Loving Danny (24 page)

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ he said angrily. ‘It wasn’t till I got your letter that I realised what I’d done, and then it was too late.’ His voice
softened. ‘All I’ve thought about for the past couple of weeks is you. You are the most important thing in my life, Omi. I don’t care about my music, The Wonderfulls; none of it
matters without you. Please give me another chance to prove it to you.’

He was so earnest, so desperate, that I felt my resolve beginning to slip. Maybe it was possible to make this work. Nobody would ever love me this much again, would they? Or was everything he
was saying merely part of his illness?

‘But you need help, Danny,’ I said. ‘You’re not well.’

‘I know,’ he said, quietly. I could tell that it was a big deal for him to admit it. ‘But if you’re with me I can get better. You can help me get better. I’ll stop
cutting myself, I’ll make us both happy. I need you, Omi – please help me.’

My head was spinning, my mouth parched. I got up from the bed. ‘I need some air,’ I said. ‘I need to think. Give me ten minutes or so and I’ll come back and see you. I
will.’

He grasped my arm. ‘OK,’ he said, his eyes piercing into mine, as though he thought that if he tried hard enough he might be able to decipher my thoughts. ‘Promise
me.’

I didn’t bother to wait for the lift. I ran down all three flights of stairs as fast as I could, unconsciously holding my breath until I reached the bottom. It wasn’t until I had
pushed through the hospital’s front entrance doors that I stopped and leaned against the railings, gasping for air.

‘Naomi?’

I looked up. It was Mrs Evans. She stood in front of me, dressed as immaculately as ever, in a slate grey suit and black stilettos. She was done up for a business meeting, not a hospital.

‘Mrs Evans? Have you come to see Danny?’ It was a stupid question, but as I’ve said before, she made me nervous.

‘Yes,’ she said, with a trace of sarcasm. ‘Have you been in to see him already?’

‘Just now,’ I said. ‘He’s in a bad way – he showed me what he did. It was horrible. I think it’s all my fault.’

‘I doubt that very much, Naomi.’ It was said not with kindness, but to make me feel that I was an irrelevance. ‘It’s not the first time this has happened and I dare say
it won’t be the last. Danny is a very troubled young man. He has been for several years.’

I was confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Come on, you’re not telling me you thought you were dating Jiminy Cricket? Danny may be very intelligent and talented, but he’s also oversensitive and his ego gets the better
of him. He has a self-destructive side.’

She hadn’t answered my question. ‘What do you mean, it’s not the first time this has happened?’

‘He started cutting himself when he was thirteen – though, I grant you, he’s not hurt himself as badly before. You must have seen the scars.’

I nodded. ‘But the pills?’

‘He tried that once before too, when he was fifteen. He didn’t take enough pills to do much damage – then or now. He did it for attention, Naomi. Everything Danny does is for
attention. When things don’t go his way, he can’t deal with it. It’s always been the same. When he was ten, at his sister’s eighteenth birthday party, he deliberately
slammed the door on his hand because he felt left out and wanted everyone to focus on him.’

Sister? Danny didn’t have a sister. He’d told me he was an only child. Was it another lie?

‘His sister?’

‘Stepsister,’ said Mrs Evans. ‘Danny didn’t mention Sally? From my husband John’s first marriage. She lives in America now.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’re not the first girl to get sucked in by him. Lucy, the girlfriend he went travelling with, she couldn’t deal with it either. She left him in Colombo.’

I’d assumed that Danny had gone travelling with friends, not a girlfriend. He’d told me I was the only girl he’d ever loved. Had he told Lucy the same thing? Imagining Danny
with anybody else made me feel sick to my stomach.

‘I have no doubt he truly believes he loves you,’ said Mrs Evans, as if she were reading my mind. ‘But he’ll use you as a crutch and eventually drag you down with him.
Has he asked for your help, told you that you can save him?’

I nodded.
How did she know?

She smirked. ‘You can’t help him, dear – he needs professional help. I should tell you that John and I have decided to pay for him to go into a private clinic, so he can get
full-time care and intensive counselling. I tried once before – that’s probably why he dislikes me so much. This time we won’t take no for an answer. He won’t get very far
if we take away his trust fund, will he?’

‘Oh,’ I stuttered. ‘No.’

