October 9, 1948
"Holy shit!" George exclaimed in his surprise. "Paul, what happened?" He took a step backward from where he stood in complete shock and clapped a hand over his mouth in a way that would've been overly clichéd in a different circumstance. George turned to his friend as he fired the question, the heels of his shoes spinning on the uneven concrete sidewalk as he did. A few pedestrians passed by, seemingly oblivious or uncaring of the situation.
"I don't know!" Paul cried, his voice rising several octaves near the end, for once ignoring the rare expletive that had come from George's mouth, a true testament to the direness of the situation. Had it been any other day, Paul would've gone off his rocker about George saying a bad word, but now it was the least of his concerns. "Is he alright?" It was an exclamation and a question at the same time. Paul bit his thumbnail, a nervous habit of his.
George shot Paul a look of the way-to-react-in-a-crisis kind, and then focused his attention back to John, who he began to tentatively approach. Certainly it wasn't the time to ponder what had happened. Action was needed. He kneeled down next to his friend, instructed Paul to flag down anyone he saw who looked helpful, and studied John intently to make sure, absolutely sure, the worst wasn't true.
John was breathing, almost impossibly slowly but breathing nonetheless, which was good. It meant he wasn't dead, after all. The birthday boy was wearing dirty, rain-soaked pajamas and there was an ugly bruise on his cheek, which George winced at in sympathy. Lying on the ground with his arms spread at his side, John had on no shoes, there were cuts on his feet, and he was paler than George had ever seen a human being- like a sheet of paper. He reached out and touched John's face and recoiled at how terribly cold it was. How long had he been out there anyhow? George furrowed his expressive eyebrows in concern and took off his coat, which he laid over John in a feeble attempt to warm him, not worrying for the moment about how angry his mother would be that he had gotten the garment all wet.
"Excuse me sir!" Paul called out to one of the few of the street's pedestrians, who ignored him and kept walking along. "Sir! Sir, please, I really need some help!" It was useless, however. None of the many people he tried to wave down listened to him.
"George!" he sobbed, turning around to sit next to his friend, who was still beside John with an air of thinking very hard about him. "Georgie, nobody's wanting to help!" He wiped his nose slightly and sniffled. "Is Johnny alright?" His last sentence was meek and worried.
"I don't know," George sighed. Suddenly, he reached over and slapped John's cheek, hard enough to be felt but not hard enough to hurt. "John! John, wake up! Come on, Johnny, wake up!" Nothing. Not even a stir. That was bad, wasn't it? George was fairly certain it was. What if John ended up like Ritchie was?
"He's really cold," Paul observed. "People shouldn't be that cold." Paul then took off his own coat, balled it up, and put it under John's head as a pillow and began trying to blow his breath on John's hand to try to warm him up.
George ignored him, and instead mulled the situation over in his head. It didn't look like anyone would be giving them any help. Bastards, George thought to himself. That only left one option, and that was to take the matter of getting John to help. The plan already formulated in his mind, George reached behind John and grabbed him below the shoulders, surprised at how light he was. John was over three centimeters taller than he was, leading George to assume him to be heavier- but no, his young friend was light as a feather, much like himself.
"Paul? Little help?" George grunted. Light as John was, he didn't seem that way after a while holding him in the same uncomfortable position.
"We're carrying him?" Paul asked, flabbergasted, picking up his now-wet jacket from the ground and pulling it back on, not really paying attention to what he was doing. In fact, he didn't even notice he had put it on backwards. He regarded George with his mouth open like a fish's.
"You have a better plan?" asked George. When he got no response, he commanded "Then grab his legs." Obediently, Paul nodded and picked John up by the legs, and together with much coordination the two boys carted their friend down the gray sidewalk. The few people that they passed looked at them oddly, but none offered help- a few even muttered derogatory insults under their breath at the boys, to which George scowled and Paul frowned.
"Poor John… his feet are all cut up," Paul said softly after they had been walking for a few minutes. He shook his head to clear the wayward hairs from his line of vision. "Do you think he left his house without shoes or something?"
