Beyond the High Blue Air Read Online Free PDF Page B

phone to let the nurses’ station know we are there, time stops altogether for that moment. And then within seconds it seems Dr Stizer is walking down the corridor towards us and he is smiling, a huge beaming smile under his great moustache. The girls and I are gripping each other’s hand so tightly mine hurts but yes, he unlocks the door and says to me, Your son is breathing on his own! He looks so genuinely happy and now with this kind foreign neurosurgeon in the little room we hug one another and hug him too and dance about like small children, crying the first and only tears of joy that we will know for Miles. He is alive! Breathing all by himself! The amazing boy! We can picture his recovery, we’re euphoric. It feels as though Miles has won the most difficult race ever run, against the greatest odds.
    We go out that evening to a Mexican bar we’ve come across that does excellent cocktails. We call the family and all the close friends to tell them the news and many mojitos later we dance down the street to the hotel, chanting as we go: He’s-brea-thing-on-his-own! He’s-brea-thing-on-his-own!
    Our euphoria is short-lived. The days sink back into their routine; each morning I wake in the hotel room with a stab of fear. I remember what it felt like to wake slowly and easily but now I am taut with foreboding at what the day might hold. I get up and fill the small hotel kettle to make tea for whoever is with me, either Ron or one of the children if Ron’s not there.
    Marina is with me today. She has just turned twenty, the youngest in the family and Miles’s adored little sister. Looking at her small shape still asleep in the bed I am relieved to see her face peaceful for the moment. I switch on the kettle and sit down to wait for it to boil, leaning back in the armchair with my eyes closed. Miles is lying in a hospital bed just a few streets away from us; despite breathing on his own he is still in a coma. In the quiet of these cold mornings I have a new ritual: I go to him. I’ve never been able to meditate but this thing I can do, willing my mind to cut loose so that I can join him where he is. There is a list I repeat like a mantra when I reach him: please let him open his eyes and know us, please let him walk again, talk again, please, please let his brain heal so that he can come back and be the vital person he was. I want to use the concentrated force of furious love to make these things happen. I suppose this is the way that some people find prayer helpful; perhaps this is a prayer.
    I wake Marina with a cup of tea and call Claudia, who is in the next door room, to join us before we go down to breakfast.
    Breakfast has become an ordeal. I used to love hotel breakfasts like a childish treat, the anticipation of what new and exotic choice might be on offer in a foreign dining room, but now I find I can’t eat anything. Walking into this Alpine dining room each morning I am repulsed at the sight of the serving tables set out with what seems a lavishly obscene spread of food: great bowls of gelatinous yoghurt, muesli glistening with nuts and seeds, glass jars of dark sticky honey and blood-coloured jams, fresh red raspberry, strawberry, dark blue fruits of the forest. There are platters of fat yellow cheeses or oozing creamy ones, slices of violent pink ham and salami, bowls of bald expressionless eggs and baskets piled high with voluptuous rolls. Round these tables the hotel guests circle intently, eyeing the food and jostling for position to load their plates, and I can only think of snouts and troughs. I find a table in the corner and sit down, and around me I’m aware of munching and swilling, a lifting of spoons and forks and cups to mouths that seem to open and close and chomp in a syncopated rhythm of mastication, all in time to the sickening jingle of hotel muzak playing on a loop in the background; it’s like being in an orchestrated