It was all too much to take in. The sister, the ex-girlfriend, the trust fund: three fundamental aspects of Danny’s life that I had known nothing about. Now I understood where he had
acquired the money to pay for my gifts, for our expensive meals out. He didn’t hate his car or his house, he hated himself for accepting them. He hated his parents because, without them, he
would have had nothing.

Were omissions the same as lies? Danny may not have volunteered this information, but I had never asked. Had I been too scared of the answers to ask the right questions? Or was it his reaction
that I’d feared?

Mrs Evans was suffocating me; I wanted her to leave me alone. ‘You should go up and see him,’ I suggested. ‘I’m going to sit out here for a while and then I’ll go
back to the ward.’

She smiled, slyly, and proffered her hand. ‘Goodbye, Naomi.’

I ignored her gesture. I no longer cared what she thought of me. She was a hateful, bitter woman – no wonder Danny was so messed up.

‘Goodbye,’ I said.
And good riddance.

When she had gone, I found a bench in the hospital grounds and sat myself down, pushing my fingers in between the slats. The world was topsy-turvy and back to front. It even smelled different,
the atmosphere heavier and darker, as if it had been laced with tar. Somehow, I had found myself in a parallel universe where Danny was a sick and needy stranger. However much I wished it
wasn’t true,
this
was the real world after all. The strong, confident Danny – the guy I had fallen in love with – had been an illusion; he had never existed.

Spiteful as she was, Mrs Evans was right about one thing: I couldn’t help Danny. I wanted to, but what could I do? I wasn’t a doctor or a counsellor, and I didn’t want to be.
Danny had been ill for years – what if he never got better? I was going to go to university, to become a lawyer or a photographer, or whatever I decided, one day. I didn’t want to spend
my life in dingy pubs, applauding Danny, soothing his ego when things didn’t go well, putting antiseptic on his cuts. If I stayed with him, that might be my reality. And then it struck me: I
didn’t want to be his muse, I wanted to be
someone
myself, and I wanted a partner who could support me and be strong for me too. Danny needed time alone, to figure out who he was.

If Danny doesn’t know who he is, how can he be my soulmate?

And if he is my soulmate, doesn’t that make me as damaged as him?

Sometimes, the more you think, the less you understand. My mind was plagued by interference, like a radio caught between stations. I wished I could shut it up, switch it off.

I waited until I saw Mrs Evans leave the hospital and then I took the lift back up to the third floor. As the doors opened, I noticed that a slender girl was standing by the ward doors, with her
back to me. There was something familiar about her posture, her colouring.

‘Debbie?’

She turned round, startled. ‘Naomi! Your parents told me you’d be here. I was starting to worry that I’d missed you.’

‘I was just outside, having a think.’ It was so good to see her. ‘Oh my God, what are you doing here?’

She hugged me, tightly, and the warmth and familiarity of her embrace made my eyes begin to brim with tears. ‘Your mum called me and told me what had happened. I was in the town centre
already, so I just got straight on the next London train. I thought I should come down to be with you.’

I blinked hard. If I let myself begin to cry now, I might never stop. ‘You came all the way down from Manchester just to see me?’

‘Of course I did. You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, definitely,’ I said, pleased that she’d want me to. Not that I could imagine that Debbie would ever find herself in a situation like this. ‘Oh, Debbie, things are
such a mess.’

‘Do you want to go somewhere to talk?’ she asked.

‘Yes, please. Just give me a second – I need to say goodbye to Danny first.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

I pondered her offer. While I welcomed her support, this was hardly the time to introduce the two of them. I didn’t want to upset Danny, or embarrass him.

‘No, I’ll go in by myself, if you don’t mind waiting.’

She hugged me again. ‘Of course not.’

Danny was sitting up in bed, a half-read magazine lying open across his lap.

‘You’ve been ages, Omi,’ he said impatiently. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back.’

‘I promised I would, didn’t I?’

‘I know, but you were so long that I was starting to get paranoid.’ He laughed at his choice of word. ‘Then again, I guess I’m entitled to be, considering everyone here
thinks I’m a mental patient.’

He noticed that I wasn’t smiling and his bravado vanished. ‘I wish you hadn’t gone,’ he continued. ‘My mum was here – I told the nurse I didn’t want to
see her.’

I decided it was best not to mention my encounter with his mother.

