be honest, as long as there’s something in the drawer I don’t think he’d care what it was. I can tell him I had a crisis with the washing machine or the dog ate it or something.’
Or she could just tell him the truth, but the whole thing was irrelevant at the moment. She was hardly going to get pregnant if they didn’t—
‘You need to eat lots of dairy, too,’ Kate was saying, ‘but be careful with the soft cheese and unpasteurised milk products if there’s the slightest possibility you might be pregnant.’
A humourless little huff of laughter escaped from Fran’s mouth. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing.’
Kate clicked her tongue sympathetically. ‘Did you broach the subject of going away?’ she asked gently.
Fran laughed again, but it was just as bad as the last one and utterly unconvincing. She swallowed hard. ‘He’s—He hasn’t got time.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Probably, but if he wanted to, he’d make time—wouldn’t he?’
Kate smiled. ‘Don’t ask me. Men are a mystery.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Fran murmured.
‘So do something romantic at home. Cook a nice meal, put something pretty on …’
‘He’ll think I’ve run up a credit card,’ she said dryly, and then felt saddened that they’d come so far down the line that they’d come to this, her talking about her marriage to a woman she hardly knew, trying to gain insight into her husband’s behaviour. Not to mention her own …
‘Kate, sorry—Ah. Fran. I’m glad you’re here,’ Nick said, his face troubled. ‘Um, I’ve had a call from Ben. Mike’s got a bit of a problem. He was apparently cutting down a tree—’
‘What?’ The word came out soundlessly from lips suddenly numb. She felt the colour drain from her face, her limbs curiously heavy and her heart lumping with dread. She lifted a hand to her mouth. ‘Not the chainsaw …’
‘No—no, a branch rolled onto him and it’s pinning his leg down. Ben’s with him—thinks he’s got a fracture but the ambulances are all out on a big RTA and it’ll take them ages to get to him, so I’m going to pop over there with a bit of pain relief while the fire crew get the branch off him. I’m taking morphine, but I just wondered if we’d got Entonox, Kate.’
‘Yes—I’ll get it. And we’ll come. Come on, Fran, I’ll drive you.’
The props weren’t working. The weight of the upper trunk was too great, and they couldn’t shift enough wood to secure it. The fire crew was gathered round Mike, having a muttered conference that didn’t inspire confidence. He just wanted to get the hell out, and he needed those drugs.
‘I’m going to dig it out,’ Joe said. ‘If I undermine it, under that leg and foot, we can ease him out. The other one’s free.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ he mumbled, but the fire officer in charge had other ideas.
‘Sorry, I can’t let you get that close,’ he said.
Joe’s reply was pithy and not in the least bit polite, and it made Mike smile. Seconds later he felt him digging, felt Joe’s hands under his leg while Ben supported it, stripping away the shale that was digging into his shin, and then his foot moved a fraction and he let out a whimper as he felt his leg sliding down gradually, away from the weight of the trunk.
He bit down on his lip, knowing it was necessary to dig around his foot so he could wriggle free but not sure he could take it.
Not without pain relief, but Nick was there, bringing him Entonox. He knew about that—Kirsten had had it when she’d been in labour with Sophie, and he sucked greedily on the mouthpiece while Joe tunnelled away like a mole, shifting the stony soil away from his leg and foot while he tried not to yell. Nick was putting something in his hand—some kind of IV set—and then injecting something that made him feel woozy and lightheaded.
‘Whazat?’ he mumbled.
‘Morphine, and metaclopromide, to stop you feeling sick from the morphine.’
‘’S lovely,’ he replied. It was. The pain was going, fading a bit, less global.
‘Right, that’s as good as it gets,’ Joe said.
‘OK.’ That was Ben. ‘Mike, can you get your legs out yourself? Just slowly and carefully.’
He took a deep breath of the Entonox, wriggled his left leg free, took another suck of the gas and tried to move.
Pain lanced through him despite the drugs, and he swore viciously, suddenly wide awake. ‘I need a hand, guys,’ he said, sweat beading on his brow. ‘Just pull me out, nice and carefully. I can’t do this myself.’
‘It is free,’ Ben said, feeling round his leg gently. ‘We should be able to do it. It’s a very unstable fracture, though, and I don’t want to drag you. And you need a spinal board.’
‘To hell with that. What I need is to get out of here now,’ he muttered as the tree groaned again. He felt it shift against his calf, and yelled, ‘Just get me—Joe and Nick maybe?—and he could feel Ben’s hands on his leg, steadying it. On the count of three they pulled, he gasped and swore and bit hard on his lip, and then he was free, and they were dragging and lifting him away from the tree while everything went black for a second and he fought the urge to scream with the pain.
As they put him down and shifted him to his back, Fran’s white, terrified face swam into view. He thought she was going to yell at him, but she just smiled a little shakily and said, ‘I didn’t know you knew half of those words.’ And then with a last tortured groan the tree slipped and fell the last few feet with a thundering crash, and she burst into tears.
‘What the hell were you doing down there on your own with the chainsaw?’
He gave a rueful smile, and Fran felt a terrible urge to smack him. She’d hung on as long as she could, but the ‘what the hell’ question just wouldn’t stay locked up any longer, and she sat by his bed in the hospital and clamped her hands together. So she didn’t strangle him, or so they didn’t shake?
She didn’t know. She didn’t care. All she cared about was that Mike was alive—damaged, but alive—and only because Ben, Joe and Nick had got him out when they had.
She and Kate had got there just as he had been yelling at them to pull him out, and she’d watched in horror as his face had blanched and he’d let fly a string of words she’d never heard him use before.
And then the trunk had dropped, right where he’d been lying, and one of the firemen had been lucky to duck out of the way of the flying branches.
It could have been so, so much worse.
Infinitely worse. Unimaginably worse—
‘I’ve done the milking for you, you idle skiver—and can you stick to Monopoly and not pick-up-sticks in future?’ Joe said, walking up behind her and saving him from the strangling he so surely deserved.
‘Hi,
