‘I doubt that very much.’ I flicked the lights on and glanced at the bed. Andrew was spread out across it, clutching his foot and rolling from side to side as if he’d been impaled.
‘Let me see.’ I sat next to him and held out my hand. Perhaps he’d done real damage to it. Judging by the way he was acting, I was sure his nail would be hanging off. He winced as he passed me his foot.
‘Is that it?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean, is that it?’
‘There’s no blood, the toenails are intact, the tendons and ligaments aren’t flapping around outside your body, there’s barely a red mark.’
‘There is!’ He sat up and pointed to the red mark on his toe.
‘It’s pink. Flushed. It’s hardly red.’
‘Do you know how much this hurts? I bet I’ll have a black bruise under my toenail tomorrow.’
I leaned in and looked closely. ‘That’s doubtful.’
‘Do you know how painful stubbing your toe is?’
‘Yes, I do, actually, or have you forgotten who you’re talking to.’
‘Oh, right,’ he nodded.
‘It’s sore. But you’re acting as if you snapped it in three places. No wonder men aren’t the ones who give birth. Honestly, the population would have died out a long, long time ago if we’d left it up to males to have the babies.’
‘Childbirth isnothingcompared to this agony, I can tell you that.’ He moaned again, this time with a small smile playing on his lips.
‘Shall I wake my father up? Maybe you’ll need emergency surgery. An amputation, crutches – hell, maybe you’ll need the entire leg removed.’
He chuckled between his moans. ‘You seriously have zero sympathy for the agony I’m in?’
I looked at his foot again. ‘The most I’ll do is get you some ice, but that’s it!’ I stood up and started walking towards the door.
‘Hurry!’ he said as I exited the room.
Moments later, I was back and found Andrew sitting on the bed with his leg propped up on a pillow.
‘You’re not being serious,’ I eyed his foot.
‘You’re supposed to elevate it.’
‘Yes, if you have a sprain or a pulled ligament. Not if your toe brushed against something.’
‘Brushed? It smashed.’
‘I would hardly call it a smash, but be that as it may, I shall ice it for you.’
I sat down on the bed by his elevated foot with a bag of frozen peas in my hand. My dad was a big believer in the power of frozen peas. And being an incredibly clumsy child, our freezer had always been stocked with them, even though they were never eaten. Mother insisted that they were inferior to fresh peas.
I lowered the bag, and he winced again. I rolled my eyes very deliberately at him. He smiled back, clearly unoffended by my eyeroll. The bag was getting too cold to hold, so I put a hand towel over it, which allowed me to keep it in place. We sat in silence as I watched the bag of peas become softer and softer. Droplets of water slid down his foot and fell onto the bed. I looked up from his foot, for the first time since I’d put the peas on it, and found Andrew staring at me.
‘What?’ I asked.
He shook his head and looked down.
‘What?’ I said, louder this time.
‘It’s just, this feels, you and me, you icing my injury, it feels . . .real.’
