Hi, I’m Becky, an artist and writer based in Derbyshire. I write about my life in what I hope is an honest and open way. I write about mental health, autism, sobriety and simply trying to find my way in this world. Please subscribe to support my work and to read more of my posts.
Hello,
How are you?
To ease me back in after my week off for my birthday, this week I am sharing some more of my fiction. This is another piece that entered into the Manchester Writing Competition.
I hope you enjoy it.
Always
“Hi Sarah, it’s Will. Are you free to talk?”
“Hi, Will. Yes, of course. Is everything okay?”
“In all honesty, no, it’s not. It’s Nikki…”
The drive up to Derbyshire took an eternity. Simon, Sarah’s husband, was driving and they had picked up Katherine and Tara on the way but the car was silent. Silent tears dripped down faces, quickly wiped away. They had all cried a lot but crying now felt like an acceptance.
An acceptance that Nikki was already gone.
Arriving at the hospital in Hallowfields, they walked silently to the ICU and found Will waiting for them at the reception. As they began to walk through the large, ominous double doors, Sarah’s phone pinged. Nadia had dropped off the kids with her Mum and was on her way. Driving all the way up from Bournemouth, she would be around four hours, give or take. Sarah put her phone away without replying. Looking up she saw that everyone had waited so they could all walk down to the room together.
“Nadia’s on her way.”
Small, forced smiles fell on faces. Simon reached out his hand and Sarah grasped it. They began a slow walk down the corridor.
Reaching the room, they saw Nikki’s Mum, Claire, through the window that looked into the room. Will went in alone and whispered to Claire. Claire appeared to protest but after a few moments, she stood up. Walking out of the room was a tiny human being not the vivacious, colourful Claire that they all knew.
“Hi, girls.” Claire’s voice was small and filled with sorrow.
“We’re going to grab a cup of tea,” Will said.
“I’ll join you,” Simon said, wanting to allow the women this moment together. Although without Nadia, it was not quite right.
They watched as they walked back down the corridor, disappearing back through the doors. When they were gone from view, Sarah turned to Katherine and Tara. No words were spoken but Sarah gently pushed the door open.
The room was dimly lit, with blinds shutting out the light, a slight breeze through an open window making them dance together. The only noise apart from the gentle dance of the blinds was the beeps of machinery.
Nadia not being here was not the only thing that made this moment not quite right because Nikki wasn’t really here either. They lay in a bed, a small figure engulfed by wires and tubes.
Walking around the bed so Katherine was to the left, Tara at the bottom and Sarah to the right, they looked down upon a person whom they had known for the last twenty years, someone so familiar and yet so strange.
Gone but not quite.
This was real. Not a worry in the back of their minds. Not a fear. Not a nightmare. This was real.
“Oh, god.”
Hours had passed and Will, Claire and Simon had returned. Visiting hours had been put aside for reasons no one wanted to utter. There was no mention of anyone leaving, heading back to homes or hotels. No one wanted to risk not being there when Nikki woke up.
Or when…
The afternoon had turned to night when Nadia’s face appeared behind the window. She made no moves to enter the room and so Sarah got up and walked towards the door. Katherine and Tara followed. In the hallway, Nadia leaned against the wall, head in her hands. When she finally looked up, tears streamed down her face.
“Is she going to be okay?” Nadia’s voice was small, childlike. A question asked that she didn’t really need answering. No matter what happened, Nikki was most definitely not okay.
Standing in the hospital hallway were four people who had once been so close. In each other lives every chance they could be, now down to a couple of visits a year at the most. Life had caught up to them all and new responsibilities, new places, new homes, new needs, new loves. It had all pulled them away from each other.
It was a part of growing up, growing older. No one got out of it happening and no friendship group escaped having to now plan meeting up six months in advance.
This was life.
So, why did they now collectively feel like they’d fucked up? That they should have stayed closer, more tightly knitted together. That their friendships shouldn’t have begun to hang on the hinges of a WhatsApp group.
Because one of them was dying.
And she’d done it to herself.
A fate they had all seen coming for a long time, no matter how much they tried to believe differently.
Standing in the hallway, silent, Nadia’s question hanging in the air, no one wanting to answer.
Finally, Tara spoke.
“Let’s go to the cafe and get a drink.”
Sarah began to protest, just as Claire had. “What if something happens whilst we‘re gone?”
