It’s amazing how quickly you become institutionalized. I wake, accept the ministrations of a handful of people I now recognize, try to say the right thing to the consultants, and wait for my parents to arrive. My parents keep busy with small tasks in my room, and become uncharacteristically deferential in the face of the doctors. Dad apologizes repeatedly for my inability to bounce, until Mum kicks him, quite hard, in the ankle.
After the rounds are finished, Mum usually has a walk around the concourse shops downstairs and returns exclaiming in hushed tones at the number of fast-food outlets. ‘That one-legged man from the cardio ward, Bernard. Sitting down there stuffing his face with cheeseburger and chips, like you wouldn’t believe.’
Dad sits and reads the local paper in the chair at the end of my bed. The first week he keeps checking it for reports of my accident. I try to tell him that in this part of the city even double murders barely merit a News In Brief, but in Stortfold the previous week the local paper’s front page ran with ‘Supermarket Trolleys Left in Wrong Area of Car Park’. The week before that it was ‘Schoolboys Sad at State of Duck Pond’ so he has yet to be convinced.
On the Friday after the final operation on my hip, my mother brings a dressing-gown that is one size too big for me, and a large brown-paper bag of egg sandwiches. I don’t have to ask what they are: the sulphurous smell floods the room as soon as she opens her bag. My father wafts his hand in front of his nose. ‘The nurses’ll be blaming me, Josie,’ he says, opening and closing my door.
‘Eggs will build her up. She’s too thin. And, besides, you can’t talk. You were blaming the dog for your awful smells two years after he’d actually died.’
‘Just keeping the romance alive, love.’
Mum lowers her voice: ‘Treena says her last fellow put the blankets over her head when he broke wind. Can you imagine!’
Dad turns to me. ‘When I do it, your mother won’t even stay in the same postcode.’
There is tension in the air, even as they laugh. I can feel it. When your whole world shrinks to four walls, you become acutely attuned to slight variations in atmosphere. It’s in the way consultants turn away slightly when they’re examining X-rays or the nurses cover their mouths when they’re talking about someone nearby who has just died.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What is it?’
They look awkwardly at each other.
‘So …’ Mum sits on the end of my bed. ‘The doctor said … the consultant said … it’s not clear how you fell.’
I bite into an egg sandwich. I can pick things up with my left hand now. ‘Oh, that. I got distracted.’
‘While walking around a roof.’
I chew for a minute.
‘Is there any chance you were sleepwalking, sweetheart?’
‘Dad – I’ve never sleepwalked in my life.’
‘Yes, you have. There was that time when you were thirteen and you sleepwalked downstairs and ate half of Treena’s birthday cake.’
‘Um. I may not have actually been asleep.’
‘And there’s your blood-alcohol level. They said … you had drunk … an awful lot.’
‘I’d had a tough night at work. I had a drink or two and I just went up on the roof to get some air. And then I got distracted by a voice.’
‘You heard a voice.’
‘I was standing on the top – looking out. I do it sometimes. And there was this girl’s voice behind me and it gave me a shock and I lost my footing.’
‘A girl?’
‘I only really heard her voice.’
Dad leans forward. ‘You’re sure it was an actual girl? Not an imaginary –’
‘It’s my hip that’s mashed up, Dad, not my brain.’
‘They did say it was a girl who called the ambulance.’ Mum touches Dad’s arm.
‘So you’re saying it really was an accident,’ he says.
I stop eating. They look away from each other guiltily.
‘What? You … you think I jumped off?’
‘We’re not saying anything.’ Dad scratches his head. ‘It’s just – well – things had all gone so wrong since … and we hadn’t seen you for so long … and we were a bit surprised that you’d be up walking on the roof of a building in the wee small hours. You used to be afraid of heights.’
‘I used to be engaged to a man who thought it was normal to calculate how many calories he’d burned while he slept. Jesus. This is why you’ve been so nice to me? You think I tried to kill myself?’
‘It’s just he was asking us all sorts …’
‘Who was asking what?’
‘The psychiatrist bloke. They just want to make sure you’re okay, love. We know things have been all – well, you know – since –’
‘Psychiatrist?’
‘They’re putting you on the waiting list to see someone. To talk, you know. And we’ve had a long chat with the doctors and you’re coming home with us. Just while you recover. You can’t stay by yourself in that flat of yours. It’s –’
‘You’ve been in my flat?’
‘Well, we had to fetch your things.’
There is a long silence. I think of them standing in my doorway, my mother’s hands tight on her bag as she surveyed the unwashed bed-linen, the empty wine bottles lined up in a row on the mantelpiece, the solitary half-bar of Fruit and Nut in the fridge. I picture them shaking their heads, looking at each other. Are you sure we’ve got the right place, Bernard?
‘Right now you need to be with your family. Just till you’re back on your feet.’
I want to say I’ll be fine in my flat, no matter what they think of it. I want to do my job and come home and not think until my next shift. I want to say I can’t come back to Stortfold and be that girl again, the one who. I don’t want to have to feel the weight of my mother’s carefully disguised disapproval, of my father’s cheerful determination that it’s all okay, everything is just fine, as if saying it enough times will actually make it okay. I don’t want to pass Will’s house every day, to think about what I was part of, the thing that will always be there.
But I don’t say any of it. Because suddenly I’m tired and everything hurts and I just can’t fight any more.