The traffic lights turn red.
Drivers glance at her through wound-down windows, a woman with a pram walks by and stares, just like the woman with the pianist hands back inside marrying her person, maybe, signing the paper that changes nothing and yet everything, else why would people do it, why would they want it, why doesshewant it, she has tried not to but she does.
She fiddles with a thread on her bodice while she waits, checks her phone.
Her worries began to ripple, some time ago. Expanding outwards.
And in a flourish of fear she pulls up Robin’s name on the screen once again to text, this time, ask him what’s happening, is everything okay, everything’sfine, she thinks, she plans to say, and I thought this would prove that to you, she is thinking this as she types when her phone rings in her hand and it is not Robin or Goose or even Bren but an unknown number, no name.
A stranger.
A hospital.
She is told to come, quickly.
TWENTY-FOUR
They say something about a bleed on his brain.
TWENTY-FIVE
She goes where she is told to; the larger hospital three towns over. Flags down a cab and gets in with her embellished dress so showy, so ludicrous. Sun, so bright through the windows. She doesn’t see it. Didn’t. Looks ahead, the whole of her frozen and on fire as she counts down the thirty-seven-minute drive.
How, goes the thump of her heart. When.
His tiredness. Headaches.
Flashes of anger, so appropriate, so reasonable, that it had felt reflective of her own mind twisting to figure things out, in recent weeks.
The cab parks, and she pays. Sliding doors, green signs to a specialist unit where she heads for the woman at the desk. A woman who looks at her in her wedding dress, and Nora sees her face change, puzzled to pitying. Ironic, how this dress was meant to call for no fanfare and no fuss and yet it is the fussiest thing she could be wearing in a place like this, a place neither of them should be, not today, not ever.
The woman takes a long time looking at her computer after Nora gives her Robin’s name. So long that Nora has to say look, she was called, she was told to come here, her partner had a headache, as if by saying this and not the words that had then been used, that that’s all there is to worry about.
If you could sit down, the receptionist says, I’ll let them know you’re here.
Okay, Nora says, thank you. But, she says again, like I said, they calledme. So maybe I could just go through?
The woman looks at her for a moment longer, as if bracing herself – bracing Nora – for what she’s about to share.
He went to A and E this morning, she says. And had to have a CT scan, for severe head pain.
Nora cannot absorb this. Says okay?
Then they brought him straight here, the woman says, for emergency surgery.
Nora stares at her.
Surgery, she repeats, the word alien in her mouth, and the woman nods. Says when she has any further information, she will pass it along. That Nora should sit down, for now. And somehow, Nora does. Somehow, there is a slow motion that takes over what she is hearing, and she has heard a lot, these past two days, Josie revealing a big secret and Bren breaking down and she should not have cared, she should have been here, facing what matters, because what matters is what she’d never seen coming.
A bleed on the brain.
Emergency surgery.
Those hard truths, pressing against her own skull.
_
Milk, salt, rennet. The name of an art show they saw in Paris, the dates they’d met, moved in, bought their sofa. A joke he’d told about his own socks that she can’t even recall but they refer to, daily, the relevance of it now lost but it doesn’t matter, it’s in their lore,I look at you and I’m home.
