The Wedding Dress

by Dani Atkins

  A blush came into her cheeks, which helped dispel a little of the pallor The Hybrid had painted on them.

  ‘I’m just being daft,’ she said, twisting in her seat and watching as the carriages behind us began to fill. She swivelled back to face the front and I could see her eyes following the track where it fell away a short distance in front of us, and then rose up again towards the sky in a gravity-defying ascent.

  ‘So, tell me about your final fitting yesterday. I bet your dress looked totally amazing,’ I prompted, because if there was one topic guaranteed to take Sasha’s mind off the ride, then it was her spectacular wedding dress. But today even the designer gown from the exclusive bridal shop couldn’t distract her. She leapt suddenly to her feet and snatched up her bag.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bella, I can’t do this. It’s scaring the crap out of me.’

  She was already clambering over me to step out of the carriage, but when I went to follow her, she pressed her hand firmly on my shoulder. Afterwards she told me that every nightmare she ever has of that day features that moment: when she’d pushed me back down on to the ride.

  ‘Stay,’ she urged, looking much happier now that she’d made up her mind not to. ‘You know you want to see what it’s like.’ That’s the thing about friends who’ve known you for over twenty years: there’s absolutely no point in lying to them.

  ‘I do,’ I admitted.

  ‘Don’t feel bad about chickening out, you’re not the first,’ assured the ride attendant, as he directed Sasha towards the exit sign. ‘You can wait for your friend at the bottom.’

  I waggled my fingers at Sasha as she was ushered from the ride; in the distance I heard a voice calling out: ‘Single rider for carriage number one.’

  The seat beside me was once again filled, but when I turned towards the new arrival, my smile of greeting faltered on my lips. Of all the thousands of people in the park that day, why did it have to be the one person I’d decided I didn’t like?

  The Hybrid hadn’t been built for someone that tall, and all at once the compact carriage seemed full of long denim-clad thighs and feet that barely fitted into the well designed for them. I squeezed myself as far to the right as I could, painfully knocking my ankle against a metal bolt as I did. For the second time that day, I was scowling when he spoke to me.

  ‘Hello.’ His voice was friendly enough to make me wonder if he hadn’t realised I was the girl he’d been openly staring at in the queue. ‘Again,’ he added with a flash of a smile that revealed extremely white, even teeth.

  I mumbled a greeting as I tried and failed not to acknowledge that he was very easy on the eye. When we’d bumped into each other, my only impression had been his height and breadth. Now, at close quarters, I could see that he was the classic cliché: tall, dark and handsome. The black hair and the cleanly shaven square-cut jaw reminded me of someone, but it was only when he readjusted the black-rimmed glasses on his nose that I made the connection. The man sitting beside me was a dead ringer for Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego.

  ‘Did your friend change her mind?’ His question confirmed he’d definitely been watching us, although weirdly he didn’t appear to be trying to hide it. Wonderful. I was now incarcerated in a small metal vehicle for the next minute and a half with my very own stalker.

  ‘Uh huh.’ I hoped my monosyllabic answer would convey I had no desire to chat. The sooner we accelerated away at speed, the better.

  ‘Ah, the famed roller-coaster walk of shame,’ he said, with a smile that was so unexpectedly charismatic I felt momentarily disoriented, as though the ride had already begun and gravity could no longer be relied upon.

  ‘You like roller-coasters?’ The question surprised me, popping out almost of its own volition. But his answer surprised me even more.

  ‘Not particularly.’

  I looked up, trying to peer through the reflective surface of his glasses to see if he was joking, but they were coated with something that defied all intruders.

  ‘Then why—?’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘You ride roller-coasters for a living?’ Who had a career like that, and why had no one told me about that profession when I’d been trying to work out what to do with my life?

  ‘I write travel guides. Most specifically, guides about theme parks.’

  It was an intriguing occupation and I regretted my earlier frosty attitude, because I really would have liked to hear more about it.