"I don't know," George muttered. "Maybe someone took them. You know how people are around here." was only then that he noticed Paul, who he eyed suspiciously, as the older boy didn't seem to be very tired from carrying John at all. It didn't appear that the older boy was very tired at all from carrying John down the road as they had for the past few minutes, meanwhile George was struggling more and more with each step… it quite frankly felt like his arms were about to give. "Hey, princess, pull a leg," he muttered, repositioning his arms under John's torso.
"I am," Paul defended, adjusting himself only just enough to count. "You have the heavy side anyway, s'not my fault… we should bring him to my mum. She's a nurse, she can help him…"
"He doesn't need your mum, he needs the hospital!" George snapped suddenly, causing Paul to jump slightly in surprise at the outburst and almost lose his grip on John. George continued. "For crying out loud, can't you see how serious this is, Paul? John could really be hurt! Don't you get that?"
"Well I'm sorry, Georgie! Don't yell at-"
"John? George? Paul? What's going on?" A new and obviously familiar voice broke into the impeding argument. Paul and George whipped their heads around to see John's mother, the one and only Julia Lennon, standing before them, clothed in black funeral dress, her thick and curly red hair in a bun pulled behind her head, and her green eyes rimmed slightly in red with kohl smudged around the edges. Obviously, she had shed some tears at the funeral. Neither George nor Paul could even fathom why. Bobby had been such a cruel man to her. He had completely ruined her life; his mere presence had demoted her from an affluent young woman living in the beautiful Woolton suburb with her son to a single and destitute working mother in Toxteth, disowned from her own family for her bad decisions. Young Julie, in recognizing her brother, happily cried out his name, which had been one of her first words. She was less than two years old, and couldn't possibly understand what was transpiring. Julia, however, was beginning to.
"Julia!" George exclaimed, nearly dropping the woman's son in surprise.
"George, what's going on?" Julia demanded, her voice full of trepidation. She let go of her daughter's hand, and the little girl ran to her brother and began to try to talk to him, telling him innocent details of a funeral whose purpose she hadn't understood, not noticing even that he didn't respond to her.
"We- we found him, John, in a, a-" George stumbled over his words uncharacteristically, finding himself woefully unable to convey to Julia just what had happened without scaring her. The wildly fearful expression on her face was enough to trip him up. He didn't want to be the one to tell her something was wrong, and certainly there was.
"Is my son okay? Please tell me you're just playing a game with me!" Her voice was desperate now. She knew how unlikely it was that they were just toying with her. Prankster though her son may be, Julia knew her son would never go as low as to commit such a terrible trick, and from the expressions on Paul and George's faces she knew even more certainly that something was quite amiss.
Since when do you care what happens to John? George thought bitterly to himself. Never had he seen the woman before him so involved in her son's life, at least not in recent history. Perhaps at the beginning, when he had only just met John, but after those first few weeks of George's knowing Julia she had always been too enamored with Bobby and her own affairs to notice whatever problems John had, problems he would always share with his friends when his flighty mother found herself too busy to care. Whatever opinion George had harbored of Julia Lennon as a 'cool' parent in the early days were gone, replaced by his perception of her as the neglectful one she was.
"I-" George began again, but stopped once more. How to even begin?
"Give him to me," Julia commanded suddenly, holding out her arms. The two boys immediately complied, handing John to her without complaint, surprised to say the least when the small and bony Julia held her son in her arms with ease, turned on her heel and practically ran down the road, her heeled shoes clacking swiftly against the concrete. She didn't even look behind her as she went, except to command Paul to grab Julie and for the both of them to follow her in. Obediently, Paul grasped Julie by the waist, and with a little help from George was eventually able to get her into the piggyback position on him and the three of them caught up quickly with Julia.
"Bad?" asked Julie choppily from Paul's back, apparently finally having picked up on something being wrong with the situation at hand. She pulled a lock of Paul's hair and asked the question again when she didn't get a response. "Paulie! What bad?"
"Nothing's wrong," Paul said dismissively.
"We're playing a game," added George.
This was something Julie understood very well. "Game!" she smiled.
