I WOKE UP. AGAIN. How many times had I been bumped awake in this one long night? And where was I now? I leapt to attention, my eyes wide and already focused, slapped into reality with nothing to cushion my fall.
I was sitting against the bedroom wall, clear moonlight splitting the room into light and dark. The smell of dust filled my nose, and the night-time cold of the draughty floorboards numbed my arse. I was awake. I was awake. This was real.
I didn’t have to search for Dom; my eyes found him immediately. He lay in the middle of the floor, curled into a lazy ‘S’ shape. His feet were resting comfortably, one under the other. His hands were tucked under his chin. His eyes were shut.
I scurried across the floor, moaning his name over and over. He wasn’t moving. I couldn’t see him breathe. Perhaps he was dead. I had already told James that Dom was dead; I had already believed it. But not now that I’d found him. Now that I’d hauled him out of that place. Now that I had rested my hand on his chest and felt his beating heart – I couldn’t let him be dead. Please, let him be alive.
I grabbed him and pulled him up by his shoulders. He was loose-limbed and limp as rags, and so, so cold. Not Francis-cold – normal cold, dead-body cold.
‘Dom.’ It came out a dry hiss of a word. ‘Dom!’ I shook him. ‘Come on!’
He opened his eyes and looked up at me – Dom’s eyes, clear and chocolate-brown, looking up at me as if I’d asked a surprising question. I choked out a bark of hysterical joy. Then his eyes rolled back, all the way to the whites, and he rolled out of my arms, turned away from me, and vomited all over the floor.
I’ve never seen so much puke. It stunned me into a kind of motionless awe. Kneeling over him, my hands held up in surprise, I watched as a spectacular amount of the stuff poured out of him and washed across the floorboards. His silence was eerie; he hardly even made a retching noise. His body just kept contracting and releasing, contracting and releasing, and with each painful inward curl, the tide of vomit grew.
It was everything he’d eaten since yesterday, chewed and undigested, a mass of instantly recognisable bits and pieces: the map of all that had gone before. This evening’s chicken casserole and the bread-and-butter pudding that had followed; the grease-coated sausage-and-egg-and-bacon-rasher breakfast; the chewed bites of toast; the milky wash of numerous cups of tea; even the lumpy remains of last night’s bread, butter and cheese and the white gushing tide of an entire bottle of milk.
The green pills of librium were nowhere to be seen. I found myself scanning the vile pool, watching for their vivid colour in the bland confusion of browns and creams, but they never showed up.
He stopped moving. I stared down at him, waiting for what came next.
Nothing. Nothing came next. The last contraction released its hold on him, and his body relaxed into a loose curl. His hands unfurled from under his chin and came to a rest in front of his face. He looked like he’d fallen asleep saying his prayers, except that he was lying with his cheek in a pool of his own vomit, his curls sticking to skin so pale and shiny that it reflected the moon. His eyes were closed.
‘DOM!’ I snatched him up and dragged him onto my knee again, pushing back with my feet, distancing the two of us from that disgusting puddle. ‘DOM!’ I screamed, and when he didn’t answer I just began shouting, very loud, very incoherent. I can’t to this day remember what exactly I was yelling.
This time, when the door opened, it was Ma. She flew towards us. I offered him up to her. We weren’t alone anymore.
MY MEMORIES OF that night are like snapshots: clear and sharp moments of what I know was a much longer time.
They thought it was food poisoning. They thought it was the flu. They very briefly thought it was meningitis. Theory after theory was proposed and discarded in rapid succession. The longer Dom remained unresponsive, the more puzzled their guesses became. The room emptied and then filled, and emptied again, and filled. I was pushed further and further back ’til I was standing against the wall, wedged into the corner by the dressing table.
I remember a doctor, young and stern. He wanted me to leave the room. He kept glancing at me and saying, ‘You go on outside now and wait downstairs.’ I remember wordlessly shaking my head, my back pressed to the wall, my eyes glued to Dom. I remember the doctor got very angry. Eventually he stood up and flung his stethoscope down onto the bed. It bounced and clattered to the floor just as my ma came in. She gaped at him as he strode past her, and gasped as he grabbed me by the arm.
‘Listen to me, you stupid boy!’ He was hissing into my face, but I couldn’t concentrate on him. My eyes slid past him, and I tilted my head so that I could look at Dom. The doctor shook me. ‘If you don’t leave this room now your brother will die, do you hear me?’ He had more to say, but my ma came up behind him and actually whacked him on the head. He dropped my arm like it had burnt him and ducked away from her, a look of absolute shock on his face.
She didn’t say a word, just stood there, her eyes glittering, her mouth a quivering line. She stared the doctor down. Then she raised her hand and pointed at the bottom bunk where my brother lay, still and pale in the shadows. The doctor held her eye for a moment, his cheeks two hectic flares of colour, his hand to the back of his head. Then he blushed a deep, deep red and dropped his eyes.
