Strangers (16 page)

He went to the telephone to alert the surgical team who were waiting upstairs.

Five minutes later Annie was on her way to them.

She was already gone by the time they brought Steve’s stretcher in. The pain in his leg was biting through the blur of morphine, but he twisted under the blanket they had covered him with, trying to see where she was. The accident unit looked quiet, almost ominously peaceful. Then suddenly the examination cubicle seemed full of people, their faces looming over him.

‘Annie,’ Steve said distinctly. ‘Where is she?’

They murmured amongst themselves and then someone said, soothingly, ‘She’s in good hands. On her way to theatre. Now, let’s take a look at this leg.’

The pain jabbed into him. Steve stared upwards at the bright circles of the overhead lights. They bled outwards into rainbow wheels and then contracted, hard and sharp again. He bit his teeth together to stop himself from crying out. At last the doctor straightened up and left his leg alone. ‘You’ve got a nasty fracture in the upper bone in your left leg,’ he said smoothly. ‘I think we’ll whip you up to theatre as well and get it pinned for you. We can tidy up one or two other things while you’re under the anaesthetic.’

The pain made Steve helplessly angry. He thought,
Why do they always talk like that?

But he was too weary to try to say anything. He closed his eyes, thinking about Annie’s white face under the rescue lights, and waited for them to put him to sleep.

The consultant finished what he had to do to Steve and then went out into the corridor. He was stretching to ease his muscles and thinking longingly of a whisky in the bar across the road from the hospital, but the duty sister was waiting for him. She told him briskly that Annie’s husband was still waiting in her office.

The doctor looked puzzled, glancing backwards to where Steve was lying. ‘I thought he was her husband.’

The sister shook her head. ‘Her husband is sitting in my room. He looks very shocked.’

The doctor sighed. ‘Well. I’d better go and tell him, then.’

When Annie opened her eyes again there was light streaming all round her. The brightness was shapeless at first, but then it began to form itself into long rectangles with dimmer patches separating them. She tried to turn her head and found that she couldn’t. The discovery brought a cold spasm of terror that made her eyes snap wider open, staring into the light. The light was reassuring, but she wanted to see more, to see what was beside her, and she couldn’t. She tried to gather her strength to do it but all she could feel was pain, pain everywhere, as if it had possessed the air surrounding her. Annie felt a moan rise in her throat but it was stifled because there was something blocking its way.

Then someone’s face slid forward, blotting out the rectangles of light. Annie looked carefully at it. It was a man, wearing a white coat with a high collar. Like a barber’s jacket, she thought. The man’s mouth was moving, and she realized that he was talking to her. When he stopped talking he smiled, but his eyes were watching something behind her head.

She tried to ask him what he was doing. Her tongue moved, and then she felt that she would choke. There was a tube going down her throat, and her stomach heaved against it.

The man’s face moved again, and now she could hear what he was saying. ‘Just to help you with your breathing for a little while longer, Annie. You’re doing fine now.’

She was in hospital, then. Steve had said that they would come for them before it was too late. Annie wanted to reach her hand out to touch Steve’s hand again. Her fingers moved, but her hand was too heavy to lift. There were tubes there too. She could feel the rubbery kiss of them against her wrist.

She was very tired. Annie closed her eyes again and the bright rectangles vanished.

‘She won’t die, will she?’

Martin had waited at the hospital all through the evening. It was midnight before they brought Annie out of the operating theatre. The surgeon came to find Martin in the stuffy waiting room where he had sat for hours, staring at the rubber-tiled floor. He told Martin that Annie had crush injuries to the abdomen. They had found that her spleen was ruptured and so they had removed it, and they had repaired a deep tear in her liver. The operation had revealed no other serious internal damage, but there were fractures in her right shoulder and upper arm, and deep cuts and extensive crush bruising on her legs and thighs. She was in the recovery room now, and they hoped that her condition would stabilize.

‘Can I see her?’ Martin had asked.

