Hurt (18 page)

Usually he doesn’t give this quite so much thought, but usually he feels prepared, confident, in charge. Not since he was a child has he ever felt this goddamn nervous. But today, as he climbs the long chain of ladders, he feels his pulse increase with every rung. He can sense the muscles in his legs beginning to shake; when he reaches the top, it’s as if he has already scaled a mountain. The air seems thinner up here, less oxygen; his breathing is fast and shallow. He knows his body is reacting to stress and that, if he is to stand any chance of completing the dive without incident, he must turn that stress into determination, turn the nerves into adrenalin. He knows all the techniques, has been through them countless times over the years with the sports psychologist, but today he struggles to bring them to mind. The nerves and synapses in his brain are coping with a much bigger problem, trying to fight back a very different kind of memory, although the two seem somehow interwoven – as if performing this dive were symbolic of another, far more harrowing experience. But he can’t think about that now. He
won’t
think about that now . . .

He forces himself to walk over to the edge of the platform, to look down at the pools and miniature Lego figures below. Today, the ten-metre seems higher than before, the water a long way further down, and the board feels slippery and flimsy beneath the soles of his feet. He takes a deep breath and conjures up the image of the dive the way he is supposed to, trying to feel each twist and turn in his body, mentally going through every little movement in his mind. But there is something blocking it, something in the way, and sweat rises to the surface of his skin and his lungs feel ready to burst. He wipes his face with his cloth, pressing the soft fabric against his closed eyes, willing himself to visualize the dive. But he is pacing the board now and breathing too fast, twirling his cloth frantically between his hands – ten times one way, ten times the other; another ten times before he reaches the end of the board and he’ll be OK; another ten times before he walks back to the wall and he’ll nail it. His heart is pumping like machine-gun fire, shooting blood around his body as if he were already flying through the air. He can hear his half-whispered affirmations as he mouths them frantically to himself – faster and faster, until they all blend into one word and make no sense at all. His whole body is buzzing with uncontrolled energy now, the electric grid of his nervous system firing at random. He can feel the electricity in his veins: he is a live wire, he is alight and on fire and shaking. Shaking!

Shouts of encouragement rise up to greet him: his squad mates, the synchro girls, the lifeguards, even the recreational swimmers.

‘Go for it, Matt!’

‘You can do it, mate!’

‘We know you can do it, Mattie!’

‘We love you, babe!’

Giggles from the synchro girls, but Perez’s voice echoes above them all.

‘Switch off the thoughts now, Matt,’ he booms into the megaphone, ‘and count yourself in. Get yourself into position and just count yourself in. You’ve practised it more than enough. Your body knows exactly what it has to do.’

Your body knows what it has to do, your body knows what it has to do
. But no, no, no, he doesn’t want to do it! Didn’t they hear him the first time? Didn’t he shout? Didn’t he fight? Didn’t he beg and plead, beg and plead, like a little child.
No, please no. Don’t make me do it. I’ll do anything else. Not that, please not that, please stop it. Please, God, please! . . .
They are all looking at him. At his body. High up here, in full view of everyone. Naked, apart from his Speedos, his body exposed to them all. He can feel their eyes on him, willing him to obey. Yes, his body knows what it must do.
After you’ve done it once, you never forget, never forget, never forget
.

‘Mathéo, for God’s sake, just do the bloody dive!’ His father now. He has left the bleachers in frustration and has joined Perez at the side of the pool, both men with arms folded and heads tilted back, united in their frustration. ‘You’re over-analysing it, you’re winding yourself up! Just get a move on, for chrissakes!’

He spins his cloth, pacing, still pacing. Every time he reaches the end of the board, his mind screams,
Not yet!
and he turns and makes his way back to the wall. Just one more time and then he’ll do it. Just one more time, just one more second, and then he’ll be OK, then he’ll be ready. He runs his fingers through his hair, scraping his nails against his scalp. He can hear the sound of his panicked, shuddering breathing.
Oh God oh God oh God oh God
. . .

It’s gone very quiet down on the ground below. The audience holds its collective breath, waiting to see if he is going to bottle out of it – come back down the ladders and disappear off into the changing rooms in shame.

‘Deep breath, buddy.’ Perez’s voice is gentler now, clearly aware he is at breaking point. ‘Shut out the thoughts. Take it nice and easy. As soon as you’ve done it once, you’ll know you can do it again.’

You’ll know you can do it again.
The first time, you think you’ll die. The pain is so great, you
hope
you’ll die. But you don’t, and it happens again, and then again, and then again . . .

