I’ve forgotten how to breathe. I can’t remember ever running so fast or getting somewhere so quick. From the minute the taxi I had earlier rushed into stopped I was out the door and hectically sprinting from corridor to corridor to the ward I was directed to leaving my friends to follow behind at a much slower pace. I slow down once I come around a corner, once I see Nadine stood outside of a closed door with my youngest daughter attached to her chest I stop in my tracks and I’m not completely sure why. Maybe it’s the look on her face, anxiety mixed with her tears. Or maybe it’s because I wasn’t expecting to see Paisley and Alaina here. Paisleys half asleep sprawled out of two uncomfortable wooden chairs, her small arms curled under her head causing her blonde locks to tumble carelessly over it. She’s in her pyjamas, they both are. Nadine must have draped her coat over her because she’s hidden under it as she falls in and out of sleep.
Nadine stops her rocking back and forth when she sees me and hears Sarah and Nicola echoed voices puncturing the silence from behind me. I can smell the fear clogging the air. Her face is ghostly pale, her eyes swimming with emotion but she doesn’t speak to me, I presume that if she even attempted to she would choke on her words and probably her sobs too. “What happened?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper. Her eyes flicker from Sarah then back to me but just for a split second because she has to look away again, she can’t give me eye contact and I’m sure that when her mouth first opens she holds Alaina just a little bit tighter.
“She had a fall… caused by an overdose”
“An overdose?” I feel like with just that being said it knocks all the air from me. I don’t register what’s happening until Nicola is forcing me onto one of the empty plastic chairs pushed up against the wall. I feel numb.
“It was accidental, they said it was accidental. It has to be, hasn’t it? ” She’s crying even more now, sobbing in fact and I’m crying too. “They won’t let me see her, they won’t even tell me if she’s alright. I don’t know what to do!”
“Oh god” Sarah gasps and she pulls Nadine into her with Alaina uncomfortably between them.
“I just got a call from Paisley and-“
“Paisley?”
“She found her at the bottom of the stairs; she took Cheryl’s phone and knew how to ring me. She can barely read, how did she know how to ring me?” She’s still crying just like the rest of us. I can’t imagine how scared Paisley must have been, she must have been terrified but she was intelligent enough to have phoned someone and I can’t get my head around it. Around any of this actually, not at the minute. I feel sick, my heart rate is racing and thumping against my chest so obnoxiously. I rub a hand across my forehead and I take a deep breath. I just now realise Paisley has woken and she’s nudged herself under my arm so I wrap my other one around her and hold onto her so tight that if was to let her go I’m sure she’d disappear and turn into nothing but a memory.
We all have the same uneasy look on our faces. The space between us is tense with anxiety. Disinfectant. The smell will haunt me forever. The smell of this place is starting to knock me sick now or maybe that’s just the realisation of what my former actions have caused and what my girls have had to witness tonight. A loud bleeping noise from down the corridor sends everyone into panic, it fills the air with distress as doctors and nurses begin to spring into action. For a split second I’m sure my heart pauses because I thought it was coming from Cheryl’s room. I was wrong ,thank god. But the door opens and the doctor that I had been told previously entered steps out, his wooden clipboard under one arm and his thin rimmed glasses sliding own his nose. My eyes widen, I would have jumped up if my Paisley hadn’t have just settled against me mid sob. Nicola does though and she’s asking if there’s any news, if she’s on the mend and she is because he’s nodding while I cry with relief. He’s telling us she’s making progress. She’s still weak but she’s stable, luckily.
*
I can’t believe that this is her, this is Cheryl lost in thick white sheets, propped up in an uncomfortable hospital bed. Her eyes are closed; her dark eyelashes contrasting against her whiter than white porcelain skin. She looks almost ghost-like. The girl in that bed draped in a thin hospital robe is unrecognisable, she’s skin and bones. Its like her bones are bones protruding from her body, she’s always been thin but now she looks ill. She’s dangerously skinny and it causes the lump in my throat to expand to what seems to be the size of a tennis ball.
The bright lights above her make her shine, she looks like her skin has a yellow tinge. She isn’t moving apart from her chest slowly rising and falling every so often not near enough as it should, she looks like she’s one short breath away from death but I’m just relived that she isn’t actually on deaths door like I thought she was. We were told she’s stable, weak but stable. She’ll be fine once she’s rested. She’s been lucky. I’m looking at her through a blur, my sight is blurred with tears I now refuse to let fall. I refuse to be that selfish, I can’t cry. She’s connected to all kinds of intimidating machines that keep flashing with a tedious bleep, shes connected to too many wires hanging from rusty rods. Her tiny hands are black and blue, bruises are swirling across her but I’m not sure if they are the consequences of her fall or from the tubes buried in her skin. Her hairs scrapped up, half is falling in front of her face and it moves slightly with every breath. I want to brush the loose strands away but I wouldn’t dare, I feel like my feet have been stuck to the ground. My legs are heavy. I can’t move, I can barely even breathe. Cheryl would normally be rocking some new hairstyle that almost every teenage girl in England would then be inspired to try. Now it’s a mess, she’s a mess, I’m a mess, and so is everyone around us.