"Um, Miss Julia, where are we going?" Paul asked nervously, hoisting Julie up farther on his back. Despite circumstances, George smiled at how uncomfortable Paul was keeping the young Julie aloft on his back. Her fidgety form didn't offer purchase on Paul, and she kept sliding down until her rear end almost touched the sidewalk, forcing Paul to hop and wiggle until he could get her above his hips again. It was a sort of semi-sadistic humor that could only be found in an extremely serious situation.
"Hospital," Julia muttered shortly in answer to Paul's question, not even bothering with full sentences. She looked at her son with worried eyes as she briskly walked along the sidewalk. "I want you to tell me everything. What happened?"
Paul was the first to pipe up, perhaps recognizing the fact that George didn't at all feel like talking. "We found him just now in an alley," the young boy explained. "We went over to your house to surprise him, you know for his birthday… and he wasn't there, so we started to go home and then I passed an alley a couple blocks back and he was just there, not awake or anything."
"Did you try to wake him up?"
"George did. He tried slapping him awake, lightly though, and he kept shouting his name but nothing happened." Paul was quiet for a moment. "John was cold when we found him. Is he still now?"
"Yes…" Julia murmured, hugging him closer to her and shivering from how icy he was. "Oh, Johnny," she continued, shaking her head. "Thursday night… Last I saw him was Thursday night! And I woke up for work, I thought he had gone to school… and when I came home, it must have been eleven, I thought he was asleep… why didn't I look! Or before today even, but the funeral, I was so distraught… damn it! Stupid, stupid, stupid…" she seemed to be talking more to herself than either of the boys and they didn't respond to her, instead silently power walking beside her and exchanging worriedly uncomfortable glances along the way. Julie, who was obliviously humming a tune all her own, was eventually switched from Paul's back to George's, the latter of whom eventually took pity on the former, who even after he had been rid of the small girl walked slightly bent over, like giving her the short ride had deformed his spine somehow.
As she lived in the city, Julia knew the streets at least somewhat well, and quickly she navigated herself to a bus, which she boarded along with the four children, including John who was still hanging limp in her arms. There were no seats available when she got on, all of them being filled with the grayscale Liverpudlians that occupied the city, but a kindly businessman upon seeing her vacated his place to allow her to sit down and hold John on her lap, lengthwise so his head or legs didn't invade on the space of the people on either side of her. Paul and George for their part made do sitting in the aisle with baby Julie in George's lap. In an effort to pass the time, Paul bit his fingernail once again, so much throughout the ride that the ends of his fingers turned red from his incessantly nicking the skin with his teeth as he went. George bounced his knee in his own nervousness, engaging in conversation with Paul every once in a while, but neither of their hearts were really into it. Julie eventually fell asleep in the latter boy's lap, blissfully into the senseless world of slumber. Throughout it all, Julia sat tersely in her hard plastic chair, her face never betraying emotion, and once the bus stopped at the Newton Memorial Hospital- the same one that housed Ritchie, and the same one that was the workplace of Mary McCartney- she practically sprinted off and into the double doors, followed closely by the trio of perplexed children.
And then, after all the madness, Paul found himself inside that awful waiting room again, George slumped glumly by his side like he had melted somehow into the chair, and Julia Lennon nowhere to be found. John, the second he had been taken in, had been placed unceremoniously on a rolling metal table- a gurney, as his mother had said they were called- and shepherded off through the complex latticework of hallways. And that left him alone with George, who Paul knew only too well wasn't going to want to talk.
The chair he was sitting in was of the plastic-covered-and-foam-stuffed kind. Too much stuffing shoved in tight, shiny, scuffed up gray plastic material, held into a chair-like position by wrought metal rungs. And on the seat, just next to his thigh, was a small hole in the plastic, showing the yellowing foam underneath. Paul ran the pad of his finger over the hole, noting that the stuffing underneath felt almost waxy to the touch. For a few minutes he made a game of playing with the chair's imperfection, picking and pulling at the edges of the hole, slowly making it larger and larger. For those few minutes he was entertained with that, but the small prick of cheap chair stuffing couldn't hold his attention long. And even as he was playing with it thoughts pervaded his mind, unceasingly it seemed, and eventually he stopped, leaving behind nothing but a slightly larger hole in the seat cushion and dark ramblings.
