‘Behave yourself.’
‘No option, in this plaster.’
Cass sketched a model’s little pouting gesture of mock-disappointment. It was all right, Steve thought. They had steered themselves safely through the visit. Cass pulled the fur cloud of her hat down over her forehead.
‘Goodbye, my love.’
‘Goodbye, Cass.’
Her confident, graceful walk set the tails swinging around her. She didn’t look back from the doors.
The old newsvendor leant forward as soon as they had closed behind her.
‘Who was that, son?’
‘My ex-wife.’
He chuckled throatily. ‘Didn’t look all that ex to me.’
Steve laughed. ‘Appearances can be deceptive, Frankie. Especially with Cass.’
‘Well.’ The old man settled himself down gain. ‘I wouldn’t say no myself, I can tell you that much.’
Steve looked around the ward. It had the appearance of the end of a party, with empty chairs abandoned at odd angles, strewn wrapping paper, one or two lingering guests. The smell of cigar smoke drifted in from the day room. Steve was smiling when he closed his eyes. He fell asleep at once.
The lights overhead were clear now. Annie could see the line of rectangles with the neon tubes more brightly defined behind the opaque glass. She knew the faces of each of her nurses, and the eight-hour cycles that governed their appearances made sense because she could see a big, white-faced clock on the wall opposite her bed. The Irish male nurse called Brendan was on duty now. Annie liked him best, because his touch was light and he never hurt her when he changed her dressings or slid a needle into her skin. She watched him in his white jacket as he took a reading from a scale beside her and wrote a figure on one of his charts at the foot of her bed. Behind him Annie could see the senior nurse sitting at her desk on the raised platform in the middle of the room.
Brendan finished what he was doing and leant over her. ‘There you are, my love,’ he said. ‘That’s that for another hour. Are you comfortable?’
She could move her head just enough to make a little nod. She tried to smile at him too, feeling the quivering in her swollen lips.
‘That’s my girl,’ Brendan said. He stood still for a moment with his head to one side. Then he said, ‘Listen, can you hear?’
It was a long way off, but she could hear it. It was people singing, a warm and familiar sound. It was a Christmas carol. Hark, the Herald Angels Sing. The sound of Christmas Day.
‘Ah, that’s beautiful,’ Brendan sighed. ‘Our hospital choir, it is. As good as anything you hear on the radio.’
Annie wished that Martin were there to hear it too. He had been sitting beside her bed earlier, but he had leant over to kiss her and then he had gone away. She liked it when he was there. Sometimes he talked, telling her little, ordinary things about the boys and the house. At other times he sat in companionable silence, and that was comforting because it was tiring to listen. It was only when he held her hand that Annie felt uncomfortable. She wanted the other man to be there, then. Steve. The man who had held her hand in the dark. The thought puzzled her, and she turned herself away from it.
Annie lay and listened to the singing until she couldn’t hear it any more. Then she let the warm wave of drowsiness take hold of her again. Sleep was so safe, except when the dreams came.
A week later, in the absurdly early hospital morning, Steve was sitting in the armchair beside his bed. He had been up for several days now.
They had hauled him out of bed and given him crutches that fitted under his elbows, then helped him to stand upright. There was a little knob embedded in the heel of his leg plaster. When he was ready to take the first awkward, swaying steps with the crutches, he was allowed to rest it on the floor to balance himself. Never to put any weight on it. For several days one of the nurses and a physiotherapist 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