I got to stay in the room.
They panicked when Dom began shivering. He shivered and shook like someone had dragged him from icy water. His hands clawed up into hooks. His knees drew up to his chest. They thought for the longest while that they would never get him warm.
Morning had just started to paint the windows when my dad came running up the stairs and burst into the bedroom. I remember him making a strange sound when he saw Dom, a half wail, half shout. I remember Ma starting to cry once she saw Dad, as if she’d been waiting until he arrived. I remember him spinning suddenly from where he had been kneeling beside Dom and scanning the room with frantic eyes. It took him a long time to see me; I think I had become part of the wall by then, a shadow in the corner. Dad found me, though. His eyes locked on me, and he made a quiet growling noise far back in his throat and leapt to his feet. I don’t know why, but I thought he was going to hit me. He didn’t – of course he didn’t – he grabbed me instead and hugged me tight to him and rocked me like a baby.
They couldn’t figure out the damage to Dom’s fingers and toes. They thought maybe they were burns. ‘If I didn’t know better,’ the young doctor said, ‘I’d say he had frostbite.’
Then they found the damage to my hands and the damage to Dad’s hands. They began to wonder if it was some kind of rash. Meningitis came back into the conversation.
I remember the doctor examining the split in Dom’s lip. I remember him glancing over at my bruised jaw. I saw his eyes flick to my poor dad, and a look of disgust crossed his face. Thankfully, Dad had his attention fixed on my mother at the time.
There was brief talk of a mystery virus. The word ‘quarantine’ began to crop up. There was a suggestion of bringing Dom to Cherry Orchard Fever Hospital. My mam asked what they’d do for him there that they couldn’t do here. The doctor didn’t have a particularly good answer. Dom stayed with us.
I recall another doctor, an older man with dark, kind eyes and a Jewish face, kneeling on the floor in front of me and taking my hand. When had I slid to the floor? I couldn’t remember. The doctor wagged my hand from side to side a little, to get my attention. I looked into his eyes. I remember thinking, That’s what Dom’s eyes will look like when he’s old. Dad swam into view beside him, and he was staring intently at me. I think it was very early in the morning, but I can’t be sure because the room had that aquarium feel to it that things get when you’re very tired.
‘Patrick,’ the doctor said, ‘I want you to answer me truthfully now, yes?’ He had a strange accent, like a German accent or something.
Dad was looking at me over the doctor’s shoulder. He said, ‘We won’t be annoyed, son. We just need to know.’
I looked blankly at them both.
The doctor squeezed my hand. Normally I wouldn’t have liked that. Normally I would have jerked my hand away. But, right then, it was okay that he was holding my hand; it was more than okay. I gently tightened my grip to let him know I was listening. The doctor nodded and smiled his kind smile. ‘Did Dominick take anything he shouldn’t have? Any kind of drugs?’
I tiredly closed my eyes. Oh.
Dad was talking. ‘. . . sometimes curiosity gets the better of people. It’s . . . everyone makes mistakes, son. We just need to know . . . ’
I squeezed the doctor’s hand again and let go. ‘No,’ I said. I wanted to say more, but I was so bloody tired. I couldn’t, just couldn’t, find any more words.
There was a small moment of stillness, then a hand patted my shoulder and the two men were gone. They had a long and whispered consultation on the other side of the door. I heard my ma quite clearly saying, ‘You are not making that boy leave this room.’
Eventually, I remember Ma taking my hand and pulling me into a standing position. She got me to peel off my cords, and she dragged my jumper up over the top of my head. Between them, she and Dad helped me to bed. I caught a glimpse of Dom as I staggered across to the bunk. He had finally stopped shaking, and he was propped up on a small mountain of pillows. He passed from my sight as Dad helped me up the ladder. I could hardly hold my head up.
I crawled into bed, flopping onto my stomach with a numb and smoky exhaustion. The bunk swayed like a ship; the room revolved slowly around me. My pillow was cold. The blankets were warm. I began to plummet downwards. I was losing my grip on things. I pulled myself back. No! I couldn’t do that; I couldn’t leave Dom.
Something scraped the floor in the corner of the room, and I tiredly turned my head to see. Dad was sitting by the window in a chair he must have brought up from the kitchen. The sky was a hot blue behind him, the window open against the smell of vomit and disinfectant that had filled the room. It was late morning, maybe later. Dad’s face was in shadow, and he was sitting staring at Dom. He must have felt me watching him because he suddenly switched his gaze to me.
‘I’m so sorry, Patrick.’
I couldn’t keep my eyes open, so I answered him as they were closing. The pillow seemed to be swallowing the right side of my face. ‘What for?’
‘You told me Dom was sick. I’m sorry I didn’t listen.’
I wanted to tell him that there was nothing he could have done, but I was already gone.