Odd Child Out Page 6

  “We’ll check downstairs, too,” Alvard says, and Sofia trots behind her as they go down. She knows Alvard wouldn’t have let her in if it wasn’t okay, but even so, she can’t help feeling as if she’s snooping behind the Sadlers’ backs, and prays that they won’t come home suddenly.

  On the first floor of the house Alvard opens a door into a room that’s spacious but cozy, and leads Sofia in. It’s definitely a man’s room. There’s a battered leather couch, a pair of running shoes discarded in front of it, a huge TV, and a signed cricket bat in a case on the wall. A large modern desk faces the window. It’s very different from the Buckingham Palace style of decor that’s going on in the hallway and in the other formal rooms of the house that Sofia has glimpsed through doorways.

  “It’s worth checking in here,” Alvard says. “Noah likes to come in here and use his dad’s desk.”

  “That’s fine.” Sofia’s desperate to get away now. This space feels like even more of a Sadler inner sanctum than Noah’s room. It’s as she’s turning around to leave that she sees the folder.

  It would never have caught her attention if it hadn’t been so boldly labeled. The word Hartisheik leaps out at her. She moves closer so that she can examine it.

  Alvard is plumping the cushions on the sofa—they look slept on—and Sofia takes the opportunity to flip open the folder. Inside there’s an official report titled “Living Conditions in Hartisheik Camp.” There’s also the stub of an airline ticket to Addis Ababa and some other documents, among them a hand-drawn map on lined A4 paper that’s dog-eared and creased where it’s previously been folded to pocket-size.

  With one finger, Sofia eases the map out of the folder so she can see it in its entirety. It shows a bird’s-eye view of the refugee camp where her family lived before they made the journey to England. Whoever drew it has worked quickly, sketchily, but has labeled each area. She runs her finger over the map, tracing along the main thoroughfares. Her memory of the camp isn’t perfect because she was a little girl when she was there, but she recalls the hospital, the UNHCR buildings where food and water were distributed, the market, the cemetery, and the area her family lived in.

  It’s all there, and more. It’s very detailed. Sofia’s so absorbed that she jumps when Alvard appears beside her and says, “Mr. Sadler goes to some difficult places. He does difficult work.”

  “Yes,” Sofia says. She can’t tear her eyes away. She was born in this place. She reacts physically. Her nostrils curl as she remembers the smell of it. She pictures the vast sky and her skin prickles as she feels the heat of the sun and the lash of the relentless wind that blew across the desert and shredded the tarpaulin that covered their shelter, day after day.

  She already knew from Abdi that Ed Sadler had spent time at this camp, but didn’t pay much attention to the information, because why would she? There was no nostalgic conversation to be had about what her family experienced there. Rather, Sofia would have felt a sense of shame having that conversation with Ed. She’d put the link out of her mind and kept it there, even when her parents were agonizing over whether to let Abdi attend the opening of Ed Sadler’s exhibition.

  Actually seeing the evidence of Ed Sadler’s visit there, however long ago it was, is different, though. It makes this link between their families feel much more real, and for the first time, she shares her parents’ deep unease about it.

  She tears herself away, not wanting Alvard to think that she’s lingering too long and snooping where she shouldn’t be.

  Downstairs, Alvard says goodbye affectionately, squeezing Sofia’s hand between her own. “I am praying for both boys,” she says.

  As Sofia walks away from the house she adjusts her hijab so that it shrouds her face more than usual, partly because it’s got very cold, but partly because she doesn’t want anybody to see her looking upset. She regrets it a few minutes later when she gets on the bus and a woman tuts at her, shifting in her seat to put distance between them.

  Sofia wants to tut back at the cross the woman is wearing around her neck, just to make a point, but she doesn’t. She knows that’s not how it works, and she’s not that kind of person. Instead, she sits very still in her seat, Abdi’s bag at her feet, and feels both afraid and angry. Next time the bus stops, she moves to a seat at the back.

