5 January 2000
I call them bastard liars when they tell me I died.
The doctors, nurses, pharmacists, Dad, Mum, even Ant. They’re all in on this conspiracy to keep me in the hospital by making up stuff about what happened to me. They say I ‘died’ for eighteen minutes, and that it was only Tim pounding on my chest that kept me going.
Bullshit.
Sure, my ribs are knackered and every breath hurts like hell. And there are times when I can’t control my body, so my limbs spasm at random, jerking and lurching with all the power of my best kicks.
It’s bad, yeah, but I can’t have died. Even a dumb footballer knows that’s a one-way street.
Out in the real world, Sunday turns into Monday which turns into Tuesday and now it’s Wednesday and I’m already being left behind. My parents have given up their round-the-clock vigil, and when they come in at lunchtime, they’re all over each other, like my trauma has made them fall in love again or something.
Ant’s gone back to catering college and Kerry’s back at school, so there’s been no one to protect me from the staff who keep coming to prod or poke or scan the body that doesn’t look or feel like mine anymore.
But now it’s dusk. She’s here. Kerry, I recognize her footsteps. I feel safe, as long as she’s nearby.
‘How are the jerks?’ she asks when she reaches my bed.
‘Driving me mad,’ I reply.
‘Oh no.’ Her forehead creases with worry. ‘I thought you looked a lot less . . . juddery?’
‘I was talking about the doctors. The jerks. Get it?’
It takes her a moment, but now she’s grinning so broadly she looks about five years old. ‘A joke! Joel, you made a joke.’
‘Yeah, and?’
‘Jokes are hard. They take . . . word play and understanding and a sense of humour. It means . . . well, it means you’re still you.’
Every time she comes in, she repeats the jerks question and I give the same answer: it’s our in-joke. She’s the only one I trust not to be part of the conspiracy.
‘They’re going to move me,’ I tell her on Friday. Or is it Saturday? No, I’d know in my bones if it was match day.
‘About time. You don’t belong in here with this lot.’ She looks over her shoulder at the other patients, who are mostly out of it. ‘I mean, they’re not great conversationalists.’
‘Neither am I, Kerry. I kick a ball and grunt occasionally, and I didn’t pass a single exam.’ Not that I’ve ever cared about exams. All that matters to me is football.
Kerry laughs. ‘You don’t need GCSEs to be a mega-star and the nearest our school had to a pin-up.’
I realize she’s blushing. Why would she blush when she’s paying me a compliment? My brain feels foggy as I try to work out what I should say next. Am I meant to say, No, I’m not that good? Because that would be a lie. I am good. I really bloody am.
The silence has gone on a bit too long and I’m in danger of saying something that proves what a dickhead I am. Since I woke up from the coma, I can’t always control what comes out of my mouth. Before, I found it easy to get on with people, have a laugh. Kerry is wrong: I’m not still me. The new me is unpredictable and rude. A stranger. I hate it.
My nurse, a dark-humoured blond-haired giant from the Czech Republic, comes into view.
‘I’m hoping it’ll be livelier on the cardiology ward. That’s where I’m going, right, Vaclav? Can’t wait.’
‘You’ll miss us when you’re gone. This place is like first class on the aeroplane. Downstairs it’s economy, no more one-to-one VIP service. And the view is not five-star.’
The view is the one thing I like about ICU: I feel like I’m in a helicopter that hovers over the city. Vaclav has moved my bed so I can see the beach and two piers floating on top of the grey water.
‘The main thing is it means they think you’re getting better,’ Kerry says.
I shrug, which bloody hurts. When Tim visited me, he explained it was because he must have bruised my ribs when he gave CPR. I banned him from visiting again because he’s to blame for the pain that comes when I breathe or twist or laugh. ‘I don’t think there was anything wrong with me in the first place.’
She leans in and I can smell the flowery perfume my first girlfriend used to wear. Weird. I’ve never seen Kerry as a girly girl. Or as a girl at all. ‘There must have been. People our age don’t drop dead for no reason, there has to be a cause and they need to find it. We’ve talked about this, Joel—’
Have we? People keep telling me we’ve already discussed all kinds of stuff, and when I tell them I don’t remember, they blame the drugs that put me in the coma.
But what if it’s not the drugs? What if my brain was wrecked by the eighteen minutes that I wasn’t breathing?
‘So you think I died as well, do you?’
‘Well . . .’ Kerry picks at the nail on the ring finger of her left hand. All the other nails are short, but this one is red raw and almost down to the quick, as if she’s chosen to take all her stress out on it. ‘Only technically.’
My foot begins to shake under the bed sheet. We both watch it – Vaclav looks up from paperwork, always vigilant. After a few embarrassing seconds, the movement stops of its own accord. ‘People can’t come back from the dead, except in Stephen King books.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘What was it like? Tim told me some of the details but . . . I forgot.’
Only three people saw the whole thing close up: Ant, Tim and Kerry. Ant won’t talk to me about it because it’s ‘too mental’, and if I ever see Tim again, it’ll be too bloody soon.
