Two steps. Two more. I will go as far as the corner tonight.
“You didn’t give me a bloody life, did you? Not really. You just smashed up my old one. Smashed it into little pieces. What am I meant to do with what’s left? When is it going to feel—”
I stretch out my arms, feeling the cool night air against my skin, and realize I am crying again.
“Fuck you, Will,” I whisper. “Fuck you for leaving me.”
Grief wells up again like a sudden tide, intense, overwhelming. And just as I feel myself sinking into it, a voice says, from the shadows: “I don’t think you should stand there.”
I half turn, and catch a flash of a small, pale face on the fire escape, dark eyes wide open. In shock, my foot slips on the parapet, my weight suddenly on the wrong side of the drop. My heart lurches a split second before my body follows. And then, like a nightmare, I am weightless, in the abyss of the night air, my legs flailing above my head as I hear the shriek that may be my own—
Crunch
And then all is black.
2
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 move 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 were 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, shining a thin torch abruptly in my eyes and gazing at me with detached interest as if I were 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 onto 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 toward his colleague. Time slips, I tilt with it. I have fallen off a roof? My face is cold and I realize distantly that I have started 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 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.