“Simon will come get us.”
Tara was always the most level-headed, most together. She knew nothing would happen until Will and Claire allowed it to. Tara went back into the room and whispered their plans to Simon.
Coming back out, they all began to walk to the cafe. Tears still streamed down Nadia’s face, feelings of guilt now mixing with the sadness. She should have gone into the room. She’d been a coward. As if knowing what she was thinking, Sarah grabbed her hand and held it all the way to the cafe.
They had known Nikki the longest, meeting her all the way back in infant school. Nadia and Sarah had already been friends, growing up on the same street. Nikki joined the little gang after she and Nadia found common ground. The only two who were too shy and scared to answer their name was called in the register.
Three misfits together.
Although Sarah was never really shy or scared and Nadia steadily grew out of it, blossoming when school was over, Nikki remained shy and scared, desperately wanting to find the formula for being ‘normal’ and stopping caring what everyone else thought about her. Nikki had always felt less than, different, other.
Alien.
Life had always felt so hard for her.
And as they sat around the cafe table, tears streaming, they now had to answer all the questions they had.
Starting with Nadia’s:
Was she going to be okay?
Tara took a deep breath and then shook her head.
“I spoke with Will. The doctors told Will and Claire that it is unlikely that Nikki will wake up. And if they did, they wouldn’t be… Nikki.”
Sarah and Katherine couldn’t hold the tears back anymore, the truth cutting them all like a knife.
Tears still slid down Nadia’s face but frustration bubbled alongside it.
“So, why have all the machines and tubes?”
There was a brief silence, filled with knowing but finally, Tara spoke again.
“So we can all say goodbye.”
Tara had been the last to join the group, making friends with them all in their first year of secondary school. She had fit like a glove within the group, never feeling like an outsider.
Nearly two decades had passed now and they had all changed so much and time had pulled them apart but the connection between them all still ran deep.
Silence ran around the table. None of them were ready to say goodbye. They were all only twenty-nine and they had been friends a long time but not nearly long enough. They were meant to be wayward fools in an old people's home, driving the staff insane. One final hurrah together, like the old days, or at least that’s what they’d always joked about.
Katherine took a slow sip of her tea, a small smile tracing her lips, looking strange on her tear-stained face.
“Do you all remember when we got lost in Mulgrove after the music festival?”
Sarah could not help but let out a laugh as the memory of that night flooded back to her. “Tara was sick in a bin whilst Joe Higgins looked on in horror.”
“Oh god! I had forgotten about Joe Higgins,” Nadia said. “You adored him, Kat.”
Katherine nodded in agreement, still smiling.
“I did. And then Tara scared him away.”
“Anyone who scares that easy cannot be with one of us,” Tara stated matter of factly.
“Nikki was adamant we could walk home. She marched us all towards Chidwell.” Katherine said, continuing the memory.
“Yes, and we only ended up going 2 miles in the wrong direction.”
“I’d never been to Middleton though so that was nice.”
They all laughed, the memory so clear in all their minds.
Kathrine smiled but it slowly faded. “She felt so stupid and so bad. Like she’d really messed up. She always lets the smallest thing upset her so much.”
Tears began to slip again down Katherine’s cheeks and Tara reached for her hand as Sarah put an arm around her.
Katherine wouldn’t know anyone here if not for Nikki.
Growing up, she only lived a few streets away from Nikki, and a chance encounter with this strange wonder led to a long friendship. It had led to a long friendship with everyone here, finally cemented forever when she joined them all at the same secondary school. The school that led to them meeting Tara and their gang becoming complete.
Without Nikki, she wouldn’t know Sarah or Nadia or Tara. She wouldn’t have got lost only two miles from her house. She wouldn’t have seen H.I.M or Placebo around and about four million times.
She wouldn’t be sat in a hospital cafe at 8.15pm on a Thursday night.
“Should we go back?” Tara asked.
Nadia buried her head back in her hands. Sarah put an arm around her, and Katherine and Tara scooted their chairs closer. Moving her hands down from her face, Nadia spoke.
“I know we should. I know we should be with Nikki but, sat here, I can pretend it’s not happening. Sat here, I can pretend she’s okay.”
Everyone understood because everyone felt the same.
“Let’s stay here a little longer then.”
More hours passed and the foursome drank tea from the machine and reminisced about all the silly things the five of them had got up to.
