Chapter 56
It is hard to rebuild a house.
It is so much harder to rebuild a life.
But unless you’re content to rot in the ruins, it is a necessary work. A work I was finally ready to begin.
I woke up, broken and bruised in a hospital bed. I didn’t remember getting there. For a moment I thought I’d died and this was just what happened to folks after. Your soul is sent, battered and worn, to a soul hospital.
It’s alright, the soul doctors say. You’re safe now. It’s over.
No such luck for me. Thankfully.
I was too exhausted to feel much of anything other than tired and sore.
I’d been burning myself at both ends for a while and I probably would have ended up here even if I hadn’t had my arse handed to me by a mythical shadow creature.
The first few days passed in a blur of nurses and needles and dressings being checked and changed.
The sunlight arced gently across the ceiling over a steady background hum of beeps, coughs, sighs, trolley wheels and crocs squeaky on linoleum floors.
Then on the third day, I woke from another recovery nap to find I had a visitor.
A figure sat in the plastic chair near the end of my bed, frowning at a catalogue of antiques.
I blinked, trying to clear my eyes, because it couldn’t be who I thought it was.
Fergus looked up, startled a little from the noise of me shifting under the starched sheets.
“Oh, hi,” he said, uncharacteristically sheepish.
I worked the spit round my dry mouth.
“What are you doing here?”
Fergus huffed in surprise.
“Tell me how you really feel, why don’t you?”
“Like I got a house dropped on me,” I said. “Now, what are you doing here?”
“Visiting you, you snarky cow.” He pointed to the table at the side of my bed. “Even brought you a gift.”
I turned my head gently, trying to pull on my aching and bruised body as little as possible. Sat on the table was a small cactus with a yellow ribbon round the pot. Next to it was a note:
A prickly bastard from a prickly bastard, F x
“See, Ro said you’re not supposed to bring flowers into wards anymore. Pollen and infections and all that. So, I got you a cactus instead.” He shuffled in his seat. “Also thought you might find it funny.”
I was beginning to think I must have sustained a head injury.
“Rowan?”
Fergus pointed back to the doorway. “He couldn’t come today, so I said I’d pop in. Don’t worry; you’re not doomed to my company every visiting hour.” He made that same sneering, wolfish grin, though it seemed different now. More self-deprecating than predatory.
He rolled the magazine in his hands.
“Y’know, funny you should say that. About having a house dropped on you. Because that’s how we found you.”
My eyes widened. If I wasn’t awake before, I was now.
“What?”
“Nothing but rubble left,” he said. “Rowan had me drive us round to check in on you after… your conversation.”
Ah, so Fergus also knew what I’d done then. That was fine. I was done hiding it anyway.
“I can’t believe he did that by the way,” Fergus continued.
“I said to him, ‘You don’t take a girl up into the woods to tell her you went to prison, you psychopath.’ He said he thought the quiet would help.
” Fergus shook his head, but there was a hint of that wolfish grin.
“I swear to God, he’s got to be the dumbest wise person I know.
Anyway, we came round to check on you and half the cottage had come down. ”
I sat up, ignoring my protesting bones and muscles.
“Which half?”
“The 1a one, so your neighbour’s place. Though we weren’t sure which half was yours at first, ’cause there’s bloody nothing in 1b.
Except that sheepskin rug you got funny about.
” He peered at me like I was a strange new animal he’d found on an alien world.
“How are you living like that? No table, no chairs. Not even a telly. You’ve got to get that sorted out. ”
“How’d you know what the inside of my house looks like?”
“Because Rambo Ro went running inside to check. I wanted to wait for emergency services to arrive, just in case the other half came down, too. But in he goes, so of course I have to go in as well. Luckily you left the front door open, which, again, you’ve got to get sorted out.”
He shook his head and grabbed something from my side table.
My phone.
“I’ll add it to the list.”
“Hey!” I protested.
