Making sure I don’t throw up during the ride to the hospital is an unexpectedly useful distraction.
It forces me to prioritise the physical over the emotional and concentrate on swallowing, breathing, gripping the seatbelt and keeping my feet flat to the vibrating floor of the Hackney.
Focus on what’s real and what’s present, worry about the future when it arrives, in a few short minutes’ time.
Once we’re outside the QMC and start sweeping up the winding roads to the front entrance, and I see the red Accident & Emergency sign, abject terror washes over me. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more like a child in my life, including childhood. I want to run into the bushes and simply hide from this. I want an adult to make this alright, to protect me.
‘Just here OK?’ says the driver, peering at me curiously in the mirror.
‘Fine,’ I say and push a note into the tray in the window between us, before heaving myself out clumsily into the fresh air. I’m going to see Ed and when I see Ed, this will become real.
The thing is, you see, this can’t be true. It can’t be. But he’d never lie to me.
At first I can’t see him and my heart races. This was a prank. This was someone pretending to be Ed?! It hasn’t happened, it hasn’t happened, it hasn’t …
‘Eve! Eve?’ Ed calls to me and I look round. He’s rumpled in a t-shirt with his parka thrown over the top. His face twists, and collapses, as our eyes meet. I feel my own do the same. He belts over and throws his arms round me and I sink my face into the waxy cotton of his coat, and sob. I’ve never appreciated the solid six foot of Ed Cooper more, and I’ve done a lot of appreciating it. We grip each other as tightly and as desperately as if we’re on the deck of a sinking ship.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Ed says absently, on repeat, and I say indistinctly: ‘It’s not your fault,’ several times.
‘I called Justin. He can’t get off work until this afternoon,’ he says, wiping at his cheeks as we disentangle.
‘Right.’
Of course, Justin. In stark contrast to his irreverent persona and devil-may-care nature in his private life, Justin is a carer. He runs a local home for the elderly.
‘Who called you?’ I ask. I’m cold again, very cold. My teeth are chattering and I have to make an effort to disguise it.
‘The police. She’d listed you and I as emergency contacts in her wallet. Apparently her bag was thrown a long way from … they only found it searching, later. They said you weren’t answering. They went to see her dad but …’ Ed shrugs.
‘Oh God! Her dad.’ I’d been so busy thinking about us, I didn’t think of her family.
‘I don’t think he understood what they were saying, he told them his daughter should be in her classes,’ Ed says.
Susie’s dad’s had the signs of dementia for eighteen months or so. I’d not asked her recently how he was, she didn’t like to discuss it. Her mum died several years ago and her brother lives abroad.
‘I had no idea it was that bad,’ I say.
‘Neither did I … The doctor wants to talk to us together,’ Ed says.
The word ‘doctor’ hits me in the gut, and yet part of me is still resilient, even hopeful. Doctors make people better. Ed said dead, but he could’ve meant coma. Her bag was missing, sounds like they could’ve mixed up the files. This remains negotiable.
Look, this is Susie Hart. People die all the time, but Susie isn’t ‘people’.
‘Eve? Is that OK?’
‘Yes,’ I say, limp, and take Ed’s proffered hand. We have never held hands before. It goes without saying but I never imagined it would be like this, when we did.
Ed guides me through the busy, antiseptic-smelling, brightly lit reception and says something to the woman behind the desk that I don’t hear, I think it’s just his name. She turns away and makes a sotto voce internal phone call.
She doesn’t look remotely perturbed and I marvel at this, that it must be so ordinary for her. She has every day to practise being politely, professionally impassive in the face of people who look as bewildered and shaken as if they’ve stepped out of a time machine.
In the intervening seconds, Ed turns to me and looks like he’s going to say something to me and then doesn’t say