he could hear the bip bip bip of the heart monitor. He had seen enough films and television dramas to know that if the line on the screen were to run flat – to flatline – he should shout for a doctor, and then panic would render him frantic and helpless as doctors and nurses would come running, their footfall heavy in the long corridors. They would bring out the defibrillator and Jamie would stand there and watch as they fired electricity into Paul’s chest, making his body buck, rising up and falling back onto the bed, the bed where he had lain since the accident, six weeks ago.
But nothing like that did happen.
Six weeks, and nothing had happened at all. Paul did nothing except lie motionless beneath NHS sheets, his eyes closed, his body continuing to function at the most fundamental of levels (his heart beating on, his chest continuing to rise and fall, his hair and fingernails growing, skin being shed) but his mind locked away in that body, doing nothing. Nothing but dreaming. If he did dream at all.
Paul was never alone. His family and friends took it in turn to sit beside his bed: his parents, his sister, his grandmother, Heather, Kirsty, Jamie. Most of them would sit and talk to him, chatting about life as it went on outside the hospital, pleading with him to wake up, expressing regret for things said or unsaid in the past. Sometimes Paul’s parents played recordings of his favourite football matches. Paul and his dad were both Arsenal fans – it was pretty much the only thing they had ever talked about – and Mr Garner would record matches off Radio 5 and play them back to his son, hoping a dramatic moment might reach into Paul’s sleeping brain and draw him back to the surface.
That’s what it seemed like to Jamie: that his friend had slipped deep beneath the surface of the world, into a deep lake of dreams or darkness, and although he was still there – still with them – he couldn’t communicate with them. He was too deep. He had been swallowed up, and all they could do was wait and see if the subterranean place in which he now dwelt would spit him back out. Or if he might float upwards, blinking with sleep-clogged eyes as he emerged into the light.
It was what he prayed for.
Jamie barely spoke to Paul when it was his turn to sit beside him. He didn’t tell stories or jokes or play music. He merely sat and watched. He didn’t believe that his friend needed chatter and prompts; no-one could pull him back to the surface with songs or football commentary. He believed that Paul needed to rest – he was sleeping off the results of the accident like a bad hangover. Jamie and Paul used to joke that after a night on the beer, Paul would slip into a coma, and that nothing could wake him but time. Of course, Jamie knew that this coma had nothing to do with alcohol or over-indulgence, but something told him that the same principle applied. All they had to do was wait.
‘He’s suffered a serious head injury,’ said the doctor at Bromley Hospital, where the ambulance had taken Paul after the accident. ‘It’s very difficult to say at this point what the long-term outcome will be.’
After a day, Paul fell into a coma. The doctor told them that he might never come out of that coma, and if he did he might be brain damaged. He might not be able to talk. He might have lost the use of his limbs. On the other hand, he could make a full recovery, although it would not be quick. He could spend months or years in therapy.
‘All we can do,’ said the doctor, ‘is wait and hope. And pray, if you’re that way inclined.’
‘So there’s a possibility that he might never wake up?’ said Heather. She was trying to maintain her professional nurse’s stoicism, but was not succeeding. Her voice cracked as she spoke. Jamie’s parents had shuffled off to get coffee from the machine down the corridor.
The doctor spoke softly. ‘There is that chance, yes. He might slip into a vegetative state, in which case the family would have to make a decision. Or the coma could continue for a long time. If at any point his brain stopped functioning completely – if it died, in effect – we could keep him