I must have made some sound, because there was a rustle off to the side and a voice said gently, “Toby.”
I flinched, sending pain crashing everywhere, but it was my father: leaning forwards in a chair, rumpled and red-eyed. “Toby, it’s me. How are you feeling?”
“OK,” I said blurrily. Actually I was feeling a lot less Zen than I had when I went to sleep. Everything hurt even worse, which wasn’t supposed to be happening; I was supposed to be getting better, and the possibility that things might not be that straightforward set the panic scritch-scratching at the edges of my mind again. I managed to get up the courage to touch two fingertips gingerly to the spot behind my right temple, but it seemed to be covered in a thick pad of gauze, which didn’t tell me anything useful, and the movement ratcheted up the pain another notch or two.
“Do you want anything? A drink of water?”
What I wanted was something to put over my eyes. I was trying to pull together the focus to ask for it when one edge of the curtain twitched aside.
“Good morning,” said the doctor, putting his head through the gap. “How are you today?”
“Oh,” I said, struggling to sit up and wincing. “OK.” My tongue was about twice its usual thickness, and sore on one side. I sounded like some bad actor playing handicapped.
“Are you feeling well enough to talk?”
“Yeah. Yes.” I wasn’t, but I urgently needed to know what the fuck was going on.
“Well, that’s a big step,” the doctor said, closing the curtain behind him and nodding to my father. “Let me give you a hand there.” He fiddled with something and the head of my bed lifted, with a displeased wheezing sound, so that I was half-sitting. “How’s that?”
The movement made my vision swoop and dip like I was on a fairground ride. “Good,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Good good.” He was a young guy, only a few years older than me; tall, with a round, bland face and a receding hairline. “I’m Dr. Coogan”—or it may have been Cregan or Duggan or something totally unrelated, who knows. “Can you tell me your name?”
Just the fact that he was asking, like I might actually not know, was disturbing. It brought back a churning flash of chaos, loud voice snapping in my ear, bright light swinging and bouncing, my whole body convulsing with dry retches— “Toby Hennessy.”
“Mm-hm.” He pulled over a chair and sat down. He was holding a sheaf of cryptic-looking paper that I assumed was my chart, whatever that meant. “Do you know what month it is?”
“April.”
“It is indeed. Do you know where you are?”
“In a hospital.”
“Right again.” He made some kind of note on the chart. “How are you feeling?”
“OK. Kind of sore.”
He glanced up at that. “Where’s the pain?”
“My head. It’s pretty bad.” This was an understatement—my head was pounding so hideously that it felt like my brain was actually rocking with the force of every heartbeat—but I didn’t want him to go off in search of painkillers and leave me without any explanations. “And my face. And my side. And”—I couldn’t think of the doctor-appropriate term for “right above my arse,” I knew there was one but it wouldn’t come out—“here?” The movement pulled an involuntary noise out of me.
The doctor nodded. He had small, clear, shallow eyes, like a toy’s. “Yes. Your tailbone is cracked, and so are four of your ribs. There’s nothing we can do to help with those, but they should all heal on their own with no lasting damage; nothing to worry about. And I can certainly get you something for the pain.” He held out a finger. “Can you squeeze my finger?”
I did. His finger was long and a bit chubby and very dry, and there was something nasty about touching it that intimately.
“Mm-hm. And with the other hand?”
I did it again with the other hand. I didn’t need medical training to tell the difference: my right hand felt the same as always; my left had a dreamlike cotton-wool quality that terrified me. My grip was soft as a child’s.
I glanced up at the doctor, but he gave no sign that he’d noticed anything. “Very good.” He made another note. “May I?”
He was indicating the bedsheet. “Sure,” I said, disorientated. I had no idea what he wanted to do. My father was watching in silence, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled in front of his mouth.
The doctor flipped back the sheet, expertly, revealing my bare legs—I had a couple of ugly bruises—and the rucked-up skirt of the hospital gown, which was a graying white with a discreetly perky print of little blue diamonds. “Now,” he said, placing the palm of his hand to the bottom of my foot. “Can you point your foot against my hand?”
Flex, extend, other foot, left weaker than the right again, although not as badly, surely the difference wasn’t as big— There was something horrifying about being exposed and handled so efficiently and impersonally. He was acting like my body was meat, not attached to a person at all. It took all my willpower not to jerk my foot away from his hand.
“Good,” he said. “Now I want you to lift your leg against the pressure of my hand. All right?”
He tweaked my gown straight and put a flat palm on my thigh. “Wait,” I blurted out. “What’s wrong with me?”
I half-expected him to slap me down like he had the woman in the other bed, but she must have just been neurotic or a pain in the arse or something, because instead he took his hand off my leg and sat back in the chair. “You were attacked,” he said gently. “Do you have any memory of it?”
“Yes. Not all of, the whole thing, but— I mean, that’s not what I mean. Do I have a, a—” I couldn’t come up with the word. “My head. Did they break it? Or what?”
“You were hit in the head at least twice. Once probably with a fist, here”—he pointed to the left side of his jaw—“and once with a heavy sharp object, here.” That spot behind my right temple. I heard a tight breath from my father. “You had a concussion, but that seems to have resolved well. You also have a skull fracture, which caused an extradural hematoma—that’s a bleed between the skull and the outer covering of the brain, caused by a ruptured blood vessel. Don’t worry”—I wasn’t really following a lot of this, but at that my eyes must have widened, because he raised one hand reassuringly—“we corrected that surgically, as soon as you came in. We drilled a small hole in your skull and drained the blood, and that relieved the pressure on your brain. You were very lucky.”
Some vague part of me felt that this was a fairly outrageous thing to say to someone in my situation, but a bigger part seized on the comfort of it—lucky, yes, I was lucky, the guy was a doctor after all, he knew what he was talking about, I didn’t want to be like the whiny woman in the other bed. “I guess,” I said.
“You were indeed. You had what we call a lucid interval, after the attack. It’s fairly common with this kind of injury. We’re estimating that you were unconscious for an hour or more, due to the concussion, but then you came to and were able to call for help before you lost consciousness again?”
He blinked at me inquiringly. “I guess,” I said again, after a confused moment. I couldn’t remember calling anyone. I still couldn’t remember much of anything, actually, just dark seething flashes that made me not want to look too closely.
“Very lucky,” the doctor repeated, leaning forwards to make sure I understood the seriousness of this. “If you hadn’t managed to get help, and the hematoma had been left untreated for another hour or so, it would almost certainly have been fatal.” And when I stared at him blankly, unable to do anything at all with that: “You nearly died.”
“Oh,” I said, after a moment. “I didn’t realize.”
We looked at each other. It felt like he was waiting for something from me, but I had no idea what. The woman in the other bed was crying again.