It seemed like hospitals were a fixture in his life. This particular place of Newton Memorial had been so familiar to him since he could remember, and even before that. Paul had even been born there, eighteenth of November back in 1940. There had been a time when hospitals, outlandish a notion as it seemed now, were places of happiness. They were full of sweet nurses and bright eyed doctors, pretty young girls selling poppies from trays to support a faraway war effort.
But that was the past, when the place he was at now wasn't one of pain and horror and misery- and, worst of all, the sinking feeling of cold dread in the pit of his stomach that made him feel close to throwing up from his mounting worry. Back then he was innocent, shielded from the reality of the world. Hadn't he been stupid? There wasn't a way for him to stay protected for long. Perhaps it was better for his childish spirit to be shattered now than later. Paul leaned back in his chair and hugged his knees to his chest, putting his head down. Where did the wonders of yesterday go?
"Paul? What are you doing here?" a soft inquiry lofted through the sterile air and the boy in question looked up to see none other than his own mother Mary McCartney, clothed in her pressed white nurse's uniform, slight concern readable in her eyes. He could not have been happier to see her.
"Mum!" Paul cried, hopping out of his chair and grasping her in a ferocious hug so sudden that she stumbled back involuntarily. Surprised as though she may have been at his presence, she didn't show it, and returned the hug soothingly, whispering softly into his ear.
"Honey, what's the matter?"
"Johnny's really hurt," Paul said, his voice muffled by the rough fabric of his mother's uniform.
Mary made a sharp intake of breath and paused a moment before responding. "What? Was there an accident? Paul, sweetie, talk to me," she wheedled gently, sitting down in the nearest seat and pulling her eldest son onto her lap. Even though he wasn't outright crying, she could still tell with her motherly sense that he was upset. She petted his dark hair softly, knowing it always made him feel better.
"I dunno," Paul sighed. "I went to his house to see him this morning, but he wasn't there… and then we got lost and found him in an alley all beat up and cold, and then we found Julia and she brought us here."
"Julia, John's mother?" Paul nodded in response.
"I'm here too, not that anyone seems to care," George added seemingly from nowhere. He had an amazing knack for disappearing into the mist only to reappear sometime later with a snarky comment or two to chime in with. He glanced over at the mother-son duo with his arms crossed over his chest from his seat three spots away.
"George," Mary gently admonished. "Of course we care about you. Come over here." She opened up one side of her hug and invited the boy to the shared affection.
George hesitated a moment, feeling slightly uncomfortable hugging people that weren't his own family, but who was he kidding? It was Paul, his best friend, and Mary, one of the sweetest women to ever grace God's green earth. Eventually he scooted over and sat in the seat next to Mary, leaning over the armrests to put his head against her shoulder and close his eyes. He was so tired, but he hated to sleep, especially in public. And besides, he was absolutely determined to hold out until they got some news on John.
Despite the comfort of the hug, Mary did have to leave after only a few minutes, for after all she was at work and needed to do her job. She promised, however, to bring back whatever news she could about John when she returned next. So reluctantly Paul let her go, and George moved into the same seat as him; since they were both small, they could fit comfortably.
Minutes passed, that much was abundantly clear, but whether or not the hours passed or how quickly was hard to pinpoint. Had it even been hours? It was doubtful, but still quite possible. Was it that the minutes were dragging out infinitely or passing like seconds? Time, it seemed, ceased to exist in hospitals. There were no clocks, no windows, no way to tell.
"Hey George?" Paul asked quietly after what seemed like forever. Forever, and no Julia, no Mary, and no John. He looked absentmindedly across the room, his vision lopsided by the fact that his head was n George's shoulder. "We're gonna be okay, right? All of us?"
"Who knows?" George shrugged, his latent cynicism showing through.
"But George…"
George sighed at the tone in Paul's voice and nodded. It was wrong to rob Paul of whatever hope and innocence he had left. "Yeah, Paul. We'll all be okay."
"Good. That's what I thought."
A/N: Sorry I've been long in the update! But please review, it makes my day, and remember to tune into Renaissance! Lol, I sound like an infomercial. My bad :)