The Other Half of My Heart (24 page)

He remembers the impact, and the sideways shunt. He's twisted so he can see Tina, whose eyes are closed, whose face is bloody, whose hair is perfect. The part of his brain that's calm and knows what to do tells him that it's a better sign if she's conscious, if she's talking.

‘Tina,' he says, ‘it's Roddy. Tina, I need you to talk to me.'

He thinks she says something, but at that moment there's a rushing of chatter from outside the car, and he misses her words, if they are words.

He sees one of the girls from the stable, beyond Tina; she's reaching in through the broken glass of the passenger window, finding Tina's wrist.

‘Hey, Roddy,' she says, her voice a controlled, unnatural evenness, ‘I know this is going to be tough for you, but try not to talk.'

‘Tina,' he says.

‘She's breathing,' the girl says – her face won't stay in focus long enough for him to understand who he's looking at. ‘Roddy, don't worry.'

‘Tina,' he says, ‘Tina, I need you to open your eyes if you can hear me. I'm here. We're all right, Tina.' In his head, his voice has all of its usual clearness, but he realizes that his words aren't leaving him. His mouth isn't working. He's cold. His eyes want to close.

People are saying his name, over and over, Roddy Roddy Roddy. Not long now, someone says. There's light shining in his eyes, there's a siren, there are more voices, but none of them is Tina's. And so he closes his eyes. She'll be there when he wakes up. When he wakes up, this will all be over.

Howard and Alice and Fred and Fran get the news from a police officer, who comes to the ball. ‘Roddy's been done for speeding, d'you reckon?' Fred says to Howard, when he sees the officer walking towards them, but Alice takes Fran's hand.

Aurora gets herself a lift back to the Flood place. She changes, checks the yard, and sweeps the water that's lying everywhere towards the drains. Only then does she let herself into a stall and sit herself down on the hay, her back against the side of a sleeping horse – a bay, she doesn't know which one, it doesn't matter, she just needs the smell and the warmth and the solid beating heart.

She sits and listens as she hears cars arrive, the phone ring, ring, ring again. She thinks about Sam, about Roddy and Tina. They couldn't all be dead. They couldn't all three die. It wasn't possible.

But then, three hours ago, when she was all high heels and lipstick and the hope of a bit of a fling before the evening waned, she would never have said that what has happened was possible.

That dislocated body. That face in the wet earth.

She sits quietly as someone else walks round the yard, quietly, as she has done.

‘Is that you, Aurora?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you coming in?'

‘Not yet.'

‘OK. There's no news.'

‘OK.'

And this is what it's like; they all get on with things, they all let each other be. The Fieldens stay for a fortnight, while the Floods come and go at odd hours, tear-stained Fran and granite-faced Fred.

And then Edward, Arabella and Anastasia go home, although Edward comes back with Bob and Foxglove. It's as though he's hoping the horses being at the stables will make Roddy fit to ride them. Aurora stays and tries to do what Roddy would do. She wants to make sure that the Floods aren't short-handed, on top of everything else. She works hard, and she puts the higher-spirited horses through their paces. She does everything that Charlie asks her to do, as though she is a groom herself. Aurora isn't often given to reflecting on her own behaviour, but she wishes she had been nicer to Tina. Not that it would have made any difference to the outcome, of course.

Everyone who works at Flood Farm seems lost in their own worlds. It isn't unusual to look over the door of a silent stall and see a groom standing perfectly still next to the horse, a hand or a forehead resting on the animal's neck.

Sam's funeral happens before July ends. No one apart from the family is invited, but everyone at the yard knows when it is. When the church bells ring, they walk down to the gate of the farm, where they can see Missingham laid out below. They watch the procession come from the church, two parents then a taggle of uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, and what feels like a very little time before the earth is filled in. Tina isn't there. She's regained consciousness, Fran says, but she can't be moved.

Fred and Fran stand there longest, making their way up to the farmhouse only when the light starts to fade and the graveyard is quiet, when it's hard to pick out the patch of black earth where Sam is invisible under swathes of summer flowers.

