After You (2 page)

‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’

A brace around my neck.

A hand feeling around my head, gently, swiftly.

I am alive. This is actually quite surprising.

‘That’s it. Open your eyes. Look at me, now. Look at me. Can you tell me your name?’

I want to speak, to open my mouth, but my voice emerges muffled and nonsensical. I think I have bitten my tongue. There is blood in my mouth, warm and tasting of iron. I cannot move.

‘We’re going to put you onto a spinal board, okay? You may be a bit uncomfortable for a minute, but I’m going to give you some morphine to make the pain a bit easier.’ The man’s voice is calm, level, as if it is the most normal thing in the world to be lying broken on concrete, staring up at the dark sky. I want to laugh. I want to tell him how ridiculous it is that I am here. But nothing seems to work as it should.

The man’s face disappears from view. A woman in a neon jacket, her dark curly hair tied back in a ponytail, looms over me and shines a thin torch abruptly in my eyes, gazing at me with the same detached interest as if I was a specimen, not a person.

‘Do we need to bag her?’

I want to speak but I’m distracted by the pain in my legs.
Jesus
, I say, but I’m not sure if I say it aloud.

‘Multiple fractures. Pupils normal and reactive. BP ninety
over sixty. She’s lucky she hit that awning. What are the odds of landing on a daybed, eh? … I don’t like that bruising, though.’ Cold air on my midriff, the light touch of warm fingers. ‘Internal bleeding?’

‘Do we need a second team?’

‘Can you step back, please, sir? Right back?’

Another man’s voice: ‘I came outside for a smoke, and she dropped on to my bloody balcony. She nearly bloody landed on me.’

‘Well, there you go – it’s your lucky day. She didn’t.’

‘I got the shock of my life. You don’t expect people to just drop out of the bloody sky. Look at my chair. That was eight hundred pounds from the Conran Shop … Do you think I can claim for it?’

A brief silence.

‘You can do what you want, sir. Tell you what, you could charge her for cleaning the blood off your balcony while you’re at it. How about that?’

The first man’s eyes slide towards his colleague. Time slips, I tilt with it. I’ve fallen off a roof? My face is cold and I realize distantly that I’m starting to shake.

‘She’s going into shock, Sam.’

A van door slides open somewhere below. And then the board beneath me moves and briefly
the pain the pain the pain
– Everything turns black.

A siren and a swirl of blue. Always a siren in London. We are moving. Neon slides across the interior of the ambulance, hiccups and repeats, illuminating the unexpectedly packed interior, the man in the green uniform, who is tapping something into his phone, before turning to adjust the drip above my head. The pain has lessened – morphine? – but with consciousness comes growing terror. A giant airbag is inflating
slowly inside me, steadily blocking out everything else.
Oh, no. Oh, no.

‘Egcuse nge?’

It takes two goes for the man, his arm braced against the back of the cab, to hear me. He turns and stoops towards my face. He smells of lemons and he has missed a bit when shaving. ‘You okay there?’

‘Ang I –’

The man leans down. ‘Sorry. Hard to hear over the siren. We’ll be at the hospital soon.’ He places a hand on mine. It is dry and warm and reassuring. I’m suddenly panicked in case he decides to let go. ‘Just hang on in there. What’s our ETA, Donna?’

I can’t say the words. My tongue fills my mouth. My thoughts are muddled, overlapping. Did I move my arms when they picked me up? I lifted my right hand, didn’t I?

‘Ang I garalysed?’ It emerges as a whisper.

‘What?’ He drops his ear to somewhere near my mouth.

‘Garalysed? Ang I garalysed?’

‘Paralysed?’ The man hesitates, his eyes on mine, then turns and looks down at my legs. ‘Can you wiggle your toes?’

I try to remember how to move my feet. It seems to require several more leaps of concentration than it used to. The man reaches down and lightly touches my toe, as if to remind me where they are. ‘Try again. There you go.’

Pain shoots up both my legs. A gasp, possibly a sob. Mine.

‘You’re all right. Pain is good. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think there’s any spinal injury. You’ve done your hip, and a few other bits besides.’

His eyes are on mine. Kind eyes. He seems to understand how much I need convincing. I feel his hand close on mine. I have never needed a human touch more.

‘Really. I’m pretty sure you’re not paralysed.’