She has no makeup on and at first I thought her eye makeup was smudged around her eyes but how wrong was i? Dark shadows are surrounding her sockets, black and dark shades of purple all playing together on her skin making her face look even more Skelton-like then it did. I gasp as her eyes flicker open, I don’t know how to react, I don’t know how she’s going to react when she sees me for the first time in forever and I’m stood at the foot of her hospital bed that in my mind i put her in. Guilt is riddling me and it feels like the bare white walls are closing in on us.
Her eyes travel onto me, I’m still in denial that this is actually her because it doesn’t look like her, not my Cheryl. So I don’t speak when her eyes meet mine, my mouth is dry and my throats even drier. Her huge eyes used to be so beautiful, so full of emotion, impossibly dark and warm whilst now they’re blank. Her pupils are dilate so the iris’ can’t be found, It’s like she’s looking right through me and once I murmur her name she looks away. In some ways I’m glad because now I can’t see the fear that’s so obvious in them, I don’t want to see the effect the drugs being pumped through her veins have made. I want to see the old Cheryl in front of me, not the broken, fragile one.
“Cheryl?” My voice is quiet and low, I can’t even recognise it. It shakes just as much as my hands. “It’s okay, I’m here now” I hesitantly cross the room one trembling step at a time over to her frail body lying there so lifelessly. Once my hand touches hers she pulls away. I only touched her for a fraction of a second and I feel like I’m still clinging to the coldness because she was so freezing it could have been ice I had reached for.
“I didn’t die, why didn’t I die?” Her voice cracks, her eyes are filling up, she’s looking directly at me and I step backwards in silence. I don’t know what to say, what can you say when someone seems so disappointed death didn’t take them?
*
Darkness. I’m surrounded by it. Drowning in it. I’ve been in bed for hours but still yet to slip into a sleep. It’s too quiet, my bed is too empty and I’m too alone and the questions in my head still unanswered are too loud. Normally I have both my children right by my side because they reuse to sleep alone in the beds in the other box sized room but Nicola took them home with her when I went in that horrible room to see Cheryl. I should cherish the peace I’m getting and the space I have to move without having an arm over my face or a pair of feet carelessly digging into my back but I can’t let myself enjoy the emptiness I’m feeling when I’m riddled with worry. I was ripped away from Cheryl once a female doctor entered the room wanting to run some more tests and I was ordered to go home. I was hesitant at first, I wanted to know about what landed her in that bed. I point blank reused to leave but I could see Cheryl didn’t want me there, she needed rest and I was just making things worse. She didn’t speak to me. Not once, she couldn’t even look at me and I couldn’t look at her because all that I could think about are the last words I remember falling from her lips. “Why didn’t I die?”
The sheets are cold and crisp on my body and if I listen closely I can hear my new neighbours’ voices travel through the thin walls. They’re arguing, their slurred voices get louder, almost hysterical and as I hear a string of indecent words and quick, witty but disgusting insults bounce from one to another for one crazy split second I hesitate, I feel uncomfortable and wonder if I should do something and intervene. I quickly talk myself into ignoring the noise, it’s not my problem. I don’t know these people, they don’t know me. I shouldn’t care and I don’t I’m just trying to distract myself from the unanswered questions lingering over me. ‘Why?’ is the main one. Why did I leave the kids with her knowing how mentally unstable she was? Why didn’t I do something and try to straighten her out before this incident happened? Why does stuff like this keep happening to our family? and Why did Cheryl do this to herself when she has everything to live for? Not for one minute do I believe it was accidental, I tried to but I can’t. Not after I saw the disappointed on her face when she realised she was very much alive.
I close my eyes and roll over onto my side. I become tangled in the almost perfectly straight sheets that I earlier just slipped myself between. This bed which is much smaller than the one I shared with Cheryl feels ridiculously small, like I could disappear in it. I wish I could, it would be better for everyone if I did but thoughts like those are probably the ones travelling through Cheryl’s head as she contemplated putting god knows what into her body. When I heard the word ‘overdose’ I immediately thought of her late best friend. Her face popped into my head, the last smile I ever saw her smile. I thought of the funeral too and I thought about the impact her death had on everyone around her. It’s still deeply affecting Cheryl to this day so I don’t understand. I can’t understand why she would follow in her foot steps and do the same thing, use the same poison as she did. I’m assuming she did or maybe she didn’t. She wouldn’t use heroin again, especially not with the girls in the house. I know how much she despised it after the amount of lives close to her it claimed. She wouldn’t have let it claim her own life, could she? There must be more to it then what meets the eye, I have to get my questions answered tomorrow.
Okay, i know. Short, badly written and not telling you what you want to know but i wont have a lot of time to give you a proper update tonight so i thought i would leave you with something short and simple(ish) instead of nothing at all. TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Do you think theres more to it or do you think Cheryl is in fact back to her old ways?