31 December 2017
After I’m discharged, I go back to the flat alone.
My parents come round with Christmas leftovers and I put on the best act I can. They try to talk me into going to the Pier Players’ New Year Bash – this year the theme is Stranger Things, so they’ve dug original 1980s tracksuits out of the loft – but they give up without too much of a fight.
After Mum and Dad leave, I sit by the window and watch as the sky turns grey, then deep blue, then black. The wind picks up.
I start a text to Marek on the replacement handset my sister got me. I find it hard to picture his face, even though he’s the man I’ve woken up next to for the last six months.
Hey. I’m going to bed early tonight. Have a wonderful night and I’ll see you in 2018.
I usually add xxx without hesitation but this afternoon it feels dishonest. I end it with Kerry and no kisses.
I half expect a call, but instead I get a message back.
I will call tomorrow. Happy new year, zabka. Mx
I hobble to the kitchen and pour a generous double of the flavoured gin Marilyn got me for Christmas. There’s no tonic so I drink it neat. Hibiscus? More like Hibiscrub hand cleanser.
I’m pouring another when my mobile rings. An international number. Do they not give scammers New Year’s Eve off? I answer, partly because I wouldn’t mind swearing at someone. ‘Hi?’
‘Is that Kerry?’
‘Gwen?’ Now I really wish I hadn’t answered, and brace myself for the telling off of my life. She must be apoplectic if she’s calling from Myanmar.
‘Now, listen, Sawyer’s been bombarding me with emails and links though I can’t click on any of them halfway up Mount Phongun.’
‘I messed up. I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, you did. Worse than that, you managed to get yourself filmed doing it. First rule, don’t get caught. I’ve had messages from the others. Lars is especially cross with you.’
When Lars called me, he was sympathetic but there was a hard edge to his voice. If your own colleagues aren’t backing you, you’re screwed. ‘I’m angry with myself, too.’
‘Righto. This call is costing me about a fiver per minute so cutting to the chase. You’ve screwed up royally, Kerry, but in purely financial terms, I’ve no intention of letting stuffy Sawyer chuck you out and waste the money we’ve invested so far. I am certain we can work out a way of putting this right, and that Joel chap has suggested a few things—’
‘Joel called you?’
‘Nice boy. Don’t know how he got through, but these TV people have their ways, don’t they? Anyway, he was suggesting how we could turn this to our advantage. So consider yourself told off, but don’t worry. We won’t be throwing you out of the helicopter just yet. OK?’
‘Er. Yes. Yes, OK. Thank you.’
‘You will be making up for it, don’t you worry. Happy New Year, Kerry. Oh. Nearly forgot. Joel asked me to tell you he’s put something on his video channel, to try to divert people from the footage of you in the ditch.’
‘What?’
‘No idea. No signal here. Must dash, back on the twelfth. And avoid camera crews, will you, Kerry, for pity’s sake.’
I finish pouring the second shot of gin. It tastes slightly better now. I turn on my laptop, though I don’t know if I can bear to watch anything Joel has made. There’s no fixing this.
His YouTube channel has 1.3 million subscribers. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I don’t usually get time to waste watching stuff online. I click on the ‘latest’ tab, bracing myself to see the horrible rescue footage or his face.
Except there’s nothing from the crash. In fact, there are only four new videos posted in the last month – yesterday, in fact. They each have only a big white number on a black background as the thumbnail. The playlist title says:
HOW TO SAVE A LIFE – WATCH IN ORDER BUT PLEASE WATCH THEM TODAY
I click 1, despite my reservations.
When Joel’s face appears, I catch my breath. He looks exhausted. Even when I close my eyes, I see his face when they pulled me out of the stream.
He begins to talk to the camera:
‘Imagine a room with a hundred people in it: a packed pub, maybe, full of people you know and care about.
‘One by one, without warning, your friends and family members begin falling to the floor. Eventually, only six or seven are left standing.
‘That’s the truth about cardiac arrest. Without immediate help, fewer than one in ten people will survive.
