The Witch Elm: A Novel Read online

  I did a lot of sleeping, and when I was awake there was usually someone with me. During the day it was mostly my mother, who had ditched work and thrown everything into the department’s lap—she teaches eighteenth-century history at Trinity—as soon as she got the phone call. She brought me things: a fan because the room was mercilessly hot, endless bottles of water and juice and Lucozade because I needed to stay hydrated, art postcards and bunches of tulips, snacks I had liked as a kid (Monster Munch, cheesy popcorn that smelled violently of vomit), cards from my aunts and uncles, a baffling assortment of books, a pack of cards, a hipstery Lego-plated Rubik’s Cube. I touched almost none of it and within a few days the room was getting a weird overgrown look, as if random stuff was popping up on every available surface through spontaneous generation and sooner or later the nurses would find me buried under a heap of cupcakes and an accordion.

  I’d always got along well with my mother. She’s smart and spiky and funny, with a keen sense of beauty and a lovely, expansive capacity for happiness, someone I would have liked even if we weren’t related. Even when I was a mildly rebellious teenager, my fights (standard-issue stuff, why can’t I stay out later and it’s so unfair that you give me hassle about homework) had been with my father, almost never with her. Since I’d moved out of home I had rung her a couple of times a week, met her for lunch every month or two, out of genuine affection and enjoyment, not duty; I picked up odd little presents for her now and then, texted her funny things Richard said that I knew she would appreciate. Even the look of her warmed me, her long-legged unselfconscious stride with coat flapping, the wide fine arcs of her eyebrows quirking together and up and down in tandem with whatever story I was telling. So it came as a nasty surprise to both of us when her hospital visits drove me crazy.

  For one thing she couldn’t keep her hands off me: one of them was always stroking my hair or resting on my foot or finding my hand among the bedclothes, and even aside from the pain I was finding that I loathed being touched, so intensely that sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from jerking away. And she kept wanting to talk about that night—how was I feeling? (Fine.) Did I want to talk about it? (No.) Did I have any idea who the men had been, had they followed me home, maybe they’d spotted me in the pub and realized my coat was expensive and— At this stage I spent most of the time foggily but firmly convinced that the break-in had been Gouger and one of his Borstal buddies, getting revenge on me for having him booted out of the exhibition, but I was still much too confused about the whole thing to explain it to my mother even if I had wanted to. I retreated into grunts that got ruder and ruder until she backed off, but an hour later she would circle back to it, unable to help herself—Was I sleeping all right? Was I having nightmares? Did I remember much?

  The real problem, I suppose, was that my mother was badly shaken up. She put a lot of willpower into covering it, but I knew the artificial, over-calm cheerfulness from childhood crises (OK, sweetheart, let’s get the blood cleaned off so we can see whether you need to go to Dr. Mairéad for the blue glue! Maybe she’ll have stickers again!) and it set my teeth on edge. Occasionally the façade slipped and a terrible, raw horror showed through, and that sent me into paroxysms of sheer fury: obviously she had had a bad couple of days, but now I was out of danger and she had nothing to worry about, her hands were both working perfectly, her vision wasn’t stuttering and doubling, nobody was giving her speeches about occupational therapy, what the hell was her problem?

  All I wanted to do, almost the moment I saw her, was pick a fight. Whatever else the head injury had done, it didn’t stop me doing that—on the contrary: most of the time I could just about form simple sentences, but going on the attack seemed to unleash a new and ugly fluency. All it took was one misstep from my mother, one phrase or look that flicked me on the raw—and even at gunpoint I couldn’t have justified why certain things counted as missteps, but they did—and we were off.

  “I brought you peaches. Will you have one now? I can wash them in the—”

  “No. Thanks. I’m not hungry.”

  “Well”—dialing up the cheery note, bending to rummage in the stuffed plastic bag beside her chair—“I brought pretzels, too. How about those? The little ones that you—”

  “I said I’m not hungry.”

  “Oh. All right. I’ll leave them here for later.”

  The soupy, martyred forbearance on her face made me want to throw up. “Jesus, that look. Can you stop giving me that look?”

  Her face tightened. “What look?”

  “Oh, poor dear Toby, he’s not himself, must make allowances, the poor thing doesn’t know what he’s saying—”

  “You’ve been seriously hurt. Everything I’ve read says it’s normal for you to be a bit—”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. I’m not a fucking vegetable. I’m not drooling into my puréed prunes. Is that what you’re telling people, that I’m not myself? Is that why no one’s been in? Susanna and Leon haven’t even rung me—”

  My mother was blinking rapidly, staring past my ear into the light from the window. I had a horrible feeling that she was trying not to cry, and an equally horrible one that if she pulled that crap I was going to throw her out of my room. “All I’ve said is that you might not be feeling well enough yet. You haven’t seemed like you want to talk to people.”

  “You didn’t bother to ask me what I thought? You just decided that I was too not myself to make a great big decision like that all on my own?” It was a relief to be able to blame this on my mother. I didn’t in fact want to talk to my cousins, but we had grown up together, and although by this stage we weren’t living in each other’s pockets any more—I saw Susanna a few times a year at Christmas and birthdays, Leon maybe once a year when he was over from Amsterdam or Barcelona or whichever city he was currently drifting around—it had still stung when they didn’t bother.

