After You Read online

  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 is tapping something into his phone, before turning to adjust the drip above my head. The pain has lessened—morphine?—but with consciousness comes a growing terror. It is a giant airbag 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 toward my face. He smells of lemons and has missed a bit when shaving.

  “You okay there?”

  “Ang I—”

  He 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 am suddenly panicked in case he decides to let go. “Just hang 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?”

  “Paralyzed?” He 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. He 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 paralyzed.”

  “Oh, thang Gog,” I hear my voice, as if from afar. My eyes brim with tears. “Please don leggo og me,” 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.

  • • •

  Afterward they tell me I fell two floors of the five, bursting through an awning, breaking my fall on a top-of-the-line, outsized, canvas-and-wicker-effect, waterproof-cushioned sun lounger on the balcony of Mr. Antony Gardiner, a copyright lawyer and neighbor I have never met. My hip smashes into two pieces and two of my ribs and my collarbone snap straight through. I break two fingers on my left hand, and a metatarsal, which pokes through the skin of my foot and causes 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 is the bright lights of an operating theater 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. Hahahahaha.

  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 color of her hair, I think distantly. And then: Oh. It’s my mother. My mother doesn’t talk to me anymore.

  “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 does not seem to require an answer. All I have to do is lie there. My mother dabs at her eyes, and then 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 over 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.

  Her words tail off. 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 earlier, but I have not seen him in person for the eighteen months since I left my hometown. 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 actually looked 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 mustache, and that’s pretty much what you look like. Actually”—he peers closer at my face—“now that 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 ol’ 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 how his eyes have grown a little watery. How his smile is 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, come 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 hoodlum 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 has brought homemade food to the hospital ever since the day we all stared at my lunch and, despite five whole minutes of intense speculation couldn’t work out what it actually was. “And in plastic trays, Bernard. Like a prison.” She prodded it sadly with a fork, then sniffed the residue. She now arrives daily with enormous sandwiches—thick slices of ham or cheese in white bloomer bread—and 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 my 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 Keith 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 slow and horrible deaths, 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-story 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 is amazing how quickly you become institutionalized. I wake, accept the ministrations of a handful of people whose faces 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 cheeseburgers 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 the 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 is yet to be convinced.

  • • •

  On the Friday after the final operation to pin 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 sulfurous smell floods the room as soon as she opens the bag. My father mouths an apology, waving his hand in front of his nose. “The nurses’ll be blaming me, Josie,” he says, closing the door of my room.

  “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 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 are examining X-rays, or the way the nurses cover their mouths when they’re talking about someone who has just died nearby.

  “What?” I say. “What is it?”

  They look awkwardly at each other.

  “So . . .” Mum sits on the end of my bed. “The doctor said . . . the consultant said . . . it’s not clear how you fell.”

  I bite into an egg sandwich. I can pick things up with my left hand now. “Oh, that. I got distracted.”

  “While walking around a roof.”

  I chew for a minute.

  “Is there any chance you were sleepwalking, sweetheart?”

  “Dad—I’ve never sleepwalked in my life.”

  “Yes, you have. There was that time when you were thirteen and you sleepwalked downstairs and ate half of Treena’s birthday cake.”

  “Um. I may not have actually been asleep.”

  “And there’s your blood-alcohol level. They said . . . you had drunk . . . an awful lot.”

  “I had a tough night at work, and I had a drink or two and I just went up on the roof to get some air. And then I got distracted by a voice.”

  “You heard a voice.”

  “I was just standing on the top—looking out. I do it sometimes. And there was this girl’s voice behind me and it gave me a shock and I lost my footing.”

  “A girl?”

  “I only really heard her voice.”

  Dad leans forward. “You’re sure it was an actual girl? Not an imaginary . . .”

  “It’s my hip that’s mashed up, Dad, not my brain.”

  “They did say it was a girl who called the ambulance.” Mum touches Dad’s arm.

  “So you’re saying it really was an accident,” he says.

  I stop eating. They look away from each other guiltily.

  “What? You . . . you think I jumped off?”

  “We’re not saying anything.” Dad scratches his head. “It’s just—well—things had all gone so wrong since . . . and we hadn’t seen you for so long . . . and we were a bit surprised that you’d be up walking on the roof of a building in the wee small hours. You used to be afraid of heights.”

  “I used to be engaged to a man who thought it was normal to calculate how many calories he’d burned while he slept. Jesus. This is why you’ve been so nice to me? You think I tried to kill myself?”

  “It’s just he was asking us all sorts. . . .”

  “Who was asking what?”

  “The psychiatrist bloke. They just want to make sure you’re okay, love. We know things have been all—well, you know—since—”

  “Psychiatrist?”

  “They’re putting you on the waiting list to see someone. To talk, you know. And we’ve had a long chat with the doctors and you’re coming home with us. Just while you recover. You can’t stay by yourself in that flat of yours. It’s—”

  “You’ve been in my flat?”

