The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  * * *

  Tom drove her to her first outpatient appointment with Yomi at the West Midlands Rehabilitation Centre at Selly Oak, and she arrived with some nervousness, expecting everything that the word ‘rehab’ conjured up – grim-faced orderlies in white coats and flapping gurney wheels on scratched linoleum floors – but what she found were smiling faces, potted plants and a sense of hushed, unhurried concentration, like a private college or a conference centre.

  ‘This is liable to take a good couple of hours,’ said Yomi, glancing at Tom.

  ‘You don’t have to stay here for the whole thing,’ Rachel said to him.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he replied. ‘I’m in no hurry. The more I know the better I can help you.’

  Yomi raised her eyebrows, looking him up and down with approval. ‘You hang on to this one, my lovely,’ she said.

  ‘Oh I absolutely intend to.’

  They were shown to the Prosthetics Department, past treatment suites and a large exercise room where teams of blue-uniformed physiotherapists guided patients in the use of their mechanical legs – it looked to be painful and frustrating work – but when she reached their destination Rachel thought she’d been brought to the staff lounge by mistake.

  ‘Welcome to your classroom,’ smiled Yomi, ushering her into what looked suspiciously like an ordinary domestic kitchen.

  ‘I thought this was occupational therapy,’ Rachel said.

  ‘It is. Did you think you were going to be weaving baskets and painting with a brush in your teeth?’

  ‘Well, no, but…’ Rachel stopped, took a deep breath and consciously unbunched her shoulders. ‘Okay. What do we do?’

  Yomi made a show of consulting a complicated schedule on her iPad. ‘I don’t know about you but I was thinking we start with a cup of tea and some biscuits and you tell me how you’ve been getting on with that arm of yours.’

  ‘I think I can manage that.’

  Over tea and chocolate Hobnobs she told Yomi about how she’d been looking after her arm and keeping the worst of the pain at bay with her medication but otherwise trying to tough it out. The longest she’d managed so far had been from breakfast until mid-afternoon before she’d been unable to bear it and was forced to pop a co-codamol. Yomi quizzed her on every aspect of her job at the Highways Agency, her home routine, what kinds of clothes she liked to wear, whether she cooked (‘Does having the phone number of your local Papa John’s on speed dial count as cooking?’); did she drive a car, ride a bike, have any hobbies, play any sports or musical instruments? Tom was banished briefly while she was taken to a small examination room and given a full physical check-up, as a result of which she was pronounced to be as physically fit as could be expected under the circumstances.

  ‘Fine then,’ said Yomi when she’d finished. ‘Someone with a disease, unless it’s a really nasty one, can go for a long time pretending nothing’s wrong, telling themselves it’s just a headache, a bit of tiredness, a patch of dry skin. Men are the worst.’ She winked at Tom. ‘But you don’t have that luxury, I’m afraid. You can’t ignore something that should be there but isn’t, if you know what I mean. Our job here is to help you be able to do all of those things you need to do with the minimum of fuss and bother. Your arm’s still got a lot of settling down to do, but now might be a good time to start thinking about whether or not you want any kind of prosthesis. Lots of people do. Lots don’t. It all depends what you’re comfortable with. That will help us decide what you need to learn and how – the fact that you’re right-handed obviously makes things a lot easier from the start.’

  ‘Well I don’t want something that just looks like the real thing but doesn’t do anything, I know that at least. What are my options?’

  ‘Come and have a look.’

  Yomi led Rachel and Tom back through the main physio studio and into a room full of arms. Some were simple hooks, some looked disturbingly realistic – hanging from pegs on the walls like serial killer trophies – and others were engineering confections of straps, cables and pulleys so elaborate Rachel couldn’t imagine how they were even put on, let alone operated. They spilled out of boxes on shelves and lay disassembled in a workshop area, where a technician looked up briefly, said hi and then bent back to making the articulated steel fingers of a skeletal hand flex and un-flex.

  ‘That’s all very Terminator,’ Tom observed.

