“Shh,” I said, cupping her soft head, stroking her back. The honeysuckle smell of her, the delicacy of her neck under my hand—I felt a breathtaking rush of love towards her, for being there and for breaking down so that I was the strong one comforting her. “Shh, honey. It’s OK. It’s all going to be fine.” And we stayed there like that, sweet spring breeze stirring the blinds and the sun throwing ovals of wavering light through the myriad water bottles, my tailbone killing me and me ignoring it, until she had to go open the shop again.
That was how we spent a lot of her visits, the best of them: together on the narrow bed, not talking, not moving except for the rise and fall of our breathing and the steady rhythm of my hand on her hair. Sometimes, though, it didn’t work out that way. There were days when the thought of anyone touching me made my flesh leap, and although obviously I didn’t put it that way to Melissa (I told her I hurt all over, which in fairness was true) I could see that it caught at her to feel me shift away after a brief hug and kiss—So how was today, did you sell anything good? She hid it well, though: pulled up the visitor’s chair and chattered away, funny stories from work, gossip about her flatmate’s latest drama (Megan was a petulant, nitpicky girl who managed a chichi organic-raw-kale-type café and couldn’t work out why everyone she met turned out to be an arsehole; only Melissa could have lived with her for any length of time): dispatches from the outside world, so I would know it was still there and waiting for me. I appreciated what she was doing and I tried my best to listen and to laugh in the right places, but my concentration was shot, the nonstop flow of talk made my head hurt, and—I felt ungrateful and traitorous, but I couldn’t help it—her stories seemed like such trivial fluff, so minuscule and weightless, next to the vast dark mass that filled my mind and my body and the air around me. I would end up drifting, finding pictures in the folds of the rumpled sheet or picking compulsively at my memory of that night in search of new images, or just plain falling asleep. After a while Melissa’s voice would trail off and she would murmur something about getting back to work or getting home, lean over to brush a gentle kiss on my bruised mouth, and slip away.
When I had no visitors I did, basically, nothing. My room had a TV, but I couldn’t follow a plotline for longer than a few minutes, or have the sound up to a normal volume without getting a splitting headache. I got a headache if I tried to read, too, or mess about on the internet on my phone. Normally this kind of inactivity would have had me jiggling like a kid and asking anyone who came within earshot when I could go home or at least go for a walk or do something, anything; but I found myself eerily willing to just lie there, watching the fan blades turn lazily and the stripes of light through the blinds make their slow way across the floor, shifting position every now and then when my tailbone ached too badly. My phone beeped and beeped—texts from friends (Hey dude just heard, how fucked up is that, hope you’re on the mend and the arseholes who did it get banged up for life); from my mother, asking whether I wanted a jigsaw puzzle; from Susanna, Hey just checking in, hope you’re doing well, let me know if you need anything or if you fancy some company; from Sean or Dec, asking if they could come visit; from Melissa, Just to say I love you. Sometimes it was hours before I got around to picking up the phone and reading the texts. Time had lost its solidity, in that arid, airless room haunted by faint electronic noises and smells of dissolution, it puddled and scattered like mercury. The only thing that gave it any cohering thread was the inexorable cycle of my pain meds kicking in and wearing off. Within a few days I knew the signs in fine-grained detail, the gradual ominous build of the throbbing above my ear, the thinning of the kind fog that kept the world at a manageable remove; I could tell almost to the minute when the pump on my IV would let out the smug, piercing beep that meant I could push the button for another dose.
The pain wasn’t the worst part, though, not by a long shot. The worst part was the fear. A dozen times a day, more, my body would do something that it patently should not have been doing. My vision would split and wobble, and it would take a frantic burst of hard blinking to reset it; I would reach for a glass of water with my left hand, unthinking, and watch as it tumbled from between my fingers and went bouncing across the floor, water slopping everywhere. Even though the tongue swelling had gone down, my speech still had that thick village-idiot slur to it; when I went to the bathroom, my left foot dragged across the sticky greenish floor so that I hobbled along like Quasimodo. Every time sent me into a fresh tailspin: what if I could never see/walk/talk properly again? what if this was the first of those seizures the doctor had warned me about? if not this time, what if it was the next time or the next or the next? what if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again?
Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I’d never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked. After an eternity (lying in bed with my heart jackhammering, adrenaline firing me like a strobe light, feeling the last few threads that held my mind together stretch to snapping point) something would happen to break the vortex’s hold—a nurse coming in so that I had to make mechanical cheerful chitchat, an uncontrollable rush of sleep—and I would clamber up out of it, shaky and weak as a half-drowned animal. But even when the fear receded for a while, it was always there: dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me, waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.
* * *
?About a week in, two detectives came to talk to me. I was lying in bed watching TV with the sound off—a bunch of cartoon trucks were trying to comfort a truck in a pink cowboy hat, who was crying big cartoon tears—when there was a tap at my door and a guy with neatly trimmed graying hair stuck his head in.
“Toby?” he said. I knew straightaway, from his smile, that he wasn’t a doctor; I’d already got the hang of the doctors’ smiles, firm and distancing, expertly calibrated to tell you how much time was left in the conversation. This guy looked genuinely friendly. “Detectives. Have you got a few minutes for us?”
“Oh,” I said, startled—which I shouldn’t have been, obviously this was going to involve detectives at some point, but I had had other things on my mind and it hadn’t occurred to me. “Yes. Sure. Come in.” I found the bed-lift button and whirred myself upright.
“Great,” said the detective, coming in and pulling the chair to the side of the bed. He was maybe fifty, or a little over it; at least six foot, with a comfortable navy suit and a solid, unbreakable-looking build, like he had been cast all in one slab. There was another guy behind him—younger and skinnier, with ginger hair and a slightly flashy retro tan suit. “I’m Gerry Martin, and this is Colm Bannon.” The ginger guy nodded to me, settling his backside against the windowsill. “We’re investigating what happened to you. How’re you getting on?”
“OK. Better.”
Martin nodded, cocking his head to examine my jaw and my temple. I liked that he was straight-up inspecting me, matter-of-fact as a boxing coach, rather than pretending not to notice and then sneaking glances when he thought I wasn’t looking. “You look a lot better, all right. You got a bad doing-over. Do you remember me from the night?”
“No,” I said, after a disorientated second—it was disturbing to think of them there that night, seeing me in whatever condition I’d been in. “You were there?”