He led me down to the emergency department on the lower ground floor.
It was like all those hospital shows on TV. Patients lying on trolleys in corridors, streams of people and activity flowing around them. Old people with drips coming out of their arms, oxygen masks on their faces, young people, dazed and bloodied, from a fight, an accident. Doctors with stethoscopes, nurses with charts, wardsmen ferrying more trolleys into and out of lifts.
Anders had told me to prepare myself, but I wasn’t prepared. Not even a little bit.
The sight of her hit me like a fist in the chest. Tiny and helpless on a trolley at the end of the corridor. Tubes running out of one arm, the other strapped against her body. Bags of clear liquid hooked onto a stand attached to the side of her bed. The rigid outline of something running the length of her leg under the sheet that covered her tiny frame.
Her face was turned towards me, her eyes closed. The pain had stripped away all her defences. She looked like a little kid, exhausted, tossed onto a mattress and abandoned.
I ran towards her, but there were so many tubes and bandages, I didn’t know which bit was safe to touch.
‘Mum–’ I whispered.
Her eyes fluttered open, and focused with an effort on my face.
‘Honey-bun...’ Tubes swayed as one hand reached up and traced the outline of my face. ‘What are you doing here?’ I leaned closer to catch the wispy words as they drifted from her lips. ‘I told Manny to keep you with him tonight–’
‘I had to see you, Mum. I couldn’t leave you here on your own–’
She pressed cold fingers to my mouth, her pale lips stretching in an awful attempt at a smile. ‘Didn’t wear my lucky shoes, honey-bun.’ Her eyelids trembled with the effort to stay open. ‘They’ve given me something – for the pain ... you don’t need to worry, honey ... I’ve got room service here, they change the sheets every day...’
Her eyes closed and then snapped open, as though something from the back of her mind had clicked through to the front. Her hand slipped down and latched onto the neck of my T-shirt. She pulled me towards her, a note of panic rising in her voice. ‘Where’s my bag? What have they done with my things?’
I looked around and could see nothing that looked like the shoulder bag she took to work with her every day.
‘Some nurse answered your mobile phone when I rang, so your bag must be here somewhere.’
I ducked down and checked under the bed. A plastic bag was tucked onto a shelf below the mattress. ‘I think your stuff ’s in here.’
She tried to prop herself onto her good arm for a better look. ‘Is there a big yellow envelope in there?’ Pain rippled across her face. ‘Oh God, tell me it’s there–’
‘Calm down, I’m looking.’ I pulled out her shoulder bag and emptied its contents onto her bed.
Wallet. Keys. Brochures of houses for sale. Pens. Notebook. Mobile phone.
No yellow envelope.
‘It’s not here, Mum. What’s in it?’
‘Oh God.’ She collapsed back onto her pillow with a moan. ‘It must still be in the car.’
‘What? What’s still in the car?’
‘The contract.’ She took a breath. ‘Henry, you have to find it. It’s a contract on that house on the river.’
Her tiny fist knotted in my shirt, a desperate note entering her voice. ‘They signed. They both signed. For one-point-nine-five million dollars. That’s nearly fifty thousanddollars in commission. But without that contract, there’s no sale. I can’t get them to sign another one while I’m stuck in here. We need that money, honey-bun. Especially now.’
Her breath came in short gasps as she struggled to sit up. ‘You have to find that contract, Henry. Get Manny to help you. Caleb. Anybody. But you have to find it or somebody else will make the sale while I’m laid up in here–’
‘OK, OK, I will. Just stop, you’ll hurt yourself.’ I helped her settle back onto her pillow, her face ashen. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll find it and take it into your work in the morning. I promise.’
‘Lydia Hoey Hobson?’
A giant of a wardsman checked the chart at the foot of the bed. A huge job-stopper of a tattoo, a double strand of barbed wire, coiled around his neck. ‘Time to go get you ready for surgery, Ma’am.’
He leaned down and helped me pack everything back into the bag. ‘You might want to keep your mobile in here so your boy can talk to you. But that wallet should go somewhere safe–’
‘Take it, honey-bun. You’ll need it more than I will–’ She forced a smile. ‘Got room service here, remember?’
I took the wallet and stepped back as he unlocked the trolley’s brakes. Her hand fell away from my shirt, but her eyes never left me. Not even when the tattooed orderly wheeled the bed around and trundled my mother away.
‘You all right, love?’
The voice was familiar; the night nurse I’d spoken to on the phone. She was neither young nor old, but something in between. She looked like someone’s mum. Someone else’s, not mine.
I sucked in a deep shuddering breath. ‘Where are they taking her?’
‘Fourth floor. Pre-Op, then surgery.’ She looked at her watch. ‘There’s no point sticking around here. It could be hours and she’ll be groggy after the general anaesthetic. Not to mention exhausted, after all she’s been through.’
She looked past me and smiled at someone behind me. ‘You should take your boy home. I can give you a number to call, to see how the surgery goes. But better you come back tomorrow after his mum’s had a chance to get some sleep.’
Anders nodded politely. My cheeks burned, but it was easier to let it ride than to try to explain that he was practically a stranger.
I didn’t want to share the story of my life, the story of my mum’s life, with a night nurse at Royal Brisbane. I didn’t want to admit that our family was stretched so thin that we had to rely on the kindness of strangers in a crisis.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked. It sounded abrupt, even a bit rude. But he didn’t react.
‘Talking to the doctor,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
He led the way back out to the car park. I found myself telling him about the lost contract, Mum’s desperate need to get it back.
‘She thinks it must still be in the car. They would have towed it, wouldn’t they? Where would it be now? Do the police take it? Do they have a smashed-car yard somewhere that the cars go to until their owners get out of hospital? Do you think Manny or Caleb would take me there tomorrow?’
He stopped so suddenly, I rammed right into the back of him.
‘No. I’ll get it.’ Something in his face warned me not to pursue it, and we walked the rest of the way to the car in silence.
It wasn’t until we’d wound our way back down car park ramps and slipped into the traffic flow of Herston Road that I broached the topic again.
‘Can I come with you, tomorrow? To find the contract?’ I could picture Mum’s face, when I showed it to her, the relief, the sheer–
‘No.’
I swung round in my seat. ‘Why not?’
The flashing lights of an ambulance lit up his face as it swept past us, heading back the way we had just come. Something was eating him, but he couldn’t put it into words.
He pulled up at the lights on Kelvin Grove Road, yanked on the handbrake and slipped the car into neutral. ‘You should go to school.’
If that was the best he could do, he could stick it. I folded my arms and stared mutinously back at him.
‘I hate school.’
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, they took on a size and importance they hadn’t had the whole time I’d been bottling them up.
‘Everybody hates me. They think I’m a vampire and that I hang round with a bunch of freaks. I have to spend all the breaks by myself in the library because nobody even talks to me. Except for the principal, and that’s like walking around with a big ‘L’ stuck to your forehead. Nobody cares if I don’t go to school. Nobody cares if my mum’s in hospital. Nobody cares if her contract gets lost and we don’t have any money. Nobody cares about us, OK? NOBODY CARES.’
The blip of a horn behind us told us the light had turned green. He didn’t break eye contact until the second, more insistent blurt. His lips worked, but no sound came out. He released the handbrake, slipped the car into gear and we travelled the rest of the way home in silence.