  ‘And yours for only about ten thousand pounds,’ said Yomi.

  Rachel whistled. ‘Really?’

  ‘You’ll either need to go private or be in the army to afford something like that. Here, my common garden variety NHS patient, let me show you what’s available to the great unwashed.’

  * * *

  ‘What did you make of those arms, then?’ Tom asked, as they undressed that night. He was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth.

  ‘Ugly,’ Rachel said. ‘Awkward. Honestly I think I’m going to be better off without.’

  ‘Not even the myo-electric one?’

  ‘Ha! At ten grand? Win the lottery while I was in hospital, did you?’

  He spat, rinsed, spat again. ‘No, but I have been talking with Mum and Dad.’

  ‘You can’t ask them for that. The house is one thing; that’s for us.’ To raise a nice little addition to the Cooper dynasty, she added silently to herself. ‘My hand is mine. I’ll pay for it, or not, thanks.’

  ‘Asking for help isn’t a crime, you know,’ he replied.

  She didn’t want to have this conversation again, and especially not now. Her own mother – a woman whose life was a scrupulously accounted ledger of obligations owed and discharged – had been deeply reluctant but ultimately powerless over the extent to which Tom’s family had supported them at the start of their marriage, and Rachel found herself fiercely protective of the empty space below her elbow.

  She pulled her t-shirt off and went into the bathroom, turned her back towards him and fumbled with the clasp of her bra. ‘Well in that case, mister, care to lend a lady a helping hand?’ She was more than capable of doing it herself one-handed, but had no intention of letting him know that. ‘Don’t you go getting any ideas, though.’

  He came to her, grinning, and undid the clasp. ‘Nope, no ideas here.’

  ‘None that you’re thinking with your brain, anyway.’ She could feel the reassuring solidity of his chest against her naked back, the hardness of him lower down in his briefs, his lips moving in the soft hair at the base of her neck, and the warmth of his hands as they reached around to cup her breasts. She sighed and relaxed back against him as his fingers teased. Her wound had enjoyed more than its fair share of attention over the last two weeks; time for the rest of her to have a go. She reached back over her head to run her fingers through his hair – reaching with both arms, of course, it being such an instinctive response, forgetting that she had only the one hand with which to do it, but reminded when the compression sock protecting her stump grazed his ear.

  The unexpected contact caused a flash of pins and needles up to her elbow; not pain as such, more the zing of a sore tooth bitten carelessly. She hissed in discomfort.

  Tom jerked his hands away. ‘Sorry! Shit! I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Not your fault. Just a twinge.’

  She turned to face him, putting her left arm around his waist and sliding her right hand down the back of his briefs to his bum and pulling him close. ‘Let’s try it this way round, what do you say?’

  But the hardness had gone, which was ironic considering the rest of him was as stiff as a board.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘It’s just…’

  ‘Still weird. I get it.’ She pulled away, picked up her nightshirt and went into the bathroom, closing the door on him to finish undressing. Not to punish him – just so that he couldn’t see how furiously embarrassed and stupid she felt. ‘Tell me though,’ she called through the door. ‘Is it ever going to stop being weird, do you think?’

  He didn’t reply.
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  ‘Because this is never going to grow back, you know. This is me now.’ She stared at her reflection in the mirrored doors of the bathroom cabinet, feeling all slanted and lopsided, her right arm hanging so much lower, like an orangutan’s. Then she shook herself, squared her shoulders and put her head back. ‘This is me now,’ she repeated to her reflection defiantly. She half-opened the mirrored cabinet door, and placed its edge in the middle of her chest so that when she looked down at herself in it, the reflection of her right arm occupied the space of her left. She slowly opened and closed her right hand, imagining as she did so the feeling of her left hand doing the same thing. It was a simple technique that Yomi had told her about, which fooled the brain into thinking that the non-existent hand was still there, and supposedly reduced the stress on the nerves. She repeated this a dozen times, waiting for them to settle.

