Zo Read online

  Pausing at the open door of Ally’s room, he gazed silently at her. The room bloomed with sunflowers, their patterns on the wallpaper, bedspreads, and curtains, and real sunflowers filled several large vases with their cheer. Their yellow sunniness should have lifted his spirits, but as he watched his friend, her face turned away as she looked out the window, he could only sense the yellows of cowardice and loneliness in the buttery shades.

  Slowly, her head turned until her bruised, violet eyes met his, and she regarded him sombrely for a full minute, looking deep into his soul. Peter blinked and looked down. His sense of failure was overwhelming.

  ‘You know you’re an idiot,’ her soft voice broke the silence with faint but melodious amusement.

  He looked up sharply, relieved at the absence of malice or accusation in her tones.

  ‘What were you thinking, Peter?’ she asked, patting the bed to invite him closer.

  ‘I was thinking that I couldn’t live without you.’

  ‘Oh, piffle. You’ve done perfectly well without me for years.’

  Making his way to her bedside, he took her hand in his and gently felt for her pulse at the base of the bandages that wrapped her lower arms. The regular, strong beat under his fingertips was reassuring, like finding a rock to stand on after treading water for too many hours.

  ‘It might look that way,’ he smiled down at her, ‘but you know I’m the statue who fell in love with my female Pygmalion.’

  ‘So you say,’ she spoke so softly that he had to lean over to hear her words. 'But you’re assuming I sculpted you, while I know that I merely released you from the cage you’d placed around yourself.

  ‘Semantics,’ he grinned at her, gently stroking some hair from her forehead, and hiding the rush of emotion as he felt the warmth of her skin under his fingertips. ‘I’m glad you’re here with me today.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m glad, yet, but I’m beginning to feel that this is the right outcome.’

  ‘Life is always the right choice when there is a choice,’ he raised his eyes to the ceiling as he spoke, quoting one of her oft-used expressions from the past.

  ‘Ouch,’ she squeezed his hand. ‘I recognise that line. Was I always so sure of everything? So convinced that there was only a right and a wrong, and not a swamp of maybes, perhaps, and inconceivables in-between? That really makes me sound rather priggish.’

  ‘Never,’ he murmured, ‘just certain of what could be.’

  ‘I’m not so certain now.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘Although, I am certain you are an idiot,’ her smile flashed at him again, ‘a sneaky idiot, though. I’d planned everything, as you probably realise now, but I didn’t plan on you having the same blood type and being stupid enough to hook yourself up to me like a fuel pump.’

  ‘It worked, though.’

  ‘I think you’re feeling very smug,’ she reproached him, ‘but I’m going to forgive you this once. Mind you, don’t make a habit of smugness – it’s quite unattractive on you.’

  ‘I’ll take note of that advice.’

  ‘Good.’ She squeezed his hand again, more gently this time as her arm hurt, and drilled him with her eyes. ‘You’re like a horse at a creek crossing, Peter, standing at the edge and not wanting to get his feet wet, but determined to cross it anyway. What is it you want to tell me? Just jump in and blurt it out.’

  ‘I’m a doctor. I don’t blurt,’ he countered, his lips twitching slightly. ‘But you are right about wanting to tell you something. I want to tell you lots of things.’

  ‘So much to say, so much not to say?’ she asked him, quoting one of her favourite lines from a book they’d studied together long ago in English classes.

  ‘That’s probably true of everyone,’ he paused and scratched at his chin as he gazed out the window at the flower garden, his mind side-stepping to an inconsequential observation. ‘Do you think the sunflower theme is overdone?’

  Following his gaze to the bright display of yellow sunflowers in the garden outside, she snorted, ‘There is an overpowering sense of sunniness in this room. I’m sure if I wasn’t suffering from chronic depression, I’d appreciate it more.’

  ‘You’d appreciate lots of things more if you weren’t suffering from it.’

  ‘True,’ she shrugged, ‘though I’m feeling remarkably perky right now. What feel-good drugs are you taking that came into my system with your blood?’

