Chapter 22: Promises

“How’s the knee?” I asked as we climbed the stairs to the Grand Plaza on our way back to Campus Heights. It was bitterly cold, with a strong wind. Snow still covered the ground after an overnight dusting, and flurries on and off during the day. It was all I could do not to stare out of the window, mesmerised by the falling flakes during my exam. The module had been Administrative Law, and it was deathly dull. Still, I think I’d done okay. Or hoped I had.

“You keep asking and I keep telling you,” Alannah said, smiling a cute little smile. “It’s fine. It really is.”

“You kept saying that last term as well.”

“I know, but ... I’m being more careful now. And the gym work is helping to strengthen it. I really should have been doing that all along.” She shrugged. “Look, I’ll make you a promise, okay? If I find it starts hurting, not just how it did last term but even just a little, I promise I’ll tell you and I promise I’ll take it easy for a while when you tell me to, okay?”

I nodded. “Good enough. For now. But you better keep that promise. Promises. There were two in there—a promise to tell me if it hurts and a promise to take it easy.”

“You better keep reminding me of them then.” She smiled again. “Thank you for caring, Paul.”

“You’re welcome. I just wish there was more I could do.”

“Well...” She gave me a sheepish look. “With all that money you have, you could offer to pay for an operation privately.” The tone of her voice, and the big grin that followed, told me she was joking.

But I wasn’t.

“If you think it would help, then I’d be happy to.”

She looked into my eyes. “You’re dead serious, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “I’ve told you before, if I can help, then I want to help.”

She touched my arm and offered me a warm smile. Damn, she was beautiful when she smiled. Actually, she was beautiful, period. But even more so when she smiled.

“If you’d have made that offer two years ago, I might have taken you up on it. Or my parents would have. They’d have snapped your arm off, actually. Well, Mum would. Dad would have had ... reservations. But not now. Although, I do appreciate the offer. I really do.”

“Why not now?”

“Well, first, you need to do the operation right after the initial injury if it’s going to be effective, so that’s reason enough on its own, but second, I’m a different person than I was two years ago and wouldn’t want to have the operation done privately anyway. Even if Mum would have wanted it.”

I furrowed my brow. “Why not?”

“Because private health care undermines the NHS, and if people keep undermining the NHS, we could end up losing it. And that would be a complete tragedy. The NHS is something precious. Something unique. We need to fight to keep it.”

“It’s not unique. Other countries have state-funded health care.”

“Not as comprehensively as we do. There’s no other country where care is free at the point of use for everyone and covers the whole cost. It really is unique.”

“I don’t believe that. Are you telling me that countries like ... I don’t know ... Sweden? Norway? They don’t have a health care system like ours? Better than ours, even? Don’t they always say they are, like, the happiest nations on earth or something?”

She shrugged. “Okay, I’ll admit, I don’t know how every country does health care. Maybe the NHS isn’t ‘unique.’ But I do know that some European countries have systems that only cover part of the cost, and you need insurance to cover the rest, or you have to pay up front and then claim it back from the government. And don’t even get me started on how it is in America. You spent a year in America, so you must already know what that’s like.”

“Thankfully, I never needed to use the system while I was there.”

“Yeah, well, you were lucky. Did you know that the cost of health care is the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in America? That’s criminal! It’s scandalous! Do you know how many bankruptcies there were in the EU last year because of health care costs? Zero. None.”

I nodded. “No, I didn’t know that about the bankruptcies. How do you know all this anyway?”

She shrugged. “I read, Paul. I care! I mean, I care about how this country is run and how it could be run better. Not enough people our age care. I mean, there’s an election coming up next year, right? We didn’t use to know when it was, but this government passed the FTPA, so now we do.”

“The FTPA?”

“The Fixed Term Parliament Act. Were you not paying attention after the 2010 elections, Paul?”

I shook my head. “Not really, no.”

“See!”

“Yeah, well, I don’t believe you were paying attention either. You were, what? Fourteen? No fourteen-year-old cares who’s in government.”

“I did. Although, that was because of Dad. He’s a bit of an activist. That’s why he’d have had reservations about a private operation. He took me campaigning with him during the 2010 election. You know, putting leaflets through letterboxes, talking to people in the town centre on a weekend and stuff. I got to listen to him trying to convince people to vote the way he wanted them to.” She shook her head. “Not enough people our age pay attention and so we get screwed over. Like with the tuition fees. They promised not to increase them at the last election, and then increased them anyway. Do you know why?”

Again, I shook my head.

“Because young people don’t pay attention and, crucially, don’t bother to vote most of the time. You can ignore what people who don’t vote want, because they won’t vote against you next time anyway, because they don’t bother to vote! Does that make sense? I mean, who are you planning to vote for next year?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Exactly. I’ll bet you weren’t even planning to vote, were you?”

“I hadn’t—”

“Hadn’t thought about it. Yeah, I get it. But you need to, Paul. It’s important. Voting is the only way we get a say in how we’re governed. You need to vote. People fought and died so that you could vote.”

“They fought and died so I could choose not to vote, too.”

“True. But there’s a difference between actively choosing not to vote because you don’t like what’s on offer and not being bothered to vote because you haven’t thought about it.”

We’d stopped walking about halfway through this conversation and were standing by the clock tower in the centre of the Grand Plaza. I looked at her. She had spoken with such passion. Such fervour.

“You really care about this, don’t you?”

“Yes!” she said. “Because it’s important.”

I nodded. “Okay, I’ll make the effort to find out who would be the best party to vote for. I promise.”

“Good. Although, I can tell you now if you like.”

I smiled. “Let me work it out for myself. That’s how democracy works, right?”

“Well, yeah. But you also need to listen to what people who know about the issues say.”