They are all watching him, feeling for him, willing him to go for it, and he knows now that he has no choice, he never did have a choice, his body is no longer his own. Others tell him what to do and he obeys; he obeys or they get frustrated, they get angry. So angry. Yes, he will do it and he will get hurt – so badly that to others it will be unimaginable; so badly he may never recover.

Slowly he makes his way to the edge of the platform. Finds his spot, takes a deep breath. He slides his feet apart, lowers his arms and searches for the perfect grip on the edge of the board. Gradually he transfers the full weight of his body onto his hands, his wrists, his arms, his shoulders. His ankles begin to loosen, and with great care he raises his feet off the ground. No wobble, no fall. Slip now and it’s all over. With flexed legs and pointed toes, he brings his feet together straight above his head. His body is stretched upwards by his toes – he is taut, he is tight, he is strong, he is all muscles and sinew. His back to the water, he prepares to launch himself into the void. Ready? Never, but it’s time to count himself in.

One: he is hit from behind, sent sprawling to the ground. His body tightens, he does not move.

Two: he is grabbed by his hair, face smashed against the damp-smelling earth. He takes a deep breath, stretches himself up as high as he can go.

Three: he is pinned to the ground, crushed by a weight from which there is no escape. But this time he can get away – he can fly. With a flick of his wrists, he launches himself away from the board and into the air. Away, away, away. He doesn’t care where, as long as he is free. And then he remembers: begins his first somersault, eyes searching for the slash of blue. But it’s not where it’s supposed to be: he finds the platform edge instead. And he is rotating straight towards it. Close, too close!
Too. Damn. Close . . . BANG!

And just like that, he’s dead. This time it’s easy. Why wasn’t it before? He had wanted it, begged for it, prayed for it even. But no, just the pain, again and again. This time, however, as he spins down ten metres in freefall, he feels the world just skid away. He hits the water. Sucked into darkness. Plummets down, down, deep down. Feels only relief. Absolution. It’s all over. Never again. He is free, he has flown. At last he has found what he was looking for. He has found peace.

Down, down, down. Deep beneath the surface. He is trapped underwater, drowning, but has neither the energy nor the desire to pull himself free. Echoes in the distance: the sound of people talking, the rattling of a trolley, rhythmic bleeping of machines, strains of music interspersed with laughter, someone crying out in a low plaintive wail. Like radio static or interference, voices cut in from a distant, foreign station. He is rocking on the surface of life. Someone is saying his name; he tries to open his eyes but they seem held down by weights. No, no, no. He doesn’t want to wake up. He will stay down here for ever, adrift in a timeless ocean. The world can go on without him; he wants no part in it any more. But words and phrases and snatches of conversation are seething all around him. Voices that tear at his ears, reverberate in his skull; he feels he will scream if they do not shut up. The world is garish, sharp; it cuts at his brain. He tries to slide back under, but his mind is spitting and fritzing, its wires burned out. He can feel the proximity of oblivion, can touch it, can taste it even, yet his mind insists on turning this way and that, slogging in and out of consciousness.

He is beginning to rise, to struggle, blinking and gasping, to the surface. Blotches of life and fury. He opens his eyes to a harsh white room, and a light that screams in agony. He is in a world of hurt, his head pounding, full of static and cracking pain. He gets a hint, a glimpse of his surroundings; a blurred image, like a poster seen from the window of a speeding train. He is aware of a poorly defined human shape hovering nearby. A pulse of fear runs through him: the shadow’s edges are splintered, ragged, like something lost at sea. He is struggling to open his eyes now, to move his head. A crackling, fiery bonfire flares up in front of him, illuminating whatever he looks at. He is disorientated and confused, his senses overstretched, aching.

He is aware of another sound now, something between a groan and a whimper.

A placatory hand pats his arm. The sound of a woman’s voice. ‘Mateeo?’ She mispronounces his name. ‘You’re OK. Can you look at me? That’s it. Good! Look at me, right here. Do you know where you are?’

His eyes slowly focus on a woman in nurse’s uniform. He is lying in a bed, a machine bleeping to his right. His hand feels fat and heavy – he looks down to find several tubes running into the back of it, taped down and bandaged up; a plastic clip is attached to his finger and a blood-pressure cuff is wrapped around the top of his arm. There seem to be an awful lot of wires.

‘Hospital?’ His voice sounds cracked and feeble; his lips are sore and dry.

‘That’s right. You’re in Duke’s Memorial – you were brought in about an hour ago with a head injury. Do you remember how that happened?’