  ‘An appreciation of life,’ he said, raising a hand to count off points on his fingers, ‘the drug of good humour which can be addictive, a pile of endorphins released because I was doing something that I felt was right, and perhaps a bit too much sugar as I’d eaten half a tub of ice-cream only an hour or so earlier.’

  ‘Stress eating?’

  ‘Maybe. But it is excellent ice cream, so perhaps I should blame gluttony, not stress.’

  ‘OK, then, if you don’t have uppers coursing through your veins - and, by the way, blurk,' she pulled an unattractive face to accompany the sound, 'to your list of goody-two-shoes feel-good drugs - did you pump some mind-altering drugs into me while I was off visiting la-la-land.’

  ‘I wasn’t your doctor at the time,’ he pointed out. ‘Gina took over because I was running out of blood and couldn’t be relied on to think straight. I am fairly sure she gave you something, though.’

  ‘Hmf,’ she grunted, ‘and here I thought I was just feeling buoyed up by being alive, but it’s artificial.’

  ‘They didn’t work before,’ he reminded her, ‘so maybe it’s the feel of my manly blood inside you.’

  Ally wrinkled her nose at him, ‘You know that sounds really gross. I will concede, though, that you’ve done a mighty fine job side-tracking me again,’ she lightly slapped his arm. ‘Jump in the creek, get your feet wet, and tell me what it is you’re all nervy about.’

  When they were teens, it had never failed to amaze him how perceptive she was when it came to any problem, concern, or secret he might have. Obviously, the talent remained with her. They had never been able to plan a surprise party for her without her finding out almost immediately. Secrets may as well have been presents wrapped in glitter paper and held out in front of them for her to unwrap. She was right, though, he should jump in and tell her.

  ‘I don’t know when you’ll be up to seeing them, but the gang’s all here.’

  Ally narrowed her eyes and tilted her head at him as she digested that bit of news. It was impossible to tell if she felt joy, anger, or any emotion at all in the twenty seconds of silence as she thought about what he’d said.

  ‘All four of them?’ she asked, finally.

  ‘All four,’ he nodded. ‘They arrived yesterday while you and I were dancing the transfusion tango.’

  ‘Of course, they did,’ she rolled her eyes at the timing. ‘Quantum connections never cease to amaze me. After all these years, I reach that point yesterday, and everyone appears at that exact time.’

  ‘To be fair,’ Peter explained, ‘I had called them the day before because I was worried that I couldn’t reach you.’ He hesitated, not wanting to say that he had thought she was going to die, but not wanting to gloss over the truth. Ally always hated the duck-and-dodge when a good punch would do. ‘I’d told them that I was worried that you would succeed in ending your life.’

  ‘Not for the want of trying,’ she sniffed sighed, and reached into herself to find words that could help explain her actions. There were so many shadows and locked doors in her mind that it wasn’t always easy to find a place where she could uncover the words that would illuminate her actions. ‘I…look, I am sorry, Peter. I didn’t want to go on hurting you and hurting everyone else and feeling…feeling so sad. That overwhelming sense of sadness almost every waking moment was making this life meaningless. It seemed that death wasn’t so much a way out as a logical choice - the way to end the pain. Though I know how I’d beat you about the ears if you ever said the same thing.’

  His lips twitched as he recognise
d the truth of those words.

  Ally continued trying to release words from the dark rooms and corridors within her head, careful to keep the darkest firmly locked, for now. ‘Death used to seem so far away, something that wasn’t a choice but an ending that would be thrust on to me when I didn’t want it. How many lectures did I give you about choosing to live no matter what happened in your life? No, don’t answer, it was rhetorical, and you know it.’

  She squeezed his hand to acknowledge the amused expression in his eyes before continuing. ‘These past years, though, death has seemed such a small sideways step, something I could control by one day simply choosing to step sideways, and then that great weight of sadness would be gone. Yesterday, with the world looking so beautiful outside, I decided to take that step. It didn’t seem like a big decision, just one that made sense and gave me a huge sense of relief once I’d made it. It was like I’d been trapped in this mire of sorrow for an eternity, and I’d discovered the road out. Death was the road out.’

