Strangers (20 page)

At the lift doors she watched mesmerized as the light flicked upwards over the indicator buttons. The doors opened with their pneumatic hiss and inside the green-painted box the musty, metallic smell was so strong that Annie looked round to see if it affected Brendan too.

He smiled at her. ‘Okay, my love?’

He pressed the button. As they swooped down the sensation was so intense that Annie was briefly afraid that she might faint. But now, with bewildering speed, the falling stopped and the doors hissed open again. Annie blinked in the shafts of light that fell around them and they swung along another echoing corridor. At the end of it she saw a ward. They were moving so fast that she wondered if Brendan was running.

The doorway yawned and they swept inside. Annie gasped at the jungle of flowers and flower-printed curtains, the scents and the profusion of colour, and the light and dark shadows dappled over the vivid red floor. It was as if there had been only the terrifying darkness, and then a world bled of all its colour, and now the light and vividness of it had all come flooding back at once.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she whispered.

Brendan laughed. ‘Ward Two’s been called a lot of things. Never beautiful.’

A bed was waiting for her. The sheets were as white as a hillside under thick snow. Brendan was talking to the ward nurses. Annie could distinguish the separate cadences of all their voices but the impressions were crowding in too thickly for her to be able to hear what they were saying. Through the window behind her bed she saw a vista of red-brick walls, more windows, drainpipes, and pigeons sitting on a ledge, an intricate network, each part of it defined with spotlit clarity.

On the bedside locker there was a poinsettia in a pot. Annie had always disliked the assertive red flowers. Now she thought she had never seen anything as lovely as the flaring scarlet bracts with their ruff of jagged bright green leaves beneath. She wanted to touch their sappy coolness with the tips of her fingers. There were more flowers waiting in a great cellophane-wrapped spray on the bed. One of the nurses held the bouquet out for Annie to see. The flowers were chrysanthemums, every shade from pure white to deepest russet bronze. The curling yellow satin ribbon bows crackled with the shiny cellophane. They held out the card to her too, and Annie read the florist’s unformed handwriting.

With love and best wishes for a speedy recovery, from everyone at Rusholme
.

Rusholme was Thomas’s school.

Without any warning, the kindness of the gesture made her cry. The rush of sensation seemed to have peeled away a protective layer of her skin, and Annie felt how vulnerable she had become. She sat in her wheelchair with tears running down her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why flowers should make me cry.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ Brendan told her.

Another of the nurses took the flowers. ‘I’ll put them in water, shall I? Mind you, I’m no flower arranger.’

They helped her into bed. The sheets felt crisp and smooth under her feet, and the pillows were soft behind her head. The tears were drying stiffly on her face and Annie sniffed a little.

‘That’s more like it,’ Brendan said. When they had made her comfortable he kissed her on the cheek and waved at her as he left.

‘You’ve done well. We’re proud of you, upstairs.’

‘That Brendan,’ the other nurse exclaimed when she brought back the chrysanthemums in a tall vase. She pulled the curtains tight around Annie’s bed. ‘Shall I leave you to get your breath back now?’

Annie lay in her quiet space. She looked around it, examining each detail as though she had never seen anything like it before. The light from her window lay thickly on the white covers and the cream-painted curve of the bed-frame, and on the flowers in their place on the locker.

Very slowly, Annie put out her hand. With the tip of her finger she traced the waxy curve of a chrysanthemum petal. The intense yellow of the flower seemed to trap the light, and then to beam it out again, as rich and buttery-warm as burnished gold.

In that instant Annie felt a beat of pure happiness. The charge of it diffused all through her body, warming it and weakening it with its glow until her hand dropped to her side and she lay back helplessly against her pillows.

The world had never seemed so beautiful or so simple. She understood not only that she was going to live, but how precious life was. Gratitude for it took hold of her. It swelled in her chest and throat until she could hardly breathe, it danced in the light and dazzled her eyes, and it sang in her ears and blocked out the mundane clatter of the hospital ward.

Annie was smiling. She was awed by the munificent beauty of the gift that had been presented to her, and the reflected glow of it bathed and transformed everything around her. Even her own hands were beautiful, stretched out on the sheet in front of her. Her vision was so penetrating that in her mind’s eye she could see the tiny threads of capillaries as they branched away, full of resourceful life, under the bruised and discoloured skin.