  “Well, we had to fetch your things.”

  There is a long silence. I think of them standing in my doorway, my mother’s hands tight on her bag as she surveys the unwashed bed linen, the empty wine bottles lined up in a row on the mantelpiece, the solitary half-bar of Fruit and Nut in the fridge. I picture them shaking their heads, looking at each other. Are you sure we’ve got the right place, Bernard?

  “Right now you need to be with your family. Just till you’re back on your feet.”

  I want to say I’ll be fine in my flat, no matter what they think of it. I want to do my job and come home and not think until my next shift. I want to say I can’t go back to Stortfold and be That Girl again, The One Who. I don’t want to have to feel the weight of my mother’s carefully disguised disapproval, of my father’s cheerful determination that it’s all okay, everything is just fine, as if saying it enough times will actually make it okay. I don’t want to pass Will’s house every day, to think about what I was part of, the thing that will always be there.

  But I don’t say any of it. Because suddenly I’m tired and everything hurts and I just can’t fight anymore.

  • • •

  Dad brings me home two weeks later in his work van. There is only room for two in the front, so Mum has stayed behind to prepare the house, and as the motorway speeds by beneath us, I find my stomach tightening nervously.

  The cheerful streets of my hometown feel foreign to me now. I
look at them with a distant, analytical eye, noting how small everything appears, how tired, how twee. Even the castle looks smaller, perched on top of the hill. I realize this is how Will must have seen it when he first came home after his accident, and push the thought away. As we drive down our street, I find myself sinking slightly in my seat. I don’t want to make polite conversation with neighbors, to explain myself. I don’t want to be judged for what I did.

  “You okay?” Dad turns, as if he guesses something of what’s going through my head.

  “Fine.”

  “Good girl.” He puts a hand briefly on my shoulder.

  Mum is already at the door as we pull up. I suspect she has actually been standing by the window for the past half hour. Dad puts one of my bags on the step and then comes back to help me out, hoisting the other over his shoulder.

  I place my cane carefully on the paving stones, and I feel the twitching of curtains behind me as I make my way slowly up the path. Look who it is, I can hear them whispering. What do you think she’s done now?

  Dad steers me forward, watching my feet carefully, as if they might suddenly shoot out and go somewhere they shouldn’t. “Okay there?” he keeps saying. “Not too fast now.”

  I can see Granddad hovering behind Mum in the hall, wearing his checked shirt and his good blue jumper. Nothing has changed. The wallpaper is the same. The hall carpet is the same, the lines in the worn pile visible from where Mum must have vacuumed that morning. I can see my old blue anorak hanging on the hook. Eighteen months. I feel as if I have been away for a decade.

  “Don’t rush her,” Mum says, her hands pressed together. “You’re going too fast, Bernard.”

  “She’s hardly flipping Mo Farah. If she goes any slower we’ll be moonwalking.”

  “Watch those steps. Should you stand behind her, Bernard, coming up the steps? You know, in case she falls backward?”

  “I know where the steps are,” I say through gritted teeth. “I only lived here for twenty-six years.”

  “Watch she doesn’t catch herself on that lip there, Bernard. You don’t want her to smash the other hip.”

  Oh, God, I think. Is this what it was like for you, Will? Every single day?

  And then my sister is in the doorway, pushing past Mum. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Come on, Hopalong. You’re turning us into a freaking sideshow.”

  Treena wedges her arm under my armpit and turns briefly to glare at the neighbors, her eyebrows raised as if to say really? I can almost hear the swishing of curtains as they close.

  “Bunch of bloody rubberneckers. Anyway, hurry up. I promised Thomas he could see your scars before I take him to youth club. God, how much weight have you lost? Your boobs must look like two tangerines in a pair of socks.”

  It is hard to laugh and walk at the same time. Thomas runs to hug me so that I have to stop and put a hand out against the wall to keep my balance as we collide. “Did they really cut you open and put you back together?” he says. His head comes up to my chest. He is missing four front teeth. “Grandpa says they probably put you back together all the wrong way. And God only knows how we’ll tell the difference.”

  “Bernard!”

  “I was joking.”

  “Louisa.” Granddad’s voice is thick and hesitant. He reaches forward unsteadily and hugs me and I hug him back. He pulls away, his old hands gripping my arms surprisingly tightly, and frowns at me, a mock anger.

  “I know, Daddy. I know. But she’s home now,” says Mum.

  “You’re back in your old room,” says Dad. “I’m afraid we redecorated with Transformers wallpaper for Thom. You don’t mind the odd Autobot and Predacon, right?”

  “I had worms in my bottom,” says Thomas. “Mum says I’m not to talk about it outside the house. Or put my fingers up my—”

  “Oh, good Lord,” says Mum.

  “Welcome home, Lou,” says Dad, and promptly drops my bag on my foot.

  3

  Looking back, for the first nine months after Will’s death I was in a kind of daze. I went straight to Paris and simply didn’t go home, giddy with freedom,