  Gradually the buzzing ache subsided, but in its absence there was more than just a lack of pain. There was something that felt like cold – a chilly breeze playing with her dead fingertips. She almost fancied she could feel goosebumps rising.

  ‘Oh just fuck off,’ she whispered to her stump, then closed the cabinet and went to bed. Tom was already there, prodding at his phone.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if it helps, I bet we can get hold of some kind of sex toy attachment for one of those things.’

  He snorted a laugh.

  ‘There you go.’

  * * *

  Tom left for work early the following morning and Olivia came around with cards and flowers that she’d been stockpiling. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ she asked.

  Rachel gestured at the hallway, with its ancient wallpaper half-stripped and its paint-spattered floorboards. ‘That all depends on how good you are with a paper steamer.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ her mother emphasised, indicating that since they had been the ones to pay for it, all matters pertaining to the house were a matter for the Coopers, specifically Tom.

  ‘You can help me decide which clothes to keep and which to chuck?’ Rachel suggested.

  ‘That’s more like it. I’ll get these in some water while you make a start.’

  Upstairs, Rachel opened her wardrobe as if expecting something to leap out at her. The smell of camphorated mothballs and dry-cleaning powder reminded her of the hospital. Everything reminded her of the hospital. Bits of it seemed to have followed her home. Her clothes hung tidily or were folded into neat piles. She had a little chart tacked to the inside of the door with hand-drawn cartoons of all the different permutations of which piece of clothing went with what. Newly added were the things that she’d bought for the canal holiday: French stripes, navy-blue three-quarter-length trousers, deck shoes, canvas and cotton. While Tom’s holiday had begun when he’d started the narrowboat’s diesel engine and his eyes had lit up at its throaty roar, hers had begun weeks earlier when she’d started shopping for outfits to satisfy a carefully curated mental image of sitting on the foredeck in the setting sun with a glass of wine, while Tom did something mechanical, or possibly involving long, heavy ropes, which required a v-neck tee and cargo shorts.

  ‘Never going to happen now,’ she told the wardrobe, and transferred them by the handful into a charity bag. They could have gone on eBay, but getting rid of them piecemeal like that would have been as painful as having her hand amputated finger by finger. A clean break was the only way to do this.

  Then there were the suits. Technically she didn’t need any as a regional control officer because Highways England had its own uniform, and watching three large monitor screens for an eight-hour shift didn’t offer much opportunity for striding purposefully through a metropolitan cityscape, latte in hand, looking capable and sharp. But Olivia had instilled ambition in her daughter, and Rachel had had plans to enrol on a course in transport planning after the summer, to see how far up the civil service beanstalk she could climb. Now she’d been told that she couldn’t return to work until the occupational health report on her was finished, and Yomi had said that might take a month, and she was already two weeks into her three months of sickness leave.

  ‘Neither’s that,’ she said, and out came the suits too.

  She’d never thought of herself as a superficial person before, but looking at all her outfits now she realised how many of them had been bought to satisfy one or other lifestyle fantasy, none of which involved her having only one functioning hand. She pulled out the rest of the clothes, first by the handful, then by upending entire drawers and flinging them across the bedroom in a sudden flood of rage and self-pity that seemed to come out of nowhere.

  When Olivia came upstairs to investigate the commotion, she found Rachel sitting in the middle of it all. It looked like someone had taken off the roof of the bedroom and dumped the contents of a charity shop into it. Rachel was sobbing in great gulping breaths.

  ‘I can’t… do this!’ she wept. ‘It’s not fair! I don’t want to be like this!’

  ‘I know, honey, I know.’ Her mother gathered her in a hug and tried to shush her, and when that failed simply sat there and let Rachel shudder against her.

  ‘I can’t work, I can’t even put a bloody necklace on! Tom won’t come near me. It’s like I’m a… a leper or something! What…’ she gulped. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Olivia replied, doing an elaborate show of thinking deeply. ‘I think, given everything that’s happened, what you really need to do is help me sort out what to do with all those flowers.’