When Roddy looks back he'll remember that time in the car as a curious oasis of peace and calm. He drifts between unconsciousness and lucidity, although in his lucid moments he's aware that he might be in a bit of trouble. It's not until he comes to in the hospital that he realizes how serious this could be.

He can't move anything. His head is in a brace, his trunk secured, his legs – he has no idea what's going on with his legs. Everything hurts. Even blinking hurts. He can hear crying. He works out that he isn't in his car any more. He tries to speak but nothing like a word comes out of his mouth. He must manage something, though, because a face he doesn't know looms over him, a shadow between him and the bright strip light above. The sensation of nothingness in his lower body is so closely related to painlessness, such a contrast to the ache of every ribboned nerve in his torso, head, neck, arms, face, that it is almost a relief.

Then everything goes dark again. The next time he wakes, there's daylight. He comes to with memories of being in strange rooms, of lights and sounds and the sense of motion. He can't move his head. He can flex his hands, though. As soon as he does, there's a cry.

Fran's face moves into the space above Roddy's face.

‘Don't try to move,' she says. ‘You were in an accident. You're wearing a neck brace until the doctors have checked everything.'

‘Tina?' he says. ‘Tina is in surgery but she's going to be OK,' Fran says. Her voice is sadder than her words. Roddy closes his eyes again.

He remembers, always, the careful words that his parents later use to tell him that Tina has had an operation to repair her shattered pelvis and broken leg, and that she should make a full recovery; but that Sam, unseatbelted, has not fared so well, his neck snapping as his body hit the window, dead before he hit the ground. It was somewhere in that first ten days, because he was still in the hospital, rather than the rehabilitation unit. He wasn't wearing the collar, so it must have been after the first couple of days, once he had been X-rayed to look at his bones and MRI-scanned to examine his soft tissue. He knows he was lying down, but that might have been tiredness, or it might have been that he hadn't been shown how to use the trapeze to pull himself, briefly, upright yet. He remembers the feeling of slight over-stimulation that came with the steroids to keep the swelling down, but he took those for a month.

He knows it must have been after the doctors told him that his spinal cord was sheared right through, twisted and snapped by the impact, although his bones were intact. He remembers exactly when that was: day three, at four o'clock, because his father was growling about them being late, and how he wondered what they could be doing that was more important than this. His mother was red-eyed and quiet. The consultant had brought a model backbone so he could show them where the injury was, in the thoracic spine at T11, and gave them a leaflet listing what was possible for Roddy now, and what was not. Roddy had looked at his legs and tried to understand that they would never do anything for him again. From now on, their only option was to hang off the end of his body, dead weights. Both of his parents had cried. He had listened to the doctor, talking about normal bowel and bladder and sexual function as though he was telling Roddy he could fly. And he had felt sorry for himself, a huge miserable wash of despair. He would be moved, the doctor explained, to the rehabilitation unit in Birmingham as soon as he was deemed stable enough to start on the occupational therapy and psychological support which would, apparently, make all the difference. His mother had taken his hand and he had shaken it off. He'd thought about the way it felt to walk down from the farmhouse to the yard, the judder up the spine with every step, a pleasure he has never once thought of as a privilege.

But once he finds out what's happened to Tina, to Sam, the loss of the use of his own legs seems like a meagre punishment, death commuted to life imprisonment in a moment of misplaced clemency. Roddy would rather the rope. He determines to get better, and to be better, and to work out a way to comfort Tina even though he is the one who brought this situation upon them. It was an accident, people say over and over, accidents happen; as though Sam was a mug smashed on the kitchen floor. You weren't there, Roddy says. He knows that it's his fault, and that if he had taken less for granted then there would have been no need for the crash. If he hadn't taken Tina for granted he would have asked her, properly, about staying over with him. He would have thought about how it looked, Aurora getting out of his car when she could have travelled with her family, or when he could have driven Anastasia too and given the Fieldens a bit of peace and Tina some reassurance. He had known that Aurora would make mischief. He knew that she liked to get what she wanted, and if she didn't, there were always repercussions.

