Rope of Sand

by C F Dunn

  “That’s remarkable,” Henry muttered as he studied the display, the paper creaking in his hands.

  “What is more,” Matthew continued, “there’s been no change in the rhythm of Emma’s heart for the last forty minutes or so.” Something in his voice said there might be more to this than he stated.

  Henry sounded doubtful. “Could there be a fault with the machine?”

  “No, I’ve checked it – it’s working perfectly. There’s been no fluctuation, despite the nature of your conversation. Or mine,” he added dryly.

  Henry’s mood responded, becoming brighter despite his misgivings. “The damage must be worse that we thought, or she couldn’t have heard us. She’s still unconscious, she…”

  Matthew broke in. “No, she isn’t, are you, Emma? Tired perhaps, which is not surprising, but certainly not unconscious. She’s listening to everything we’re saying.”

  “But does she understand?” Dad asked.

  “Oh, yes, I think so; so we’d better watch what we’re saying if we’re not to get it in the neck later on. We need to push those bloods through though, Henry.”

  “I’ll deal with that myself,” Henry said, still in contemplation.

  “Will you please explain what is happening?” Dad spluttered. “I don’t know whether I’m supposed to be celebrating or mourning. Why won’t she wake up if she’s going to be all right?”

  Matthew adopted the tone I recognized when he wanted to comfort and reassure. “Emma is going to be fine, colonel. She’s very tired and her reactions are a bit sluggish, but I can assure you, she’s largely undamaged.”

  I grunted silently at his quaint use of the word undamaged as well as at his cautionary use of largely. My chest felt pummelled like kneaded dough.

  “And are you in agreement with your son’s prognosis, Henry?” I heard my father ask, a little of the bullish mannerism surfacing as he struggled to comprehend the enormity of what had happened, and the narrow escape from death or a vegetative state I seemed to have miraculously achieved.

  I wrenched my eyes open at last. Still standing at the end of my bed, his arms folded across his chest, Matthew watched me closely, as I guessed he had been all along. Standing next to the monitor, Henry had his back towards me. With a degree of resignation, he said, “Well, you know, youth must prevail in this case, Hugh. I defer to my son’s greater knowledge.”

  Matthew raised an eyebrow at me and then grinned and I felt my mouth lift in response.

  Still uncertain, my father sounded as if he intended pushing the point. “Well, if you’re sure, but I would have thought…”

  “Dad!” I coughed as my vocal chords vibrated and set up an irritating tickle. “Stop arguing.”

  “Emma?” his voice broke uncertainly. “Dear Lord, you’re awake!”

  I smiled weakly. “Hi, Dad.”

  Henry shook his head slowly from side to side as first he looked at me and then at Matthew. “Well, well, you never cease to amaze me – both of you. Welcome back, Emma; you had us all worried there for a while.”

  “Sorry, Henry,” I murmured foggily.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for, Emma, just please – for the sake of all our sanity – stay away from coffee in future.” He glanced at Matthew, who hadn’t moved. “I’ll chase the bloods, Matthew, and I’ll see you later, young lady,” he said to me in a fatherly way, then nodded to my father. “Hugh.”

  Dad picked up my free hand and cradled it in his big, broad paw. “Henry said you had a reaction to coffee, Em. Sounds a bit extreme to me, but you never really touch the stuff normally, do you? You probably remember it didn’t suit your grandfather either.”

  I didn’t.

  Matthew uncrossed his arms. “Oh?”

  “Yes, my father couldn’t stand it, said it made everything too noisy, too bright, whatever that means. But it didn’t do this to him.” He cast a baleful look at the equipment beeping and humming around me like a trapped bluebottle.

  Matthew undid his jacket and took it off, slinging it over the back of a chair. “Did your father have a history of heart problems?” he asked casually.