  ‘And if I had said that to you about ending my life?’ he raised his brows and inclined his head at her, accurately predicting her response.

  ‘I’ve already said that I’d beat you about the ears, then I’d have stated that you were a bloody idiot, and I’d find the drugs that would stop making you think like that.’

  ‘It’s not that easy, though, is it?’

  ‘It would be if I was advising you,’ she teased him in her soft voice, finding a small measure of enjoyment in watching him walk on eggshells around her, worrying about saying the wrong thing and triggering more self-destructive behaviour. She was reasonably sure that the desire to end her life had finished with the lecture she had received while unconscious, not that she would tell Peter about it at this point as it would only distress him more to think her mind had suffered such a break with reality. As she had learned many years ago, her friends saw her version of reality as a dangerous fantasy, and it was safer to keep it hidden

  ‘How do you figure that?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, you’re a simple sort of a person,’ she ribbed him, her eyes gleaming, ‘with easy-care instructions while, obviously, I am far more complicated and require more complex treatments than a get-well-soon card and a pill.’

  ‘I won’t argue with that,’ he nodded, relieved to find one of the first real signs of the old Ally, always ready to jest about situations. It was comfortable to fall back into the familiar verbal ground of their younger years and tease her back. ‘At least, not while you are in this weakened state. It would be unfair to point out my superior qualities while you are lying in bed looking so ill.’

  ‘I look amazing, and you know it,’ Ally smiled knowing full well she looked wan and weak, but for the first time in years she felt that she’d crossed the energy threshold needed to raise her head, look life in the eyes, and joke about it. ‘I doubt even a Hollywood movie star could look better at this moment.’

  ‘Coincidentally, we have one of those not far from this bed if you’d like to compare.’

  ‘As long as you don’t bring a mirror, I’ll probably compare quite well. You know they’ll tell me that I look well, look lovely, look the same, look beautiful. They’re not going to tell me I look like shit.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘Do you realise that I know what you are doing?’

  ‘Doing?’ she asked, looking puzzled.

  ‘You have side-tracked me again, and you are stalling. Gina will be back any minute and she’ll kick me out because you need your rest.’

  ‘You’re so easy to side-track, though,’ she nudged his arm with her elbow, careful not to cause too much movement to her bandaged wrists, and winked at him in a way that made his heart pound even after all these years. ‘You are so set on doing something, then a butterfly flitters past and you’re all pretty thing, and away you go. It’s fun.’

  ‘So, I can bring them in?’

  Ally had been stalling. It had always been easy to distract Peter from any short-term goal. A little dance of words and away they’d twirl in another direction, though she was slightly surprised that she was enjoying doing it. Enjoyment hadn’t been strong in her life for many years. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see her friends again, it was just that there were so many segments to the action of seeing them. Part of her was desperate to see her friends, the children she’d raised when she was a child herself, because they were pieces of her life that had been missing for too long. Opposing that was the part of her that was embarrassed by what she had come to - all the advice she had given them about staying positive and seeking all that they could from life when she had failed so dismally to practice it herself. Another section of her mind dreaded seeing them because of the cold, black memories that sat between now and when they were friends. She hadn’t been able to forgive them for what they did to her - for what they did to her mind and her memories of her other life – and now she knew she knew they had been right.

  It was all very complex. So, she stalled with another butterfly for Peter.

  ‘What do they actually want? It’s been so many years.’

  ‘They want – we want – to see you again. To have you back in our lives. We want to say sorry. We want you to talk to us – about everything. We want to understand.’

  To himself, he added, and we want you to love us. You created us and then we drove you away, and we need you back.

  Ally pursed her lips, remembering what happened last time she tried to reveal everything to them. ‘Yeah, well, Mr Doctor-man, I don’t recall that talking to you about everything is all that healthy for me.’

