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If at some point we all succumb,
For goodness sake, let us be young,
Because time gets harder to outrun,
And I’m nobody, I’m not done.
In the days immediately after everything goes to hell, Caroline stays in. She gets up rigorously at 6 am, beats the hell out of her punch bag and then sits on the sofa and refuses to drink tea. It may, along with the stiff upper lip, be an essential part of British culture when things go arse end over, but it offers a kind of comfort that Caroline is not willing to take.
So she sits on the sofa and listens to the buzzing of ‘traitor’ under her skin and wonders when the hell she started to care. She isn’t thick; she knew what she was doing right from the off, hugged words like ‘betrayal’ and ‘manipulation’ close to her and felt like it was okay because they were her choice. Then the light of day shone onto the situation and suddenly she wasn’t choosing those words, they were being branded to her skin; carefully traced by Lester’s bland expression and then seared in place by each piece of flesh missing from Stephen Hart’s body. Suddenly, it’s not so okay.
It takes eight days precisely before she can’t stand it anymore. So she gets out the phonebook and she starts ringing local hospitals. It takes her four phone calls to find him.
In the taxi to the hospital, she changes her mind approximately forty-three times. Somehow, she still ends up there, in the entrance to Room 334, Ward G.
Caroline did not know Stephen Hart well – she’d never had a conversation with him, couldn’t tell you his favourite colour, or where he grew up, or any of the things that made him tick – but in some ways, she felt like she knew him best of all.
She didn’t know any of the details of what had happened between Stephen and Helen and the rest of the team. But she knew well enough how it felt to take a series of increasingly wrong decisions that lead you further and further down a path you don’t want, but somehow have chosen, until eventually, your life explodes, implodes, or otherwise disintegrates into a mess of technicoloured devastation.
The only difference was, Stephen Hart had thrown himself into a room of prehistoric predators as penance, and Caroline Steel was sitting by a hospital bed, watching a figure more bandage than man and trying to pretend she has any right to be there.
It takes another thirteen days for him to wake up. Thirteen days of bad hospital coffee and uncomfortable hospital chairs and hiding in the waiting room every time she arrives and Cutter is sitting by Stephen’s bed.
It’s late, visiting hours are almost over and Caroline is sitting, almost as comatose as the patient, lulled by the beep beep beep of whatever machine Stephen’s currently hooked up to. She’s so used to stillness and silence that when Stephen’s fingers twitch against the bed covers, she physically jumps. When Cutter comes to visit, he holds Stephen’s hand, but that’s a line Caroline doesn’t have the gall to breach and so instead, she stares at Stephen’s fingers as though they might leap up and bite her.
They don’t.
But his eyes open. The blue of them is clouded, confused, so dulled with pain that it makes Caroline flinch and look away. When she looks back, his eyes find hers and all that’s in them is questions.
Caroline doesn’t have any answers.
Why? Why is she here?
She doesn’t even have an answer to that.
With a cool, cool breeze and dirty knees,
I rest on childhood memories,
We all got old at breakneck speed,
Slow it down, go easy on me.
Go easy on me.
It takes seven long months before Stephen is released from the hospital. Caroline finds it much harder to visit him, now that he’s actually awake. So do the rest of the team, if their all-too-frequent absences from the hospital are anything to go by.
At first she thinks that maybe they’ve branded ‘traitor’ to his skin too, and the very idea makes her furious. Surely seven months of bed-bound, bad-coffee, beep-beep-beep should be enough penance for anyone to pay. Then she realises that it’s Stephen himself that’s done the branding, and that the scarring on the outside is absolutely nothing compared to what now lies within.
She both hates and pities him for his ability to achieve that level of stupidity (selflessness, whatever).
A lot happens in that intervening seven months. Most notably, Caroline gets given a job. No one is more surprised by the offer than her, except possibly Lester himself, his eyebrows twitching up even as the words come out of his mouth. But the truth is, with Stephen out of action, and Cutter functioning at varying degrees of stability, they need someone. Caroline knows, and if she’s proved anything, it’s that she can handle herself.
At first, she can’t possibly understand how Lester expects her to work with these people. Or rather – how he expects these people to work with her. It takes her all of two days to realise; sometimes trust is given, sometimes it is earnt and sometimes it can be taken for granted because the debt owed is so impossibly big. Caroline is the one in the red in this scenario.
She takes some comfort from the fact that in order to trust her at all, they must all believe that somewhere deep down she is sorry. Some days, this helps.
Connor, strangely, seems to hate her least of all, and secretly, she starts to revise her horrifically low opinion of him until she realises with a start that he might just be better than all of them.
So, during these seven months, she learns how to fire a gun and how to close an anomaly and how to laugh in the face of prehistoric teeth (Stephen helps her with this one – he is, after all, the unquestioned master of it.)
She also learns that she and Stephen Hart will never be friends. They also, however, will never be able to deny that there is a connection between them.
He blames himself for what happened. Everyone else blames her.
He asks her once why she came to visit him that first time.
She doesn’t answer, laughs at him instead, but she knows the reason now.
Because I blame me too.
Put a wetsuit on, come on, come on,
Grow your hair out long, come on, come on,
Put a t-shirt on,
Do me wrong, do me wrong, do me wrong.
Time passes.
Stephen goes through gruelling physiotherapy sessions and works himself to the point of exhaustion more times than Caroline can count.
She does her best; drinks with him, sits in tight-mouthed silence with him, wipes the blood off the wall the night he finally gives in to the uncontrollable urge to hurt, hurt, to hurt and drives his knuckles into brick and plaster (Caroline prefers her punch bag, personally – less fractured fingers that way).