Annie was weak, but she was also unshakably strong again.
I am alive
, she told herself.
I won’t be afraid any more
.

Annie was still smiling when the curtains parted a little at the foot of her bed. She had heard murmuring voices beyond them, and now a nurse’s cheerful invitation, ‘Go ahead. She’s quite decent.’

The curtains opened wider and a man came through them. He was moving awkwardly, on crutches, and one of the flowered hangings caught over his shoulder. The man shrugged it off without taking his eyes from Annie’s face.

Annie saw his slight frown of concern or concentration. His eyebrows were very dark, darker than his hair, and they drew close together over his eyes. There were deep lines beside his mouth and she saw that his hands were clenched too tightly on the arms of his crutches.

She had never seen his face, but she knew him as well as she would ever know anyone.

‘Steve,’ she said softly.

His frown disappeared then.

Annie put her hand up to her bruised face and then, with the recollection that she had nothing to hide from Steve, she let it drop again.

At last, still looking at her, he said, ‘You look so happy.’

‘I am,’ she answered. She held out her free hand, the same hand that had held on to his all through their hours together. Steve balanced upright as he put his crutches aside and then, holding on to the edge of the bed for support, he swung himself slowly along until he could take her hand.

The memory that the touch brought back caught them and held them. It was a long moment before either of them could move.

Then Steve came closer, perching on the bed beside her. He lifted his other hand and reached under the torn ends of her hair to touch his fingers to the nape of her neck. Then, quickly and quite naturally, he leant forward and kissed her cheek.

Annie felt the colour rising into her face as if she was a girl again.

‘You look so happy,’ he repeated and Annie found herself laughing.

‘I look dreadful.’

‘No, Annie, you don’t.’

Steve didn’t see the bruises, or the unhealthy pallor of the rest of her skin, or the half-healed graze blurring the corner of her mouth. He saw the Annie he had imagined when her husband told him that she was going to live. Laughing, as she had been a moment ago, with her fair hair loose around her face. She had blue eyes and warmly coloured skin. She wasn’t beautiful, or even particularly striking, but she was full of life.

‘Look,’ Annie said.

She held out their linked hands to touch the tightly furled petals of the yellow chrysanthemum.

They looked at the flowers, and then at the simple things all around them, a plastic water jug and a glass, the chipped wooden locker, the curtains and the dingy view from the window. They were both thinking about the pain in the darkness, and their fear that they would never see anything so ordinary and beautiful again. Annie felt her happiness rising once more, rippling and ballooning outwards until she could have floated with it. She looked at Steve’s face and saw from the light in it that he felt it too.

They smiled at each other in their triumphant pride that they had survived. Steve lifted her hand and touched his mouth to her knuckles. For a moment there was nothing to say. They knew everything already, yet they had to begin all over again, here in the warm daylight.

When they did speak again the questions came spilling out together and they broke off together too, half embarrassed and half laughing, like adolescents.

‘Go on.’

‘No, you go on,’ Steve said.

‘I was just going to ask how you are. Is your leg bad?’

He told her briefly, shrugging it off. As he talked Annie listened to the familiar sound of his voice, trying to piece it together with his face and the shape of his head. His attractiveness surprised her. In her mind’s eye, down in the darkness, he had been a bigger, bulkier man with blunt, assured features. But this Steve was lean, and she guessed that before the accident he must have been very fit. His dark hair was cut short over his forehead, which made him look younger than the age she knew he was. There were marked frown lines between his dark eyebrows and more lines beside his mouth, but the mouth itself curled humorously. When he smiled, she found herself smiling back.

‘I know how you are,’ Steve told her.

‘How come?’

‘I’ve had regular bulletins. Mostly from the nurses, once from your surgeon. And your husband came to see me on Christmas Eve.’

‘Martin did?’ Annie was startled.

‘He told me that you were going to be all right. He said that you smiled at him.’