  “No, not a history of them, or none that I’m aware. He died after a massive coronary though; it came out of the blue after he’d returned from a Royal Engineers’ reunion. Said he felt odd, keeled over, and that was it. Now I come to think of it, he did say something about the lights, said we should change the bulbs – too high a wattage, he said – and that the television was too loud. Strange I’d never thought of it before.” It was the most I had ever heard Dad say about his father. His hand suddenly tightened on mine. “You don’t think there’s a connection between what happened to my father and this thing with Emma, do you?”

  Matthew loosened his tie with his finger and thumb, and undid the top button of his shirt. “No, I shouldn’t think so,” he smiled reassuringly, but the little tight line to his mouth that I hadn’t seen for some time reappeared.

  “Why did you drink coffee when you know it doesn’t suit you, Em? Look how ill it’s made you.” Dad sounded more aggrieved than worried now. Next his face would take on a reproachful look and I would be eleven years old again and being dressed down in his study like one of his cadets.

  “I needed a caffeine boost, Dad.”

  “Now, you won’t do that again in a hurry, will you?” he said in his best indulgently paternal manner.

  “No – she won’t,” Matthew muttered.

  I primped my lips at his tone, glad that I could feel them again, and raised my arm to look at the object attached to my finger monitoring my heartbeat. I wondered – if I tugged hard enough – whether it would come off, and then thought it would be better left, just in case. “Can I go home now?” I asked.

  “No!” they both said at once.

  “But I feel fine,” I implored, “and, Matthew, you said…”

  “No, Emma,” he repeated, with a cautionary note that reminded me I wasn’t in any position to argue. “You’ll just have to be patient.”

  Dad rumbled a laugh deep in his chest, relief making him more loquacious than usual. “Impatient, more like. You always were a terrible patient, Emma. Your mother would be quite beside herself at times. Do you remember when you broke your leg and Nanna found you trying to get on your bicycle with the plaster barely set? You were only six and you made such a fuss. It took both your grandmother and your mother to get you back indoors.”

  I remembered it well. I felt very tired all of a sudden, and the thought of my mother and home and Nanna, and all the years spent without Matthew, expanded into an eternity of loneliness that caught me unawares. I choked back tears, silently cursing myself as they kept pushing out from between my lashes. I yanked my hand free from my father’s, but too late – he saw them before I could wipe away the evidence.

  “Emma… darling, I didn’t mean it! I was joking, please don’t cry.” He began to flounder, because in all the years at home when at war with each other, I had endeavoured to hide my tears of anger and frustration from him. He wasn’t used to seeing me cry, and his own face rumpled with distress.

  Matthew tucked his arm around my shoulders, and I buried my face in his chest and sobbed as he stroked my tangled hair until the anguish eased and I stopped shaking.

  “She’ll be all right in a moment, colonel, don’t worry,” he said over the top of my head.

  “I didn’t mean to upset her.” Dad sounded guilty and almost as upset as I felt, but it came tinged with something else, envious, perhaps, that another man comforted his daughter. I castigated myself for being so feeble. Matthew’s voice reverberated against my cheek, soothing and reassuring. “Emma’s exhausted, and she’s reacting to both the physical and emotional stress she’s been put through. There’s no reason to reproach yourself. You must be tired as well. Perhaps you both should rest now.” His velvet voice dropped, the suggestion laced with sedation. It was very effective and I snuggled into him, sniffling.

  “I am feeling rather fatigued,” Dad ad
mitted.

  I raised my head, feeling drained and blotchy, but less inclined to cry. “Dad, get some rest. I’ll be all right here. Nothing’s going to happen to me now.”

  “You can be assured of that.” An ominous edge crept into Matthew’s tone again.

  “Well, if you’re sure…” Dad kissed my forehead, his chin already scratchy after our early morning start. “Just don’t do anything silly while I’m gone, Em, promise me.”

  As the door closed after him, Matthew rose from the bed and went over to the other side of the room, returning a moment later with a glass of water and two capsules. “For your headache,” he said flatly.

  I took them from him, not needing to ask how he knew that my head felt as if it were a log being split by an axe. “Thanks.”