  Peter winced at the mention of what they’d done to her, but wanted to let her know that they had changed. ‘Talking will help. I know we didn’t listen before, but we want to listen now. Really listen. We don’t want to change you, or change your memories, or get rid of Zo. We just want all of you in our lives. We want everything about you, including Zo. We want to hear the whole story.’

  The whole story? Ally thought bitterly to herself, no, they didn’t want to hear everything, and she didn’t want to tell it. There were too many buried secrets that didn’t need uncovering, too many memories that would emerge as insanity, too much that would shock them and force them to choose what was right. Like she had done when they were growing up, she would shove all the secrets back into the rooms and lock them away. It would be a relief to unburden herself, but they weren’t ready for it. Zo wanted her to tell them, though.

  ‘The whole story? That would be depressing,’ she kept her voice light. ‘How about a brief summary? I have the black dog eating at me, I made some mistakes, I think I’ll be better now, and I’m sure there’s not anything I can say that you, Doctor Barker, haven’t heard a hundred times before from others who felt the same.’

  ‘Every story is unique,’ he spoke softly, hoping she’d continue to talk. Talking was often a healthy outlet to help drain the poison that ate at minds. ‘I want to hear everything. We all do.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she shook her head and closed her eyes. Long ago, when she had tried to tell them just one part of it, they had responded by trying to destroy her mind, her memories, her thoughts…her love. Perhaps their actions were understandable since what was inside her head looked insane to anyone not living inside her head. And they only heard part of it – she had no idea what they would do if she revealed everything. It was smart to keep quiet. ‘The problem is, you want to hear me talk of my craziness as if it were a craziness that I have left behind, and not like it’s an elemental truth that defines my existence.’

  ‘An elemental truth?’ he softly repeated her words, knowing that it was time to stop seeing her view of the world as wrong, and simply accept it was different. ‘If that is what it is to you, I want to accept that. I want to see your view as part of you, as it is. I don’t want to see it as something that should be altered or removed.’

  ‘Really?’ Her mouth twisted with scepticism. She
narrowed her eyes as she regarded him. ‘It didn’t work out so well for me last time I tried that.’

  ‘Ouch,’ he winced at the verbal punch, knowing she had good reason to doubt him. ‘I was wrong. I’ve paid for it every day since then. We all have.’

  ‘None so much as I,’ she uttered dryly, considering her vanishing life as their stars rose, but there was no bitterness in her heart about their success. It had always been her intent to lift them up, and her own fractured life was something she had always been prepared to pay for their lives.

  ‘No doubt. But we need to talk about it. All of it. We need to go back to childhood and start over. We need to talk about the day you ran from us and why you don’t want to live.’

  ‘Do you really want to hear about Zo?’ Ally noticed him flinch when she said the name, and that was answer enough. ‘No, you don’t want to hear about him because, to you, he represents my loss of sanity, so I have to keep him, and so many other things, hidden from you.’

  ‘Not this time. I – we – want to hear it all. I believe if you can reveal everything to us as we did to you when we were growing up, then we will understand you. We do want to see and comprehend your truths. The only things I want to see gone from you are the depression, the sadness, the sense of loneliness, and the feeling that you can’t trust us. We want the love and trust we had in those early years.’

  ‘Back then, you were only seeing the surface of me,’ she patted his hand and closed her eyes, tiredness overcoming her. ‘I still don’t think you want to see beneath the surface, not really.’

  ‘Will you give us a chance? Will you see the gang?’

  ‘Give me a few minutes to catch my thoughts,’ her voice faded as she withdrew into her mind, ‘and to duct tape the surface of my life together, and then bring them in.’

  ‘Five minutes only,’ Gina spoke from behind Peter. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there, but Ally’s eyes had not slipped sideways over his shoulder while they’d been talking so he guessed she had only just arrived. ‘I know she’s your friend, Peter, but, for now, she’s my patient.’