Chapter 2
TWO
Ludo
I bang my head against the bed rail just to hear something more than my own tripping brain. It’s late, close to midnight, and the strangling silence of the sleeping hospital makes me want to throw things around and scream. Anything to disrupt the oppressive quiet.
Restless, I sit up. Lie down. Sit up again.
Unwelcome energy buzzes in my veins, and a tremor shakes the hand that isn’t encased in plaster.
The effects of the general anaesthetic have long faded, and even the discomfort of having fresh metal pins inserted into my forever-damaged wrist isn’t enough to quell the anxiety flaring in my gut.
I need to get out of here.
But escape isn’t an option. The nursing team have been forewarned that I pose a flight risk and check my every move. I can barely use the bathroom without an escort, and the unwanted attention is almost as bad as the phantom ants crawling over my skin.
I lie down again, chest rising and falling too fast, and focus on the throbbing beneath the cast, the tugging sting of the stitches holding my skin together.
It works for a while. Then I picture ants for real, imagine creepy bugs invading the space between my flesh and the plaster, and new agitation surges.
Fresh sweat sticks my thin T-shirt to my back and the reverb in my brain hurts my ears.
I need . . . something.
There’s a handful of mobile screens on the ward. At home, my predilection for paranoia means I rarely watch TV, but trapped in hell, I’m desperate for distraction. Maybe I can watch the weather on mute.
I find a telly trolley and wheel it closer to my bed, straining the only limb I possess that isn’t a victim to the noise in my head. A nurse catches me, but it’s the one who likes me—as much as she likes anyone. She helps position the TV and retrieves the remote.
“Quiet now,” she says. “They’re bringing someone down from intensive care, so you need to stay put, okay? No more wanderings tonight.”
I’ve spent my entire adult life being spoken to like a child.
I nod and lie down, curling up under the thin, grey blanket and scratchy sheet, fixing my gaze on the TV screen.
The Weather Channel comes up trumps, and I lose myself in the moving screen of sleet and snow expected over the next few days.
It excites me. I like the cold—the wind in my face, ice against my bare feet.
It’s so much more bearable than suffocating heat.
I close my eyes, willing sleep to carry me through until my morning lithium dose. The hospital fucked it up yesterday and today, feeding me half the dosage of my usual pill.
Don’t worry. You won’t feel any different.
But they were wrong.
I feel different every day.
By the nurse station, the double doors swing open. Metal wheels scrape the rubber floor, and a bed carrying an unconscious man is pushed onto the ward.
I squint in the dim light. I drowsed through the new faces that arrived immediately after my surgery, too out of it to take much notice, but as the bed passes, I’ve never felt more awake in my life.
Jesus.
Even bruised and bloodied, the man is gorgeous. And clearly under seventy; a rarity on this random overspill ward.
Orderlies push the bed to the high-dependency bays opposite mine.
A flurry of nurses work to hook the man up to machines while the ward sister and another man talk gravely at the foot of the bed.
I’m enthralled but, as ever, so unsubtle it’s painful.
My friendly nurse meets my gaze, shakes her head, and draws the curtain around my bed, corralling me into my quiet corner.
But she leaves a gap, and as hard as I try, I can’t look away.
The man has ink-dark hair, and what skin isn’t hidden by wound dressings, blankets, and equipment is alabaster pale. The kind of skin that’s so smooth to the touch you can never stop. I wonder—
Fuck.
I swallow and shrink against my bed. You absolute sicko. Look at the state of him.
It’s hard not to. With his leg plastered from foot to thigh and a crude tube contraption protruding from his ribcage, the man is a mess. A beautiful mess, but a mess nonetheless.
Word repetition, even unspoken, grates my nerves. I focus on the unconscious man and instantly regret it. The tube in his chest looks excruciating, and whatever misfortune has befallen him has happened recently enough for dried blood to still be smeared over his glorious skin.
I want to wipe it off.
But then, I also want the ground to swallow me whole, and I can’t gauge which voice is loudest.
The second man to enter the ward is still deep in conversation with the ward sister. He’s slimmer and older, but shares enough of the unconscious dude’s dark good looks to be a relative. He scrubs a hand down his weary face. “Will he be okay?”
The sister nods and turns to leave. “We hope so.”
What sort of answer is that? I frown and wonder why it matters to me, but the reedy man doesn’t seem convinced either. He stops my nurse and repeats the question. I brace myself. I’ve only been on the ward a few days, but I know this nurse well enough to anticipate her brutal candour.
“Your cousin fell twenty feet, hitting a van, and then landed on concrete,” she says. “He had a chest tube inserted in the field while he was trapped, and his leg is broken in three places. I imagine he won’t be okay for quite some time.”
She speaks with compassion, but her words hit the man as though she’s slapped him. He takes a deep, shuddering breath and sinks onto a nearby chair while I bite my lip, abruptly and acutely aware that perhaps listening in is the ultimate disrespect to these strangers in the night.
I glance around for something else to occupy my racing mind, but the TV no longer holds up.
A frantic desire to be somewhere else hits me. My mind jumps, my heart pounds, and I’m crawling out of my own skin. If I could peel myself like an old satsuma and throw the pieces away, I would. There aren’t many parts of myself I wouldn’t give up for the peace of mind I so often lack.
I press the call button. A new face appears. I grab my notes from the side of the bed and hold them out.
“Can I have a sleeping pill, please?”
