Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
told him briskly that Annie’s husband was still waiting in her office.
The doctor looked puzzled, glancing backwards to where Steve was lying. ‘I thought he was her husband.’
The sister shook her head. ‘Her husband is sitting in my room. He looks very shocked.’
The doctor sighed. ‘Well. I’d better go and tell him, then.’
When Annie opened her eyes again there was light streaming all round her. The brightness was shapeless at first, but then it began to form itself into long rectangles with dimmer patches separating them. She tried to turn her head and found that she couldn’t. The discovery brought a cold spasm of terror that made her eyes snap wider open, staring into the light. The light was reassuring, but she wanted to see more, to see what was beside her, and she couldn’t. She tried to gather her strength to do it but all she could feel was pain, pain everywhere, as if it had possessed the air surrounding her. Annie felt a moan rise in her throat but it was stifled because there was something blocking its way.
Then someone’s face slid forward, blotting out the rectangles of light. Annie looked carefully at it. It was a man, wearing a white coat with a high collar. Like a barber’s jacket, she thought. The man’s mouth was moving, and she realized that he was talking to her. When he stopped talking he smiled, but his eyes were watching something behind her head.
She tried to ask him what he was doing. Her tongue moved, and then she felt that she would choke. There was a tube going down her throat, and her stomach heaved against it.
The man’s face moved again, and now she could hear what he was saying. ‘Just to help you with your breathing for a little while longer, Annie. You’re doing fine now.’
She was in hospital, then. Steve had said that they would come for them before it was too late. Annie wanted to reach her hand out to touch Steve’s hand again. Her fingers moved, but her hand was too heavy to lift. There were tubes there too. She could feel the rubbery kiss of them against her wrist.
She was very tired. Annie closed her eyes again and the bright rectangles vanished.
‘She won’t die, will she?’
Martin had waited at the hospital all through the evening. It was midnight before they brought Annie out of the operating theatre. The surgeon came to find Martin in the stuffy waiting room where he had sat for hours, staring at the rubber-tiled floor. He told Martin that Annie had crush injuries to the abdomen. They had found that her spleen was ruptured and so they had removed it, and they had repaired a deep tear in her liver. The operation had revealed no other serious internal damage, but there were fractures in her right shoulder and upper arm, and deep cuts and extensive crush bruising on her legs and thighs. She was in the recovery room now, and they hoped that her condition would stabilize.
‘Can I see her?’ Martin had asked.
‘We’ll be taking her along to intensive care shortly,’ the surgeon had answered carefully. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to worry about tonight. We want to try to bring her blood pressure up. Go home and try to get some sleep now, and come in to see her in the morning. Sister will call you at once if there’s any change.’
Martin had gone home.
His mother had arrived to take care of the boys, and she was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him. Martin shook his head wearily at the familiar sight of everything. Was it only this morning that Annie had been there? He relayed the news that the surgeon had given him, and then he went upstairs to look at the boys. Benjy looked as he always did, curled up with the covers pulled close around his head, but Tom was restless, turning and muttering anxiously in his sleep.
Martin went and lay down on their double bed. He dozed fitfully, waking up constantly because he thought he heard the telephone ringing.
In the morning he went straight back to the hospital. On the telephone before he set out the sister told him that Annie was rather poorly. The doctor was with her now.
Martin’s car was still in the little mews near the wrecked store where he had left it yesterday. He went to the hospital by tube. All the people travelling to work held up their newspapers, and the pictures of the bombed store and the outraged tabloid headlines danced in front of his eyes. Martin turned his head and stared through the black window, thinking, Annie, Annie.
In a bleak little room beside the double doors of the intensive care unit, Martin saw the doctor. Annie’s surgeon had gone home to sleep, and this man introduced himself as a renal specialist.
Martin listened numbly. In the early hours of the morning Annie’s kidneys had begun to fail, and they had put her on a dialysis machine. Her blood pressure had fallen further, but they had stabilized it now.
‘It’s a question of waiting, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said.
‘She won’t die, will she?’ Martin repeated. He saw the muscle twitch under the doctor’s well-shaven cheek, and he thought, He must hear this all the time, people asking, Will my wife die? Will my husband die? Suddenly the enormity of what had happened struck him, and the random horror of it. Why did it have to be Annie?
‘Your wife is young and healthy. I think her chances are good. But we won’t know for a day or two.’
‘Can I see her now?’
‘Sister will take you.’
They gave him a white gown to wear, and plastic covers to pull over his shoes.
Martin followed the sister’s blue dress and starched cap through the double doors. He had a brief impression of a long room, brightly lit, partitioned into cubicles. As he passed he saw, in each bed, an inert shape fed by tubes and guarded by machines. Then the sister stopped. He looked past her and saw Annie. He knew it was Annie because of the colour of her hair on the pillow. But her face seemed to have shrunk, and her cheeks and the skin under her eyes looked bruised. There was a tube in her mouth and another in her nose, there were tubes taped to her wrists and another to her ankle. She was wearing a white cotton hospital gown and through the open front of it Martin could see a line fixed into her chest. Her bed was hemmed in by the square, hostile shapes of machines and a bag of dark red blood hung over her head, trailing its colour down into her arm. Under the gown her shoulder was strapped with white tape, and there was another taped dressing over her stomach. Looking down at her Martin felt how cruel it was that she should be so reduced. Her body looked so dispossessed, as if the machines had taken it and Annie herself had gone away somewhere, a long way off.
There was a male nurse in a white coat watching the three monitor screens at the bedhead. Martin looked away from the flickering dots that read Annie’s life out second by second.
The nurse nodded at a chair a little to one side of the bed.
‘Would you like to sit with her for a while?’ he asked cheerfully. He was Irish, Martin noted automatically. The unit was full of quiet, deftly moving people. It seemed strange that they should have individual characteristics like an Irish voice or a dark skin, and yet be part of these machines and their winking eyes.
‘It’s a pity you weren’t a minute earlier. She was awake for a little while, there,’ the nurse told him. ‘She’s dropped off again now.’
Martin sat down beside her. He reached out to take her hand, but he was afraid of dislodging the tubes. He just touched his fingertips to hers.
Martin sat with her for an hour, but Annie didn’t move. He thought of her as she had been at home, moving briskly around the kitchen or running up the garden with the boys whooping ahead of her, and he shifted on the uncomfortable chair to contain his anger. He was angry with the people who had done this to her, and he was shocked to recognize that he was angry with Annie, too, because she had gone away and he couldn’t reach her. Martin looked at the machines as if they were rivals, cutting him off from her.
‘What are they for?’ he asked, nodding at the monitor screens.
‘Pulse, blood pressure and ECG,’ the nurse said. ‘This scale monitors