It's normal to feel guilty, people say. Roddy nods and knows that that's because he is guilty. He wasn't concentrating on the road, and he should have been. It was as simple as that. Sam even tried to tell him to watch the road, for Christ's sake. In that last moment, when the lorry hit, it caught them only by a fraction, so if Roddy had seen it sooner, slowed down earlier, then they would have had a near miss, instead of a hit.

Every day, the first thing he asks is how Tina is. He recites messages which his mother repeats back to him until she is word-perfect. He asks her to take flowers, chocolates, other inadequate things that cannot even start the conversation that he needs to have with her, but that he hopes say: I am here. I am waiting. I am ready to say the things we need to say. ‘Get better,' he says to Tina-via-his-mother over and over, and ‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

And then, the day before he leaves for rehab, Howard comes to see him. Roddy has been lifted into a wheelchair so he can ‘start to get a feel for it'. He'd asked his parents to leave, so he would have a chance to get used to the idea before he had to see them being brave about it. He finds that he's clinging to the arms, feeling unstable and panicky without the familiar ballast and balance of his legs. The muscles in his back ache. A nurse is sitting with him ‘just to make sure you're OK'. He supposes this is what his new world is going to be like, unable to sit in a chair without supervision. He pushes the thought away. He can feel himself sweating. And then Howard comes in. There's a blink of shock as they look at each other. You are so different to the last time I saw you, their eyes say to each other, how terrible to meet in this wretched new place.

Howard shakes Roddy's hand. Roddy feels unstable as he lets go of the side of the chair to do it, but he cannot refuse such a generous gesture. He wonders if he will cry.

‘It's good to see you, Roddy.'

Roddy nods, then shakes his head, although the movements are increments, made cautious by pain. There's no way he can respond to that.

‘Tina,' he says, ‘how's Tina?' Talking is a struggle, sometimes, his lungs still learning how to work in a new body that doesn't behave the way the old one did.

‘Tina's not great. She's pale. She sleeps a lot, and cries. Her pelvis should heal. She will walk. There's a plate, and some pins, and they've mended her bowel. Her leg's in plaster. She might be home in a month, depending how she does. They keep explaining it to us, but …' he shakes his head, ‘it doesn't seem to go in, not properly. Alice can explain it better – but she should be all right. Well. You know.'

‘Yes. As well as she can be, without Sam.' Roddy is not sure he is even allowed to say Sam's name. The sound of it makes him want to cry, but if Sam's father is dry-eyed, then he can't be allowed to weep.

‘Yes. That's true of all of us.' Howard speaks calmly but looks uncomfortable. If he'd had a cap, he'd be turning it round and round in his hands. Instead, his knee starts to bob up and down. He watches it. Puts his hand on it, to still it.

‘I'm so sorry,' Roddy says.

‘I know you are, son,' Howard says, ‘but that's what I came to say. No one blames you—' He pauses, stops, starts again. ‘You're not to blame. You didn't have a hope. We all know what that road is like.'

‘But—' Roddy can see it now, see it always. A little more conviction in the hands that threw the steering wheel to the left. A little more attention to the rain, the lights, the road so familiar that he had made the mistake of thinking it was a friend to him. A little less trying to look at Tina, sitting next to him, hoping that she would smile at him, the smile that lit him up in a way that he couldn't explain. Explaining about the room at the Coach and Horses, telling her how ridiculous Aurora was so she didn't have to talk to Sam, didn't have to ask. This is where his mind goes most often, the most inconsequential but also the most easily fixed thing: he should have realized how much Aurora's stupid jokes could hurt Tina, even if she had complete faith in him.

All he had to do was pull over for a minute, explain. But no. He had been thinking that he really was Roddy Flood, the man the road rises to meet. And he shouldn't have been. And if he hadn't been thinking that way, Sam might be alive. Tina might be tacking up Snowdrop, or lying in his bed with her hand on his stomach and her head on his shoulder. He might be wiggling his toes into his boot without a thought for what a miracle such movement was.