by Dani Atkins
‘Hey!’ the man cried out one last time, now sounding seriously pissed-off with me. But I had no intention of hanging around to make things any easier for him. I saw a small gap between the oncoming cars, hesitated for a split second, and then leapt forward as though jumping nimbly into a skipping-rope game. But this was no children’s playground. The startled expression on the driver’s face darkened as he applied his brakes. A horn blared in a long angry bleat from a car in the adjacent lane, and I jerked rapidly out of its path. It came so close I could feel the heat of its engine against my back, like the breath of a thwarted dragon. Behind me, the man with the bald head was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying, because all I could hear was Ryan calling out my name from the other side of the road.
‘Maddie!’ I turned and began to run towards him and everything he represented: home, safety, and sanctuary. ‘MADDIE!’ This time there was a different note in his voice, which sounded an awful lot like terror. I looked at him and his mouth was open wide and he was screaming something. And weirdly the bald man behind me was doing exactly the same thing. And because he was much closer than Ryan, I could hear him far more easily.
‘Watch out! For Christ’s sake, watch out!’
I turned towards him. One of his arms was waving madly. He looked quite distraught, I remember thinking, and what was that in his hand? It looked remarkably like my cardigan, which I didn’t even know I’d dropped.
It was the man’s flat dark eyes I was staring into in those final seconds. If I could rewrite one single moment of that day, I would turn my head so that it was Ryan’s I was looking into when it happened. I think that might have made it a little more bearable.
It was over in an instant. One moment I was standing in the middle of the road, and the next I was flying upwards through the air. I saw sky and then pavement and then bizarrely, sky again. I saw a huge wall of white – the bonnet of the van that had hit me – coming up fast as I fell back down upon it. Oddly I felt no pain as I bounced bonelessly onto the metal, as limp as a rag doll. Even hitting the windscreen and hearing the crackle of shattering safety glass failed to register. I slithered in a fluid confusion of broken limbs back onto the surface of the road. I saw sky again and a moment later a circle of faces, but their features were covered in blood, so much blood. Someone was screaming my name, but they sounded like they were doing so from the end of a very long tunnel. The world was shrinking as the faces became harder to see. I blinked and more blood fell into my eyes, and then everything went quiet and very, very, dark.
Chapter 2
I was in a tunnel; a long, dark, deep tunnel. A whole underground network of tunnels, in fact. They twisted and turned like a maze. Sometimes I thought I caught a fleeting glimpse of light filtering through the darkness, but for the most part it was a perfectly black, inky void. Sounds pierced the perpetual velvet hum of silence: sometimes voices; sometimes loud clattering noises that I couldn’t place. Often I could hear my name. Sometimes it was whispered, at others it came out on a sob. On several occasions it was shouted, almost cruelly. But the delivery of the words made no difference, for I was powerless to reply.
Often I heard my mother. Strangely her voice was the clearest and the most lucid of them all. She told me to hold on; that I wasn’t alone, and that she was with me. She urged me to keep walking through the darkness until I could find my way back. Back from where? Where was I? Hands touched me. Sometimes roughly, sometimes in a caress. That surely had to be Ryan? I would recognise the feel of his skin against mine anywhere. Other sensations were far less pleasant. There was pain. So much pain. At times it felt as though I was drowning in it; fighting to kick up to reach a surface that never materialised. Everything hurt until I wasn’t sure how much more of it I could take and then – unbelievably – there came even more. It felt as though my stomach had been gripped by an angry giant who was slowly twisting it over and over, like a rag being wrung out. The pain was too much, the tunnels were too tempting, I fled back down into them and didn’t come up for a very long time.
I was swimming beneath ice. It should have felt cold, but instead the water was warm, and encompassing, like a cocoon. This must be what it feels like in the womb, I thought, and something about that idea bothered me. I tried to hold onto it, but it kept slipping away, as elusive to grasp as a handful of smoke. I moved on a current of nothingness, looking up through a thick opaque layer which had mysteriously turned from black to grey. Up ahead the grey became lighter. Limbs that had felt no pain for a very long time suddenly began to ache. Stay away from that place, warned my brain. ‘Go towards it, Maddie,’ urged my mother from somewhere in the dark far below me.
