In the Light of What We See

by Sarah Painter

  I shook my head, keeping my lips firmly closed. She was watching me carefully. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing you can tell me about that night? It’s important that I get all the details down so that I can finish the report. You don’t want any hold up with that, it could affect your insurance.’

  ‘Isn’t there CCTV footage?’ Parveen said, standing up. ‘I thought Britain was ninety-nine per cent covered by surveillance these days. You should be looking through that, not hassling someone who is in hospital.’

  Parveen put emphasis on the last word but the officer didn’t seem perturbed. ‘Not on that particular stretch of the road,’ she said. ‘We do have footage of your car travelling at fifty-six miles per hour at an earlier point in your journey.’

  ‘That’s inside the speed limit,’ I said, more relieved than I cared to admit.

  ‘You’re not being accused of anything here,’ Coleman said, more gently than she had spoken before. Her eyes flickered to Parveen, who was standing up, her arms crossed. ‘Our department is just concerned with working out the exact sequence of events. There might be information which is in the public interest, something that can help us to improve the safety of our roads.’

  ‘But I can’t remember,’ I said, my throat closing up.

  She pursed her lips a little, but I didn’t know if she was frustrated by my lack of cooperation or worried that I was beginning to sound upset. ‘I’ve spoken to Dr Kanthe and she assures me that long-term memory loss is unlikely. At some point this is going to come back to you and, when it does, I need you to give me a call.’ She put a business card on to the bed.

  ‘I didn’t hurt anyone?’ I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something they hadn’t told me, something I was missing.

  ‘No.’ She looked confused. ‘Just yourself.’

  ‘Thank God. Thank God.’ My chest had tightened up along with my throat and my thoughts were coming in staccato bursts. I heard my voice say ‘Thank God’ again and I pressed my lips together to force myself to stop babbling.

  Parveen moved back and put an arm around my shoulders. ‘You’re upsetting her,’ she said. ‘She’s answered your questions and I think you should leave.’

  PC Coleman put her notebook away and gave a fake smile, which went nowhere near her eyes. ‘Get well soon.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Parveen said as soon as the officer had gone. ‘That was intense.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I managed. My chest was hurting and I couldn’t take a full breath. ‘I don’t like thinking about it. Trying to think about it. I know I have to, but I don’t want to.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Parveen said. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’

  I didn’t know that, of course, and neither did she. It was nice of her to try, though. ‘What if I didn’t do something I was supposed to do, though; what if I was distracted? In a car you can kill someone because you didn’t put your foot on the brake or turn the wheel at the right time. Not taking action can be just as bad as doing something.’

  ‘But you didn’t kill anyone. You only hurt yourself.’

  I knew Parveen was right, but I didn’t feel it. The guilt was weighing on my chest, crushing me, and I couldn’t breathe. For a moment I felt a strap pulling across my shoulder. It was the sensation of a seatbelt, like I was in a car. Blackness came in from the edges, swift and sure. My mind shutting down the memory before it could take hold.

  Parveen’s arm was still around my shoulders; she gave me a squeeze and then got up to pour some water into a cup. ‘Drink.’

  After a few sips, I felt my heart rate begin to slow, the blackness receded and I came back to the moment. That was when I noticed that Parveen looked tense, her hands shaking. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Just the adrenaline. I hate confrontation.’

  ‘You were amazing with her. Like a guard dog.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Parveen said, pulling a face.

  ‘Not a dog. Something more flattering. A guardian angel.’

  Parveen smiled weakly. ‘Yeah, but . . . the police. You just get that instant sense of guilt. Like you’ve done something wrong even when you know you haven’t.’

  I let my head fall back on to the pillow and closed my eyes for a moment. ‘I’m just so relieved I didn’t hurt anybody. Mark said—’ I broke off. If I repeated what he’d said it wouldn’t sound good. It might sound like he’d been trying to make me feel bad. Parveen wouldn’t understand that he was just freaking out.

