Art would rather lose a hand then spend twenty minutes in a confined space with her.
‘Wait there.’ She left him standing in the hallway, as she took the stairs two at a time to get her car keys. ‘And stop being a douche canoe.’
‘What the hell’s a douche canoe?’ he shouted after her.
‘A guy with way too much testosterone and not nearly enough common sense,’ she shouted back, taking a wild guess.
‘For Christ’s sake, slow down. I’m not going to bleed to death in the next ten seconds.’
Ellie slanted a look at her passenger. He clung on to the handle above the car door, sweat glistening on his forehead, the blood having soaked through the towels she’d wrapped round his other hand in scarlet blotches.
‘I don’t care if you bleed to death,’ she replied, trying to remain calm – he was a big guy, hopefully he had a few pints to spare. ‘What I do care about is you bleeding all over my rental car.’ She eased her foot off the accelerator to take the next hairpin bend in the A30. ‘I’ve got to drop it off in Salisbury in a couple of days and I don’t want to pay a fine, or have to spend hours cleaning it.’
‘If you were worried about your stupid hire car why did you insist on driving me to A and E?’
‘Because I stupidly care if you lose your stupid hand.’
‘I’m not going to lose my hand.’
‘Not on my watch you won’t.’ She braked at the roundabout on the outskirts of Gratesbury and heard him curse. She wrestled the unfamiliar stick shift into first gear. ‘Did you seriously think you were going to carry on playing dodgeball with a rotary blade with half a hand?’
She jammed her foot on the accelerator when she spotted a gap ahead of an articulated lorry.
‘Jesus!’ He slapped his uninjured hand down on the dash. ‘Who taught you to drive?’
‘Stop changing the subject.’ She took the second exit signposted Gratesbury.
She had checked on her mobile before they set off that the minor injuries unit was still there and open at weekends in the market town. Art’s breath caught as she zipped past a tractor with at least an inch to spare on the road that took them past the town’s church and secondary school.
‘What subject would you rather talk about?’ he said drily. ‘How much longer we have to live with you at the wheel?’
They headed up the town’s main street, which was furnished with a collection of charity shops, pound shops and chintzy tourist-friendly tearooms. The narrow pavements that headed up a steep hill were mostly deserted. Apparently Sunday opening hours still hadn’t made it to Gratesbury.
‘Now who’s being Princess Drama?’ she said, taking the side street at the top of the hill past the Somerfield supermarket.
They drove past a collection of old detached stone houses, their high garden walls lovingly decorated with trailing lobelia.
She’d once moaned incessantly about the lack of any fashion options for women under sixty in Gratesbury or the chances of getting a soy vanilla Frappuccino because they didn’t even have a Seattle Coffee Company café, which were all the rage in London, when her mother had brought her here during that summer. But in retrospect, weekend trips to the town had been a quaint and pleasant way to spend the afternoon – and the Women’s Institute market had done a phenomenal lemon drizzle cake.
The road narrowed ahead and seemed to be coming to a dead end. ‘Where is this place?’ she asked, wondering why she hadn’t spotted the sign.
Art stilled beside her. A brief glance confirmed his face had gone deathly white. Sweat dripped down his temple to furrow through the stubble on his jaw. It was a sunny day, and pleasantly warm, but not that warm.
She wondered how many more pints he could afford to lose, because the metallic smell had begun to permeate the whole car.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been to it before.’
He closed his eyes and pressed his head into the headrest, the tight grimace signalling how much pain he must be in.
She almost felt bad about the Princess Drama crack. The man was nothing if not stoic.
She slowed the car, and finally spotted a blue sign emblazoned with the NHS insignia. ‘At last, found it.’
He shifted beside her as she drove into an almost empty car park. The one-story utilitarian building had a glass front and an ambulance bay with a paramedics van parked in it.
‘I hope it’s actually open,’ she said.
Still no comment.
‘Do you want to wait here while I investigate?’ she asked, concerned he might be about to pass out for real.
‘Sure.’
The bloody towel covering his injured hand had started to seep onto his T-shirt.
She got out of the car and sprinted across the lot, propelled by panic.
Art Dalton might be a pain in the arse, but she really would prefer it if he didn’t die in her rental car. Not only would that be a difficult one to explain to the car hire company, but she had a sneaking feeling her mum would be devastated.
*
‘Art, wake up, it’s open and the receptionist says the doctor can see you straight away.’
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ Art dragged his eyes open, because some bugger had attached ten-ton weighs to his lids. Ellie’s intent green gaze roamed over his face.
He must really look like shit for her to actually be anxious about him, although maybe her anxiety was more to do with the threat to her upholstery than the threat to his health.
He certainly felt like shit. His hand was throbbing as if someone had tried to hack it off with a chainsaw – not completely untrue. But worse was the sick sensation in his belly, and the anxiety that had his chest in a death grip as he stared at the plate glass panel twenty feet away.
He hated hospitals. Really hated them.
He’d been trying to convince himself all the way here, this wasn’t strictly speaking a hospital, more like a glorified GP’s surgery. And it looked deserted. He wouldn’t walk in and be accosted with the sound of hurrying feet slapping against linoleum, the smell of blood and urine and bleach, or the beep of monitors, phones ringing, hushed conversations or shouted demands, or worse, the groans and mumbles of other people’s pain – everything that had haunted him in nightmares for years.
Even so, he’d rather risk losing his hand than have to walk through those sliding glass doors in the next few minutes…
Worst of all was the knowledge that if he hadn’t been thinking about Ellie, while he was supposed to be concentrating
