Page 32 of One Step Behind
I weave past an empty hospital bed and a postbox-red resuscitation trolley and reach bay B. The area is larger than the triage spaces in A&E – one bed for our every two. But like A&E, there are no personal TVs, no extra comforts on this ward. Just machines and monitors and alarms.
There are six beds in the bay. Six patients, six people unconscious, six ventilators making their push-pull shhh of air in and out of lungs. But it’s the bed in the far corner that I focus on. Bed 6.
I force myself to shuffle forwards. One step, ten steps and I’m standing over you.
The scrape along your cheek is now a dark red, but the black specks of tarmac have been cleaned away. There’s a purple bruise forming along your jaw where the dislocation occurred. Your entire right arm and leg are wrapped in pure-white plaster that hasn’t had a chance to get dirty yet. I wonder with sickening hope if it ever will.
Up close you are more attractive than I thought. Broad-shouldered, dark hair, and a tanned face with a bit of stubble.
What possessed you to do this? Why would an attractive man in his twenties stalk and terrorize me? I scrub up well enough for a woman in her forties when I have the energy, which is rare, but I’m nothing special.
You’re smart, too. All of your horrible gifts have been left without a single identifiable image on the CCTV camera, no fingerprints. You are cautious and meticulous. A ghost on the streets, appearing and disappearing just as fast. But why? Who the hell are you, Matthew Dover?
I focus on the wires trailing out of you – from your fingers, from your chest, from your head, snaking down your body and all the way into the machines keeping you alive. How easy it would be to flick those switches to off. The thought makes my fingers itch, my pulse skittish.
I pluck your chart from the end of the bed and flick through the notes, anything to occupy my hands. I discover your age – twenty-five; your address – 134 Long Road West; and that forty-eight hours after being wheeled into A&E the swelling in your brain has yet to subside enough to risk waking you from your coma.
An induced coma is not like an ordinary coma. You can’t hear me, you aren’t dreaming or fighting your way back to consciousness. Your body has been pumped with a cocktail of sedatives, which have deactivated your brain. Everything your body needs to stay alive – cardiac rhythm, blood pressure and breathing – is being maintained by machines.
Total shutdown. It’s the only way your brain has a chance at healing itself. This isn’t an episode ofGrey’s Anatomy. In real life, patients don’t get whizzed into open brain surgery every five minutes, and they don’t wake up the next day feeling fine. There is so much more wait and see in medicine than most people realize.
I slide the chart back into place at the end of your bed and open the bedside cabinet. My eyes remain on you, as if any second now you’ll wake up and stop me. You won’t. You can’t. Inside the cabinet is your backpack, the one you wear slung over one shoulder. It didn’t fare much better than you in the accident. One of the straps is ripped and there’s a tear in the fabric down the middle.
In the main compartment there’s a uniform. A white top and blue-check bottoms. Whiffs of onion and garlic drift from the bag. Are you a chef in town? Did you see me in a restaurant once? Is that how we met? It makes no difference – the how, the why – but still I wish I knew. I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment when everything changed for the both of us.
I check the front pocket next, pulling out a set of door keys and an iPhone. It’s smashed in the top corner and there’s a long sharp crack down the side. The screen is black, but from a flat battery or the impact of the bus I don’t know.
A loud urgent alarm beeps from somewhere on the bay. Two nurses rush in. I stuff your backpack into the cupboard and glance towards the noise, but it’s not the commotion my eyes are drawn to, it’s the couple holding hands in the middle of the floor. The woman is staring right at you.
She’s tall and in her mid to late twenties, but looks girlish in a t-shirt and sports leggings that cling to her slender legs. Her skin is pale and flawless and her hair is long, and dyed an icy grey.
The man beside her is wearing denim shorts and a t-shirt that shows off his muscular frame. He has a tanned face and brown hair styled in a gelled quiff.
The boyfriend starts to move, tugging the woman with him so quickly that she stumbles and he has to pull her upright before shooting her a worried glance. As they draw nearer to you, the woman’s face drains of colour. Her mouth goes slack, dropping open, and her already large eyes are wide with shock or fear, I’m not sure which.
Chapter 17
Sophie
The hospital is busier than I expected and we have to push our way through meandering visitors to reach intensive care.
My heart is thundering in my head like the bassline to one of my running tracks. I should’ve come yesterday. I should’ve cancelled some clients like I wanted to, but Nick hates it when we do that. Even this morning would’ve been better, but I had to wait for Nick to finish the boot-camp fitness class he runs in the nearby park. Now it feels like I’m late, like I shouldn’t be here at all.
A nurse shows us where to go and Nick grabs my hand, squeezing it tight before yanking me forwards. He gives me a look, a silent warning to get a move on, to get this over with, but I’m jittery, unable to move.
This morning Nick suggested we go to the gym after visiting Matthew, and work on our weight training. ‘As long as your legs aren’t hurting too much from that long run,’ he added. They were, but I could tell by Nick’s tone that he was still angry. The weighttraining will be my punishment for coming home late.
An alarm starts beeping from the bed near the door as we enter the bay. Two nurses rush by us.
My mind blanks. I can’t think. I can’t be here. Nick keeps pulling me and I let him, my eyes fixed on the bed in the corner and Matthew’s lifeless body. I don’t know what I was expecting him to look like, but it wasn’t this. His face is all banged up. There’s a horrible red mark covering one cheek, and he has one arm and one leg in plaster. His skin is a ghostly white and if it wasn’t for the beep, beep, shhh of the machine beside him, I’d think he was dead.
‘It’s OK, Sophie,’ Nick whispers from beside me.
I nod and move the final few steps without being pulled. My gaze is no longer on Matthew, but the woman sat beside him with the dark-red hair. She looks … she looks so much like Mum that for one crazy moment the world around me disappears and she is all I see. I feel gut-punched, the air forced out of my lungs, and I have to concentrate really hard on keeping my expression neutral, and not blurting something stupid out.
Get it together, Soph.
This woman isn’t Mum. She just looks like Mum used to look fifteen years ago, but skinnier. There’s something fragile about her too, as though the slightest nudge will send her shattering to the floor.