  Her expression closed down at the mention of his name. Now that memories from my life before were coming back, I knew that I’d thought she was very quiet and meek, almost unemotional. I didn’t know, now, how I could ever have thought that. Everything she felt was written on her face.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Just thinking about before. I wish we’d been friends earlier.’

  Parveen smiled, as if to take the sting out of her words. ‘You weren’t very interested then.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Was I really awful?’

  ‘Not awful,’ Parveen said. ‘A bit scary.’

  ‘I was not scary. Pat is scary,’ I said, affronted. ‘Self-possessed.’

  ‘Closed off,’ Parveen said. ‘Aloof.’ She stopped smiling. ‘Actually, you really didn’t seem very well. I kept wanting to ask you if you were all right but then—’

  ‘I was scary and aloof,’ I finished for her.

  Parveen made a finger gun and shot me. ‘Exactly. And then there was Mark, which was awkward. Especially since I wasn’t supposed to have noticed that you two were getting hot and heavy in the stationery cupboard.’

  ‘We did not!’

  Parveen paused, smiling wickedly, and then she shrugged, letting me off the hook. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You shouldn’t tease the amnesia patient,’ I said, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

  After the let down of the garden, I decided to explore the hospital in a more random fashion. If I wasn’t setting my heart on a particular destination, then I couldn’t be disappointed. I was practical, too; trips to the vending machine on the floor below meant chocolate, and salt and vinegar crisps. I gained strength by walking up and down the hallways closest to my ward, gradually increasing the distance, hour by hour, day by day.

  The Viking took me for hydrotherapy sessions in the pool and was thrilled with my progress. It brought my release date ever closer and every time my back screamed at me, or my knee threatened to buckle, I reminded myself that this was my way out.

  One of my forays took me past the hospital chapel. I hesitated outside the door for a moment, feeling a strange pull to go inside. Then I had one of my now-familiar conversations with myself. Was I religious? Was the fact that I was a person of faith another facet of my personality that I’d lost in the accident?

  As I dithered, looking at the posters of doves and messages of hope that were pinned alongside the entrance, I realised that the feeling of connection I had experienced was just a jolt of recognition. I realised, in the way that every fact seemed to come back to me, in the manner of something always known and simply not acknowledged, that wild horses couldn’t drag me into a place of worship.

  I remembered, too, that Pat hadn’t been brought up as Catholic, but had converted when she’d married Dylan. She had embraced Catholicism with the fervour of an ex-pat living abroad. While Dylan was lackadaisical about his faith, Pat acted as if the pope himself was planning a surprise visit to check up on us.

  I leaned against the wall, my head brushing the ‘God loves you’ poster, and saw, instead of the blank beige wall opposite, the picture of Jesus that hung in our hallway. His slim handsome face and soft brown eyes. They were almost coquettish, inviting.

  Pat wanted images of Mary around the place, but Geraint had argued with her. He’d fully embraced his position as black sheep by then and seemed actively to enjoy winding her up. Sometimes it was really funny, like the time Geraint said a picture of Jesus was beautiful and that he quite fancied the Son of G
od. Later that night, we couldn’t stop reliving the moment Pat’s face had gone purple as she’d tried to formulate a response. We argued over whether it was the suggestion of man-on-man attraction or casual blasphemy that had enraged her more. Once he’d obtained such a good reaction, Geraint couldn’t resist baiting Pat. ‘You’ll go to hell for an eternity of pain and suffering,’ she’d warn. ‘Tell him,’ she’d say to Dylan. She was always appealing to her husband in these matters. In nothing else, of course, but in these matters he was the original Catholic so she deferred to him. At first, at least. His moderate nature and quiet faith weren’t enough and she’d end up talking instead. Ranting about sin and demanding that Geraint say the rosary with her.

  Our church was Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Most of the people in the village were either agnostic or quietly Church of Wales. Protestant. Pat said we were doubly persecuted, historically speaking, both Welsh and Catholic. A double-whammy.

  Leaning against the wall, my body hurting and my mind following each new memory hungrily, hoping the trail wouldn’t end, I knew that the religious side to my upbringing had seeped into my soul. I wanted to ask God for help. I wanted to make a bargain with the deity I didn’t even believe in. ‘If you make my mind work properly again, if you bring back my memories,’ I said silently, ‘I’ll do Good Works.’

