Tread Softly (6 page)

She was aware of another bed. And someone in it – close, yet miles away. The voice was deep. A man's voice. Could it be her father? Had he died again?

‘Are we dead?' she asked. ‘In heaven?'

‘No, Mrs Pearson, you're in the Recovery Room. And you're perfectly safe.'

‘So … why … am … I …?' The shaking took over, completing the question for her.

‘It's a reaction to the anaesthetic. It does sometimes give people the shakes.'

Anaesthetic. She vaguely remembered a needle in her arm. Then nothingness.

‘And you got very cold in theatre, being immobile for so long.'

Yes, cold. Frog-cold. Her teeth were still chattering. But she mustn't make a fuss. She was lucky to have two nurses to look after her. One was taking her blood pressure again. The other tucked a blanket round her. The blankets were shaking too. And the tube in her arm. Why did she need a tube? Had something gone wrong?

The man beside her was speaking. ‘I feel sick,' he said. So did she. Waves of nausea were rolling through her body, nudging at her throat.

She shut her eyes, surrendered to the sickness. Surrendered to the shaking. Shaking, shaking, shaking. No relief. No change.

Time passed. Still shaking.

‘We're going to take you back to your room now, Mrs Pearson. All right?'

No. Not all right. How could she go anywhere like this?

The trolley rattled over bumps. Unsafe. She might fall off. Glaring lights. A corridor. Clanging doors. A lift. Then the room with poppy-fields, blood red. And a familiar voice. Angry.

‘What the hell's going on? They told me an hour and a half, and she's been gone four hours.'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Pearson, there was a slight problem in –'

‘A problem? What do you mean? She's not in danger, is she? Why is she shaking like that, for God's sake?'

The voices faded.

‘R … Ralph?'

‘He'll be back in a moment, pet. He's just outside, talking to the other nurse.'

Pet. Mr Hughes called her Pet. But Mr Hughes was dead.

Another voice. Male again, but cheery: ‘Hold still, Mrs Pearson, we're going to put you back into bed.'

Hold still? How could she? The shaking wouldn't stop.

As they moved her from the trolley, she caught sight of her foot. Bandaged, with the toes sticking out. Wires in the toes, caked with blood. Her lower leg was bruised. Red and purple blotches. She couldn't feel the leg. Or the foot. Just a sort of numbness.

Someone took her hand. A bigger hand than the nurse's.

‘I'm here, Lorna.'

Ralph's voice. She clung to it.

‘Darling, are you all right?'

‘Fine,' she mouthed. Mustn't cry. If she cried he'd leave. Like Tom.

‘What time is it?'

‘Ten past two.'

‘In the afternoon?'

‘No, two in the morning. I'm the night nurse, Eileen. I've come to top up your drip. How's the pain?'

‘I can't feel anything.'

‘Good. Do you need the commode?'

‘Er, yes.' Her bladder seemed as numb as her leg, but it would be humiliating to have an accident.

The nurse removed the cradle from her leg and helped her to sit up – not easy with a tube in her arm. ‘Careful! Don't put any weight on that foot.'

She manoeuvred herself on to the commode and somehow managed to pull her bloomers down. Though numb, her left leg felt huge and unwieldy, as if it no longer belonged to her. She sat like an obedient child, trying to perform. But peeing was impossible with an audience. Impossible full stop. ‘I'm sorry, I … don't think I can.'

With an audible sigh, Eileen helped her back to bed. Resentful of time-wasters no doubt. All the staff seemed perpetually busy and hadn't time to chat. She wondered if Ralph was asleep. If only she could phone him … But he wouldn't know what to say, and anyway he needed his sleep. He had looked shattered when he left, and would have had the snow to contend with, and unreliable trains again, most likely. All very well for her, tucked up in the warm, away from demanding clients phoning at all hours. She admired his fortitude. He would never dream of giving way to panic, although from a psychological viewpoint he surely had reason enough. As a child, he had suffered more than she had: an indifferent mother, a pig of a stepfather, no Agnes to provide a home, no security whatever. Nor had his misery ended there. His first wife, Naomi, had developed multiple sclerosis early in the marriage and had become a mental and physical cripple over the next ten years. And even his present life wasn't exactly a bed of roses, what with the pressure of work, the debts, and a second disabled wife. But his method of coping was to bottle everything up, to use silence as a defence weapon. She had been aware of that from the start, accepted it almost gratefully. It meant they complemented each other: his control counterbalancing her emotional outbursts.

‘There's nothing
else
you need, is there?' Eileen was already making for the door, and her tone of voice implied that any further request would be as greedy and unreasonable as asking for cream as well as custard on your apple tart. Forget apple tart – a cup of tea would be heaven; a slug of vodka better still.

‘No, thank you,' Lorna said to the closing door. ‘I'm … fine.' Fine was a crucial word in her armoury. The Monster hated fine.

She remained sitting up against the pillows. Outside, a few cars sped past, and she could see a plane in the dark night sky, its tiny red and blue lights flashing. Across the road there were lighted squares of windows in a tower block. Other people sleepless? Mourning? ‘No man is an island …' A lie, of course. Everyone was an island, and at 2 a.m. the bridges were closed and the ferries didn't run.

