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.