Spoiler
This has just been knocking around my head for a while so I put pen to paper! I may now officially be a med student but my knowledge of comas is woefully lacking so if you can correct me, please do. Other than that, all other comments appreciated!
“I hear you killed Jameson. Good job. Good riddance.”
I look up, startled; from the book I’m holding to where Christian Connolly has sidled into the bookshop, leaning against the shelves and talking as if we were co-conspirators. I shove the book in my hand back onto the shelf. The cover ruches under the pressure and I just stare at it. The only answer that presents itself is to state the obvious.
“He’s not dead.”
I move away but Christian follows, bobbing along beside me. He bounces on the balls of his feet with each step to try and hide the near foot of height difference between us. I still look down on the top of his head, hair dark with grease. “No brain activity. That’s basically dead,” he says cheerfully.
“Minimal brain activity. Minimal. Not none,” I correct him, since that word, ‘minimal’ is all that is stopping my breakfast making a reappearance. I counter with a change of subject. “What are you doing in a bookshop anyway? I didn’t know you read.”
“I don’t.” He nods towards the giant glass windows and the grey shopping centre corridor beyond. “I was in the game shop. Saw you through the window and thought I’d come congratulate you.”
I stop in my tracks and stare at Christian. “It’s not something I’m proud of, Christian.”
“Not yet. I mean I guess you’re in shock or whatever but you’ll see. It’s for the best.”
“How can- never mind.” I pick up my pace to a level Christian can’t follow.
“It’s not like you liked him!” he calls as I hurry down the anonymous corridor. Here people look at me and see a lanky teenage boy, not a murderer.
The bookshop was my last safe haven. At home Mum and Elsie spend as much time in the hospital as the Jamesons themselves. I deleted my Facebook account since the comments I received fell neatly into two categories: those from people like Christian who had suffered at the hands of Will Jameson, and Will’s own friends. The former sent me ‘well done’s and ‘thank you’s and the latter sent me death threats. School was over apart from the people sitting state exams. My driving lessons had of course been cancelled. So I had had plans to spend the summer in libraries and bookshops, perhaps not necessarily reading the books themselves as much as the blurbs. The sticky situations that characters found themselves in that were different to my own. The more different, the better.
Christian Connolly has just destroyed another safe location. He has allowed Will to invade the single last part of my life that I had hoped to evade him.
I slalom through the crowds, the lazy June weekday shoppers, old ladies doing little in-between grocery shops mid-week, girls younger than me discussing texts and drinking milkshakes. I hear snippets of language in Polish and Lithuanian from workers on their day off. Everybody comes here to shake off the worries of the day before, or the week before or the life before. Shaking off that moment, 4.53 on the 2nd June as the car clock had stated, seems a much harder task than forgetting something like a pay cut or a harsh remark.
I swing myself onto the bus and swiped my card, sitting down in the seats closest to the front behind the driver. It was where Elsie and I always used to sit, when we used to do things together. “We’ll make the front the cool end of the bus!” she’d say and grin. I haven’t seen her grin in far too long. Her eyes instead follow me around the house just as every other thought and every other remark followed me. She blames me and I don’t blame her for it.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Mum. “What?” I ask bluntly.
“Andy, dear, where are you?” I hate nicknames, Elsie loves them. Even though we are far from identical, our own mother amongst others is of the opinion that twins have the same taste in everything, and it is always Elsie’s taste I inherit and not the other way around.
“I was just in the bookshop. I’m coming home.”
“I wish you wouldn’t run off like that-“
“Where did you think I was going?”
She doesn’t respond since there’s no answer. She’s just worrying for nothing, overly concerned that I’ll steal a car or something equally uncharacteristic and this time it’ll be me that’s lying in a hospital bed.
“Elsie and I are going over to the hospital. Would you like to come?”
I sigh. A long moment stretches down the imaginary line between me and her. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Really? You’ll come?” This is the chirpiest I’ve heard her sound since it happened.
“Why not? I guess I should apologise some time.”
“Well, we’ll wait for you then. Hurry back!” She puts the phone down as if she’s about to prance away through a meadow of flowers.
It’s about time I see Will, I think. I eavesdropped on Elsie while she was on the phone to a friend. You can’t really see any damage, she said, just a little cut that the doctors have patched up nicely. I won’t be able to see just the extent of my crime- technically an accident but still a crime in my eyes as well as the eyes of the hundreds of people who loved and worshipped Will Jameson.
There were witnesses. It’s important to understand that there were witnesses, my driving instructor included. There was nothing I could have done, they all agreed. I had gone through a green light on a T junction at the proper speed, checking no cars were coming. My instructor had even murmured, ‘Good.’
Until Will loped across the street, black hair and Canterbury tracksuit bottoms flying in the breeze. I couldn’t stop. All of Will went flying onto the tarmac. I screamed. My instructor screamed. A woman on the pavement screamed. Horns beeped and people came running. I sat behind the wheel, engine still running, while my instructor hopped out. Somebody called 112. The ambulance came. They had pulled me out of the car by then and I looked at the little pool of blood around Will’s perfectly careless hair. Somebody put a blanket around me. They put Will into the ambulance. I told them the horrible fact that I knew him, I went to school with him. I told them his name. They drove him to the hospital. My driving instructor drove me back to the centre.
That was nearly a week ago, and that was the last time I saw him.
Mum’s taken a leave of absence from her work as an occupational therapist. She’s promised me countless times that she’s seen people in states almost like Will’s, and she helps bring them back. Almost is the operative word. If Will ever does wake up, Elsie whispered on the phone that night, the doctors say most likely he’ll be a vegetable. I can’t decide which is worse, that he dies or he lives half a life.
When I open the front door, I can hear their voices from the kitchen. They stop talking when they hear the latch shut again. “Andy? Is that you?” Mum calls.
“Who else?” I grumble, going through into our green tiled kitchen. We redecorated and Mum chose green because ‘the twins like it’, because it’s Elsie’s favourite colour. She’s wearing it right now, in fact, as I look at her, curled up with a cup of tea, the forest coloured jumper sloping off one shoulder.
“Hi,” she says, glancing up with pale blue eyes just like mine. “I hear you’re coming.”
“Am I allowed to?” I ask, shaking the teapot and pouring out what’s left, tea as black as tar.
“Of course,” Mum says with measured calmness. “I think it would be good for you. And Will. I don’t know why you’ve been so reluctant.”
“Because Andrew hated Will,” Elsie mutters. “I’ve explained before, Mum.”
“But you liked him.”
Elsie hides behind her thick brown curls. I open the fridge, take out the milk and slam it shut again. “Elsie barely knew Will, Mum. In fact.” I pour the milk, screw the top back on and look at my sister across the kitchen. “How do you know him? Anita?”
Elsie shakes her head as another guilty shot goes through my chest. She and Anita, Will’s long-term girlfriend, stopped being friends years ago, as soon as Elsie started getting plumper and shyer whereas Anita just kept getting taller and more gorgeous and more charming. “Applied Maths,” she says. “We were in class together.”
“Are the other girls from Applied Maths visiting him every day?” It’s such a minority subject that my and Will’s school, Freetown College, combines the class with its sister girls’ school, St Catherine’s.
“None of their brothers were the reason he’s there,” Elsie snaps. “Are we going or not?”
“Let me finish my tea,” Mum says, looking uneasily from Elsie to me. “Don’t bicker, the two of you.”
“Sorry,” we grumble in unison. I glance at Ellie over the rim of my own mug. Our identical eyes meet each other and her mouth twitches at the corners.