  He waited until I had taken them, took the glass from my hand, deposited it on the table by the window, and then rounded on me. “What possessed you to be so totally reckless?” he thundered, eyes burning. I’d been expecting something like this. He held up his thumb and forefinger with barely a gap between them. “You were that close, Emma – that close – to dying. God alone knows why you’re still here. What did you think you were doing?” A nurse stuck her head around the edge of the door with a worried expression. “Out!” Matthew fired at the poor woman and she hastily retreated. He strode halfway to the window, spun around as if he’d changed his mind, and came storming back towards me. “Well?” he demanded.

  “I had to do something. Maggie was right on the edge, you heard what she said…”

  “So you thought you would try to kill yourself as a distraction, is that it? Well, it certainly worked.” He began pacing up and down, throwing me furious looks as he did so. I refused to be browbeaten. He might be older than me but that didn’t always make him right, and this was something about which I felt absolutely certain.

  “Matthew, putting her under pressure like that was wrong. It was always going to be counterproductive.”

  “And killing yourself wasn’t? Come on, Emma, what did you think you were going to achieve?”

  I stuck my chin out obstinately, wishing the pain relief would hurry up and work so that I could think more clearly. “You gave me the idea,” I said more calmly than I felt.

  “What?”

  “You said that if you could reach inside people and remove the poison that made them do what they do, you would. But you can’t – and I can – so I did.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Each angry step he took jarred my head, making it increasingly difficult to think. I put my free hand to my temple, and rubbed it.

  “Well, if you’d just stop that pacing for one moment and give me a chance to explain rather than ranting like a… a deranged mongoose…”

  He halted abruptly, his hands on his hips and clearly seething, but at least he remained still. “All right, I’ve stopped. Explain.”

  “You remember at Christmas I said that the coffee made everything clearer and that I could somehow feel Ellie’s emotions?” He nodded tersely. “I thought that if I tried that again, I might be able to reach Maggie and stop her from saying something about you or the family.” I stopped rubbing and instead put the heel of my hand to my throbbing head and tried to drive the pain away.

  Still angry, at least he listened now. “And did you?”

  “Did I what? Oh – reach Maggie? Yes, I did. It worked from that point of view; but I don’t know how effective it was in getting her to change her mind or anything like that. Have you heard how she is, by the way?”

  “Oddly enough I have been somewhat preoccupied,” he replied caustically. I flinched at his tone and he moderated it. “So you reached her, and then what? You spoke to her?”

  “Well, no, not exactly – it was more like I called to her emotionally, and I’m sure she heard me, but it was so crowded and they all wanted my attention at once, so I can only hope that she got the message.”

  Matthew looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and exasperation. “Emma, you’re doing it again; stop talking in riddles. Who wanted your attention?”

  My head still hurt, but there were lapses in the intensity of the pain like patches of blue on a cloudy day. I laid it gratefully on the pillows and found it even better if I closed my eyes. “The colours did, people. There were so many of them at first – it was confusing.” I felt sleepy.

  He almost contained the snort of frustration, but not quite. I smiled. I wasn’t used to him behaving like this; I found it terribly normal.

  When he spoke again I opened my eyes to find him looking down on me, and was relieved to see he wasn’t cross any more. “I told your father you didn’t sustain any brain damage. What am I going to tell him if you go around talking about colours wanting your attention?”

  “It would only confirm what he’s known about me all my life.”

  “Mmm.” He balanced on the end of my bed. “I suppose I’m going to have to forgive you your lapse in self-preservation.”

  “It would be more peaceful,” I agreed, stretching my legs out past him under the covers, and feeling multiple wires tug at sticky patches on my skin. “I didn’t know I would have such a strong reaction to the coffee. I thought that perhaps I could control it better than I did; it was a calculated risk.”

  “Huh! Calculated on what?” He stared at the wall above my bed for what seemed like ages; then, when he looked at me, the fire had gone from his eyes and they were clear blue again. “At the funeral yesterday, you did something similar to me, didn’t you? And then again when you sensed Monica?”