‘We’ll be taking her along to intensive care shortly,’ the surgeon had answered carefully. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to worry about tonight. We want to try to bring her blood pressure up. Go home and try to get some sleep now, and come in to see her in the morning. Sister will call you at once if there’s any change.’

Martin had gone home.

His mother had arrived to take care of the boys, and she was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him. Martin shook his head wearily at the familiar sight of everything. Was it only this morning that Annie had been there? He relayed the news that the surgeon had given him, and then he went upstairs to look at the boys. Benjy looked as he always did, curled up with the covers pulled close around his head, but Tom was restless, turning and muttering anxiously in his sleep.

Martin went and lay down on their double bed. He dozed fitfully, waking up constantly because he thought he heard the telephone ringing.

In the morning he went straight back to the hospital. On the telephone before he set out the sister told him that Annie was
rather poorly
. The doctor was with her now.

Martin’s car was still in the little mews near the wrecked store where he had left it yesterday. He went to the hospital by tube. All the people travelling to work held up their newspapers, and the pictures of the bombed store and the outraged tabloid headlines danced in front of his eyes. Martin turned his head and stared through the black window, thinking,
Annie, Annie
.

In a bleak little room beside the double doors of the intensive care unit, Martin saw the doctor. Annie’s surgeon had gone home to sleep, and this man introduced himself as a renal specialist.

Martin listened numbly. In the early hours of the morning Annie’s kidneys had begun to fail, and they had put her on a dialysis machine. Her blood pressure had fallen further, but they had stabilized it now.

‘It’s a question of waiting, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said.

‘She won’t die, will she?’ Martin repeated. He saw the muscle twitch under the doctor’s well-shaven cheek, and he thought, He must hear this all the time, people asking,
Will my wife die? Will my husband die?
Suddenly the enormity of what had happened struck him, and the random horror of it. Why did it have to be Annie?

‘Your wife is young and healthy. I think her chances are good. But we won’t know for a day or two.’

‘Can I see her now?’

‘Sister will take you.’

They gave him a white gown to wear, and plastic covers to pull over his shoes.

Martin followed the sister’s blue dress and starched cap through the double doors. He had a brief impression of a long room, brightly lit, partitioned into cubicles. As he passed he saw, in each bed, an inert shape fed by tubes and guarded by machines. Then the sister stopped. He looked past her and saw Annie. He knew it was Annie because of the colour of her hair on the pillow. But her face seemed to have shrunk, and her cheeks and the skin under her eyes looked bruised. There was a tube in her mouth and another in her nose, there were tubes taped to her wrists and another to her ankle. She was wearing a white cotton hospital gown and through the open front of it Martin could see a line fixed into her chest. Her bed was hemmed in by the square, hostile shapes of machines and a bag of dark red blood hung over her head, trailing its colour down into her arm. Under the gown her shoulder was strapped with white tape, and there was another taped dressing over her stomach. Looking down at her Martin felt how cruel it was that she should be so reduced. Her body looked so dispossessed, as if the machines had taken it and Annie herself had gone away somewhere, a long way off.

There was a male nurse in a white coat watching the three monitor screens at the bedhead. Martin looked away from the flickering dots that read Annie’s life out second by second.

The nurse nodded at a chair a little to one side of the bed.

‘Would you like to sit with her for a while?’ he asked cheerfully. He was Irish, Martin noted automatically. The unit was full of quiet, deftly moving people. It seemed strange that they should have individual characteristics like an Irish voice or a dark skin, and yet be part of these machines and their winking eyes.

‘It’s a pity you weren’t a minute earlier. She was awake for a little while, there,’ the nurse told him. ‘She’s dropped off again now.’

Martin sat down beside her. He reached out to take her hand, but he was afraid of dislodging the tubes. He just touched his fingertips to hers.

Martin sat with her for an hour, but Annie didn’t move. He thought of her as she had been at home, moving briskly around the kitchen or running up the garden with the boys whooping ahead of her, and he shifted on the uncomfortable chair to contain his anger. He was angry with the people who had done this to her, and he was shocked to recognize that he was angry with Annie, too, because she had gone away and he couldn’t reach her. Martin looked at the machines as if they were rivals, cutting him off from her.