He tries to nod. Winces sharply. ‘Training.’

‘Come again?’

‘Diving. I mistimed the – the . . .’ He makes a circular motion with his finger. Such an effort to speak. ‘The rotation,’ he manages. The pictures seethe and swing in front of him: shards of memory that he has to reconstruct from the mayhem in his mind. He can’t seem to go back in time, but neither can he move forward, his memory too capricious to trust. There is no chronology inside his head. Instead, it is composed of myriad images which spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water, then vanish entirely, no more substantial than a dream.

There is a fold in time because suddenly another person is in the room – a man in a white coat, shining a light in his eyes. He is asking Mathéo to follow his finger. So Mathéo stares at it, then beyond, through the late afternoon sun that fills the window, to somewhere so far away that he seems to disappear . . .

The doctor moves away. Dark spots dance before Mathéo’s eyes. The spots seem to elongate, turning into shadows, turning into trees. The flash of trees rushing past him. Trees, tall and threatening in the dark, stretching up into the night sky. He closes his eyes to get rid of the image, but it only makes it clearer, and now he can hear the crunch of twigs beneath his trainers, the panting, retching sound of his breath tearing at his lungs. He is running. Running away from the scene of the crime, running away to escape what he has done, running away to escape what he has become. And suddenly he remembers. Remembers it all. That night in Brighton. That night he transformed into something horrific, despicable, became a different person, and he has been trapped in this different body ever since . . . He holds his breath, willing the memories away, pushing himself back down into oblivion, back into a place where he no longer exists . . .

He hears his name being called, over and over again, and finally he forces himself to open his eyes a crack, blink groggily at the blurred shape beside him. He recognizes his mother, sitting on the edge of his bed and patting his tube-free hand. She is talking to him about brain scans, although he can’t remember how the conversation started. His father and the doctor are somewhere nearby, bulky shadows by the window, their voices low and resonant, filling the room with unwanted sound. Perez also seems to have appeared and he learns from the conversations that swirl around him that he has a ten-centimetre gash on the side of his forehead and twelve stitches, that he has concussion but that his skull is intact and the EEGs show no sign of internal bleeding or bruising. He also gathers that, between falling unconscious into the pool and being dragged out by Aaron and Perez, he managed to inhale a lungful of water, stop breathing for over a minute, and had to be resuscitated by one of the lifeguards.

They all keep talking: his mother, his father, Perez and the neurologist. Their words are like bullets, ricocheting off the walls. Sometimes they are aimed at him and he does his best to answer. But when he closes his eyes to try to escape, they just seem to grow louder. He wants nothing more than to go home. He hates hospitals – the last time he was in one was when he fractured his wrist after an awkward landing in the foam pit; he was discharged with a plaster cast only a few hours later. But this time, when he tries to get out of bed, everyone gets very agitated and he finds himself pushed firmly back down against the pillows, dizzy with pain.

‘We need to keep you in for a night or two, Mathéo,’ the doctor informs him firmly. ‘Just for observation. You’ve suffered concussion and inhaled quite a bit of water and stopped breathing.’

Mathéo closes his eyes again to hide his distress; the conversations continue without him and gradually fade out into the corridor. Sometime later his parents come back in to say goodnight.

The evening seems to go on for ever. His head feels ready to explode. He dozes fitfully – waking with a start when he feels himself falling again, only to find himself stuck in a hospital bed covered with a thin white sheet, soaked in sweat and shivering. Each time he closes his eyes he sees the edge of the platform rushing towards him, the world spinning at all angles. He feels trapped and crushed by an invisible weight that presses down over the whole of his body. He just wants to move, get comfortable, kick off the clammy sheet and run outside for some fresh air. But the room is heavy with the smell of medicine, the lights blaze down from a pale blue ceiling, and all Mathéo wants to do is scream. He asks for a drink but the nurse insists he can have nothing until morning. The empty saline drip is replaced with a fresh one but does nothing to quench his thirst. He tries to sit up, but dizziness forces him back; he is overcome by a feeling of utter uselessness when he realizes he can’t even get out of bed. Different nurses come in at regular intervals – to check his temperature, his pulse, his blood pressure. At first he is too hot and then he is too cold; he feels exhausted but sleep eludes him. At some point he must have said something because a nurse starts patting his hand, telling him he’ll be OK, that he can go home soon. He wonders what that means. Wonders if he cares. Life has dug itself out of him and he feels himself sinking, his desperation too big and empty for any one person to contain. Fear has run its course and depression has whittled him down to nothing.