Brother (Petekey)

Heart Or Hospital

Pete had never before noticed how loud the beeping of the hospital machines could be. He'd been in hospitals before, of course, but it had felt nothing like this. There was no other sound in the room, nor any that could be heard of the outside creeping in, as though everything behind these four unfeeling white walls was purposely withdrawing itself, avoiding the tense fearfulness that held the scattered occupants of the space in its brittle, yet compelling, grasp.

   Each calm beep and breath from the machinery broke the silence like bone: every time it recovered from the damage done, it came back stronger, denser, tougher, but adorned with fresh, unavoidable scar tissue - each sound was just another painful 'tick', another inevitable 'tock' on the clock that counted down to the last shallow breath of the figure in the bed.

   The figure that was, at that moment, so precariously balanced on the edge of his life, supported only by the efforts of the machines around him, was of a just below average height, and fairly broad shouldered build, but stick thin. He had a tangled mess of hair, dyed a too bright shade of red, which was now the only noticeable oasis of colour in the plain white desert of the room.

   His face was undeniably pretty, even through his ghostly tone, with a soft, rounded shape, gently curved almond shaped eyes, a small, pointed nose with a subtly snubbed tip, and a mouth that was constantly turned up slightly at the corners, creating the perpetual hint of a smile.

   And, of course, he was loved. Everyone in that room held him in such adoration that the sight of him like this, and the knowledge that any of these mechanical beeps could last for just too long, signalling his last heartbeat, brought a feeling of the world falling apart around them that they had all hoped to never, ever, have to feel.

   Except Pete. He, too, felt that collapse of normality, but for a completely different reason. He couldn't say that he wouldn't miss him, because they had, to some extent, been friends of a kind, but the thing tearing him apart was not grief, but guilt. It had, after all, been his party, his alcohol, and his drugs. With the silent digital clock on the wall reading 03:32am, they should all have been messily sleeping off the effects of the substance abuse the previous night, rather than gathering silently around a hospital bed.

   The body in the bed was still all too young, too well loved, too desperately needed, and too vibrantly living, with his flaming hair and quiet smile, to be laying so still in a hospital bed, but, of course, as his heart monitor so rudely declared, and, this time, cruelly continued to boast, he was also dead.

***

   After the bed had been extracted from the room, the occupants, who had shifted to the side to allow it to pass, drifted back to their places around it, forming in the room the allusion that it was still there, still containing Gerard's body - the body in which lungs should be inflating and deflating with air, and a heart should be beating, like Pete's beat, to supply those living cells with oxygen. Behind that pretty face, a brain should be filled with electrical impulses, and neurons firing, and thoughts spinning wildly, of his next song to write, and his next painting, and his next meeting with Frank.

   But all these things had now been hushed, forever. His lungs hung empty, and his heart rested from its twenty one years of beating. His brain, no longer a beehive of plans and lyrics and carefully crafted brush strokes, lay against his skull, just a grey lump of dead fat, holding no hint of its previous vigour.

   Pete watched the empty space in front of him, mimicking the others at his sides, wondering faintly if anyone really was pretending that the space was still filled with that ghostly smile and those rough strands of hair. He glanced around at them all furtively, praying that they wouldn't look up, wouldn't catch his gaze, and wouldn't know that his attention had been turned away from the space before them. He considered the fact that he was more worried about what they would think of him than he was about their own minds, and the pain they must all be in to keep their heads lowered and eyes closed like this, and the thought of his own selfishness and innate sense of self-importance sickened him. He had been the cause of everything that had happened, and yet still, all he could think of was how it affected him.