“I know. I’m in the hospital a lot, they don’t really want you using your phones.”

“That’s okay, I understand.” I pause, pressing my fist into my forehead, closing my eyes. “It’s just…you don’t know how good it feels to hear your voice. I miss you. So much.”

So much that my chest is burning with the words.

I hear her swallow. “Yeah. I miss you too.” Her voice sounds so fragile, like glass, as if she doesn’t really believe what she’s saying. But still, I cling to it. She misses me.

“I…I think about you all the time. You know. I love you,” I whisper.

But there is only silence stretching an ocean between us.

I go on, unable to handle it. “I know I really fucked up, love, but…”

“Lachlan,” she says tiredly. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does. It matters. You matter. I’m changing, I swear, I know I have a problem.”

She grunts angrily. “Yes you have problems. But I have problems too. My mother is in a fucking coma. Forgive me if I don’t care to hear your sob story right now.”

Ouch.

No blow in rugby has hurt quite like that.

“Okay,” I say raggedly. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she says. “Look, I have to go, I’m heading back to the hospital now. I’m just…this is my life now, you know? Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I could come over there,” I tell her. “I can help.”

“No, you can’t help.” she says quickly. “You can’t even help yourself. You stay where you belong. Okay. Look, I just can’t deal with you, with what we were, right now. Please just…don’t call me again. Don’t text me either. I can only handle one heartbreak at a time.”

I feel the last shred of hope inside me crumple into a ball, blown away by some cold wind, never to return.

“Bye Lachlan,” she says.

I can’t even move my lips to answer her back. She hangs up and everything I had with her is immediately severed. I can feel it, cutting so deep.

I’ve truly lost her.

My love.

I get up, grab my wallet and keys, and leave out into the night.

I go to the closest shop, pick up a bottle of Scotch, then go and sit in the park across from my flat. I sit there for hours.

I drink nearly the whole damn bottle.

When I wake up, I’m on the bench still and some man is trying to steal my shoes. I kick at him, catching him in the face and he runs off across the grass, jumping over a fence.

I stumble to my feet, leaving the bottle behind, and somehow manage to get inside my flat.

When I wake up again I’m on my stomach in the hallway.

A puddle of vomit lies beside me.

My vomit.

A few piles of shit and piss are near me too.

Thankfully those aren’t mine. Just poor Lionel and Emily’s, since I never took them out last night.

No, instead I did such a noble thing and got absolutely wasted by myself, chasing the sorrow Kayla left on me with an unending flood of Scotch.

I can’t do this anymore.

Brigs is right. I won’t get Kayla back this way and I probably won’t get her back any way, but one day, if I ever get a chance again, I can’t fuck it up.

I can’t fuck up my life anymore.

I have these dogs. I have my friends. My brother. My family.

I have all these beautiful, lovely aspects of my life and when I started out as a wee lad, I had nothing at all but a stuffed lion.

I started with nothing and was given everything.

And look where I am, drinking, feeling sorry for myself, trying to give it all away.

I slowly pick myself off the floor.

I clean up the mess.

Take the dogs for a very, very long walk, practically to the shore and back.

I talk their ears off, apologizing, drawing looks from passerbys as I usually do when I’m talking to dogs, but I don’t care. They need to hear it all. I need to get it off my chest.

When I get back I go straight for the medicine cabinet and for a brief moment I feel the guilt smash into me, threatening to drag me down again, and the Percocet calls my name, offering a rope, just as Scotch handed me a rope last night.

But it turns out the rope is no different from a noose.

I take the pills and though there isn’t much left, I empty them out and flush them down the toilet.

Then I head over to the kitchen, snatch the phone number from the fridge and before I can second guess myself, I make an appointment in a few day’s time. The receptionist is also nice enough to suggest a short-term rehab clinic I can check into on the weekend, so it won’t interfere with the games.

I have some people I need to talk to. Jessica and Donald. Alan. Amara and Thierry. I need to be honest with them, as honest as Brigs was with me. They need to know what’s going on in my life. They need to know I’m not well and I’m not doing okay and I need as much love and support from them as I can possibly get. I want to do this for myself but I can’t do it alone. I’ve been doing it alone for too long. And it’s not enough.

I know now who I want to be.

Still me.

Just better.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kayla

It’s been three weeks.

She’s been in a coma, unreachable, for three fucking weeks.

My life has become a living hell but I can’t even imagine what she’s going through, where she possibly is in this world in such a hopeless, dead state. I can only hope that somewhere, somehow, in whatever limbo she is in, that my father has her hand. I know the stronger he holds onto her, the less likely she’ll return to us. But at the same time, I can’t bear the thought of her being alone, lost inside herself.

Because I’m lost too.

So lost.

And throughout all the pain, I keep thinking back to Lachlan, the way I treated him on the phone. I told him to leave me alone and never call me again but in truth, that was a lie. I just didn’t know it at the time. I pushed him away, punished him for caring for me, making him feel worse about himself than I’m sure he already does.

I just want to take it back. I want to hear his voice, to hold me in his strong arms and tell me everything is going to be okay, even though we both know it won’t be. But just to hear it from him – he used to make me feel like it was us against the world and that he could protect me from everything.

He just couldn’t protect me against himself.

Then again, he couldn’t protect himself against that either.

I wasn’t lying when I said I missed him. Because I do. All the time. Constantly. This dull, throbbing ache in my heart that won’t go away. It’s a different kind of pain than the one I feel for my mom and they are both so terribly unbearable.

And when he told me he loved me…I remembered for one blissful second what it was like to so freely have his love and so eagerly give him mine and it feels like another time, like we were just these young kids in love and the world was this sunny, endless place, our playground. I crave those days so badly that it makes my gut twist, hungry for something I’ll probably never have again.

It’s a Friday when Paul calls me at work and asks me to meet them all at the hospital around lunchtime. I don’t even have to ask Lucy if I can leave, I just go. I have a feeling that they’re just waiting to fire me when the time is right, they just don’t want to be total dicks and lay off a long-term employee whose mother is dying. But really, I do nothing all day because Candace has taken over everything and even when I try and am in the right frame of mind, it’s a half-hearted effort. There’s too much on my plate and I’m not going to fight for a job that I wanted to leave in the first place.

I decide to pick up Toshio on the way to the hospital, needing support to even make it through the drive. We all know what this is about, what it’s come to.

In three weeks there has been no improvement at all.

It’s time to decide how long we can do this to her.

And, let’s face it, how long we can keep doing this to us.