  I closed my eyes and recalled. “I seem to be able to feel you more easily than anyone else in the same way you can sense my pain more intensely, but Monica was different – she imposed herself on me like a… violation.” I pulled a face and opened my eyes. His hand found my shin and rubbed it in the way he often did when thinking. “But today there were too many distractions. I thought the coffee might help to boost the effect.”

  “It certainly did that. I suppose I only have myself to blame. I shouldn’t have put you under pressure to speak to Duffy.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Matthew. I still think I would have taken the opportunity if the circumstances were right. Maggie was breaking, and the coffee was there for the drinking. I’m quite capable of making my own decisions, you know.”

  “Yes, and killing yourself.”

  “But I didn’t, thanks to you, and it all still might have been worth it.”

  “It might,” he said, but without conviction. He leaned over the bed and pressed a couple of the buttons on the heart monitor, concentrating as he read the display.

  “What is it?”

  Sliding off the bed, he went around to the machine, checking the lines running from the monitor to various parts of my body like wires from a telegraph pole. “If this is reading you correctly, there’s still no change in the output of your heart.”

  I peered at the screen’s flat face. “Is that bad?”

  “No, not at all, just unusual. In the last half hour you’ve woken up, cried, and had me ranting like a ‘deranged mongoose’, I think you said – not withstanding your headache. I would have expected all that to have shown up on this,” he tapped the top of the machine, “but it hasn’t.”

  “And the significance of it is…?” I prompted him.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll wait and see what the blood test results are like and compare them with the ones we took at Christmas.” He lifted my hand and, holding it against his face, breathed in the scent of my skin.

  I stretched my fingers to stroke the crease between his eyes and smooth it, but it deepened at my touch, and he sighed. “I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. It was bad enough after Staahl attacked you, but now…” He drew a jagged, painful breath. “Emma, if you had died today, I would have lost my reason for being.”

  I didn’t need to see his colours to know what I had put him through. For all that had happened to me, it was still Matthew who had
just lost his wife and had buried her only yesterday, and yet here I lay – with what amounted to a self-inflicted injury – when I should be looking after him, not the other way around.

  I inched forward and took my hand away from his face, and put my arms around him as far as I could without dragging the wires out of place. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I only did it to protect you. I didn’t mean to hurt you or anyone else.”

  He stared straight into my eyes, and at that distance the full impact of his gaze hit me like a taser. “Hurt me? Hurt doesn’t even begin to come close. You have no idea what it did to me.”

  I withdrew against the pillow, annoyance fuelled by guilt. “Yes, I do, I know exactly what it’s like, Matthew. I feel it every time I think of losing you. You don’t have a monopoly on hurt, you know.”

  It was a stupid thing to say – a stupid, insensitive thing. He looked away. The axe man in my head began to split lumber again, blow after blow, pounding away relentlessly. I welcomed the pain – I deserved it – but he turned back to me, and positioned his hand over my temple, lifting the fire from my head as he did so.

  “No… don’t.” I pushed his hand away. He smiled sadly and replaced his hand.

  “Emma, your pain won’t make mine any better.”

  “I didn’t mean how it sounded,” I murmured mournfully.

  “I know you didn’t.” He looked at his watch. “It’s time you had something to eat; it’ll help your head.” I thought he was about to say something else, but he appeared to think better of it. “I have some things to sort out. I won’t be very long. Think you can avoid coffee for the next half an hour or so if I leave you alone?”

  I didn’t want him to leave, but he picked his jacket off the back of the chair and made for the door. “On second thoughts,” he said, turning back briefly as he slung his jacket over his shoulder, “I don’t think we’ll take the risk. I’ll get someone to sit with you, just in case.”

  I must have slept because it was dark outside when I opened my eyes again, and the only light in the room came from a side lamp and the glow from the machines by the bed. The attachment monitoring my heart pinched my skin and in my stupor, I put out a hand to ease it.