  When I was in primary school I had a friend called Matthew. He came to visit me in hospital very soon after my diagnosis. I was in the main area of the ward where there were three other beds in the same bay as mine.

  “It’s a bit like camping, isn’t it?” Mum said when we unpacked our things into the small cabinet beside the bed. The doctor said we were going to be in for at least four days. The plan was to have an operation to put my central line in and do some more tests so they could choose the right medicines for me. It was my first operation and my first time staying in the hospital.

  On the bed opposite was a bigger girl sitting up in bed with pink headphones over her ears, watching a film on a portable DVD player. Her arms were toothpick-thin and she had a tube going up her nose. Her mum sat on a chair beside her. She had a book open on her lap, but her eyes were shut.

  On the bed beside me was a boy a bit younger than me with a bald head, looking at a Pokémon sticker book. He was on his own. He got out of bed and stared at me. “My dad’s getting a motorbike,” he said. He had a massive scar that went all the way over the top of his head, and one of his eyelids was droopy.

  “That’s nice,” Mum said.

  “I’m five,” he said.

  When the nurse came, she put him back under the covers and turned on the TV at the end of a plastic arm that swung out over his bed. It was showing a very loud cartoon.

  “If you stay in bed until the end of the program,” the nurse told him as she closed the curtain around him, “I’ll tell Mummy how good you were when she comes.”

  I unpacked and checked everything out and felt excited about my friend Matthew coming to see me. I wanted to show him the controller that made my bed tilt and fold.

  Matthew came to visit me two days later. His mum brought me a present. By then, I was sore from the operation to put my central line in, and it hurt to move much, but I showed Matthew the see-through dressing on my chest that covered up the place where the line came out of me, and I showed him the little fabric bag the nurses gave me to wear around my neck for storing the ends of the line in. The bag had smiley dog faces on it and a blue ribbon. The nurse told me nice ladies made them especially for the children. When Mum saw what I was doing, she said, “Noah! Don’t! Put it away!”

  “It’s okay,” Matthew’s mum said. “It looks very good, Noah. You’ve been very brave. Don’t you think so, Matthew?”

  Matthew stared at it and sucked his finger. I pulled down my top.

  We put on the TV while the mums got tea, but we couldn’t find anything we wanted to watch. Mum wouldn’t let us play with the bed controller after Matthew tested it out and all my things fell off the end.

  It was very cramped around my bed for us all, so we went to the playroom that was on the ward. I told Matthew a dog came to visit us in the playroom the day before. It was a special dog that visits people when they’re sick. I stroked it, and when I said, “Sit,” it sat down, but it wouldn’t roll over when I asked it to. It just licked my hand. I told Matthew about how I was going to get a dog but after I got my diagnosis we had to tell the breeder that we couldn’t have the puppy. Mum promised we would get a dog as soon as I got better. (That never happened, hence this: Noah’s Bucket List Item No. 3: Borrow a dog).

  The boy from the bed next door to me came to the playroom with a hospital play specialist when me and Matthew were there. They started to build a train set together. He had lines drawn in black pen on his bald head.

  “Radiotherapy, I think,” my mum muttered to Matthew’s mum.

  Matthew stared again. His hand crept into his mum’s hand, and he sat down beside her and didn’t want to play.

  After they went home I said to Mu
m, “I don’t want my friends to come anymore.”

  Abdi was the first friend to visit me in hospital since Matthew, and when he came he had the right attitude.

  It was the end of the spring term of our second year at school. Abdi and me were best friends by then. We did everything together: We were seat buddies on the bus to the sports grounds, we did chess club and IT club together, we sat together at lunch and we hung out together at break. I helped him with English homework and he helped me with maths.

  Abdi arrived at the hospital one evening after I’d been there for about a week. He had a chessboard and a stack of graphic novels tucked under his arm.

  I was in a room of my own. You get one if you’re a baby or if your treatment is very harsh.

  “Don’t you think chess is a bit much?” Mum said.