‘Oh, thang Gog.’ I hear my voice, as if from afar. My eyes brim with tears. ‘Please don’ leggo ogme,’ I whisper.

He moves his face closer. ‘I am not letting go of you.’

I want to speak, but his face blurs, and I am gone again.

Afterwards they tell me I fell two floors of the five, busting through an awning, breaking my fall on a top-of-the-range outsized canvas and wicker-effect waterproof-cushioned sun-lounger on the balcony of Mr Antony Gardiner, a copyright lawyer, and neighbour I have never met. My hip smashed into two pieces and two of my ribs and my collarbone snapped straight through. I broke two fingers on my left hand, and a metatarsal, which poked through the skin of my foot and caused one of the medical students to faint. My X-rays are a source of some fascination.

I keep hearing the voice of the paramedic who treated me:
You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height
. I am apparently very lucky. They tell me this and wait, smiling, as if I should respond with a huge grin, or perhaps a little tap dance. I don’t feel lucky. I don’t feel anything. I doze and wake, and sometimes the view above me is the bright lights of an operating theatre, and then it is a quiet, still room. A nurse’s face. Snatches of conversation.

Did you see the mess the old woman on D4 made? That’s some end of a shift, eh?

You work up at the Princess Elizabeth, right? You can tell them we know how to run an ER. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

You just rest now, Louisa. We’re taking care of everything. Just rest now.

The morphine makes me sleepy. They up my dose and it’s a welcome cold trickle of oblivion.

I open my eyes to find my mother at the end of my bed.

‘She’s awake. Bernard, she’s awake. Do we need to get the nurse?’

She’s changed the colour of her hair, I think distantly. And then: Oh. It’s my mother. My mother doesn’t talk to me any more.

‘Oh, thank God. Thank God.’ My mother reaches up and touches the crucifix around her neck. It reminds me of someone but I cannot think who. She leans forward and lightly strokes my cheek. For some reason this makes my eyes fill immediately with tears. ‘Oh, my little girl.’ She is leaning over me, as if to shelter me from further damage. I smell her perfume, as familiar as my own. ‘Oh, Lou.’ She mops my tears with a tissue. ‘I got the fright of my life when they called. Are you in pain? Do you need anything? Are you comfortable? What can I get you?’

She talks so fast that I cannot answer.

‘We came as soon as they said. Treena’s looking after Granddad. He sends his love. Well, he sort of made that noise, you know, but we all know what he means. Oh, love, how on earth did you get yourself into this mess? What on earth were you
thinking
?’

She doesn’t seem to require an answer. All I have to do is lie here.

My mother dabs at her eyes, and again at mine. ‘You’re still my daughter. And … and I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you and we weren’t … you know.’

‘Ngung –’ I swallow the words. My tongue feels ridiculous. I sound drunk. ‘I ngever wanged –’

‘I know. But you made it so hard for me, Lou. I couldn’t –’

‘Not now, love, eh?’ Dad touches her shoulder.

She looks away into the middle distance, and takes my hand. ‘When we got the call. Oh. I thought – I didn’t know –’ She is
sniffing again, her handkerchief pressed to her lips. ‘Thank God she’s okay, Bernard.’

‘Of course she is. Made of rubber, this one, eh?’

Dad looms over me. We had last spoken on the telephone two months previously, but I haven’t seen him in person for the eighteen months since I left my home town. He looks enormous and familiar, and desperately, desperately tired.

‘Shorry,’ I whisper. I can’t think what else to say.

‘Don’t be daft. We’re just glad you’re okay. Even if you do look like you’ve done six rounds with Mike Tyson. Have you seen yourself in a mirror since you got here?’

I shake my head.

‘Maybe … I might just hold off a bit longer. You know Terry Nicholls, that time he went right over his handlebars by the mini-mart? Well, take off the moustache, and that’s pretty much what you look like. Actually,’ he peers closer at my face, ‘now you mention it …’

‘Bernard.’

‘We’ll bring you some tweezers tomorrow. Anyway, the next time you decide you want flying lessons, let’s head down the ole airstrip, yes? Jumping and flapping your arms is plainly not working for you.’

I try to smile.

They both bend over me. Their faces are strained, anxious. My parents.

‘She’s got thin, Bernard. Don’t you think she’s got thin?’