  ‘Oh well, I bet you’ll love this one.’

  He shifted slightly in his seat, his hip bone momentarily coming into contact with mine. ‘I doubt it,’ he said, sounding a little resigned.

  A bored-looking attendant began walking along the row of carriages, pushing each safety bar in place, as if on an assembly line. Ours came to a rest against my companion’s abdomen rather than mine, leaving a gap of several centimetres between me and the restraint. I tugged down on the thickly padded bar, trying to inch it a little closer. I could sense the dark-haired man watching me.

  ‘Ever been on one this fast before?’ he asked conversationally.

  I shook my head, pretty sure my ponytail must have struck him in the face with the action. Why on earth did they make these carriages so small? Despite scooting as far from him as I could, my left leg was still pinioned against the length of his; his denim fusing with mine, as though the two fabrics were loom-mates being drawn back together.

  ‘Are there any?’

  ‘There’s one in Dubai, and Six Flags… oh, and then there’s the one in Japan.’ He knew roller-coasters the way I knew dog breeds. What a pair of nerds we were, I thought with a twisted smile.

  The sound of raised voices distracted me and I glanced at the ride podium, where two teenage members of King Arthur’s court had now been joined by a third. One was speaking animatedly into a walkie-talkie, while another was repeatedly jabbing at buttons on a huge aluminium panel, which looked like it belonged in a cockpit rather than an amusement park. Was there some sort of problem?

  ‘They’re taking their time to get going,’ my companion observed mildly. I looked around and saw that several other riders in the surrounding carriages were clearly thinking the same thing. Heads were turning, and brows were furrowing. No one looked exactly worried (except possibly me) but the air of excitement that had been hanging over the ride was suddenly infiltrated by filaments of tension, like small arcs of electricity.

  For no reason I could pinpoint, I suddenly wanted to get off the ride, really wanted to get off. The illuminated green exit sign that had led Sasha to safety beckoned to me like a beacon. I didn’t care how stupid I looked; I’d say I was feeling sick, or something. The wine I’d drunk earlier was swirling unpleasantly in my stomach, so it wasn’t even a lie.

  But before I could attract anyone’s attention, a switch was flicked and the Excuse me my lips were getting ready to form was blasted from them as the ride rocketed away from the platform. We shot away so fast my turbulent stomach felt as though it was surely travelling several carriages behind ours. The air stung my cheeks as they were pulled back in a look I’m sure was far from attractive. We plummeted down an incline, leaving even more internal organs momentarily displaced. And then the track rose up, almost vertically, like a mountain summit. The cry that escaped me was echoed like a Chinese whisper in every carriage behind us. I glanced to my left and caught my ride companion’s quick flash of a smile. If my lips had been able to move, I might have attempted to smile back. But then we were shooting down the other side of the incline and angling around a bend so sharp my body slithered against his. Before I could apologise we’d tilted back the other way and were hurtling towards another peak in the track. We crested it, and I can still recall that one blissful moment when I remembered that this was actually great fun. I liked the speed, I liked the momentum, I liked looking down and seeing the ground whipping past in a multicoloured blur.

  Except all at once it wasn’t whipping or blurring at all, but coming sharply into focus
as the ride jerked to an unexpected stop. Our carriage, which was already over the top of the pinnacle, came to a halt at a precarious angle, facing downwards. I tightened my vice-like grip on the bar and braced my feet against the inside of the carriage, wincing as my bruised ankle protested at the manoeuvre. Out of everything that came after, that was the thing that stuck in my head like a burr… the pain from my ankle.

  ‘Is it meant to do this?’ I asked, turning to the stranger beside me, my voice betraying the fact I already knew the answer to my question.

  He didn’t bother lying, although part of me really wished he had. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, peering over the edge of the track at the ground, which suddenly seemed incredibly far below us. Perhaps he saw the rising panic in my eyes, for he immediately back-pedalled. ‘But these things are always having technical glitches. They’ll get it sorted out in a moment or two.’