  “If you want to see everyone, I can—”

  “If I want to see them, I can tell them myself. Or do you think I’m too brain-damaged for that? You think I’m basically a toddler now, I need Mummy to set up my playdates?”

  “OK”—with maddening care, hands clasped tightly in her lap—“then what would you like me to tell them, when they ask about you? They’ve all been Googling head injuries, and of course there’s such a wide range of outcomes that they have no idea what to—”

  “Don’t tell them anything. Nothing.” My family swarming and picking like ants over my carcass, I could just see it—my aunt Louisa pulling soppy compassion-faces, Aunt Miriam debating which of my chakras would need unblocking, Uncle Oliver pontificating about some blather he’d picked up on Wikipedia and Uncle Phil nodding sagely through it all— It made me want to punch someone. “Or I know, I’ve got a genius idea, tell them I’m fine and to mind their own fucking business. How’s that?”

  “They’re worried about you, Toby. They just—”

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, is this hard on them? Are they having a hard time with this?”

  And so on and on. I had never been cruel before, never, even in school where I had been one of the cool kids and could have got away with anything, I had never once bullied anyone. Finding myself doing it now gave me a rush of savage, breathless glee and of wretchedness—glee because it was a new weapon although I’m not sure exactly how it was supposed to protect me (next time I ran into burglars I could totally flay them with sarcasm, I suppose) and wretchedness because I had liked being a kind person and now I couldn’t find my way back to that, it seemed lost for good in some dark expanse of smoking rubble, and altogether by the time my mother left every day both she and I were exhausted.

  In the early evenings my father came. He was a solicitor, always up to his ears instructing barristers on some impenetrable financial case; he came straight from work, bringing with him the same unflappable, esoteric atmosphere of expensive suits and half secrets that used to sweep in the door
with him every evening when I was a kid. Unlike my mother, he could tell when I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat, and unlike with my mother I had no urge to goad him into no-winner fights. Mostly he would ask a few polite questions about how I was feeling and whether I needed anything, then pull a rolled and battered paperback from his coat pocket (P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Keneally), settle himself in the visitor’s chair and read quietly for hours on end. If I had been capable of finding anything restful or comforting, I think it would have been that: the regular rhythm of his page-turning, the occasional soft huff of laughter, the clean lines of his profile against the darkening window. Often I fell asleep while he was there, and those were the only sleeps in that place that weren’t ragged and precarious, shadowed by tainted dreams and by the possibility of never waking up.

  Melissa came whenever she could find someone to mind the shop, even for an hour, and again in the evenings. To be honest, the first time she came, I was horrified. Even to myself I reeked of sweat and nameless chemicals, I was still wearing a hospital gown, and I knew I looked like shit. When I had dragged myself to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, it had been a shock. I was used to being, frankly, good-looking, in an easy, straightforward way that didn’t require much thought from anyone concerned; I have thick smooth fair hair, very blue eyes, and the kind of open, boyish face that instantly makes both guys and girls want to like me. The guy in the flyspecked mirror was a whole other story. My hair was a stringy, dirty brown and there was a big shaved patch on the right side of my head, with an ugly red wound-line running across it, studded with thick, brutal staples. One eyelid had an ugly, stoned droop, my jaw was puffy and mottled with purple; a big chip was missing from one of my top front teeth, and I had a fat lip. Even in those few days, I had lost weight; I’d been on the lean side to start with, and now there were hollows under my cheekbones and jaw that gave me a startling, starved urgency. Several days’ worth of stubble made my face look unwashed, and my eyes were bloodshot and had an unfocused middle-distance stare that put me somewhere halfway between dumb and psycho. I looked like the lowlife in a zombie movie who isn’t going to make it past the first half hour.

  And there was Melissa, airy gold head and whirl of flowered dress in the opening door, a fairy creature from some faraway world of butterflies and dewdrops. I knew she would take one look at this grim place and me—anything worthwhile deliberately, methodically stripped away, nothing left but the basest mechanics and fluids and stenches of life obscenely exposed—and she would never see me the same way again. I didn’t expect her to turn and run—for all her softness, Melissa has a straight-backed, unwavering code of loyalty that I knew would not include dumping your brain-injured boyfriend before he even got his IV out—but I braced myself for the jolt of horror across her face, the clench of determination as she set herself to do her duty.

  But instead she came flying across the floor without even a second’s pause, arms reaching—“Oh Toby, oh darling—” just stopping herself at my bedside in case she hurt me, hands fluttering inches from me, white face and round stunned eyes as if she had only that moment heard what had happened—“Your poor face, oh Toby—”

  I laughed out loud with sheer relief. “Come here,” I said, managing not to sound too thick-tongued, “I’m not breakable,” and I wrapped my arms around her (shot of agony through my ribs, but I didn’t care) and squeezed her close. I felt her tears hot on my neck, and she laughed through a sniffle—“So silly, I’m just so glad—”

  “Shh,” I said, cupping her soft head, stroking her back. The honeysuckle smell of her, the delicacy of her neck under my hand—I felt a breathtaking rush of love towards her, for being there and for breaking down so that I was the strong one comforting her. “Shh, honey. It’s OK. It’s all going to be fine.” And we stayed there like that, sweet spring breeze stirring the blinds and the sun throwing ovals of wavering light through the myriad water bottles, my tailbone killing me and me ignoring it, until she had to go open the shop again.