Cutter plays the more traditional role of carer; he drives Stephen to the hospital, drives him to work, makes sure he’s eating properly (Caroline hasn’t known Cutter for very long, but she still gets the irony of this). He’s almost definitely forgiven his old friend and in doing so, has given Stephen another reason to torture himself until the end of time.
Caroline is in no doubt that this is, in fact, his plan. Never in her life has she met anyone so utterly bent on self-flagellation. It makes her wonder, how, if Stephen cares this much for Cutter, he ever managed to sustain an affair with his wife (not once, but twice?). Humanity’s ability to make god awful decisions never ceases to amaze.
It takes eighteen months before Caroline is willing to even tentatively consider the possibility that Stephen might be rising from the pits of depression. Physically, he is recovered as he’ll ever be, his lounge wall has gone un-abused for eight months, and she hasn’t seen him drunk (well, she has, but functionally so) in nearly as long.
And Caroline, unquestionably, is now a part of his life. Odd, that. They’re still not friends. They don’t chat on the phone, or go out for meals, or lounge on the sofa watching TV. Caroline doesn’t think she’s ever told him a single personal thing about herself, or vice versa.
What, she wonders, is the term for someone who has seen you at your absolute worst and made an attempt – a very lame one, but an attempt none the less – at helping you stay sane? What do you call the person whose doorstep you show up at, blind drunk and cursing at 3 am, because the nightmares just won’t fuck off?
With the rest of the world, Stephen is so clammed up that Caroline wonders why he lets her see these things at all. Then again, she supposes it’s easier to show your worst to somebody when you know that, even at your lowest, you’re still several steps above them on the ladder of decency.
Ho hum.
If it’s up and after you,
What do you suppose that you would do?
You’re all whacked out from lack of sleep,
You blame it on the friends you keep.
Okay, so here’s the thing. It’s been three years and things are…normal. Stephen, as far as Caroline can tell, is…normal.
And therein lies the problem. Because it’s a Tuesday and she’s in Cutter’s office, and she’s not snooping per se, just idling around the room until Cutter comes back from his meeting with Lester.
And she sees it. Corner of a photograph, sticking out from between two books. A good, honest person would respect the Professor’s privacy, so naturally, Caroline immediately yanks it free.
It’s an old picture – ten years, maybe more – clearly taken at some kind of university event. Cutter is there, looking about four decades younger and with much better hair, and so is Stephen. Stephen is laughing.
This renders him virtually unrecognisable and this, Caroline realises, is a problem.
She goes to his apartment after work that day. Stands on the doorstep for a while, because it’s been some time since she came here to see him. Despite this, when she knocks, he opens the door immediately and lets her in without saying a word.
She sits on his sofa and when he raises an eyebrow, she begins.
“Tell me the last time you were happy.” She doesn’t bother to try and make it sound like anything other than an order.
She can see him pause and if she were Cutter, she knows with unflinching certainty that the next words out of his mouth would be ‘I’m fine’.
As it is, he remains silent.
“You can’t remember, can you?” She answers for him and he doesn’t correct her.
“Abby wants to know if I’m going to beat myself up forever,” he says instead.
Caroline resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Abby doesn’t understand.”
He hums an agreement and this is when Caroline decides something has to be done.
“What do you do for fun?” she asks.
Stephen’s entire face twitches and he hesitates, stumbles, and eventually, sounding slightly unsure, he says, “I surf. Or, I used to.”
Not the most convenient of hobbies, but fine. She can work with that.
“Pack a bag,” she tells him, and once again it’s an order.
Does holy water make you pure?
Submerged, your vision’s just obscured.
You’re a lot like me, in up to our knees,
In over your chest is way too deep.
At seven o’clock the next evening, Caroline has learnt that she hates surfing. It’s freezing cold, it’s rough and very frequently painful and it plays havoc with her hair.
Stephen, on the other hand, seems to enjoy it. ‘Seems to’ – not exactly a glowing success; he doesn’t light up at the sight of the ocean and run splashing into the waves like in all the films. He doesn’t laugh, or even really smile.
Instead, he stares out to sea for a very long time, and then stays in the water even longer. He teaches Caroline the basics as best he can, and is gentlemanly enough not to laugh when she wipes out time after time after time.
But afterwards, when they’re sitting side-by-side on the sand, Caroline thinks she can sense that something in him has eased.
There’s silence for a while, and then he speaks.
“You hated that, didn’t you?”
There’s no point in pretending. “Yes.”
Stephen chuckles and for once, it’s not completely devoid of humour. “We have absolutely nothing in common.”
It’s true, they don’t.
“Yet here we are,” she says, and then, “Why surfing?”
Stephen shrugs. “The usual clichés. The hunt for the perfect wave.”
This makes her smile. Then the wind blows and she shivers. “We should go in.”
Stephen shakes his head. “In about half an hour, there’s going to be the most spectacular sunset. Obligatory watching.”
And, oh, Caroline is so not that girl who sits on the beach and watches the sun go down. Then again, she suspects Stephen isn’t that boy.
So she stays and they watch the sun fall below the horizon and as far as endings go, this one is beautiful.
They still aren’t friends (maybe) and he’s unbelievably screwed up (or she is) and she can’t quite believe she’s actually trying to fix him (just, god) but in this moment, things are okay.
Neither of them are going to have the tidal waves of overwhelming happiness that come from grand love affairs, or being a hero, or raising a family.
But as long as there are sunsets, the occasional perfect wave and someone to ice your knuckles when you punch the wall, Caroline thinks they might learn to find happiness in the small things.
Given everything that has happened, that will be enough.
Slow it down, go easy on me.
Go easy on me.