I could see a long snaking fissure fracturing the ice above me. I reached up and touched it with my fingertips. It felt sharp and dangerous, and yet I continued to propel myself forward, following it. I moved in total silence, although from somewhere unseen there came a low rumble of sound, like an invisible avalanche. A single shard of light pierced the grey, pierced everything. Like Excalibur scything through the water, it punctured the unbreakable. Light radiated from it, and suddenly I was scrabbling beneath the ice towards it, afraid it would disappear at any moment.
Staying would be so easy, I knew that. I could sink back down to the place where the ice was thick, or I could push against the crack. Because it would break, I knew that it would, all I had to do was push. Push. Push. The instruction filled my head like a long-forgotten memory. My hands were on the ice, my back was arched and I pushed through the frozen barrier.
‘Mum!’
Someone shrieked. It wasn’t me. I didn’t have the strength, breaking through had drained me.
Something fell, or was dropped. I heard a crash and then the sound of breaking china or glass.
‘Oh dear God, I can’t believe it. You’re awake! You’re awake!’ exclaimed a voice I didn’t recognise.
‘Mum?’ this time my voice was hesitant and unsure. My mother was back in the black void, urging me onward. Whoever this stranger was, with her hands suddenly upon my face, it wasn’t her. With an effort that almost broke me, I instructed my eyes to open. They did so reluctantly, as though they’d forgotten how. To begin with I saw nothing. Then gradually my retinas began to awaken from their long hibernation. Shadows separated and my brain slowly began to recall how to process the images it was receiving. A figure hovered over me, I couldn’t make out who it was, or what she was saying. I knew they were words, but they sounded foreign, garbled, and incredibly excitable. It took several moments for me to realise it was because she was crying.
The hand that had been touching my face dropped to grip mine where it was lying on something scratchy. A blanket? Was I in a bed? If so, it wasn’t mine. I had no idea where I was and suddenly I was very afraid. Perhaps she saw something in my eyes, because suddenly my hand was crushed beneath her fingers, so hard it almost hurt.
‘Oh no, you don’t, Maddie. You stay with us now. You stay with us!’ Never releasing her hold, she reached over and pressed something on the wall. My eyes were suddenly fluttering again, the lids were closing. Even as they shut I could hear the woman begin to shout out into the darkened room, clearly too impatient or unwilling to wait for whoever it was she had summoned. ‘She’s awake! She’s awake! Madeline Chambers is awake!’
It was some time later before my eyes opened again. The room I was in was dark, lit only by a single low-wattage lamp. There was a distinct smell in the air, which took me longer than it should have done to place. Antiseptic. I knew then, without asking, that I was in a hospital. What I didn’t know, was why.
The soft swish of leather on linoleum alerted me that I wasn’t alone. A nurse – different from the one before – hurried over to the bed. My vision was still blurred and unfocused, so when she leant over me, her face was surrounded by a glowing nimbus of light. She looked like an angel on a Christmas card.
‘What happened to me?’ I asked. My voice sounded hoarse and croaky, as though each
word had fought its way out from beneath thick flakes of rust.
Was it my imagination, or did she hesitate before replying? ‘You were involved in an accident, Madeline. You’re in St Margaret’s hospital.’
St Margaret’s? Hadn’t I’d heard someone asking about that earlier today? The memory was vague and kept twisting out of my grasp every time I reached out for it. I returned to the nurse’s bewildering statement, and slowly shook my head, certain she was mistaken. I couldn’t remember anything. ‘An accident? No, I . . . I don’t think so,’ I said, my voice small and hesitant. From absolutely nowhere an image of a black leather jacket torpedoed through the fog in my head. I had no idea why.