Aidan
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I’m going to kill someone if it doesn’t stop.
Careful to keep my body still, I cast an irritated glare at the monitor taking up space at my bedside.
It has the added attraction of letting me know I’m still alive, but that’s about it.
At this point, I’d happily die rather than hear another sound from it.
Drama queen.
Maybe, but combined with the insane amount of pain coursing through me, checking out seems a viable option.
Or chucking up.
Fuck. I swallow hard, trying to dispel the violent nausea swelling in my scratchy throat. Panic takes hold as I realise vomiting will involve movement, and a desperate, inhuman groan escapes me.
Pain.
“I know, mate. Use your morphine pump.”
The voice is far away and nothing like any of the voices that have followed me into hell, but the mention of a morphine pump rings a distant bell. You fell, remember? You broke your leg and had a tube shoved between your ribs.
More nausea. I have zero clue where the mythical morphine pump has gone, but I know one thing for certain: I’m going to be sick, and it’s going to hurt like a motherfucker.
That’s two things, arsehole—
The devil on my shoulder is no match for my years-old reaction to extreme pain. Bile surges in my throat and my stomach contracts, triggering fiercer waves of agony. I lurch sideways and throw up into the darkness as another ragged sound tears from me. I can’t breathe. I—
A cool hand touches my face, turning it gently. “There’s an emesis basin right there, and I’ve put your pump by your left hand. It was on the floor.”
“Ludo, back to bed, please.”
The second voice is stern and one I recognise from the last time I upchucked on myself, but it’s little comfort to me as the soothing palm slips from my cheek. For the brief moment it touched my skin, it grounded me. Without it, I’m swimming again, with nothing to cling onto but pain.
Sometime later, I open my eyes. A stark hospital ceiling, itchy sheets, and cold draughts greet me, but the burning in my chest has faded, and my leg is so numb it seems no longer attached to my body.
I shift to ease the stiffness from my shoulders and brave a glance around, but there’s not much to see. The next bed is empty, and across the aisle, everyone seems to be asleep, if the hunched shape in the bed directly opposite is even a person.
Giving a shit is exhausting. I drop my head and consider passing out again, but before the thought completes, a tall figure darkens the end of my bed. A doctor who looks like he belongs on the set of a hospital drama.
“Hello,” he says. “I’m Dr Ramsey. Are you feeling awake enough to talk?”
I contemplate holding an actual conversation, something I avoid even when I’m not skewered on a hospital bed.
Despite Dr Hotness, it doesn’t hold much appeal.
On the other hand, the desire to escape is strong, and the doctor likely knows more about when that might happen than the nurses I’ve cursed at and puked on. “I’m okay.”
Dr Ramsey draws the curtain around the bed, pulls up a stool, and sits down. “Good. I know you’ve been sick overnight, so I’ve left you alone, but I want to get that chest tube out of you before I go home. It must be uncomfortable.”
“It’s not fun.”
“I’ll bet. You were a trooper when it went in, if it’s any consolation. Didn’t make a sound.”
“Eh?”
“I was on the HEMS team that extracted you from the accident site.” Dr Ramsey makes a note on the clipboard he’s holding. “I don’t expect you to remember much of that though.”
I’m having a hard time recalling what day it is, let alone the shit show my life has descended into while people have shoved tubes into every orifice. I remember the tree, the truck, and falling. After that, it’s a blur of pain and confusion. “I don’t remember you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Hopefully the drugs worked and you didn’t feel much.”
“Can I go home?”
Dr Ramsey shakes his head. “You’re going to be with us for a while, I’m afraid. That chest tube needs to come out, and then the surgeons need to look at your leg again. We did what we could downstairs, but you’ll likely need some rods inserted to help the bones reset.”
“Surgery?”
“Yes.”
“What else is wrong with me?”
“What are your other injuries?”
I nod. “I know I broke my leg . . . I felt it, but I don’t know what happened to the rest of me.”
Dr Ramsey sets his clipboard down and fixes me with a gaze that’s somehow kind and intense at the same time. “Well, you fell pretty far. I think the tree you were working on was around thirty feet tall, but the van roof broke your fall a little.”
“Super.”
“Yes, I thought so. If you’d hit concrete from that height, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
I’ve got nothing. Literally nothing.
Dr Ramsey gives me a moment, then continues.
“Okay, so your lung collapsed on impact. We inserted a chest tube to expand it, and then I worked to free your leg from the tree while my colleague patched your head wound and kept you breathing. You gave us a bit of a scare on the chopper, but you’re young and fit, so your lung held up.
I’m confident you’ll recover fully from that injury. ”
That injury. The ominous throb in my leg reignites, settling deep into my shattered bones. “What about my leg?”
The doctor’s gaze flickers with something I can’t decipher. “It’s hard to say. The damage to the knee is severe. It will take some time to ascertain the best route for repair, and it’s unlikely it’ll ever be quite the same.”
“But I’ll be able to walk?”
“Yes. Perhaps even go back to work, but you need to be prepared to make changes. Adapting is how we survive, and you did survive a fall that should’ve killed you. Try to remember that when recovery kicks you in the tits.”
I blink, unprepared for the good doctor’s bluntness. It’s so unlike anything I’ve ever heard from a health professional that I have no sensible response.
Clearly taking my silence as a sign the conversation is over, Dr Ramsey stands and plucks latex gloves from the dispenser on the wall. “Right then. Let’s get rid of this tube.”