click
trying to push myself up from the floor but my arms were juddering like a seizure, went from under me and face-first onto the carpet
click
lunatic swipes and dabbles of red on white fabric, rich metallic reek of blood
click
on hands and knees, vomiting, warm liquid spilling onto my fingers
click
ragged blue chunks of china, scattered (in retrospect I figure these must have been the remnants of my espresso cup but at the time my mind wasn’t working that way, nothing had any meaning or any essence, nothing was anything except there)
click
crawling through an endless field of debris that shifted and crackled, my knees slipping, the edges of my vision seething
click
the corridor, stretching away for miles, brown and beige and pulsing. A flick of movement far far away at the end, something white
holding myself up against the wall, staggering forwards jerkily as if all my joints had been unstrung. A terrible cawing noise coming from somewhere, rhythmic and impersonal; I tried desperately to speed up, to get away before it could attack, but I couldn’t break out of nightmare slow-motion and it was still there, in my ears, at my back, all around me (and now of course I’m pretty sure it was my own breathing, but at the time et cetera et cetera)
click
brown wood, a door. Scrabbling at it, grate of my fingernails, a hoarse moaning that wouldn’t form into words
click
a man’s voice urgently demanding something, a woman’s face skewed with horror, mouth wide, pink quilted dressing gown, and then one of my legs went liquid and the blindness came roaring back in and I disappeared.
Two
After that came a long period—about forty-eight hours, as far as I can reconstruct events—where nothing made much sense. Obviously there are big dark patches where I was out cold, and I’m unpleasantly aware that I’m unlikely ever to know exactly what went on during those. I did ask my mother once, but she got a white, tight look around her mouth and said, “I can’t, Toby,” and that was the end of that.
Even when I started to wake up off and on, my memories are dislocated fragments arranged in no particular order. People barking at me, demanding things from me; sometimes I tried to do what they wanted—squeeze my hand, I remember, and open your eyes—to make them happy so they would leave me alone, but sometimes I just ignored them and eventually they went away again. My mother slumped in a plastic chair, silver-blond hair straggling loose and a green cardigan falling off one shoulder. She looked terrible and I wanted to put an arm around her and tell her that everything would be fine, she was getting wound up over nothing, all I had done was jump out of my grandparents’ tree and break my ankle; I wanted to make her laugh till her slim rigid shoulders relaxed, but all I could manage was a clumsy grunting sound that sent her hurtling from the chair towards me, mouth stretched wide, Toby oh sweetheart can you—and then more darkness. My hand, with a chunky, shocking arrangement of needle and tube and bandage attached to the back of it, embedded deep in my flesh like some grotesque parasite. My father leaning against a wall, unshaven and baggy-eyed, blowing into a paper cup. There was an animal pacing silently back and forth in front of him, a long-muscled tan creature that looked like some kind of wild dog, maybe a jackal, but I couldn’t focus on it properly enough to be sure; my dad didn’t seem to have noticed it and it occurred to me that maybe I should warn him, but that would have felt silly when quite possibly he had brought the animal himself, to cheer me up, which it wasn’t really doing but maybe later it was going to curl up on the bed with me and that would do something about the pain— The pain was so huge and diffuse that it felt like an element intrinsic to the air, something to be taken for granted because it had always been there and would never go away. And yet it’s not what I remember most vividly when I think of those first couple of days, not the pain; what I remember is the sensation that I was being methodically pulled apart into gobbets, body and mind, as easily as a wet tissue, and that there was nothing at all I could do to resist.
When the parts of me actually managed to reassemble themselves, tentatively and to whatever extent and in whatever form, it was night. I was flat on my back in an uncomfortable bed in an unfamiliar room, some part of which was partitioned off by a long pale curtain. I was much too hot. My lips were parched; my mouth felt like it was lined with dried clay. One of my hands was tethered to a tube that ran upwards into shadow. Window blinds ticked fitfully in a draft; a machine beeped faintly and regularly.
It occurred to me, gradually, that I must be in a hospital. This seemed like a good idea, given the kind of pain I was in. Just about everything hurt. The epicenter seemed to be a spot just behind my right temple; it felt full to bursting with a dark, hideous, liquid throbbing that made me too afraid to put up my hand and feel it.
The rush of sheer terror, once started, wouldn’t stop. My heart was racing so frantically that I thought I might be having a heart attack; I was panting like a runner and every breath flared pain through my left side, which set the terror rising even more wildly. I knew there had to be a button somewhere nearby that I could press for a nurse, but I couldn’t afford to do that: what if she gave me something that knocked me out, and I never managed to struggle back up again?
I lay very still for a long time, gripping fistfuls of bedsheet and fighting not to scream. Thin stripes of gray light slid between the slats of the window blinds. Somewhere beyond the curtain a woman was crying, quietly and terribly.
At the heart of the fear was the fact that I had no idea how I had got there. I remembered something about Hogan’s and Sean and Dec, walking home, phone kisses to Melissa or had that been another night? and then nothing. If someone had tried to kill me—and it certainly felt like they had, and had come pretty close to getting the job done—then what was to stop them coming after me in here, what was to stop them being behind the curtain right now? Sore, weak, shaking, staked down by tubes and God knew what else, I wasn’t going to be much use against a merciless determined killer— The blinds clicked, and a spasm of fear nearly shot me out of the bed.
I don’t know how long I lay there, trawling doggedly and desperately through the ragged shards of my mind. The woman in the other bed was still crying, which was at least slightly reassuring: as long as she kept going, I could be fairly sure there was no one creeping up on her side of the curtain. I was pretty close to tears myself by the time I finally managed to come up with one image: my living room, sudden blaze of light, two men frozen and staring at me.
Maybe this sounds strange, but it came as a huge relief. Burglars had beaten me up: it could happen to anyone, and now it was over and I was safe; they were hardly going to track me down in hospital to finish the job. All I had to do was lie there and get better.
Slowly my heart rate calmed. I think I even smiled, through it all, into the dark. That’s how convinced I was, you see, how utterly and blessedly certain, that it was all over.
* * *
?In the morning a doctor came to see me. I was awake, more or less—the noise level out in the corridor had been building for a while, brisk voices, footsteps, the sinister rumble of trolley wheels—but I could tell from the pale, head-cracking blast of light through the window that it was early. Behind the curtain someone was telling the woman in the other bed, with the cool, heavily emphasized firmness you would use on someone else’s tantruming toddler, “You’ll just have to accept that everything we’ve done has been within best-practice guidelines.”