Fragments of memories began floating down, like tantalising balloons released from a netted ceiling. They dangled above my head, just out of reach. One exploded with a loud and startling bang as I grabbed hold of it. ‘Ryan?’ I gasped, my voice a panicked question. ‘Where’s Ryan?’ My head twisted on the starchy pillow, as though unable to believe he was not here with me. But the room held no one except the nurse and me. The visitor’s chair beside the bed was empty. ‘My fiancé . . . is he here?’
The nurse’s face was suddenly a mask, a professional latex rubber thing, which revealed nothing. She cleared her throat slightly before answering me, I think I’ll always remember that. ‘He was here, but he had to leave.’
‘Why? Where has he gone?’ Ryan would never leave me alone, scared and injured, unless he’d been hurt in the same accident. Was that the thing the nurse was doing such a poor job of hiding from me? Because it was clear she wasn’t telling me everything. Her face was too full of sympathy, and there was something in her eyes that scared me. Why couldn’t I remember anything? ‘Is he . . . is he hurt?’
The nurse answered none of my questions, but instead turned to the door. ‘I’m going to find one of the duty doctors to talk to you,’ she explained, clearly anxious to summon reinforcements. What was it they weren’t telling me?
She looked back just once, before slipping out into the hospital corridor. She chewed on her lower lip before speaking. ‘Your fiancé wasn’t involved in the accident. He’s fine. But he went home a while ago. I know he’s been phoned and told that you’re awake. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.’
I flopped back on the pillows, temporarily comforted. Ryan was coming back. Everything would soon be all right.
While I waited in the dark for my world to be restored to order, I tried to make sense of the little I’d been told so far. I’d been in an accident, they said. And they must be right, for why else would I be in hospital? But what were my injuries? Very slowly I lifted one arm from the mattress. It felt stiff and heavy, as though the bones within it had been turned to lead. But apart from that, it appeared to work. One by one I conducted an inventory of my limbs. They all ached, and moving them – even the smallest amount – was exhausting. But they weren’t bandaged, or encased in plaster. So no bones were broken. Very slowly I lifted one hand and allowed my fingers to explore my face and head. Someone had taken the time to braid my long hair into a plait, which seemed an odd thing to do, but apart from that, everything felt completely normal.
In the quiet of the hospital room, sleep eventually dragged me back under, and with it came dreams; weird dreams that made no sense. I was in a shop, buying something important. A cardigan, I think. And I was worried because no one could find my handbag, and how could I pay for anything if my money was gone? Then everything suddenly shifted, the way it does in dreams, and I was sitting in a hairdresser’s chair, but when the stylist instructed me to look in the mirror, the reflection staring back at me was the stuff of nightmares. I had no hair, none at all. I was completely bald.
I gasped myself awake, my hand instinctively going to the plait, even though I could feel it perfectly well behind my neck. Long purple fingers of light were clawing through the dawn sky. I must have been asleep for hours, and if the doctors had come to my room, they had chosen not to wake me.
From the corridor I could hear the sound of approaching footsteps, which slowed and then eventually stopped just outside my door. I could hear a soft murmur of two voices. One was deep and gruff and unfamiliar, but the other was the only one in the world that mattered to me. My head was already turned towards the door as it opened, my heart yearning for him so much it felt like a physical ache. Ryan entered the room behind the doctor and then just rocked on his feet and froze. My tentative smile of greeting faltered before dying on my lips. He looked dreadful. Even in this poor light it was easy to see that my accident had devastated him. His hair was dishevelled, as though he’d run his hands through it a thousand times on his way to my bedside. And his eyes were tormented, as though they knew a pain I couldn’t begin to imagine. And then, suddenly, the lock holding back my memories slid open. I saw the street, I saw the bald-headed man holding my cardigan, and at the final moment, when it was too late to avoid the inevitable, I saw the fast-approaching van.