“Shut up. You’ll thank me later.” He finished typing something, then put my phone back down on the table. Then put the charger cable into it. “Anyway, we found you down in the basement, covered in masonry dust and more blood than I thought a person could make so… congratulations, I guess.”
I looked down at my bandaged limbs.
“For making that much blood or surviving losing that much blood?”
“Either. Both.” He shrugged. “Rowan told the emergency services you’d talked about having a neighbour, so they went looking for her in the clusterfuck of building violations you call next door.
I don’t know who you’d seen, but they said the place looked like it had been deserted for years.
They checked the blood on you, too, just in case you’d murdered someone. ”
I looked up.
“But it’s all yours, so we’re calling you Blood Bath from now on.”
I thought of what had happened in her side of the house. The last I remembered I was in 1a. There was sunlight and then there was dust everywhere. I must have been blown through the door back into my side of the house.
Along my arms, I saw the line of pinpricks from the needle. The red thread was gone.
Fergus noticed me looking.
“Doctors don’t have clue what those are,” he said. “They were hoping you could enlighten them.”
I shook my head in faux confusion.
“Nails from the floorboards maybe?”
The lie would probably cost me a tetanus shot, but the truth was probably better left alone.
Fergus was quiet for a moment.
“Good thing we came round to apologise when we did, eh?”
I frowned.
“What are you apologising for?”
Fergus frowned back.
“Oh, come on. I’m man enough to know when I’ve been a prick.” He pointed at the cactus. “Hence the prickly bastard.”
“Yeah, I got that,” I said. “I’m not exactly an angel myself.”
“He told me,” Fergus said, “after I—what I told you in the hardware store.”
Here it is. Your comeuppance. ‘We’re glad you didn’t die, but we don’t want to be mates. Please leave us alone.’
I hushed the nervous voice inside myself.
Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it’s going to be okay.
“See, Ro has a habit of picking up strays,” Fergus said, before adding, “Probably shouldn’t have called you that.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, meaning it.
“He knows what it’s like to fuck up your life.
I remember when he first moved up here. He looked haunted.
I think he feels like if he can help other people avoid making the same mistakes he did, it’ll make up for—well, everything he did before he got his act together.
” Fergus leaned forward. “He overdoes it a bit, though. I tell him he’s got to let people sort themselves out, but he never listens…
” He sighed. “I just wanted him to focus on himself rather than running around trying to solve everyone else’s problems. And, well, I guess I took it out on you. ”
I remembered the version of him back in the house. The stapler. The store raining down around us.
“I thought you hated me because I’m from the city or something,” I said.
“No, I judge you because you’re from the city,” he said, with a ghost of a smile. “But I don’t hate you. And I’m sorry I made you feel like that.”
My phone started to buzz on the side table. I reached over and looked at it. There was an alert.
TEXT ROWAN
it said and then listed Rowan’s number.
Fergus looked over my hand at the screen. “Oh, I put that one in yesterday. In case neither of us managed to make it today.”
I didn’t understand.
“You’re putting alerts on my phone?”
“Yeah,” he said, as if I’d asked the most stupid thing ever.
“Why?”
“Alerts are great. Remind you to sort out important stuff. And have I mentioned you’ve got stuff you need to get sorted?”
“No, I mean why are you helping me?”
He understood.
“We’re all we have out here. If you can’t trust your neighbours to turn up when you need them, then—” He shrugged. “And Ro’s right. You are a ranty drunk. And it amuses me.”
He looked again at my phone screen then at the clock behind him.
“Ah, shit. Time’s up.” He got up from his seat.
“I’ll have a chat with my Aunt Sheila—she used to be a solicitor—about what happened with your neighbour’s house.
I reckon you could get some compensation or something.
No promises though.” He put the catalogue in one of his jacket pockets. “See you tomorrow.”
I sat, pleasantly dumbfounded.
“See you tomorrow,” I said.
Later that day, my phone buzzed with another alert.
It said,
DRINK WATER.
I did.