  I waited a moment, just to see if Dr Adams was right and I really was a miracle.

  Pat said that life was about suffering. Or guilt over not suffering enough. Or not being good enough in the face of suffering. When your bedtime stories are of saints, you’re royally screwed. How are you supposed to measure up to poor Lucy, patron saint of the blind, with her eyes on a plate? And, most annoying of all, I still felt the pull of those teachings. I still felt like a sinner, who was being righteously punished.

  In stories about twins one is good and one is evil. Like lots of siblings, Ger and I had our labels early on. I was the good child and he was the naughty one. Ger was the child who couldn’t stay neat and tidy for Sunday school. In fact, Ger was the child who couldn’t even stay in Sunday school. The terrifying lady who ran it made him sit outside in the vestibule more often than she let him stay in the main hall. I would bend my head studiously over my colouring, shading in the basket with baby Moses or the donkey that carried Mary, feeling the stone in my gut that said Ger was in trouble again and was going to catch it from Pat when we got home. Worse than that, though, was the sense of disappointment in myself. If only I were braver, I could be out in the vestibule with Geraint and we’d be having fun. Instead I was trying to colour with stupid broken crayons. I didn’t want to complete a picture neatly for the horrible teacher but I was too scared not to do so, and I hated myself for my cowardice and compliance.

  Ger was the one who didn’t do his work in primary school when he couldn’t see the point of copying out words to practise handwriting or learning phonetics when he’d been able to read since he was three. By the time we were both at the local comp, he was bored and rebellious and hardly ever turned up for lessons. I was even better, as if to make up for it. I don’t remember him ever holding it against me, although the comparisons must’ve worn thin.

  When the kids in the top year began picking on me, Ger set his jaw. I told him not to worry, that it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. Truth was, I didn’t expect it to escalate. I was a girl. I didn’t believe for a second that they would really do anything to me. All the trouble I’d seen was of two varieties: girls being mean to each other (with the occasional face slap or hair tug) and boys all-out fighting. Throwing punches and rolling around in the playground until a teacher broke it up. So when Justin and his fellow knuckle-draggers cornered me on the way to the buses after school, I was nervous but not properly frightened. I didn’t know that I should’ve run. I thought I should take the advice of every grown up I’d ever heard on the subject and stand up to them. It hurts to think about it now. How close to disaster I came. Three large boy-men. Sixteen-year-olds with impressive acne and wide shoulders and newly developed jaws. One, unpopular even in this subset of society, was lookout.

  I knew this was, in some way, about Ger. I flew under the radar at school and there wasn’t much about me that seemed to offend anybody or garner attention. This group, though, hated Geraint and, when we’d first started at the comp, they’d bullied him. The last couple of years things had died down and I assumed they’d grown bored, or Ger had done the magic ‘standing up’ and they’d backed off.

  Now Justin was standing far too close to me. I felt the first proper wave of fear as the smell of Lynx deodorant and testosterone hit my nostrils. The other guy, I didn’t know his name, had moved behind me without me noticing and suddenly he grabbed my arms. He pulled them behind my back, jerking them from the sockets and making me yelp. I knew that there were tears in my eyes and I couldn’t wipe them away. I felt exposed and the first tendrils of real fear wound their way around my body.

  Justin leaned in; he had his head tilted like he was considering something. I thought he was going to hit me, knew in some primeval part of my brain that that was what he had intended. In that moment, though, he changed his mind. I saw it. His intention shifted. Instead of smacking me in the mouth, his hands came up and began kneading my chest through my school jumper and shirt. It hurt, but I turned my face to the side and took shallow breaths through my mouth, trying not to panic, trying to seem unbothered. Like I could pretend this was a minor inconvenience and that would, somehow, make it less humiliating.