I cried out from my hospital bed, my hand flailing through the air towards my fiancé, and yet for a moment he still hesitated. There was sorrow on his face, and a look of loss and grief. With a sickening lurch I suddenly knew why. My hand flew to my stomach and I ran it hurriedly from one jutting hip bone to the other and back again, following the path the sonographer had taken, gliding across my skin on a slippery coating of gel. My stomach was now flat – no, worse than that – it was concave. The bump was gone. I was crying by the time Ryan finally reached the bedside. I turned to him in heartbroken anguish, the question that needed no answer forcing its way past my trembling lips. ‘The baby? Ryan, where’s the baby? Did I lose our baby?’
He gathered me into his arms, cradling me against the familiar warmth and smell of him. He held me so tightly that the buttons of his shirt, one which I couldn’t ever remember seeing him wear before, made small indents in my cheek. We were both crying, and dimly I was aware of the doctor murmuring something, and then discreetly backing out of the room. I was glad when he went, although Ryan looked considerably less so.
Very gently, as though I was made of spun glass, Ryan lowered me back onto the pillows and perched on the very edge of the visitor’s chair. He looked like a runner, waiting on the blocks for the crack of the pistol.
‘How are you feeling, Maddie?’ he asked, his voice scarcely more than a whisper.
‘Like I’ve been hit by a truck,’ I said. I wasn’t trying to be funny. Because there was no humour or amusement to be found in this tragedy. The baby we hadn’t planned for, but which we had dearly wanted, was gone. And although I knew he would never say it, the weight of guilt fell firmly on my shoulders. I had been negligent. I had been entrusted with something so precious that it could never be replaced, and I had lost it. Me. I had done that.
And yet, my response to Ryan’s question was inaccurate, because I didn’t feel as though I’d been in an accident. I should be in plaster, or traction. I should be bloodied and bruised and in pain. I deserved to be, for I had done this to myself and our baby in one stupid unthinking moment. No wonder Ryan could scarcely bear to continue holding me in his arms.
‘I’m not even injured. How is that possible? I remember the van, I remember it hitting me, and then being thrown through the air.’
Ryan groaned, and when I looked at him, tears were streaming down his cheeks. He reached for my hand and the familiarity of his fingers entwined with mine, felt like coming home. ‘It was the worst moment of my life. It’s in every one of my nightmares. I will never, ever, be able to erase that moment when all I could hear was your scream and then the sound of the van ploughing into you. By the time I got to your side, I was convinced you were dead . . . and I wanted to go with you. I couldn’t bear the thought of living for a single minute longer without you.’
Something small in my heart tore away from its moorings at the remembered panic in his voice. ‘That you were still alive was a miracle. The paramedics, the doctors, everyone said that it was. I believed it then; and when t
hey called me in the middle of the night to say you had woken up, I believed it again.’
My thumb ran across his hand and knuckles, sweeping backwards and forwards in a caress. There was something about his skin that felt strange; it was hot and dry as though he was coming down with the flu or something. And there was something else, something he’d said that was bothering me. My head was beginning to ache, but I dug deeper, probing to uncover whatever it was that had troubled me.
Beyond, in the corridor, I could hear the rattle of a tea trolley and the casual sounds of morning greetings and laughter. The sun had crept a little higher, and a few watery rays were slanting through the window. It was going to be another perfect June day. Or was it?
‘We’ll have to cancel the wedding. I don’t think we can go ahead now, do you? It wouldn’t be right. I think we need to postpone it, to give us time to grieve properly about losing the baby.’
I had lived through many moments with Ryan: happiness; joy; passion; even anger on a few volatile rows, whose only merit was their spectacular reconciliations. But the expression on his face and in his eyes, the pity that oozed out of every single pore in his body as he looked at me, was new and unchartered territory. It was somewhere I had never been, and never wanted to visit.
Ryan’s eyes locked on mine, willing me to work out my own truth. I could tell from his face he would rather do anything than say the actual words.
‘But we don’t have to cancel the wedding, do we?’
Very slowly, as though he was at least three decades older in age, he shook his head.
‘Because . . . you’ve already done it.’
He made a sound, which I took to mean yes. It was hard to tell. The sun was now flooding through the window. The day was promising to be a scorcher, hotter than you’d expect for June.
‘What date is it today?’