‘Stay with me, Murray. No sleeping now. We’re almost there.’
Someone gentle was holding his arm just above where it stung and someone else was doing something far less gentle to his other arm where his bones felt like fire. Everything else was numb and painless, and he was being rocked bodily from side to side. There was an ambulance siren somewhere in the far distance. Some poor sod’s night ruined. He smiled and slept again.
‘Murray? Murray. Ah, there you are!’ The blurry woman was smiling at him. He blinked, bringing her into focus, making out a stethoscope around her neck and black hair tied up. His heart sank for a reason he couldn’t quite isolate. He didn’t know he’d been hoping to see someone else.
‘You’ve just come out of theatre. Do you remember what happened?’
He tried to shake his stiff neck, but it sent a thunderbolt of pain shooting into his shoulder. It made listening to the woman difficult. There was a burning sensation all down his throat and an awful taste in his dry mouth. She was saying something about coming off his bike. Broken bones. Blood loss. An operation. He needed to sleep, she said, and his body obeyed.
There’d been so many people with their hands upon him. He’d been lifted from one bed to another, softer bed. Someone had sponged his hands and face with warm water and he hadn’t been able to open his eyes to see who it was.
Atholl was there, definitely, cursing himself, talking on his phone. Then his mum was there and he’d opened his eyes for her and croaked that he was fine. She couldn’t hear him for some reason. Then a man came, fiddled about with the back of his hand, injecting him with something cold he could somehow feel all the way up his arm and taste right in the back of his throat, and he’d slept again.
There were far too many voices when he woke up and looked around. An elderly man in pyjamas was shouting at him from the bed opposite. ‘Who are you?’ he was saying.
Mutt scrunched up his gritty eyes and tried to widen them, wanting to see more clearly. He needed to drink something. As if he’d conjured her up, a nurse appeared right away with a plastic cup. She helped him sit up a little, telling him his arm was badly broken and he might be faint from loss of blood. They were still deciding if he needed a transfusion.
He accepted this information passively, not minding at all somehow.
She said he was on a lot of pain medication so he might feel strange. The water was icy cold and gave him his voice back. He told her he did feel strange.
‘Who’s Nina?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Who’s Nina? You’ve been asking for her since they brought you down to the ward.’
‘Nina’s…’ The effort of inhaling made his ribs burn, and he grabbed his chest.
‘Don’t try to talk, just rest.’
‘Nina’s everything,’ he said in a whimper, but the nurse was gone.
The first thing that struck him was that it was broad daylight and there was a new pair of plaid pyjamas folded on the table over his bed. Someone had pulled a TV screen out from the wall on a big plastic arm and a quiz show was playing with subtitles and no sound. There was a clattering of plates and a stink of something stewed that told him he’d missed meal time and he was glad about it. He looked at his hand and shrunk at the sight of the cannula taped there. He wasn’t good with needles. He needed to tell that nurse quickly, ask her to get it out.
The ward had been cleared out. The shouting man was gone. Someone in the corner had their curtain pulled around their bed. It was hot, far too hot. ‘Nurse?’
A gasp from the space behind him startled him and he tried to turn his neck but it ached. ‘Owww!’
‘Murray!’
Someone had been sleeping in the chair by the side of his bed, just out of sight. She sprang to her feet and moved in front of him. She was so pale and drawn it hurt to see her almost as much as it made his heart swell.
‘Nina!’
She took his hand ever so gently and with it she brought the sweetest scent of lavender and willow all around her. ‘Thank God you’re all right. Murray, you came off your bike.’
‘I know,’ he blinked, his memories running like a black and white cinema reel. ‘That was you on the road?’
‘It was. I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you until I’d walked out. I was watching Echo going berserk at the side of the road. He must have seen me getting off the train. I think he was trying to warn the whole village I was back to make even more trouble.’
It hurt to smile but he did anyway.
‘They think you’ll have to stay in hospital for three or four days. Then you’ll have to go home and recover in your own bed for at least three weeks, maybe more if that pin in your shoulder doesn’t hold and you need more surgery.’
Mutt felt queasy at the thought of bone, flesh and metal mashed up underneath the bandages. He was glad his arm was bound tightly to his side. He didn’t want to see it and he couldn’t bear the thought of moving it.
‘Home,’ Mutt said as if he didn’t know what the word meant, and Nina nodded. ‘You’re… you’re here though? The perfume…’