‘Don’t be paranoid, Danny,’ I said gently. It was best to come straight out with it. ‘But I can’t stay. Debbie’s turned up. I need to spend some time with
her.’

‘Debbie?’ He looked bemused. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘She came down to look after me.’

‘Oh, I see.’ But it was obvious that he didn’t. The thought that I might need looking after because of what he had done was incomprehensible to Danny. I could tell he was
thinking,
Hey, I’m the victim here.
He truly had no idea how much his actions had hurt me, how much I was hurting now.

‘I was hoping we could spend some time together, talk about things,’ he said. He looked so pitiful that for a moment I just wanted to forget about Debbie and hold him.

I steeled myself. ‘We can. Just not today. I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, OK.’ There was desperation in his voice; he feared he was losing me. ‘I was thinking – when I’m better I want to teach you how to play the guitar properly. And
maybe we could go travelling together.’

‘That would be nice, Danny.’ I didn’t mean to patronise him, but I couldn’t deal with any more confusion – I had to get out of there. I kissed him lightly on his
cheek. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’

‘OK.’

As I turned away, he sank down in the bed and pulled the covers over his head. I can’t be certain, but I think he was about to cry. He didn’t want me to see, and I didn’t want
to witness it.

Debbie stayed the night. We locked ourselves away in my room and talked for hours, just as we had always done before she went to Manchester. There was so much to tell her, all
the anecdotes and details that I had missed out before, the things that would help her to understand why it was so hard to let Danny go. I took out my pictures, the notes, the song and the gifts he
had given me, and we studied them in detail, as if we were collecting evidence for an autopsy of my relationship.

Some of what I related to her – such as our first date, the picnic – seemed to have occurred so long ago that it was like talking about another couple. It made me sad to realise that
my memories and feelings were now coloured by what had happened later and by what I had learned about Danny. Why couldn’t I have read between the lines of his lyrics and seen the anguish
behind them? Had he really thought me special at all, or had he just seen in me a need to be wanted? I wept, often – tears of grief for what I had lost and for what might never have been.

Later, I made up a bed for Debbie on the floor next to mine and we carried on our conversation in the dark. It was easier to be candid when we couldn’t see each other’s faces.

She asked: ‘How do you feel about Danny, Naomi?’

‘You know how I feel – I love him.’

‘That’s too easy. I mean how do you really feel about him –
now?
After everything? Do you still feel the same way you did? Honestly?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘When I looked at him in his hospital bed, he seemed so small and weak, so needy. I felt like I wanted to protect him and look after
him.’

‘Do you still fancy him?’

‘Yes, of course. He’s still gorgeous. But nobody’s sexy when they’re in hospital, are they?’ As I said it, I realised that part of Danny’s allure had been his
strength, his mystery. Was he as attractive without them? I couldn’t say it out loud, but I had to acknowledge that he wasn’t.

Debbie hesitated. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but that makes it sound like you want to be his mother.’

I bristled. ‘No, not exactly. If you love someone, you want to be there for them.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But what’s in it for you?’

‘I get to be with him. And perhaps . . . I don’t know, when he’s better maybe everything might be great again.’ I pictured myself with Danny – saw us smiling and
laughing – and, once more, my eyes brimmed with tears at the memory of what we had shared.

‘You don’t know that, Naomi. Will you really just be able to forget everything that’s happened? And what if he doesn’t get better? How long will you give it before you
finally give up on him? A few months? A few years?’

‘I don’t know,’ I sobbed. ‘I haven’t thought about it. Right now, I just want to help him. Just help him, you know?’

‘Oh, Naomi,’ she said, in her sweetest voice. ‘Please don’t be upset again. It’s not your fault. You can’t make him better – he’s the only one who
can do that.’

‘I know,’ I croaked. I was gulping back the tears now, breathing too fast, my head growing light.

‘Shh,’ she cooed. ‘Shh. It’s all right, honey. It’s going to be all right.’ I sensed that she was moving and heard the rustle of her duvet. ‘Budge
up,’ she said. She climbed into my bed and snuggled up to me, stroking my hair and smoothing the tear-dampened strands away from my face. Feeling her warm body against mine was such a
comfort; for the first time in many weeks I didn’t feel alone. We lay there, silently, until my sobs had subsided.