Fractured (11 page)

‘Dad, I am not confused; well I am, but not in the way you mean. Three weeks ago you looked… well, you looked absolutely terrible. The chemo had made you so sick and weak, and the weight you’d lost… well, just everything. And now… now it makes no sense, you look completely better.’

His dearly loved face looked so troubled as he studied me, his eyes beginning to well with tears.

‘Rachel, I
am
completely well.’

‘How can you have been cured so quickly?’ This was all just too much to absorb. My father began to reach for the bell push above my bed.

‘Perhaps we should ask if the doctor could come and see you again now.’

‘No!’ I shouted, my voice thick with the frustration I knew was on my face. Shaking his head sadly my father lowered his arm from the emergency button and let his roughened fingers reach for and encompass my hand, patting it soothingly.

‘I haven’t “been cured”, Rachel, because I’ve never been ill in the first place. I
don’t
have cancer and I can’t imagine why you thought I did.’

The nurses had come in then, one to remove the breakfast tray and another to help me to the bathroom. In truth I was glad to be taken away. For some reason my father was hiding what had happened to him from me. My sluggish mind, still addled from the sedative, couldn’t think of a single reason why he was keeping such a thing secret.

I was grateful for the nurse’s assistance in the sparse white-tiled bathroom. Thankfully, my IV had been removed sometime during the night, and although unencumbered by having to wheel a tripod around, I still couldn’t have managed either the short walk down the corridor or the removal of my hospital gown without assistance. With the ties undone, the nurse turned on the shower and, after establishing that I felt confident enough on my feet to be left alone to wash, she slipped out of the room.

Under the surprisingly forceful jets of water I tried to clear my mind of its endless questioning, but it refused to be still. And even the innocuous act of washing myself threw up further unanswered puzzles. An unperfumed white bar sat waiting in the soap dish, but it wasn’t until I began to revolve it slowly between my palms that I noticed the grazes upon them.

I washed off the coating of suds and turned them thoughtfully this way and that under the spray from the shower. Both hands were equally grazed, as though I had fallen heavily and tried to save myself. But for the life of me I couldn’t remember when or how I had done this. I did remember falling to the ground beside Jimmy’s grave in the churchyard, but I had landed upon grass, not concrete. The only possibility I could come up with was that I must have grazed them against a headstone when I had finally collapsed. The progression of that thought left me wondering who it was who had found me in the cemetery and brought me to hospital. In the light of the larger more puzzling questions, I was happy to let that one go.

I wished there had been a mirror in the small utilitarian washroom, so I could see if my face bore any signs of injury, for as I soaped and rinsed the rest of my body, I found several other places that were both grazed and bruised. Again they all looked too raw and angry to have been sustained in anything less than a very hefty fall. I was beyond puzzled. I appeared to be covered in injuries where there should be none, while my father had an illness that had simply disappeared. I wondered if Alice had felt this confused when she had fallen down the well into Wonderland.

Still trying to resolve the irresolvable, one idea suddenly occurred to me as I dried myself briskly on the rough hospital towel. Perhaps the reason my father wouldn’t admit to his illness was because his treatment hadn’t been legal. I almost threw the idea out as preposterous. He was so honest, I couldn’t even remember him getting so much as a parking fine in his entire life. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made – in a totally nonsensical way. Maybe he was paying privately for some unlicensed medication or treatment forbidden in the UK. And if that
was
the case, well then he’d probably
have
to lie in order to protect whatever secret trial or doctor had helped him.

As I waited for the nurse to return with a clean gown, I felt happier to have found a workable solution to the mystery. Very probably, when away from the confines of the hospital, he would confess it all, when it was safe to betray his secret without others hearing. And as for secrets, well I had been hiding a pretty big one of my own from him too: the recurring headaches. I just hoped I would be able to find the time to speak to the doctor in private about the symptoms which had precipitated my collapse by the church.

As she took my arm to help me back to my room, the nurse supplied another surprising piece of information.

