It was a garden. The sunlight was almost as yellow as our dresses. Amy snatched my doll. I made a grab for it but she dodged and ran away, laughing. I ran after her. Fast. Faster. So fast I was almost flying. Faster than a bike or a horse. As fast as a car. Too fast…No. Stop…I want to slow down…
I'm in the car. Something terrible is about to happen. Mum's foot shoves the accelerator pedal to the floor. The corner flashes forward in slow motion. Amy screams from the seat behind. Shut up. Shut up…can't breathe. A moment of glorious flight… the car hits the steep slope with bone juddering force. Spun over and over, sky, grass, stone, sky… A tunnel of terror and noise.
A wet sucking pop and agony flares in my left shoulder. My arm won't move right and dangles. Snap! It breaks. White stars explode behind my eyes, fading into blackness when my head hits something hard. A cracking thud, that seems to come from inside my skull.
Silence. Deafening silence. Why isn't Amy screaming anymore? Hanging upside down, next to Mum. A pair of strange, dark fruit. One arm trapped by the seatbelt, the other dangles, useless. Try to turn. Pain like fire. But it's ok. It has to be ok. Mum is here. Mum will make it better. I swing, a loose bag of broken bones. Can't breathe can't breathe can't breathe. Mum? Slowly, agonizingly, I turn—Mummy? —green eyes, flat, greyed over. Dead. Her head hangs at an odd angle on her neck.
I remember now.
I want to bleach the image from my brain.
I don't ever want to look away.
If I look away this will be true. Then Mum's head creaks on her neck. Turning. I see broken bone protruding, shockingly white amidst the red. Her lips move. Shaping words I can’t hear. Something that starts with ‘ahhh’ twists into ‘orrr’ and ‘ffff’. Through the deafening horror I can almost hear the last syllable – ‘errrr’.
I scream and scream and scream…
A band tightened on my left arm. Puff, puff puff, wheeeeeze…Tighter and tighter.
Haze! I struggled to move but my body was too heavy. My right arm jerked but it felt like I was lifting a fifty pound weight.
"All right, honey, your blood pressure's a bit low but perfectly normal." The voice was female. This was familiar… I wasn’t in danger now. No one had hold of me. Haze had hurt my right arm, not my left. I struggled to find my eyes to open them. The band was removed from my left arm. A tearing noise. Velcro being pulled undone. I added up the information: a tightening cuff, sheets that crackled beneath me, uncomfortable pillows, that tone of voice.
I was in hospital.
My eyes snapped open. A nurse looked down at me, assessing. "Still with us then, Emily?"
"Yuh-yes…" My voice was tiny. I remembered the rest now. Scraps and fragments. Haze breaking my arm. Blacking out. Coming round to find Mrs Holden bending over me grimly, a casserole abandoned on the stable floor. And Helen. Leaving. Slipping out of my mind like a reluctant guest sneaking out of a party early. I was fuzzy on the details of how I'd got here, the hospital in Keighley. Then, right after my x-ray, I'd passed out.
Mrs Holden was still here, wearing yet another salmon pink concoction. I groaned. Not her.
"Do you need some pain relief, love?" The nurse looked concerned. Kind face with dark circles under her eyes.
"M'ok. Th-thanks." I tried on a wobbly smile. The nurse wasn't buying it. "Wuh where's D-Dad?"
"Your father was here but he had to go back for a funeral service.” Mrs Holden was clearly keen to play messenger. The nurse’s expression said she was biting back whatever she wanted to say. I guessed Mrs Holden hadn’t shut up the whole time I was here. "Anyway, now I have all the news, I'll head back to Arncliffe. I expect you'll have some visitors tomorrow."
"Tuh tuh tomorrow…?" Panic settled on me like hundreds of twitching, winged insects.
"Yes, Emily dear. Tomorrow. After your operation." She sounded overly patient, as if I'd caused quite enough trouble without asking questions as well. "That's only a back-slab remember?" She touched my bandaged right arm. I flinched at the contact. I didn't want anyone to touch me, not after Haze had done what he did. I felt his cold fingers even now.
Mrs Holden frowned but withdrew her hand. "They have to put you under and reposition the bones before they can put a full cast on. So you're to stay in for the night. They want to check you didn't injure your head too." She sounded positively thrilled with the detail. I was feeling too small and lost to rake up any anger at my dad. My surviving parent who hadn’t taken the time to see if I was ok.
"Whatever made you go climbing in that old hayloft anyway, dear? The boards are quite rotted through." She tsked and the nurse rolled her eyes behind Mrs Holden's back.
So that was the story. I'd done something stupid. I'd fallen out of the hayloft.
"Are you sure you didn't hit your head?" Mrs Holden asked with false solicitude, desperate for more gory detail. Perhaps something to run to the doctor with. Or Dad, more like.
"Nuh no. H-head fine." My voice had gone all high and wobbly. I'd gone charging off to confront Haze with no plan and no power over him. Something stupid, alright.
I watched Mrs Holden's vast salmon-pink behind retreat down the corridor. The cubicle curtains were drawn on either side of me. I should have been glad of the privacy. Instead I felt more trapped than ever.
I hated hospitals. I couldn't believe I was back again so soon after the accident. As though, after nearly nine months away, I had been gestating new injuries to bring to birth. All of the helplessness flooded back. The tick-tocking rhythms of tests and observations and lights-out and shift changes.
I quivered inside. The smell: thick disinfectant, surgical spirit, faint metallic blood, other, worse bodily fluids, the lavender and aging flesh reek of the old ladies in the other orthopaedic beds. And cold. Soft, cold fingers of death, everywhere…
I overheard two doctors discussing my chart. They thought my fall might be the result of some sort of delayed effect of my original head injury. Bubbles of hysteria rose in my throat. What would they say if I told them what really happened?
The look on Grace's—no, Kate's—face as I lay clutching my arm. The look in Haze's eye right before he snapped my bones. Not malevolent. Not cruel. Politely inquiring. Calculating. Vaguely interested in exactly how much pressure he needed to apply. There was no pleasure in causing pain. Nothing humane to appeal too. Only actions and results. In this case my silence. No more meddling.
Remember.
I shuddered. Haze's touch was an ice burn, dark and sickening beneath my skin. He took all my warmth, my energy. The cold curled at the centre of my bones. The fear lay even deeper.
I was not allowed any food since I was having an operation in the morning. There was no way to replenish my energy. To shut down my ‘centres’ as Mrs Cranford had taught me. Night drew in but it was never really night-time in a hospital. Lights were still on, sly neon fingers slipping under heavy doors. Machines beeped reassurances that their charges were alive, stable. The swish and foot-falls of nurses walking the wards.
I shivered and shook, peering into the dim light, too afraid to shut my eyes.