‘It can happen to anyone, anywhere.
‘And the moment it does, the clock starts ticking. The heart no longer pumps blood to the brain and the body, starving them of oxygen.
‘But with the help of someone like you, many more patients could survive. Imagine thirty of those people you care about standing back up and dusting themselves down, alive and ready for their second chance.
‘It’s ordinary people like us, not doctors, who are most likely to be there when the worst happens. At work, in the park, at home, even in the pub.
‘A person’s chance of recovery depends on what happens next – starting with you.’
I watch all four videos twice over. It must be the tiredness, or the gin, but I cry before the first one is done, reliving what I did and all that’s happened since.
And though he never uses my name, in the last one it feels as if he’s speaking to me directly.
‘I said in my first video that ordinary people make the difference – but I was saved by an extraordinary person. I will never, ever stop being grateful to her or forget that it didn’t just change my history. It changed hers too. I was “down” for eighteen minutes. Those must have seemed like eighteen lifetimes to her, yet she kept going.
‘So – eighteen years too late – I want to say thank you, from the bottom of my misbehaving heart.’
I hit pause and look at his face, my own breathing uneven. It takes me a minute before I am together enough to scroll down. Already over two million people have viewed the videos and new comments appear when I refresh: I never realized how bad the odds were, one says, you’re a miracle.
Others have written their own stories of their rebirths, or when they did CPR on someone who made it, or didn’t.
Another writes simply: Now I know what to do.
I know what I want to do and that’s to call him. But I won’t, because I’m drunk and emotional and I will see things more clearly tomorrow.
Still, I’ve been cooped up in the flat for too long and it’s nearly midnight.
The flat is close to the seafront and I decide that I can make it that far with my crutches. The gin has lessened the pain in my shoulder and foot, but when I step out of the communal door, I feel like Dorothy in the middle of the hurricane. Takeaway cartons dance along the pavement. Even the gulls stay close to the ground, as though they’re scared they too could be swept up and dropped back down in Oz.
More pieces of the West Pier will be lost to the waves tonight and the i360 with its doughnut-shaped platform is closed. But on Hove Lawns, a group of kids play football under the Victorian lamp posts. They have to dodge the debris left by beach huts that haven’t survived the storms.
If I narrow my eyes, I can imagine that one of the players is Joel, though none of them have his elegance or style.
I stand where I stood with Tim on that Millennium Eve and I feel fond of the girl I was, as she waited for the millennium and the life to come.
I saved Joel; he saved me. We’re even-steven.
The childhood phrase makes me laugh. Life can’t be put in columns and the score totted up. Cruelty and suffering come undeserved. We’re at the mercy of the gods, or fate, or plain crappy luck.
The wind blows through me with only the crutches to keep me upright.
I check my watch. Five minutes till midnight. The beach beckons. I get as far as the rusty barriers before I remember pebbles and crutches don’t go together. I look up. The clouds are racing past the stars a few millennia above them.
Two minutes left.
I hear a loud noise and turn as a large piece of beach hut timber skates across the tarmac of the prom.
A boy crosses the Lawns. He’s so like Joel that I catch my breath, my body primed to do what I did eighteen years ago if he falls to the earth again.
A man falls into step beside the boy and they throw the football between them. The man looks up and his gaze locks onto mine.
It holds me.
The man hugs the boy, whispers something to him and as the kid starts to kick the ball against the back of the beach huts, the man walks towards me. I feel texts buzzing on the phone in my pocket. Fireworks begin to go off all over the city.
He’s next to me now.
‘Do you come here often?’
‘Oh, roughly once every eighteen years.’
‘Funny that. Eighteen years ago tonight, I died,’ he says.
‘Eighteen years ago tonight, I brought someone back to life,’ I whisper.
‘Was it worth it?’
‘I think it was, in the end.’ I reach out for his hand, but instead, I touch his wrist, feeling for his radial pulse, steady and strong. ‘But ask me in another eighteen years, just to make sure.’