  That was how we spent a lot of her visits, the best of them: together on the narrow bed, not talking, not moving except for the rise and fall of our breathing and the steady rhythm of my hand on her hair. Sometimes, though, it didn’t work out that way. There were days when the thought of anyone touching me made my flesh leap, and although obviously I didn’t put it that way to Melissa (I told her I hurt all over, which in fairness was true) I could see that it caught at her to feel me shift away after a brief hug and kiss—So how was today, did you sell anything good? She hid it well, though: pulled up the visitor’s chair and chattered away, funny stories from work, gossip about her flatmate’s latest drama (Megan was a petulant, nitpicky girl who managed a chichi organic-raw-kale-type café and couldn’t work out why everyone she met turned out to be an arsehole; only Melissa could have lived with her for any length of time): dispatches from the outside world, so I would know it was still there and waiting for me. I appreciated what she was doing and I tried my best to listen and to laugh in the right places, but my concentration was shot, the nonstop flow of talk made my head hurt, and—I felt ungrateful and traitorous, but I couldn’t help it—her stories seemed like such trivial fluff, so minuscule and weightless, next to the vast dark mass that filled my mind and my body and the air around me. I would end up drifting, finding pictures in the folds of the rumpled sheet or picking compulsively at my memory of that night in search of new images, or just plain falling asleep. After a while Melissa’s voice would trail off and she would murmur something about getting back to work or getting home, lean over to brush a gentle kiss on my bruised mouth, and slip away.

  When I had no visitors I did, basically, nothing. My room had a TV, but I couldn’t follow a plotline for longer than a few minutes, or have the sound up to a normal volume without getting a splitting headache. I got a headache if I tried to read, too, or mess about on the internet on my phone. Normally this kind of inactivity would have had me jiggling like a kid and asking anyone who came within earshot when I could go home or at least go for a walk or do something, anything; but I found myself eerily willing to just lie there, watching the fan blades turn lazily and the stripes of light through the blinds make their slow way across the floor, shifting position every now and then when my tailbone ached too badly. My phone beeped and beeped—texts from friends (Hey dude just heard, how fucked up is that, hope you’re on the mend and the arseholes who did it get banged up for life); from my mother, asking whether I wanted a jigsaw puzzle; from Susanna, Hey just checking in, hope you’re doing well, let me know if you need anything or if you fancy some company; from Sean or Dec, asking if they could come visit; from Melissa, Just to say I love you. Sometimes it was hours before I got around to picking up the phone and reading the texts. Time had lost its solidity, in that arid, airless room haunted by faint electronic noises and smells of dissolution, it puddled and scattered like mercury. The only thing that gave it any cohering thread was the inexorable cycle of my pain meds kicking in and wearing off. Within a few days I knew the signs in fine-grained detail, the gradual ominous build of the throbbing above my ear, the thinning of the kind fog that kept the world at a manageable remove; I could tell almost to the minute when the pump on my IV would let out the smug, piercing beep that meant I could push the button for another dose.

  The pain wasn’t the worst part, though, not by a long shot. The worst part was the fear. A dozen times a day, more, my body would do something that it patently should not have been doing. My vision would split and wobble, and it would take a frantic burst of hard blinking to reset it; I would reach for a glass of water with my left hand, unthinking, and watch as it tumbled from between my fingers and went bouncing across the floor, water slopping everywhere. Even though the tongue swelling had gone down, my speech still had that thick village-idiot slur to it; when I went to the bathroom, my left foot dragged across the sticky greenish floor so that I hobbled along like Quasimodo. Every time sent me into a fresh tailspin: what if
I could never see/walk/talk properly again? what if this was the first of those seizures the doctor had warned me about? if not this time, what if it was the next time or the next or the next? what if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again?

  Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I’d never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked. After an eternity (lying in bed with my heart jackhammering, adrenaline firing me like a strobe light, feeling the last few threads that held my mind together stretch to snapping point) something would happen to break the vortex’s hold—a nurse coming in so that I had to make mechanical cheerful chitchat, an uncontrollable rush of sleep—and I would clamber up out of it, shaky and weak as a half-drowned animal. But even when the fear receded for a while, it was always there: dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me, waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.

  * * *

  About a week in, two detectives came to talk to me. I was lying in bed watching TV with the sound off—a bunch of cartoon trucks were trying to comfort a truck in a pink cowboy hat, who was crying big cartoon tears—when there was a tap at my door and a guy with neatly trimmed graying hair stuck his head in.

  “Toby?” he said. I knew straightaway, from his smile, that he wasn’t a doctor; I’d already got the hang of the doctors’ smiles, firm and distancing, expertly calibrated to tell you how much time was left in the conversation. This guy looked genuinely friendly. “Detectives. Have you got a few minutes for us?”