  ‘I don’t think—’ I began, but the sentence was torn from me, as without warning we shot off again. I waited for the relief to flow through me, but it never got a chance. I never saw the obstacle, the single, detached, riderless carriage from the previous ride, but the man beside me did. I heard him swear, and the fear in his voice shocked me far more than the profanity. His hand reached out and covered mine on the bar.

  ‘Hang on,’ he yelled. ‘This is going to be bad.’

  It was a very accurate prediction.

  There was no time to scream, no time to do anything. I remember the feel of his fingers gripping mine, as if united we might somehow get through this unscathed. But of course, that was impossible. Still, I think I’ll always be thankful that someone, even a stranger, was holding my hand at the moment when my life changed.

  Our carriage hit the stationary vehicle with a metal-crunching jolt, which for a split second I feared would catapult us off the track and down a hundred metres to the ground below. But instead we crumpled around the halted machinery, like a crushed plastic drink cup. I felt the impact through every bone in my body. Some broke, some were crushed, but the itemisation of my injuries was lost under a wave of pain so intense I felt as if I was drowning in it.

  11

  There was a long jarring moment of silence before the screams began. Some came from the riders behind me; some rose up like vapour from the ground below us. Was one of those voices Sasha’s? Had she been looking upward, smilingly following my thrill-seeking ride when we crashed?

  Reality came back in tiny increments, as though waking from a dream. I could feel fingers touching my face, tentatively pushing back the hair that had been whipped free from my hairband. I tried to open my eyes, but something sticky and thick was steadily dripping on to the lids. I blinked, until my vision cleared from red to pink.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I forgave the man whose blood was dripping on to me for the ridiculous question. An ugly jagged cut ran from somewhere unseen beneath his thick dark hair and emerged, like a wizard’s brand, on his forehead.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, my voice a terrified gasp. I could feel pain everywhere, each individual agony vying for supremacy. I tried to move, struggling as panic gripped me even more tightly than the twisted, crumpled metal that was imprisoning me. ‘I don’t think I can get out!’

  The man pressed his hand with surprising firmness on my shoulder. ‘Don’t even try. You could make things worse.’

  Worse than being trapped in an unstable roller-coaster carriage, God knows how many metres above ground? Wasn’t that already as bad as it could get?

  ‘What happened? Why was there another car on the track? Why didn’t they stop us in time?’ My voice was rising with each question. I’d never been hysterical before; I’d always believed I was a good-in-a-crisis kind of person. But then I’d never been in a situation this dire before. I suppose very few people ever had. Emotions were roiling through me, like lava looking for fissures in bedrock. An eruption felt inevitable, and I was pretty sure that once it started, stopping it would be beyond my control.

  ‘You have to try and keep calm,’ he urged. I nodded, imagining the tether on my control as if it were a dog’s leash that had to be wound more securely around my hand. Strangely, the analogy to something that was so much a part of my everyday life did help. A little.

  ‘Good,’ he said in response, his tone calming. ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  I considered challenging that statement, but there was something strange about his voice that worried me. He sounded suddenly weaker than he’d done only seconds before. ‘They’ll have help on the way up to us very soon. I’m sure they’ve already—’

  The rest of his sentence was lost as he suddenly pitched forward, his upper body landing on me in a breath-stealing thump, as heavy and as immovable as a dropped sack of grain. The crash had crumpled our carriage in such a way that when the man slumped forward, he had nowhere to fall except on top of me. One moment I could breathe, and the next my face was lost beneath the breadth of his shoulder.

  He was a dead weight, innocently suffocating me; taking my life and never even realising it. It took all my strength to push the flat of my hand against his shoulder. Even though he was unconscious, I could feel the solid wall of muscle beneath my palm. With each ineffectual shove I could feel my panic begin to rise. I could not, would not, survive this accident, only to die slowly and ignominiously beneath the weight of another casualty. I’d like to think it was my fighting spirit that found the strength to push him free of my face, but it was just as likely that he fortunately regained consciousness before inadvertently smothering me.