  Abdi looked at me. “I don’t mind. We can just talk,” he said.

  “I want to play,” I said.

  We had to do some complicated rearranging of my tubes and machines, and it took a while to prop me up, but we got there. Abdi perched on the end of my bed and set up the chessboard on a pillow between us.

  “I think this might wear you out,” Mum said.

  “We can stop if it does.” Abdi laid out the chess pieces with neat movements.

  “You could go and get a cup of coffee if you like?” I said to Mum.

  For a moment, I thought she might refuse, because she looked so surprised. She said to Abdi, “If he looks any more pale than this or if his breathing gets ragged . . .”

  “I’ll call the nurse,” Abdi said. “I promise.”

  Mum knew that Abdi was trustworthy, because I told her he was, loads of times, even though, ironically, I wasn’t being a hundred percent honest about that, because who is?

  “Okay, well, I think I’ll just sit outside the door here, so you can call me if you need me.”

  “Mum, I’m fine.” That wasn’t totally true either, because I had some pain in my back that the morphine wasn’t touching and a wee bit of visual disturbance, but I wasn’t going to admit to that.

  When we were alone, Abdi started the game with a move that I’d never seen him make before.

  “Are you taking advantage of a sick boy?” I asked him.

  “I’m not going to let you win just because you’re in here.”

  I made my move.

  “Feisty!” he said.

  He didn’t once mention how sick I looked. He didn’t stare. As we played, I was concentrating so hard I stopped hearing the hiss of the oxygen and the sounds of the ward.

  Abdi cracked open the window after a while. The sounds of a rained-on street came into my room with the cool air. He persuaded the nurses to bring us a glass so he could put his phone in it and improvise a speaker. He’d made me a playlist and we listened to it as we plotted the destruction of each other’s chess pieces. It was the most fun I’d ever had in hospital.

  I lasted about forty-five minutes before the pain got to me and I had to re-dose on morphine. When I came around, Mum was back in her chair beside me and Abdi had gone, but the chessboard, with the pieces in place, had been moved to the windowsill, and it stayed there until he came back the next time and we continued the game.

  And the best bit? Abdi came back whenever he could. It wasn’t all that often, because he needed to be collected by his dad, who was fitting it in around his shifts, but he was the first and only friend to visit me regularly.

  I’m aware that there’s a lot of noise going on around me. Machinery noise and music, as if through headphones. I think I’m having a scan.

  Scans make me panic. I’ve had to be sedated in the past. It’s the claustrophobia. I feel it now, but I can’t do anything about it apart from wait, watching the blackness, hearing the noises, feeling the fear rise. For the first time, I wonder when they’re going to bring me out of this coma, and exactly how sick I am. I am desperate to be able to ask my mum. She would have the answer.

  I have a sense of motion, of turning wheels and a few bumps, and then we must be back on the ward because I hear Dad: “Did they say anything?”

  “They’ll speak to us after they’ve reviewed the scan with the consultant.”

  “I got you a tea.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hear them drinking their tea.

  Mum says, “That Asian registrar said that if the bleeding in his brain has stabilized they might try to bring him round tomorrow.”

  “And if not?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s not go there.”

  I hear Dad crick his fingers and groan as he stretches. He yawns very deeply and says, “I still can’t believe neither of us heard them leave the house.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. There’s no point.”

  “I shouldn’t have tied one on.”

  “It was your exhibition opening. You were allowed a drink.”

  Here’s what I want to say to Dad: “Boy, did you drink!” Because he did: one fancy bottled beer after another while we were at the gallery.

  Woodley meets me at the entrance to the intensive care ward in the Children’s Hospital.

  Inside, it’s as grim as you might expect. The children and babies are sicker than you ever want to see. Directed by the nurses, Woodley and I walk up the ward toward a bay at the far end. On either side of us, the beds are occupied for the most part by still bodies. Parents sit beside them, cloaked in anxiety.

