I never believed. I don’t disrespect people who do, I just knew I never could. At some point I stopped going with Mum on her church visits. I think it broke her heart a little, but I couldn’t help it. The roll call of all those different churches, all those ministers, all utterly convinced that they had it right and no one else.
Her latest is God’s Scholars. They’re small, they don’t even have a church. Just a prayer group run out of Father Michael’s living room. He calls himself Father Michael anyway – I don’t know what qualifications you need in order to call yourself “father”, but I’m sure Michael Thorn doesn’t have them.
God’s Scholars feels different to the other churches and that worries me. There’s a trembling, sing-song excitement in Mum’s voice when she talks about Father Michael. A sense that here – here and nowhere else – is the truth she’s been looking for.
Father Michael.
A memory flickers inside me, an uncomfortable twinge. I can’t help feeling like Father Michael has something to do with why I’m out on my own for the first time in a year. But it makes no sense; I only met him once.
I follow the footbridge until it rejoins the main road and then work my way across the big roundabout. There should be traffic. Where is all the traffic?
At last, there’s the hospital. A grey slab of 1950s concrete and glass, the big blue sign like a beacon that proclaims: YOUR HOSPITAL. YOUR NHS.
My heart pounds as I stumble through the big concertina doors and into the casualty ward. I feel like I should be shouting, “Help me! I’m sick, I’m really sick.” But I’m silent and desperate, like somebody looking up at the sky while they drown. The lights are off in the foyer, the place has a shadowed, disused kind of look.
Is it closed? Do hospitals actually close?
Then I step through the heavy fire doors and the clamour of the sick and injured kicks in like somebody flicked a switch.
Here, at least, there are people. Rows of them, side by side on plastic moulded seats: a white-haired woman hunched over and half asleep, an overweight middle-aged man with his leg grotesquely swollen and mottled, a toddler clinging to its mum, snot caked around its face.
The noise is unbearable. The stink of humans and sweat and dirt and disinfectant. Is this where everybody is? Has there been some kind of major incident?
No, I think, just the regular Casualty crowd.
I shuffle over to the little ticket machine. I’ve been here enough times to know that the receptionist won’t talk to you unless you have a ticket.
756.
Or is it 765? Or is it not really numbers at all?
I can’t tell.
I shake my head and try to think clearly. Hospitals make me anxious. Nothing good ever happened in a hospital.
My gaze lands on a man on the opposite side of the room. There’s a thick dressing wadded against his neck and he’s staring straight ahead. Blood has soaked through his bandages and stained a continent of dried, crusty dark red on to his shirt. His head rests at a funny angle against the wall, his eyes glazed. If anybody deserves to jump the queue, it’s him, I think.
His gaze shifts and lands on me. His eyes widen.
He’s too vivid, too there compared to everyone else. He reminds me of the man in town earlier, and I can’t shake the feeling that he’s thinking the same thing about me.
You’re not where you think you are.
I turn away.
New idea. The neurology clinic is round the corner. You’re supposed to have an appointment, but if I wait there for my number to be called I might get lucky and snag a passing neurologist instead.
The noise from the waiting room turns hollow and disjointed as soon as I step away. I move towards the bank of seats where I’ve sat and waited for the neurologist a hundred times before and—
I freeze.
Someone else is already sitting there.
A girl about my age. Jeans, a peach-coloured T-shirt and a denim jacket. She has jet-black hair that’s wiry and kind of unruly, and the same terrifying thereness of the man from the street and the man I just saw.
But worse, I know her.
I glance over my shoulder and seriously consider bolting. But she’s already seen me and she’s staring at me with a weird combination of relief and dismay.
“Farah?” I say.
“Kyle?” Farah replies.
Farah Rafiq is, quite literally, the last person I want to run into.
FOUR
Before I knew Farah, I only knew of her. She was just another face in the school crowd, one of the shy Asian kids. Then she got brain cancer in Year Eight and the head made her famous by dedicating an entire teary assembly to her, giving us a rousing speech about bravery and resilience, telling us how proud he was of little Farah, who was a fighter and who would battle her affliction and win!
Obviously he thought she was going to die.
It caused a frenzy. The whole year group signed a giant card, kids who’d never spoken to her kept bursting into tears in French class and having to go to the nurse. There was even a concert to raise money so Farah and her parents could go to Disneyland. I remember feeling a weird sense of kinship towards her, because the other kids whispered about her like they whispered about me. I even put some money in the pot on concert day.
Farah went into treatment; she was gone for ages and then she returned and part of me felt like asking for a refund. Because she wasn’t just back – she was back with attitude. She became one of the mouthy kids, part of a group of four or five girls who showed up late to class and acted angry all the time. They talked through classes and when the teacher called them out on it, they acted like he had no right and carried right on. Farah got detention pretty much every day but she didn’t care.
I’m a rule follower, I can’t help it. I’m one of those people who actually prefers to be told what to do. I couldn’t decide if I admired Farah for her rebel-yell bad attitude or resented her for making it look so easy.
