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