  I gasped in a huge lungful of air, like a drowning person, shrieking at the pain of a thousand sharp shards that felt as though they were piercing me from the inside out. I had no need of an X-ray machine to confirm that some of my ribs were broken.

  ‘Sorry,’ my companion apologised, as though we were commuters who’d accidentally encroached on each other’s personal space during the rush hour. I saw the effort it took him to brace his weight on one elbow to free me from his body. I looked up in concern. The small amount of colour he had left was fast disappearing from his skin even as I watched, as though the accident was gradually erasing him. Was that how I looked too?

  ‘How badly are you hurt?’ he asked, each word coming out in a husky rasp.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, hearing the panic in my voice. ‘My chest hurts when I breathe in, and my legs—’ Panic rose in me like mercury in a barometer. ‘I can’t move my legs!’

  He glanced down to where the lower half of our bodies disappeared in the convoluted remains of our carriage.

  ‘That’s hardly surprising. I think our car took the brunt of the impact.’

  I nodded, my ears tuning in to the cries of passengers from the other carriages.

  ‘Are there other people hurt?’

  He lifted his head, and I saw his blood-streaked forehead crease in a frown.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said carefully, his eyes as inscrutable as a poker player’s. What was he seeing? What wasn’t he telling me?

  He turned back to face me. ‘Mostly I can just see a lot of very frightened people back there.’

  ‘In here too,’ I added, my voice wobbling on the tears I could no longer hold back.

  His hands came up, gently cupping either side of my face. In other circumstances, it was probably the way he tenderly held a woman just before he kissed her.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. You’re not alone. I’m right here with you.’

  ‘I don’t even know your name,’ I said stupidly, as though that somehow mattered. And strangely it felt as though it did.

  ‘My name is Will,’ he said, his eyes even managing to crinkle at the edges in a smile.

  And that was how I met the man who changed my life.

  *

  ‘How long do you think it will take before help arrives?’

  Will paused in his attempts to lever up the safety bar. Beads of perspiration had broken out all over his face and his efforts had made t
he blood flow even faster from his head wound. The bar, not surprisingly, hadn’t budged a centimetre.

  ‘Soon,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here soon…’ He seemed to struggle for a moment to remember my name, even though I’d only told it to him a minute or two ago. People with a serious head injury were probably not meant to exert themselves the way he was doing. ‘Bella!’ he completed, conjuring up my name like a forgetful magician.

  Of course, he had no way of knowing how quickly help was on the way, but I wanted so much to believe him that I didn’t challenge his answer. Will returned his attention to the bar, this time attempting to use his shoulder to release the restraint. He grunted like a wounded animal, then swore using words I’m certain weren’t in ‘mild-mannered’ Clark Kent’s vocabulary. The bar stubbornly resisted all movement, confirming that his similarity to Superman really was only skin-deep.

  ‘Fuck it!’ he said, thumping angrily on the bar with his fist. ‘It won’t budge.’ He glanced back along the length of wrecked carriages, shaking his head as he watched other trapped riders with the same idea reluctantly come to the same conclusion. ‘No one is getting out of here by themselves.’ He wiped his hand across what he probably imagined was a sweat-drenched brow and looked almost surprised when his palm came away scarlet.

  ‘You’re bleeding quite badly,’ I told him, biting my lip in concern. ‘Perhaps we should try to stop it?’ The steady flow was continuing to drip on me, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. What if he passed out again from loss of blood, what if he stopped breathing?

  ‘My head is the least of our worries,’ Will said, craning his neck and looking down at the figures on the ground, who were scurrying around like displaced ants.

  ‘Can you see what’s happening down there?’

  He squinted, and repositioned his glasses a little higher on the bridge of his nose. I noticed for the first time that one of the lenses had cracked in the accident. It made him look strangely vulnerable.