‘I’d better warn you that you have a police officer waiting in your room to talk to you now that you’re awake.’

I stopped mid-step and turned to the young nurse in consternation.

‘A policeman? Why? Whatever for?’

She gave me a curious look, as though amazed I could ask such a thing.

‘Well, they obviously need to get all the details about what happened by the church the other night.’

I looked back at her dumbly.
What happened by the church
? Were the police really so light on crime in this area that they had sent someone to question me about trespassing in the churchyard late at night? Was that really even a crime at all? It wasn’t as though I’d been vandalising the graves. Surely I wasn’t going to be charged with some petty misdemeanour? How much weirder was this day going to get?

In my wildest of dreams, I could never have guessed.

The policeman was seated half out of sight behind the door of my room. Dad had clearly been talking about me, judging by the guilty way in which he shut up like a clam as soon as I appeared at the threshold. In my peripheral vision I took in a dark uniform as the policeman rose to his feet.

‘Rachel, hon, the police need some information from you, but don’t look worried… look who they sent.’ He sounded as triumphant as a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, and I turned for the first time to look at the officer.

The room swayed; I knew my face must have drained of all colour. I reached out blindly for the doorframe, knowing it wasn’t going to be any use. As I crumpled to the floor, in a swoon worthy of any Victorian gentlewoman, I had time to say just one word:

‘Jimmy!’

The good thing about fainting in a hospital is that they know what to do with you right away. It was only a moment or two before I once again became aware of where I was. Seated on the chair which my father had occupied the night before, with my head stuck securely between my knees, I could feel the comforting hand of the nurse holding a cold compress against the back of my neck. I struggled to sit up.

‘Don’t go rushing to get up yet, Rachel. Take a moment or two.’ Then, presumably directing the next comment to my dad, ‘She may have been under the hot shower a wee bit too long, she’ll be fine in a moment.’ I very much doubted that. I strained against her hand, and sat up.

I didn’t scream, or shout out, or even faint again, I just stared, totally transfixed, at the face which had been missing from my life for five dreadful years. He smiled but something in my scrutiny caused it to waver and the greeting was rearranged into a look of deep concern.

‘Rachel?’ His voice was hesitant.

I asked the only question that came into my mind.

‘Am I in heaven?’ The nurse clearly found this quite amusing.

‘Well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody call an NHS hospital that before!’

I ignored her.

‘Is this heaven? Are we all dead?’ That shut the nurse up. I saw the look my dad flashed to Jimmy.
See?
it said, as plainly as if he had spoken the words out loud.
I told you she was acting strangely.

The nurse had regained enough composure to switch back into her briskly professional role.

‘Come along, back to bed now, Rachel. I think you need to have a little lie down.’ She was definitely annoying me now. Disregarding her once more, I directed my question only at Jimmy.

‘Did I die in the churchyard beside the grave?’

I guess his policeman’s training was the reason he answered such a bizarre question so calmly.

‘No, Rachel, you did not die in the churchyard. And beside whose grave?’

My next answer, not surprisingly, took the polish off his professional demeanour.

‘Yours, of course.’

I don’t know who pushed the emergency button this time. It could have been any one of the three of them. Hell, it could even have been me. I think we all needed some medical intervention at that point.

A young doctor I hadn’t seen before came speedily into the room. There was a rapid flurry of conversation. I caught the words ‘delusional’ and ‘sedative’ and ‘tests’. They all meant nothing. I could only stare at Jimmy as they laid me back on the bed, swabbed briefly at my arm and slid the hypodermic into my vein.

It was a much milder sedative than the day before. I guess they couldn’t risk pumping someone with a head injury with too much sedation. Although my limbs were relaxed as though I were floating on a buoyant bed of feathers, my brain was still working. My eyes had closed, but I was still awake. It was a pleasantly drunk feeling, without the room-spinning element.

‘Did she
really
mean that? Did she actually think I was dead?’

My father’s voice sounded broken.

‘I don’t know, son, who knows. She thought
I
was dying of cancer.’

