Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
alive, a long way away.
After an hour he stood up stiffly and said goodbye to the nurse. Benjy and Tom were waiting at home. Martin went away down the ward without looking left or right.
‘How is she?’ Steve asked.
‘She’s holding her own,’ they told him. ‘Her husband’s with her.’
Steve had been thinking about the hours that they had lived through together. The darkness of them was still almost more real to him than his curtained segment of the bright ward. He could hear the nurses going to and fro beyond the curtains, but he could hear Annie’s whispering voice just as clearly. It was Annie he wanted to see, and talk to, now that the darkness had gone. Annie and he knew each other. In the long hours she had become his friends, his family, and he knew that he had become hers. But Annie was lying upstairs in the intensive care unit, and her husband was waiting beside her.
By the time the evening came Steve had recovered from the anaesthetic. He knew he had, because although the memory of yesterday hadn’t loosened its claw-hold, he could distinguish quite clearly between the memory and the reality of now, in the hospital ward. As if to confirm it a nurse with a little starched frill pinned to the top of her head came and pushed the curtains back, smiling at him.
‘There now. We’ll give you a bit of a view, now that you’ve woken up properly.’
Steve saw four beds opposite, and the occupants peering across at him. The table in the middle of the ward was banked with a great mound of flowers. He lay against the pillows looking at them, hypnotized by the generosity of the colours.
Annie woke up again, and she saw that the bright rectangles overhead had been dimmed. They were lights, she understood, and if they had been turned down it must be night-time now. How many nights had gone? She swallowed on the tube that stuck into her mouth, and felt the nausea rising behind it again.
Another nurse was looking down at her. This one was a woman, and Annie saw with intense clarity the contrast between the black skin of her face and the whiteness of the cap that covered her hair.
‘Hello, dear,’ the nurse said. ‘Your husband has been here all evening, but he’s just gone off home. He told me to tell you that everything is all right. Tom and Benjy send their love, and you’re not to worry about anything. So you won’t, will you?’
The nurse smiled at her, and Annie looked at the warm, reassuring contrast of light and dark again. She tried to say, Martin, but the tube gagged her. She realized all over again that she couldn’t talk or move, and the pain that had attacked her down in the darkness was even more intense here. She knew that she must be safe here under these lights. The nurse’s smile was so wide and white and confident. But still the fear came back and clawed at her. Where had Steve gone? She couldn’t even turn her head to look for him. Steve would understand what was happening. He had been there with her, every minute. She could hear quite clearly what he had said to her. She could even see through his eyes his Nan’s hunched figure shuffling to and fro in her cramped flat, Steve’s own flat with its big, abstract paintings on the white walls. Why wasn’t he here then?
She tried to speak again, this time to call his name as she had done in the terrible darkness. But he didn’t answer now, and the black nurse put her warm hand on Annie’s arm.
‘Lie nice and still, there’s a good girl. You don’t want to upset all my machines, do you?’
Annie tried to think, What machines? The answer hovered somewhere beyond the edge of her understanding, like the outer edge of one of the lights overhead that lay out of her field of vision. Its elusiveness seemed more unbearable than the pain, and Annie felt the tears gather behind her eyes and then roll out at the corners.
The nurse bent over her and dabbed them away.
‘Oh dear, now,’ Annie heard her murmur. ‘There’s no need for this. You’re doing just fine.’
Early in the morning two officers from the anti-terrorist squad came to see Steve. They sat stiffly beside his bed with their notebooks, sympathetic but persistent.
‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said. ‘There was nothing. I just held open the door for the girl, and then the bomb went off. I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t aware of anyone else.’
It happened, he thought wearily. It happened and Annie and I were there, that’s all. Annie and I and the others. The two of us were lucky. We’re still alive. Annie, are you still there?
But he had no sense of luck, yet. He felt numb, and he simply remembered the two of them lying side by side in the darkness, without being able to think any further. The officers had thanked him, folded up their notepads and creaked away again.
Steve’s next visitor was Bob Jefferies.
At the beginning, in the accident unit with the pain fogging everything, they had asked Steve for the name of his next of kin.
Cass? he had thought. No, not Cass.
‘Or just someone we can contact to let them know where you are,’ they had reassured him. In the end he gave them Bob Jefferies’ name, more because Bob was his business partner than because he was a closer friend than any of a dozen others.
And now Bob came down the wards towards him, bulky in his expensive overcoat, carrying one of Steve’s Italian suitcases. He stopped at the end of the bed and looked at the dome of blankets propped over Steve’s leg, at the dressings covering his hands and chest, and then at his face.
‘Jesus, Steve,’ he said at last. ‘Was the prospect of the staff Christmas party as bad as all that?’
Steve let his head rest against his pillows and, with a part of himself, he laughed. But the laughter jarred his bones, and it died quickly.
Bob looked at his grey face. ‘Is it bad?’ he asked.
Steve said, ‘No. Painful, but no lasting damage.’ The orthopaedic surgeon who had come in to see him earlier had told him that the compound fracture of his femur had been pinned. In time, new bone formation would begin, and he should be able to move quite normally. ‘I won’t be able to walk on the leg for a bit. Months, perhaps.’
Bob hoisted the suitcase on to the end of the bed. ‘Mmm. What about getting it over?’
Steve didn’t risk laughter this time.
‘I didn’t ask about that.’
‘No kidding?’
They were uncomfortable together, Steve thought, because Bob’s awkward urge to extend unobtrusive sympathy and his own determination not to need it had shaken their arm’s-length, flippant intimacy out of true.
Bob busied himself with unpacking the suitcase. Steve saw that he had brought in his bathrobe, pyjamas, sponge-bag. It was odd to see Bob handling them.
‘Sorry to land you with this,’ Steve said.
‘Wish there was more I could do.’ Bob wasn’t looking at him now. ‘I couldn’t find your electric razor.’
‘Not much of a next-of-kin, are you? Don’t you know I wet-shave?’
‘You apply that frayed bunch of animal hair that’s crouching in your bathroom cupboard to your chin? Well, don’t worry. I’m sure you can get one of these lovely girls to shave you.’
Suddenly Steve wanted to close his eyes. The effort of trying to be the person that Bob knew was too tiring, and there was nothing else he knew how to reveal to him.
Bob saw the weariness, and rapidly unpacked the last things. There were books, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label.
‘Can I have some of that?’ Steve asked. Bob emptied the water out of the glass on his bedside table and poured two inches of whisky into it. Steve drank some and the familiar, worldly taste of it seemed to link him back to Bob again.
‘That’s better. Thanks.’
Bob