Louise had wondered about her clients. All the people she’d missed seeing and would miss in the coming week. Some of them – Miriam and Terence and Mrs Coulson (who preferred the formality) – would have got her a Christmas present like last year. Not easy for them to arrange when they were stuck in the house. Miriam’s delight at keeping the gift secret from Louise (who had access to her cupboards and drawers in the course of looking after her) had been present enough. Mrs Coulson had flourished a crumpled parcel wrapped in half a mile of Sellotape, and Louise had thanked her, keeping her face straight when she fought her way into it and discovered the packet of assorted mints that Mrs Coulson herself had received for her birthday back in April. As for Terence, he’d arranged for his daughter in Cornwall to buy and post a beautiful pair of sheepskin mittens. They must have cost him a few bob. ‘It’s perishing out there,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t want you getting chilblains, eh?’ They’d be disappointed not to have a chance to give her their presents. She had not bought theirs yet – always last-minute.
Would they know what had happened? Would some replacement carer tell them about Luke, or would they just be told Louise was off sick?
Louise had dropped her cigarette and heard the hiss as it went out, stooped to pick it up and put it in the wheelie bin. The wind blew even harder, buffeting the fence. Across town, just a couple of miles away, Luke lay still. Alone. ‘Night, night, darling,’ she whispered. And went in.
They stopped the sedation on Tuesday morning. Louise and Ruby had been warned that it was impossible to predict what would happen. ‘Some patients open their eyes almost immediately, others can take hours, days. And some remain unresponsive.’ Persistent vegetative state. Someone had used the term at some point, but she wasn’t going to think about that. He was going to wake up.
There was nothing very dramatic to the withdrawal of sedation, just the unhooking of a drip and a note in his charts. It would take several hours for the sedative to clear from his system. Then they could try rousing him. He was breathing on his own, which they said was really good.
The past three days of bedside vigils had forced Louise to find something to do while she sat there. There was only so much chattering she could manage while Luke lay calm and quiet and so very still. Was he running in his mind? Climbing and ducking and diving? Flying even? Unfettered. She liked to think so, but no one could tell her if he was even able to dream.
So, incapable of reading, her concentration in shreds, and unwilling to sit there like a lemon, she had ransacked the roof space for her rag-bags, pulled out all the cotton pieces and the old card templates and started on a quilt. She’d no clear idea yet whose bed it would go on. There might only be enough for a single, in which case it would be Ruby’s. Or maybe she’d hang it on the wall like a picture. The project meant she could sit with Luke, cutting and tacking hexagons. Threads of cotton and scraps got all over the floor but were easily cleared up.
Ruby had loaded an MP3 player with all Luke’s favourite tunes and rigged it up to a little speaker so they could play it to him. They had it on for a while. Ruby brought some homework to do – a history project. It was one of the few subjects Louise could help her with if needs be, unlike maths or French. Grandad had been big on history and some of it had stuck.
When it got to mid-afternoon, the nurse looking after Luke came in and checked his vital signs again. There was a whole scoring system used to rank a coma. Based on how easily they opened their eyes, verbal ability, and whether they moved when given pain. Below eight was a coma. Luke had ranked five before the operation.
‘Have you tried waking him?’ the nurse asked.
Louise shook her head. They had been told they could, but part of her was fearful of trying, thinking what harm in waiting another few minutes, after she’d tacked the next patch, or the next. The nurse seemed to get this. She gave a little nod and said, ‘When you’re ready, just call his name, touch his shoulder or squeeze his hand. Try it two or three times, and if there’s no response, leave it. We don’t want to overload him. It’s very common not to get a reaction immediately; it doesn’t mean it won’t happen eventually. Otherwise just chat to him like you have been.’
