Lizzie
Lizzie jolted awake and all at once became aware of four things: the warmth of Ben’s chest where her head seemed to be resting; the griping pain stretching down her spine; the stillness of the truck, no longer juddering into her buttocks and thighs; and the persistent darkness of the night.
Lizzie sat bolt upright, her eyes fixing on the creased area of Ben’s T-shirt before dragging them up to his face.
‘Are we here?’ she murmured, grateful for the darkness masking the flush creeping across her face. The last thing she remembered was resting against the glass behind their backs and closing her eyes. So, how had her body found its way so close to Ben’s? And how had her head found its way to his chest?
Ben nodded and shuffled along the flatbed to unhook the latch.
‘I’d better go say thank you to the driver,’ she said, sliding their backpacks to the ledge without looking at him.
Lizzie scrambled down from the truck and had a sudden longing for the bitter black coffee from the vending machines that sat in the corridors at every hospital she’d ever been to, and she’d been to a lot. She never thought that she’d miss anything about hospitals, but now, in the darkness, she craved that coffee.
Ten minutes later, they’d purchased their tickets into the temple grounds and had followed a crowd of people to a wide stone wall.
Lizzie and Ben positioned themselves with their legs dangling over the edge, facing into the darkness. Lizzie’s muscles cried out in protest as she sat on yet another cold hard surface. At least this one didn’t vibrate, she conceded.
Ben pulled out his camera, seating it on his lap with the lens facing into the nothingness of night. Lizzie felt the presence of other people nearby, yet no one spoke. The anticipation floated in the air around them.
The first glow of light could have been a handheld torch, almost out of batteries, being held up by someone a few hundred metres away. After a few minutes, Lizzie began to wonder if maybe that’s what it had been, but then, even without the presence of the sun on the horizon, the sky around them began to lighten. The three cone spires of the central temple were now visible on the other side of a large moat, which looked more like a lake, stretching across from the outer wall where they sat, all the way to the temple.
Lizzie glanced at Ben and the red light glowing on his camera, and when she looked up again time had jumped forward. Within the blink of an eye the infinitesimal light had morphed into a spectacle of colours. Behind the black outline of the temple a splodge of dark orange glowed, spreading out into a vibrant fuchsia, then deep purples and dark blues.
She stared, transfixed by its beauty. Lizzie had never seen such colours in the sky before. The entire scene reflected back at them in the crystal-clear mirror image from the moat, as if they were watching two sunrises at the same time. It was everything she’d hoped it would be, she thought with both joy and sadness.
‘What are you looking for when you look at the sky?’ he asked.
She pulled her eyes away from the horizon, glancing first into his eyes before her gaze dropped to the camera now pointed towards her. She could feel herself preparing to answer, feel the emotion welling to the surface, but not yet.
With every minute that ticked by, the sky before them transformed. The dark blues lightened, the pinks faded and the orange glow took on its spherical form. Eventually, the other visitors began to move away.
Only when the full circle of the sun peaked above the highest tower of the temple did she feel ready to answer. ‘When I was nine, I spent a lot of time at Great Ormond Street Hospital, in London. There was a boy in the bed next to me, Ethan.’ Saying his name out loud felt like picking off a deep scab and feeling the pain of the wound all over again.
‘He had Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia so he was in for the long haul like me,’ she said. ‘I ignored him for a few days, probably because he was a boy and I was at that age when boys were the enemy, but it’s hard to ignore someone when you’ve heard them throwing up a metre away from your bed all night.
‘One time he spent the entire night dry retching. It was horrible to listen to, but I knew it was worse for him. You’ve got no idea how exhausting it is to be sick like that. I guess I felt sorry for him, because I walked up to his bed with a deck of cards behind my back, and he said, “What you looking at, baldy?” and I said, “You, baldy. Can you keep the noise down when you’re chundering, please? Some of us are trying to sleep.” It wasn’t very funny but suddenly we couldn’t stop laughing and we were best friends from that point on.’ She tilted her face to the sun and felt the first warmth of its rays. It felt right to tell this story here and now with the sky transforming above them.