  My twisted arms really hurt but when the pressure eased a little it was worse, because whoever was behind me was pushing me forwards, making me bend a little at the waist so that my chest was falling into Justin’s horrible meaty hands and the guy behind me was pressing against my back. I felt something lumpy and hard against my backside and I realised what it was with a rush of pure embarrassment. That’s what I remember most. Feeling ashamed and embarrassed. More so, even, than frightened. I don’t think I fully realised the danger I was in. I thought Justin would eventually stop gripping my breasts like they were handholds on a climbing wall and he and his mates would saunter off. Part of me was even a little bit relieved that they weren’t going to hit me. It was mortifying, but I’d been groped in the school hallways before and, once, on the bus by an old guy with a tent in his trousers, so it wasn’t too much of a shock.

  That’s when I felt the hand on my thigh. Justin had stepped in really close now. He had his head bent towards my neck and I thought he was going to try and kiss me, which was a whole other level of weird. Instead he said, loud enough for the other guy to hear, ‘Let’s shag Ger’s sister.’

  The hand was pulling my skirt up and the shot of terror I felt then made me almost throw up. I started struggling, ignoring the pain in my arms, but I could hear the guy behind me laughing a little. He was breathing heavily and I felt him grip both of my wrists in one hand. He needed a hand free. I went completely cold. What if he needed a hand free to undo his fly?

  I don’t know whether Geraint knew I was in trouble or whether it was pure luck that he walked to the bus stands that way. We never talked about it. In fact, I don’t even know if I ever thanked him.

  I just remember seeing him appear around the corner. I was bathed, instantly, in a potent mixture of relief and terror. I didn’t want Justin and his pals to turn on Geraint. It was three of them against one and I didn’t want Ger to get hurt. But, Christ on a bike, I was glad to see him. My saviour.

  The one who was on lookout duty took off running as soon as he saw Ger. He was that type, cowardly, and maybe things had gone further than he’d expected, and he was glad of the excuse to get away. I could easily imagine boys signing up to harass Ger’s sister, to give her a little scare, but it was harder to believe they’d all signed up to do something so serious.

  Ger wasn’t distracted, he came bowling towards Justin. I’d seen Ger angry plenty of times. I’d seen him lose it when drunk. I’d seen him raging in his own room, punching and kickin
g the walls until his knuckles bled and there were holes in the plasterboard. I’d never seen him like this, though. It was another level of fury. I guessed the guy behind me hadn’t either, because he let go of me instantly and had his hands in the air. ‘We were just messing,’ I heard him say. I’ll never forget his voice. He sounded much younger than I expected and I felt a fresh rush of guilt for falling victim to such an unlikely attacker.

  Ger was punching Justin. He got him a couple of times in the face before Justin got one back on Ger. A blow that sent him staggering before, fuelled by fury, he was back. Justin’s nose was bleeding, then his lip, then a split opened on his cheek. I had gone from relief to terror all over again. I wanted Geraint to win, of course, but I didn’t want him to get hurt, then or later when there were reprisals. His eyes were mindless with fury and I didn’t want him to go so far that he actually killed someone and ended up in jail for life.

  Fear. Then more fear and guilt. Worry and exasperation. Guilt and fear. And love. Don’t forget love.

  GRACE

  There was a precious slice of time in the morning. Just before the rush of all the other girls but not so early that you felt like death warmed up before lunch. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Grace had never been a morning person and getting up before five was never anything less than painful, both at the time and at four o’clock in the afternoon when she was reliably struck down by a wave of black tiredness so powerful it threatened to drag her under.

  Still, once a fortnight or so, Grace forced herself to get up before the morning nurse shook her awake. The shared bathrooms were blissfully empty and quiet. She could shower in water that was actually hot and not have to talk to anybody.

  It was Evie, of course, who had let her in on the secret, but she was slumbering peacefully, her lavender silk eye mask perched on her face. Grace picked up her towel and wash bag and tiptoed down the corridor. This morning the bathrooms were not completely deserted. Sister Bennett was washing her face in the sink and it was peculiar to see her doing something so intimate. She caught Grace looking and said, mildly enough, ‘My plumbing has gone funny.’