  Rachel eyed her sceptically.

  The flowers weren’t the half of it. There were also cuddly toys, chocolates, and even a bottle of Prosecco.

  ‘What in God’s name is that for?’ Rachel said, horrified. ‘Congratulations on your successful amputation?’

  Her mother looked at the card. ‘It’s from Auntie Lydia. Bless, she means well.’

  ‘And you think I’m actually going to write thank-you letters to all these people? It’s not Christmas.’

  ‘I think it’s something to keep you busy and help take your mind off things.’

  ‘My own self-pity, you mean.’

  ‘If you want to put it that way. You can start with this.’

  Her mother handed Rachel a small potted begonia with blousy pink flowers; old-lady pants, whispered a sly child’s voice in her mind, and she had to stifle a smirk. ‘You mean plant it?’

  ‘Your Tom’s a gardener, isn’t he? I refuse to believe that there isn’t a trowel hiding somewhere in all this chaos.’

  ‘He’s not a—’

  ‘Landscape gardener, then,’ corrected her mother, holding her hands up in surrender. ‘Fine. Just put that poor thing in the ground where it belongs.’

  Reluctantly, Rachel obeyed.

  The garden was a mess, she would be the first to admit that. With all of their efforts going on the house she’d had no time to really address it, and as a result the long, narrow lawn was overgrown, the flowerbeds down the side were a wilderness of weeds, and the shaggy bushes at the far end were making a bid for freedom over the back fence. She found a relatively clear space in the flowerbed nearest the patio and dug a hole. The flowers got a bit crushed while she had the begonia upside down to shake the pot free, but soon it was in the ground. She had to get on hand and knees to pat down the earth around it, and obviously couldn’t brace herself on a left hand that wasn’t there any more, so settled for leaning on her forearm instead.

  There was a spasm of pins and needles from her stump, and then, just like an old-fashioned radio dial tuning in from static to find a signal, the sensations changed. They settled down, smoothed out, and became intelligible.

  Texture.

  She could feel her non-existent fingers flexing and curling in a mulch of leaf and twig fragments, and soil below that, damp and loamy. She imagined clenching a handful of brittle leaf litter, crumbling it and digging again for more. It couldn’t be real, obviously, but all the same she could see the tendons on the underside of
her forearm working as if it was. She’d been told to expect all manner of peculiar sensations from her damaged nerves, and this had to be a tactile hallucination because even if her hand really were still there it would be lying on lawn grass, not this autumnal detritus. She dropped the trowel and with her right hand patted the grass in front of her stump just to be sure, and for a moment she even thought she could feel invisible dead leaves with that hand too, and pulled away sharply, sitting up.

  Where her stump had been lying – where she was positive that there had been nothing but clipped green grass – lay a handful of brown and black leaves.

  It was there all the time, she told herself. You just didn’t notice it when you knelt down, that’s all.

  It was possible. Just.

  What was absolutely not possible was the fact that the begonia – which a moment ago had been bright and blousy with old-lady-pants blooms – was now brown and shrivelled, and quite dead.

  * * *

  That night she dreamt of the tree again – the hollow oak with the hand reaching out from inside, and when the voice whispered, ‘Not dead!’ and woke her sweating from the nightmare, she crept out into the garden in her nightshirt and stood in the shifting undersea shadows of streetlight through the overgrown bushes, looking down at the dead flowers for a long time.

  6

  THE DEVIL’S COACH-HORSE

  RUNNING HELPED.

  She’d started six months into her job at the Highways Agency when she’d realised how easy it would be for the sedentary nature of a desk job to turn her potato-shaped. At first it had been little micro-runs around the block – shorter even than the time it took her to get changed in and out of her running gear – but as her legs and lungs got over the shock of being forced into the kind of exercise she’d never done as a teenager, her runs became longer until her lunch hour couldn’t contain them, and she was getting up before seven to put a few more miles beneath her feet before breakfast.