‘I don’t remember.’ Annie was thinking about the blur of the overhead lights and Brendan’s face looming over hers, the possessive pain. ‘I remember hearing the carol singers. My nurse told me afterwards that it was Christmas. What else did Martin say?’

‘He wanted to thank me for helping you through.’ There was an expression in Steve’s eyes that Annie couldn’t fathom. ‘I told him it wasn’t necessary, because we helped each other.’

‘Yes,’ Annie said.

The raw recollections gathered around them. Annie knew how badly she needed to talk to Steve. Not to Martin, because to tell him how it had been in the darkness would be to start at the beginning. It was only Steve who could exorcise it.

‘Are you still afraid?’ he asked, his voice gentle.

Annie looked around again, at the flowers on the locker and the curtains’ pattern. The radiance of the light had faded.

‘No, I’m not afraid. We’re safe in hospital, aren’t we? You said all along that we would be. Do you know what? The first thing I remember thinking, when I came round afterwards, with a tube in my throat, was,
Steve said that they would come for us in time
. I tried to reach out for your hand again, but I couldn’t move. I was afraid then. There were more tubes in my wrist. I could feel them touching my skin.’ Annie put her fingers up to touch the corner of her mouth. ‘I’m only afraid now when I dream. I dream that we’re buried again, and that we won’t be rescued. And that there’s no air, so we can’t breathe. I wake up choking, then. The worst dreams, nightmares, are the ones where I’m alone. You aren’t there.’

Steve took her hand and held it. He fitted his fingers between hers and clasped them to hold their palms together.

‘Remember?’ he demanded. ‘I was there. I’m here now.’ And then, as if she might reject the intimacy that that implied, he said quickly, ‘The dreams are only dreams. They’ll go away.’

‘Will you stay?’ Annie asked suddenly. ‘To talk?’ They had already talked so much. ‘Not now, I mean. But some time?’

‘Yes,’ he promised her. ‘I need that, too.’

He could hear someone walking down the ward.
Not too long
, the staff nurse had warned him when she showed him in. Steve let go of her hand. He tapped at the solid leg plaster under the folds of his bathrobe.

‘I’m going to be here for weeks,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Long after they’ve sent you back to the real world. I should think we’ll have plenty of time for conversation.’ He nodded past the curtains. ‘I’m in the next door ward. It links to this one via a charming day room. There are a great many vintage magazines and a dozen or so videotapes of bloodthirsty films. I can’t wait to show you round.’

Annie smiled at him. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’

The staff nurse came and began briskly pulling aside the curtains. Annie saw other beds across the ward, women looking over at her, more flowers.

‘Don’t tire her out, will you?’ the staff said. She looked pointedly at Steve and added, ‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the chair?’ Meaning, Annie translated silently, ‘Don’t sit on the bed.’ She sensed Steve’s amusement answering her own.

‘I would,’ Steve said regretfully. ‘But I couldn’t lower myself into it. I’m going to hobble back now and leave Annie in peace. Will you help me?’

Annie recognized his charm. The nurse moved happily to take his arm.

‘I’ll be back as soon as they let me,’ he promised Annie. They began to shuffle slowly away. Without knowing why she did it, Annie told him, ‘Benjy and Tom are coming this afternoon. I haven’t seen them since it happened.’

Steve paused, looking back at her.

‘I’m glad they’re coming,’ he said gravely. Then the nurse led him away through the day room doors.

There were three hours to wait until afternoon visiting time. Annie made herself be patient.

One by one the women in the ward came over to talk to her. Two of them had been injured in the bombing. Others had already been discharged, and new patients unconnected with it had taken their places. Annie had the sense of other tragedies and losses, piling up within the hospital walls, each one obscured in its turn by the next.

She remembered that she had wanted to ask Steve if he felt angry. She looked towards the door, thinking about him. He had said that he would come back. The knowledge was a firm, steady point in the thoughts that moved like fish, directionless, inside her head.

At two-thirty exactly, Martin and the boys came in. They must have been waiting outside for visiting time to begin. Annie saw them immediately. They stood at the end of the new ward, looking around for her, Martin stooping protectively behind the children. Tom’s face was anxious and serious, but Benjy was swinging Martin’s hand and staring along the beds. Suddenly he pointed and called out.