picked up my son.
I started to run.
You can’t run far with a four-year-old child in your arms. They are already too big, too heavy, too awkward to carry with any speed.
I wanted to get Pat home to the car, but I staggered out of the park knowing that wasn’t going to be quick enough.
I burst into the café where we had eaten green spaghetti, Pat still pale and silent and bleeding in my arms. It was lunch time, and the place was full of office workers in suits stuffing their faces. They stared at us open-mouthed, forks twirled with carbonara suspended in mid-air.
‘Get an ambulance!’
Nobody moved.
Then the kitchen doors flew open and Cyd came through them, a tray piled with food in one hand and her order pad in the other. She looked at us for a moment, flinching at the sight of Pat’s lifeless body, the blood all over my hands and shirt, the blind panic on my face.
Then she expertly slid the tray on to the nearest table and came towards us.
‘It’s my son! Get an ambulance!’
‘It will be quicker if I drive you,’ she said.
There were white lines on the hospital floor that directed you to the casualty department, but before we got anywhere near it we were surrounded by nurses and porters who took Pat from my arms and laid him on a trolley. It was a trolley for an adult, and he looked tiny on it. Just so tiny.
Tears came to my eyes for the first time, and I blinked them away. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Your child in a hospital. It’s the worst thing in the world.
They wheeled him deeper into the building, under the sick yellow strip lights of crowded, noisy corridors, asking me questions about his birthday, his medical history, the cause of his head wound.
I tried to tell them about the bike on the diving board above the empty swimming pool, but I don’t know if it made much sense to them. It didn’t make much sense to me.
‘We’ll take care of him,’ a nurse said, and the trolley banged through green swing doors.
I tried to follow them and caught a glimpse of men and women in green smocks with masks on their faces, the polished chrome of medical equipment, and a kind of padded slab where they laid him down, that slab as thin and ominous as a diving board.
Cyd gently took my arm.
‘You have to let him go,’ she said, and led me to a bleak little waiting area where she bought us coffee in polystyrene cups from a vending machine. She filled mine with sugar without asking if that’s how I liked it.
‘Are you okay?’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘I’m so stupid.’
‘These things happen. Do you know what happened to me when I was about that age?’
She waited for my reply. I looked up at her wide-set brown eyes.
‘What?’
‘I was watching some kids playing baseball and I went up and stood right behind the batter. Right behind him.’ She smiled at me. ‘And when he swung back to hit the ball, he almost took my head off. That bat was only made of some kind of plastic, but it knocked me out cold. I actually saw stars. Look.’
She pushed the black veil of hair off her forehead. Just above her eyebrow there was a thin white scar about as long as a thumbnail.
‘I know you feel terrible now,’ she said. ‘But kids are tough. They get through these things.’
‘It was so high,’ I said. ‘And he fell so hard. The blood – it was everywhere.’
But I was grateful for Cyd’s thin white scar. I appreciated the fact that she had been knocked unconscious as a child. It was good of her.
A young woman doctor came and found us. She was about twenty-five years old, and looked as though she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since medical school. She was vaguely sympathetic, but brisk, businesslike, as honest as a car wreck.
‘Patrick is in a stable condition, but with such a severe blow to the head we have to take X-rays and a brain scan. What I’m worried about is the possibility of a depressed fracture to the skull – that’s when the skull is cracked and bony fragments are driven inward, causing pressure on the brain. I’m not saying that’s happened. I’m saying it’s a possibility.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
Cyd took my hand and squeezed it.
‘This is going to take a while,’ the doctor said. ‘If you and your wife would like to stay with your son tonight, there’s time to go home and get some things.’
‘Oh,’ Cyd said. ‘We’re not married.’
The doctor looked at me and studied her chart.
‘You’re Patrick’s father, Mr Silver?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m just a friend,’ Cyd said. ‘I should go,’ she told me, standing up. I could tell that she thought she was getting in the way. But she wasn’t at all. She was the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
‘And the child’s mother?’ the doctor asked.
‘She’s out of the country,’ I said. ‘Temporarily out of the country.’
‘You might want to call her,’ the doctor said.
My mother had been crying, but she wasn’t going to do it in public. She always saved her tears for behind closed doors, for the eyes of the family.
At the hospital she was all gritty optimism and common sense. She asked practical questions of the nurses. What was the risk of permanent damage? How long before we would know? Was it okay for grandparents to stay the night? It made me feel better having her around. My dad was a bit different.
The old soldier looked lost in the hospital cafeteria. He wasn’t used to sitting and waiting. He wasn’t used to situations that were beyond his control. His thick tattooed arms, the broad shoulders, his fearless old heart – they were all quite useless in here.
I knew that he would have done anything for Pat, that he loved him with the unconditional love you can probably only feel for a child, a love that’s far more difficult to feel when your perfect child has grown into one more fallible adult. He loved Pat in a way that he had once loved me. Pat was me before I had a chance to screw everything up. It gnawed at my father inside that all he could do was sit and wait.
‘Does anyone want any more tea?’ he said, desperate to do something, anything to make our miserable lot a little better.
‘We’ll
