had made him walk up and down, a little further every time.
Frank and Mitchie and the other men cheered and called out as he struggled to and fro.
He was resting in his armchair now while the nurses made his bed. One of them looked backwards over her shoulder at him as she worked.
‘I’ve got some news for you, Steve. One of my friends works in the ICU. She told me when she came off last night that they’re bringing your friend down today. There’s a bed for her in there.’ She nodded across the room to the door that linked the day room to the women’s ward. ‘So you’ll be able to see each other.’
‘Aw,’ the other nurse said, ‘isn’t that nice?’
Steve looked at the door, and at the reflections of light from the windows on the floor separating him from it. His fingers moved on the metal shaft of the crutches propped against his chair.
‘When?’ he asked. ‘When will they bring her down?’
The nurses looked at each other. ‘After rounds, I should think.’
Now that the time had come, Steve was afraid. He could feel the flutter of fear in his stomach. Annie was so important. She was important because she was herself, but also because it was only through Annie that he could learn to come to terms with what had been done to them both.
He was waiting to see her, waiting to begin it together.
Yet he was afraid. What if Annie looked at him with the blank, polite face of a stranger?
She mustn’t do that.
Steve curled his hands deliberately round the crutches and held them tight while he sat looking at the door of the ward.
Brendan and another nurse helped Annie up from her bed. They had put one of her own nightdresses on her, and she looked down at her legs under the frilled hem of it. They looked unfamiliar, very thin, their whiteness veined and mottled with blue, as though they belonged to someone else. Brendan brought her blue wool dressing gown and helped her left arm into the sleeve. Her right arm was strapped up and so he draped the dressing gown over it and tied the sash around her waist.
A wheelchair was waiting beside the bed. They lowered her into it, then put her slippers on her feet.
‘There you are, now,’ Brendan beamed at her.
A person again, Annie completed for him.
For a week, since she had heard the carol singers on Christmas Day, her body had been reassembling itself. It was defined now, within its own skin. It no longer blurred at the edges through tubes into incomprehensible machines. She had become an individual again, dressed in her own clothes, colours and materials she had chosen for herself. She was well enough to be taken out of this quiet, humming room with its bright lights and immobile bodies.
Brendan took the handles of her chair and pushed.
Annie was suddenly frightened. She was used to the room. She had given herself up to it, and the nurses and doctors and their machines had done everything for her. Now they were thrusting the responsibility back at her. The doors came closer, and she was afraid of what lay beyond them. Annie’s hand clenched in her lap, and she felt the weakness of her grip.
The nurses in their white coveralls came to the door to see her off. Even the sister left her observation platform for a moment.
‘Good luck!’ they said.
‘Be good, downstairs where we can’t keep an eye on you!’
‘What does she want to be good for?’ Brendan pouted.
The doors opened.
Annie took a deep breath. She had come this far, and to stop was unthinkable. This afternoon, she told herself, she would be able to see Thomas and Benjy.
Annie turned round to smile at the circle of nurses.
‘Thank you,’ she said. They waved, and the doors closed behind her wheelchair.
Annie faced the hospital corridor as they rolled along. Brendan was whistling behind her. She saw the little cream-painted curve where the wall met the maroon vinyl floor, and the scuff marks in the paintwork. A porter passed them and she noticed a tiny three-cornered tear near the hem of his overall coat. A group of student nurses in pink uniform dresses were as bright as figures in a primitive painting. It was as if the light were brighter than she had seen it before, or as if a thin veil of mist had lifted to define sharper contours and strengthen the colours that sizzled around her. It was a grey, lowering day outside the windows but Annie thought that the utilitarian corridor had been illuminated by bright sunshine. She could hear with perfect clarity, too, the separate sharp notes of Brendan’s whistled tune, the clash of a trolley, footsteps and voices, traffic, even distinguishing the diesel sputter of a taxi in the street outside.
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