Lizzie pulled in a long breath before she continued. ‘It must have been around the time that Ethan had started to get better because I don’t remember him being sick after that. But the ward was never peaceful at night. There was always someone crying, or a machine beeping, nurses coming in and out, or worst of all, a parent snoring.
‘One of us would sneak into the other’s bed and we’d play our own version of rummy we’d made up because we only had three quarters of a deck of cards. It never occurred to either of us to ask our parents to bring a full deck in. After a while we’d get tired of playing and just lie there whispering about normal things nine-year-olds talk about. I remember we spent an entire night talking about whether Father Christmas was real.
‘We spoke about death a lot too, which I guess wasn’t very normal for children of our age, but it was hard to ignore it. A girl across from us, Becky, I think her name was, had been moved to a different ward. We overheard the nurses talking about her. She’d gone to intensive care, but had died a day later.’
Lizzie paused, pushing back the mound clogging her airway.
‘Ethan talked a lot about heaven. He used to say that there was this point at every sunrise and sunset when you can see the gates of heaven opening to let people in. I used to tease him about it all the time, but he just smiled as if he knew something I didn’t.’
A single tear slid down her cheek. Then another.
‘One night I sneaked inside the curtain around his bed and went to climb in alongside him, but before I got to him I could feel this heat radiating off him. They did everything they could. Pumped him with antibiotics and a cocktail of other drugs, but it didn’t make any difference … he didn’t make it to morning.’
Lizzie reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of water. She took three long gulps, wiped the tears from her face, and pushed the emotions away. If she broke down now, then she’d never stop. ‘I think about Ethan all the time. Mostly, I wonder what he’d be doing now if he hadn’t died that night. Would we still be friends? Would he be a doctor and a goalkeeper for Tottenham Hotspur like he’d planned? I’d forgotten all about the whole sunset thing, until a few weeks ago, when it popped into my head completely out of the blue.
‘So, to answer your question, when I’m staring at the sunrise or sunset, I’m trying to figure out if heaven exists.’ She tried to say it matter-of-fact, but the quiver of emotion in her voice gave her away. Lizzie dropped her eyes to the water bottle in her hand and fiddled with the cap.
They fell silent. Ben flicked off the switch on his camera and closed the digital screen
‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Thanks. It was a long time ago.’
‘I’m sorry about your tumour too. It can’t be easy knowing you’re about to die.’
Lizzie drew in a sharp breath, her head jerking to look at him. Her vision blurred. The colours of the sunrise now dancing across her eyes like an abstract replay.
She nodded and stood up, scrunching her eyes shut for a second. ‘So what did you think of your first sunrise?’ she asked, hoping to guide the conversation back to safe territory before Ben saw the fear lurking beneath the surface of her skin. She’d seen what she’d come for. A sunrise so spectacular there weren’t the words to describe it, so why did she feel suddenly deflated? The high of the previous night was gone. Another night gone.
‘It was spectacular, I’ll give you that,’ Ben said. ‘But I’m not sure it was worth the hours in the back of that truck.’
‘Just as I suspected.’ She forced herself to smile. ‘Not human at all. Now, how about breakfast?’
‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘I could murder a fry-up, or some cereal or a croissant. Some toast would do. Anything really that isn’t noodles or rice. What are the chances, do you suppose?’
‘Slim to none, I’d guess.’ She smiled, her mood lifting.
‘Me too.’ He smirked. ‘Noodles it is then. Oh, and by the way, don’t go thinking you can use me as a human pillow again on the journey back.’
Lizzie snorted as she looked at Ben and the mischief glinting in his eyes.
‘And there I was thinking it was you using me for warmth.’
They laughed and fell into an easy stroll out of the temple grounds.