‘What are they for?’ he asked, nodding at the monitor screens.

‘Pulse, blood pressure and ECG,’ the nurse said. ‘This scale monitors her central venous pressure through the line in her chest. These shunt tubes are for the dialysis machine.’

And so they held her, keeping her alive, a long way away.

After an hour he stood up stiffly and said goodbye to the nurse. Benjy and Tom were waiting at home. Martin went away down the ward without looking left or right.

‘How is she?’ Steve asked.

‘She’s holding her own,’ they told him. ‘Her husband’s with her.’

Steve had been thinking about the hours that they had lived through together. The darkness of them was still almost more real to him than his curtained segment of the bright ward. He could hear the nurses going to and fro beyond the curtains, but he could hear Annie’s whispering voice just as clearly. It was Annie he wanted to see, and talk to, now that the darkness had gone. Annie and he knew each other. In the long hours she had become his friends, his family, and he knew that he had become hers. But Annie was lying upstairs in the intensive care unit, and her husband was waiting beside her.

By the time the evening came Steve had recovered from the anaesthetic. He knew he had, because although the memory of yesterday hadn’t loosened its claw-hold, he could distinguish quite clearly between the memory and the reality of now, in the hospital ward. As if to confirm it a nurse with a little starched frill pinned to the top of her head came and pushed the curtains back, smiling at him.

‘There now. We’ll give you a bit of a view, now that you’ve woken up properly.’

Steve saw four beds opposite, and the occupants peering across at him. The table in the middle of the ward was banked with a great mound of flowers. He lay against the pillows looking at them, hypnotized by the generosity of the colours.

Annie woke up again, and she saw that the bright rectangles overhead had been dimmed. They were lights, she understood, and if they had been turned down it must be night-time now. How many nights had gone? She swallowed on the tube that stuck into her mouth, and felt the nausea rising behind it again.

Another nurse was looking down at her. This one was a woman, and Annie saw with intense clarity the contrast between the black skin of her face and the whiteness of the cap that covered her hair.

‘Hello, dear,’ the nurse said. ‘Your husband has been here all evening, but he’s just gone off home. He told me to tell you that everything is all right. Tom and Benjy send their love, and you’re not to worry about anything. So you won’t, will you?’

The nurse smiled at her, and Annie looked at the warm, reassuring contrast of light and dark again. She tried to say,
Martin
, but the tube gagged her. She realized all over again that she couldn’t talk or move, and the pain that had attacked her down in the darkness was even more intense here. She knew that she must be safe here under these lights. The nurse’s smile was so wide and white and confident. But still the fear came back and clawed at her. Where had Steve gone? She couldn’t even turn her head to look for him. Steve would understand what was happening. He had been there with her, every minute. She could hear quite clearly what he had said to her. She could even see through his eyes his Nan’s hunched figure shuffling to and fro in her cramped flat, Steve’s own flat with its big, abstract paintings on the white walls. Why wasn’t he here then?

She tried to speak again, this time to call his name as she had done in the terrible darkness. But he didn’t answer now, and the black nurse put her warm hand on Annie’s arm.

‘Lie nice and still, there’s a good girl. You don’t want to upset all my machines, do you?’

Annie tried to think,
What machines?
The answer hovered somewhere beyond the edge of her understanding, like the outer edge of one of the lights overhead that lay out of her field of vision. Its elusiveness seemed more unbearable than the pain, and Annie felt the tears gather behind her eyes and then roll out at the corners.

The nurse bent over her and dabbed them away.

‘Oh dear, now,’ Annie heard her murmur. ‘There’s no need for this. You’re doing just fine.’

Early in the morning two officers from the anti-terrorist squad came to see Steve. They sat stiffly beside his bed with their notebooks, sympathetic but persistent.

‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said. ‘There was nothing. I just held open the door for the girl, and then the bomb went off. I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t aware of anyone else.’