
The instant the witch was dead, her enchantment was broken. The golden cages all sprang open and the birds flew out. For a moment the girl saw them all as the children they had been before the witch had cast her spell on them, saw their eager faces, heard an echo of their chatter, the joyful sound of their laughter.
But the moment was brief, for had it not been for the witch’s enchantment the children would all have died long ago.
And so, as the girl watched, the bird-children all rose up, birds once more, in a rainbow of wings and birdsong, until they faded into nothing. One bird flew towards the girl, and she knew it was her sister. The little creature was weak, barely able to fly, so the girl cradled her gently in her hand as the bird sang her beautiful, sad song.
‘You must fly away with the others,’ the girl said, choked with tears.
But the bird would not leave. She sang on, the music growing fainter and fainter, until at last her song and her breath stopped.
The girl wept bitterly. Her search had all been for nothing. She carried the bird to the tree where she had first dreamt of the blood-red flower and buried her there. Then she lay down and cried until she slept. She dreamt her sister was sitting next to her.
‘You buried my bones beneath the wishing tree,’ the sister said, ‘and so now, whenever you sleep with my feather beneath your pillow, I will come to you.’
When the girl woke, she heard birdsong in the branches of the tree above her and a single blue feather drifted down as the bird flew away.
The girl picked up the feather, as blue as the summer’s sky, and knew her sister would always be with her.
The last thing I pack is my notebook. I close the rucksack and bend to lift it onto my back.
Downstairs, Polly is waiting for me. She hugs me.
‘This is for you,’ she says, holding out a tiny spider plant. ‘Or maybe for your stepmum with the green fingers.’
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Your spider plant had babies. Congrats.’
She smiles modestly.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘this is for you.’ I hand her a paper crane, folded out of a flyer from the rack in the foyer about sexually transmitted diseases. ‘Sorry, it was the only thing I could find.’
‘I’ll treasure it always,’ she says.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I always thought I hated shrinks but you’re okay.’
‘I’m not exactly a shrink, but thanks anyway. I’ll miss you, Clem. Let me know how you’re getting on, will you?’
‘I will,’ I say, because you have to, don’t you? But then I think, maybe I actually will keep in touch with Polly. Because when she says, ‘I’ll miss you, Clem,’ I can see she really means it. And I realize I might even miss her too. She didn’t have to do what she did. I bet the pay’s rubbish and Polly’s smart. She could get an easier job in a proper office with a fancy coffee machine and a gym and a healthcare plan. But instead she sits in a cupboard full of plants she’s killed and helps people like me. So maybe I will send her a postcard, one day. I turn and walk to the door.
‘Oh!’ I turn back to her suddenly, just as I’m about to walk out. ‘Can you tell your posh sister thanks too? Tell her she is kind, even if she doesn’t think she is. And tell her my sister Billie agreed with her: stories should have happy endings.’
Polly smiles. ‘And what about you, Clem? Do you think stories should have happy endings?’
I turn again to the door. Through its glass I can see the world outside, waiting for me to step into it.
‘I guess we’ll find out.’