Drunken escapades, obsessions with some poor sixth formers - “Daniel Reed, now there’s the boy we terrified!” - and so much laughter.
Dawn had just begun to break when the cafe doors pushed open. They all turned to see Simon, his face filled with sadness.
“You all need to come back.”
Coming back to the room, the dawn sun inched its way through cracks in the now-still blinds. The only noise now was that of the machines that were, without a shadow of a doubt, all that was keeping Nikki alive.
It was time.
Seven goodbyes were uttered, not one truly able to say all that needed to be said. After Claire had kissed her only child’s forehead one last time, a doctor and nurse came in and they began to turn off the machines and remove all the tubes and wires.
For a few short minutes, she breathed on her own and everyone held a small glimmer of hope but then, there was silence.
Nikki was gone.
Nikki was the first to leave the room, slowly wheeled out under a sheet. Even after she had gone, no one else made any moves to leave. It was only when a very apologetic nurse came in, explaining she needed to ready the room for someone else, did they all begin to move.
Will and Claire had more to sort out and were told they could wait in one of the family rooms. They all walked there together. As they reached the door, Claire stopped and turned back to them all.
“Goodbye, girls.”
It felt very final and, in some ways, it was. No one within that room at 5.01am would ever be the same, who they had been before disappearing with Nikki.
Before Will followed Claire into the room, he pulled out four envelopes from his inside pocket and handed one to each of the women.
‘From Nikki, ” he said before entering the room and closing the door.
No one read their letters straight away. It was all too new, too raw. Sarah waited the longest, waiting until a few days after the funeral.
Meeting up a month later, they found that each letter had been different. Each was handwritten but personal to each person. It would have taken a long time to write each of theirs and the two she had written to Will and Claire. She knew the end was coming for a long time and had made peace with it. It made it easier to believe it when she had written to each of them that there was nothing anyone could have done to stop what happened.
This was one of only two similarities. The other was how she had ended each of the letters.
In each letter, it said simply: I love you. Always.
Another month passed and Sarah, Katherine, Nadia and Tara were together again, this time meeting up in Bournemouth. They had sworn to each other that they would see each other more and each of them was adamant about keeping that oath.
They knew from Nikki’s letters that there was nothing any of them could have done to stop what happened but that did not stop all the ‘what ifs’ creeping in.
What if they’d seen each other more?
What if they’d called her on her last day?
What if they’d known it was her last day?
The things they could have done differently. Maybe she was past saving but they could have told her they loved her, that they would miss her and that they wish she wouldn’t go. Maybe it would have changed something.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
They knew that it was pointless thinking like that because nothing could be changed but it didn’t stop the thoughts.
Through the pain and sadness, some good had come from it. It had brought them all back together.
Although there was no inkling that anyone else within their now foursome would take their own life, there are no guarantees in this world. Life is fragile and you can be gone in an instant. They saw that much more clearly now and, as they sat on Bournemouth beach together, they saw how lucky they were to have each other, to have had all those years with Nikki, all the memories, all the laughter and all the love.
The thoughts and wishes that things would be different might never stop for any of them but they knew that they had each other and that, even though Nikki was gone, she was still with them.
Always.
Thank you so much for reading.
This is a complete work of fiction but I brought in some real parts of my life because of course I did!
As someone who has known the pain of suicidal inclinations but has also known true friendship and love, I wanted to write a love letter to the people left behind, allowing them to see if is okay to remember happy memories and to keep them closer, to ease the pain of the loss. Or something like that. (I promise my next piece of fiction will be all about dragons or pirates and have no real life in it!)
I made these characters twenty-nine because, since entering my thirties, I have found a lot more happiness, peace and hope. I have found a lot more me.
Nikki is gone but Becky still remains. And will for a very long time.
Thank you for reading and you ongoing support.
If you would like to, please feel free to share this letter, leave me a comment or reply to this email. It would mean a lot to know what you think.
Until next time, take care of yourself.
Love,
Becky
🖤✨🌈
Just catching up with this one and so glad I did - thank you for sharing, Becky!
Beautiful piece, I love the way you balanced the grief and loss with how much love and care there was and is between the characters. Really thoughtfully and deftly done.
A poignant piece that is ultimately about love in it's different forms.
Thanks for sharing
Hope you have a lovely Sunday Becky ☺️