Dad leans closer, and then I see his eyes are a little watery, his smile a bit wobblier than usual. ‘Ah … she looks beautiful, love. Believe me. You look bloody beautiful.’ He squeezes my hand, then lifts it to his mouth and kisses it. My dad has never done anything like that to me in my whole life.

It is then that I realize they thought I was going to die and a sob bursts unannounced from my chest. I shut my eyes
against the hot tears and feel his large, wood-roughened palm around mine.

‘We’re here, sweetheart. It’s all right now. It’s all going to be okay.’

They make the fifty-mile journey every day for two weeks, catching the early train down, and then after that, every few days. Dad gets special dispensation from work, because Mum won’t travel by herself. There are, after all, all sorts in London. This is said more than once and always accompanied by a furtive glance behind her, as if a knife-wielding hood is even now sneaking into the ward. Treena is staying over to keep an eye on Granddad. There is an edge to the way Mum says it that makes me think this might not be my sister’s first choice of arrangements.

Mum brings homemade food, and has done so since the day we all stared at my lunch and, despite five minutes of intense speculation, couldn’t work out what it was. ‘And in plastic trays, Bernard. Like a prison.’ She prodded it sadly with a fork, then sniffed it. Since then she has arrived with enormous sandwiches, thick slices of ham or cheese in white bloomer bread, homemade soups in flasks. ‘Food you can recognize,’ and feeds me like a baby. My tongue slowly returns to its normal size. Apparently I’d almost bitten through it when I landed. It’s not unusual, they tell me.

I have two operations to pin my hip, and my left foot and left arm are in plaster up to the joints. Keith, one of the porters, asks if he can sign my casts – apparently it’s bad luck to have them virgin white – and promptly writes a comment so filthy that Eveline, the Filipina nurse, has to put a plaster on it before the consultant comes around. When he pushes me to X-ray, or to the pharmacy, he tells me the gossip from around the hospital. I could do without hearing about the
patients who die slowly and horribly, of which there seem to be an endless number, but it keeps him happy. I sometimes wonder what he tells people about me. I am the girl who fell off a five-storey building and lived. In hospital status, this apparently puts me some way above the compacted bowel in C ward, or That Daft Bint Who Accidentally Took Her Thumb Off with Pruning Shears.

It’s amazing how quickly you become institutionalized. I wake, accept the ministrations of a handful of people I now recognize, try to say the right thing to the consultants, and wait for my parents to arrive. My parents keep busy with small tasks in my room, and become uncharacteristically deferential in the face of the doctors. Dad apologizes repeatedly for my inability to bounce, until Mum kicks him, quite hard, in the ankle.

After the rounds are finished, Mum usually has a walk around the concourse shops downstairs and returns exclaiming in hushed tones at the number of fast-food outlets. ‘That one-legged man from the cardio ward, Bernard. Sitting down there stuffing his face with cheeseburger and chips, like you wouldn’t believe.’

Dad sits and reads the local paper in the chair at the end of my bed. The first week he keeps checking it for reports of my accident. I try to tell him that in this part of the city even double murders barely merit a News In Brief, but in Stortfold the previous week the local paper’s front page ran with ‘Supermarket Trolleys Left in Wrong Area of Car Park’. The week before that it was ‘Schoolboys Sad at State of Duck Pond’ so he has yet to be convinced.

On the Friday after the final operation on my hip, my mother brings a dressing-gown that is one size too big for me, and a large brown-paper bag of egg sandwiches. I don’t have to ask what they are: the sulphurous smell floods the room as
soon as she opens her bag. My father wafts his hand in front of his nose. ‘The nurses’ll be blaming me, Josie,’ he says, opening and closing my door.

‘Eggs will build her up. She’s too thin. And, besides, you can’t talk. You were blaming the dog for your awful smells two years after he’d actually died.’

‘Just keeping the romance alive, love.’

Mum lowers her voice: ‘Treena says her last fellow put the blankets over her head when he broke wind. Can you imagine!’

Dad turns to me. ‘When I do it, your mother won’t even stay in the same postcode.’

There is tension in the air, even as they laugh. I can feel it. When your whole world shrinks to four walls, you become acutely attuned to slight variations in atmosphere. It’s in the way consultants turn away slightly when they’re examining X-rays or the nurses cover their mouths when they’re talking about someone nearby who has just died.

‘What?’ I say. ‘What is it?’

They look awkwardly at each other.