  Cast a cold eye, I think to myself. Dr. Manelli and I share an enthusiasm for poetry by W. B. Yeats. She told me to use it if it helped. I need a cold eye to keep moving between these beds, or I’ll have to turn around and walk out of there.

  At the far end of the ward, a woman in scrubs pulls back a curtain just as we’re approaching, and I see a woman who must be Noah Sadler’s mother.

  She sits in a chair on one side of his bed. She looks collapsed somehow, as if she’s missing something vital. On the other side of Noah’s bed there’s a huddle of machinery and a knot of plastic tubes and wiring.

  Noah Sadler looks very sick. His eyes are closed and he’s motionless, just as Abdi was, but unlike his friend, Noah exhibits no hint of life at all. I try not to be transfixed by the small veins running across his eyelids. I already know that I’ll remember this, that the sight of the prone body of Noah Sadler has worked its way under my skin.

  Fiona Sadler doesn’t want to talk beside Noah’s bed.

  “I don’t know how much he can hear,” she says, “but I don’t want to be away from him for long.”

  She confers with the nurses before leading us out of the main area of the ward into a small lobby.

  “There aren’t any rooms available,” she tells us. “Will this do?”

  We sit on plastic chairs in a row. Opposite us, nurses prepare meds in a brightly lit room with a half-glass door. A solid door beside it is labeled PARENTS’ ROOM.

  Fiona Sadler is physically slight, as if she hasn’t eaten a decent meal in a long time. Woodley and I, sitting on either side of her, dwarf her. It’s not my preferred way to conduct an interview, but I dive in.

  “Do you have any idea why the boys might have been out last night?”

  She shakes her head. Before I can ask my next question, she has one for me. “Do you know that my son has cancer, Detective?”

  There are some sentences you can hear that are an emotional body blow, and hearing that a child has cancer is definitely one of them.

  “I wasn’t aware. I’m so very sorry.”

  “He’s terminal.”

  And that would be another of those sentences. I’ve met some families in truly awful situations, and the Sadlers just joined the ranks of the most desperate.

  “I’m so very sorry.” I’m repeating myself. I want to say more, but I’m lost for words.

  Sometimes you can’t wait to get your teeth into a witness or a family member you suspect of being neglectful or complicit, but there are other times when questioning can feel cruel, even if your ulterior motive is to get t
o the truth. If it wasn’t already, this has definitely just become one of those times.

  “They told us we had a few months at best.” She raises her chin and blinks repeatedly until she recovers her composure. Her self-control is phenomenal.

  I open my mouth to try to phrase a response that isn’t totally inadequate, but she cuts me off with her next comment:

  “I want those months, Detective.”

  “I understand.”

  “I want every single one of them.”

  She’s stopped herself from crying, but her hands are shaking so much that the takeout cup she’s holding threatens to spill.

  I find her distress difficult to witness. It provokes memories of Ben Finch’s mother, Rachel, that threaten to knock me off my stride. If I’d been asked to describe one professional scenario I would have liked to be able to avoid in my first day, week, month, or even year back at work after the Ben Finch case, it would be this: a mother for whom everything is at stake because her child’s life is in grave danger. Yet here I am, and I have to be effective.

  I try to formulate a response that acknowledges and respects her grief. I have to keep a lid on my own feelings so they don’t develop into something I might not be able to manage, but I don’t want to seem cold.

  The door to the parents’ room opposite swings open as a man exits, a mobile phone protruding from his back pocket and a cup of something hot in each hand. The door doesn’t close automatically behind him, so we have a view of a cramped space containing a kitchenette with a refrigerator, a microwave, a sink, and a small square dining table. On the fridge there’s a big notice that reads, “Please label your food clearly with your child’s name and ward number.” The room disgorges a strong smell of microwaved food that seems to thicken the air in the corridor. I watch a wisp of steam trail from the spout of the kettle.

  Fiona Sadler saves me from coming up with an appropriate response. “Sorry,” she says. “It’s not your fault.”

  “We can do this another time, if you prefer?”