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 any warning, the kindness of the gesture made her cry. The rush of 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