‘You remember playing on the Lawns that night?’ she asks, placing her hands under her legs, so she can’t inflict any more pain on her bleeding finger.
Do I – or is it a memory I’ve pieced together from other times? ‘Sure.’
‘It was nearly midnight and I . . . happened to be looking across the grass when you fell.’ She blushes again. ‘I ran over and you didn’t seem to be breathing, so Fat Matt went off to get an ambulance while I—’ She stops. ‘While I did rescue breaths to put oxygen into your blood and . . . Tim . . . did CPR because your heart had stopped beating.’
‘And broke my bloody ribs, yeah, he told me. But what made you think I was dead?’
‘There were signs.’
‘What signs? Some bloke with a tail and fire coming out of his arse trying to carry me off to hell?’ I’m shouting but I can’t seem to stop. This keeps happening.
She sighs. ‘Your eyes were blank. You made a funny noise. And the other thing is . . . you wet yourself.’
‘I pissed myself? In front of everyone?’
Kerry nods glumly. ‘It was only me that noticed. I tried to stop anyone getting close enough to see. Don’t be embarrassed, it’s just the muscles relax when someone . . .’
When someone dies. I close my eyes. The others are bastard liars. But Kerry? If Kerry says it, it has to be true.
‘We kept doing the CPR and rescue breaths till the ambulance arrived.’
‘You mean the kiss of life?’ A horrible thought occurs to me. ‘Tim did the kiss of life on me?’
‘No. I did.’ Her cheeks are bright red now. ‘It’s not a real kiss. It’s just transferring air from my lungs into your lungs using my . . .’ She hesitates. ‘Well, using my mouth.’
This new detail is overwhelming. ‘I can’t stand this.’
‘Sorry, I wouldn’t have done it if there’d been any other—’
‘Go home, Kerry.’
‘Joel, I’ve only just got here. Dad’s not picking me up till seven.’
‘Then walk. You need the exercise; you’re too chubby.’ She’s not chubby, she’s just right. But I want to hurt her, like she hurt me telling me about me wetting myself like some wino on the Level. ‘At least you can leave. I fucking can’t.’
‘If you’re embarrassed, don’t be,’ Kerry says flatly. ‘Everyone knows you were out cold. No one thinks you’d ever kiss a girl like me if you had the choice—’
‘Just go.’
Something slaps onto the bed: a sports magazine. She always brings me a present. ‘I was wrong about you being the same, Joel. You might have ignored me before but you were never deliberately mean.’
I close my eyes. She zips up her coat and her steps fade away.
‘She’s gone now,’ Vaclav says. When I open my eyes, he’s by the bed shaking his head, his massive eyebrows meeting in the middle as he frowns. ‘You want to say sorry the next time you see her; you’re going to need all the friends you can get.’
Vaclav is an idiot. I’ve never had a problem making friends. If anything, I’ve got too many.
The moods, the tiredness, the pain – the difference – it’s got to get better, if I try hard enough. The real me will be back before you can say Joel Greenaway is the Dolphins’ greatest hope.
The day after I move wards, Coach Coley and Murray, the Under 23s’ team captain, show up at my bedside carrying what looks like Tesco’s entire fruit aisle.
‘All right, Banana Man? Brought you some supplies.’
I got my nickname because I’m the only football trainee to take nutrition seriously, eating fruit instead of chocolate, drinking OJ instead of beer. Now I wonder: why did I bother?
In my tartan granddad pyjamas, I feel like a sick person and I can tell from the pity in Murray’s eyes that I look like one too.
Screw him. I’m the better player and rumours say he’s going to be dropped this season anyway.
‘We lost the match without you, sunshine,’ Coley says. He’s the one I have to impress. His own career ended after an injury, and I’ve always felt sorry for him – it’s my worst nightmare. ‘Taylor got stretchered off after a nasty tackle.’
I grin. ‘You wanna see a really nasty tackle?’ Even as I start to unbutton my pyjama top, I’m beginning to regret it. But I’ve committed now. I pull the two sides apart to show them my chest. ‘I woke up thinking I’d done ten rounds with Tyson.’
But they don’t laugh, they cringe. My torso is black and blue and purple and green, like Joseph’s Technicolor dream coat.
Murray pulls a face. ‘That must have hurt.’
I’m about to tell him I didn’t feel a thing because I’d been dead at the time, but I stop the words coming out. ‘No big deal. I’ll be back on the pitch before you know it.’
Coley is still staring at my chest. ‘You can’t rush getting fit again, all right, Joel?’
He’s never used my first name before. At the club, apprentices are treated worse than squaddies. In our first year, they broke us down – cleaning the bogs, skivvying for the adult players. This year, they’re building us back up again as footballing automata. We put up with it because nothing in the world feels as incredible as playing.
Coley’s eyes meet mine, and a flash of understanding passes between us.
I put on my best determined face. ‘Sure, coach. But I won’t let you down. The game is everything to me.’
‘All right, Greenaway. However long it takes, we’ll wait for you.’