There was a long silence.

‘She must have hit her head harder than anyone realised. She’s not going to be answering any questions today. Nothing she tells you right now will help you catch the bastard who mugged her.’

‘I realise that.’

‘You probably don’t need to be hanging around here. That doctor was ordering up a whole load more tests. I can call you when she’s more… with it.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

I was wheeled from department to department. I had an MRI, two further X-rays and several other tests with electrodes affixed to my head. By then I was awake and alert enough to be asking questions. But no one was talking to me, except in soft placating tones designed not to evoke another one of my ‘episodes’. When I was finally transported back to my room, it was empty. The staff nurse who helped me back into bed advised me that my dad and all the rest of my guests had moved down to the canteen for a cup of tea. When I asked who the ‘all’ referred to, she did not know.

So I sat bolt upright in bed, staring at the door, waiting to see how many more deceased visitors I would be receiving that day.

They came in in single file: my dad, then Jimmy, followed by Matt, Cathy and Phil. I stared at them in turn as they arrived. I was still looking a little surprised to see the last three when Matt broke away from the others, rushed to my bedside and kissed me tenderly on the lips. I flinched from the brush of his soft mouth upon mine, instantly looking over his shoulder to see how Cathy would react. Amazingly her face gave away none of the rage she must surely be feeling.

‘Matt,’ I hissed, my eyes flashing a warning towards his girlfriend. I could suddenly remember the vow he had made when dropping me back at the hotel: that he was not going to let me get away again. Did he really think this was the appropriate place to start that campaign?

Besides, I couldn’t concentrate on anyone other than the person standing at the foot of my bed. At some point during the day I guessed he must have gone off duty, for he was now out of uniform, wearing jeans and a dark shirt. But the most amazing thing of all was that no one else in the room seemed in the least bit amazed that he was there. It was like that old saying about ignoring the elephant in the room. This was so enormous, so ludicrously and mind-blowingly ‘wrong’ – how come everyone wasn’t reacting like me?

And then the answer came to me. How could it have taken so long for me to get it? Especially when I’d seen
The
Sixth Sense
so many times I knew parts of it off by heart.

‘Can anyone else see Jimmy in the room?’

I can’t begin to describe the pity on their faces as they all exchanged extremely meaningful looks. My dad answered for them all.

‘Of course we can, love.’

‘No, Dad, don’t humour me. Just be honest. I can see Jimmy’s ghost right there at the foot of my bed. Now can anyone else see him or not?’

Dad’s pain was obvious as he tried to formulate an answer but before he could reply the incredibly solid-looking ‘ghost’ of Jimmy came up to sit on the bed beside me, gently picking up my hand. I felt the mattress depress when he sat down, felt too the warmth of his fingers against my grazed skin; the ghost theory was losing ground fast.

‘Rachel, just listen to me for a moment without speaking, would you?’ I opened my mouth to protest but he gently pressed his forefinger across my lips. ‘No interruptions, right?’

God, if he
was
a ghost he was a bloody bossy one. And that finger against my mouth had felt so strong… so real.

‘You’ve taken a nasty blow to your head.’ He carried on as though I was going to contradict him. ‘You’d travelled back here for Sarah’s wedding.’

At last, something I could agree with. ‘Yes, I
know
that.’ There was a communal sigh of relief that I had grasped at least that one truth.

‘Now something happened, we think you were probably mugged, after leaving the station. And we think that somehow, when you were attacked, you must have hurt your head. And all these… strange… thoughts and ideas you are having right now are because of your injury.’

He might as well have saved his breath.

‘Then this must all be a dream,’ I announced, seizing upon the only other solution that made sense. Someone, I don’t know who, gave a loud sigh of despair. I ignored them. ‘This is all just a very real and very vivid dream, but it’s all in my subconscious. Any minute now I’m going to wake up.’

There was a long silence, which no one seemed to have the words to fill. It was though my absolute determination to stick to my own beliefs had sucked all protests clean out of the room.