She wormed herself down the bed, propping her foot on two pillows. (It had to be kept higher than her heart, to help the swelling go down.) She preferred to sleep on her stomach, but that was more or less impossible with the bandage and the wires, and sleeping on her back felt awkward and unfamiliar.

‘You're lucky to
have
a bed. In the war we slept in shelters.'

‘Yes, I know, Aunt Agnes, but it happens to be peacetime now.'

Peace must be what the angels felt, a concept as foreign to her as growing up with parents – the Monster saw to that. Perhaps she could conjure up an angel: kindly and sweet-tempered, with soft, protective wings. Yes, there he was, with a steaming-hot apple tart in one hand (cream
and
custard) and a bottle of Smirnoff in the other.

‘Come in,' she murmured sleepily. It must be Eileen again, with more pills.

‘I'm sorry to disturb you at such an unsociable hour, but I'm due at the Royal Free at seven thirty, so I thought I'd look in first.'

Mr Hughes. Impeccable in a dark suit and dazzling white shirt. While
she
was lying in a jumbled bed, sweaty and dishevelled. If she'd had advance warning of his visits she could at least have combed her hair.

‘How are you, Mrs Pearson?'

Embarrassed. She tugged the skimpy gown over the unprepossessing bloomers, before sitting up gingerly. ‘The feeling's come back in my foot.'

‘Good. Any pain at all?'

‘No.'

‘We've got you on an very high dose of pain-killers, so you shouldn't experience any discomfort. And I'm glad to say that basically the surgery went well.'

‘Well? But why did it take so long? My husband thought I … I'd kicked the bucket!'

Mr Hughes gave an awkward laugh. ‘I'm afraid there was a slight mix-up, Mrs Pearson. My … saw went missing.'

Saw?
The image of a lumberjack came to mind, hacking through a massive tree-trunk. How could a modest bunion require an implement on that scale?

‘They told me it was on loan to another hospital. As you can imagine, I was exceedingly annoyed.'

Was this some kind of joke? Didn't hospitals have their own saws, or was there only one to go round? And surely the theatre staff checked that all instruments were there before putting a patient under. She couldn't conceive of a carpenter or plumber embarking on a job without his tools, so why should a surgeon be any different?

‘A motorcycle messenger was dispatched to retrieve it, and was gone for some considerable time …'

It
must
be a joke. Even the Monster couldn't have dreamed up such a scenario.

‘Eventually he returned, saying the Gresham didn't have the saw. Which precipitated another search. And, would you believe, it was here all the time.'

No, she wouldn't believe.

‘So I'm afraid you had a rather protracted sleep, Mrs Pearson.' He smiled apologetically.

Sleep? She'd been pumped full of dangerous anaesthetics for four solid hours, simply because of staggering inefficiency. And poor Ralph had been going demented. When he'd asked why it was taking so long, they'd just said vaguely she must still be in theatre. Yes, in theatre while Mr Hughes sat twiddling his expert (and extremely expensive) thumbs.

‘And there was another complication …'

‘Oh, heavens – what?' Perhaps one of his minions had sewn up a needle inside her foot, or the anaesthetist had ingested his own drugs and dozed off.

‘Your skin is paper-thin, Mrs Pearson. Which is very unusual in a woman of your age. And of course it made things much more difficult. I had to use nylon sutures instead of the absorbable ones.'

The Monster burst back in. ‘See, you're falling to pieces! When he takes the stitches out your skin will probably pull away in great lumps.'

‘And your second toe was, frankly, a mess. There was a lot of debris in it and severe arthritic changes, which again is unusual in patients under forty.'

She swallowed. It was obviously time for her bus pass, or a merciful injection from the vet. Agnes was a martyr to arthritis, but it hadn't come on till her seventies. And what on earth did he mean by debris?

‘There's very little movement in that toe. It's essential to keep it mobile. I want you to wiggle it up and down for a minute or so every half-hour. Up down, up down – like this.'

She flinched as he yanked the poor aged toe almost at a right angle to the others.

‘Now you carry on doing this as often as you can. I must be off now, but I'll look in again this afternoon.'

‘Told you so,' crowed the Monster after Mr Hughes had gone. ‘What an incredible balls-up!'

‘It went
well
. He said so himself.'

‘'Course he did. Saving face, that's all.'

‘My foot's
straight
, isn't it?' Which was indeed a triumph, although with the trauma of the anaesthetic she had hardly taken in the fact. Whatever else had gone awry, all her toes now pointed in the same direction – on one foot anyway.

‘Don't you be so sure. That bandage hides a multitude of sins.'

She turned her back on the Monster as the door opened again and a lanky, dark-skinned man appeared. ‘You like breakfast?' he asked.

‘Yes please!'

‘What you like?'

Bacon, eggs, mushrooms, beans, fried bread. ‘What is there?'

‘You not see menu?'

‘No.'

‘I fetch.'

Half an hour went by. She tried to use the time profitably by exercising her second toe, ignoring the Monster's jibes that it wouldn't do the slightest good since that toe was already a write-off. Eventually she turned on the news to drown him out: a massacre in the Congo, a bomb scare in Calcutta, flooding in Bangladesh and more casualties in Afghanistan.

‘All
right
, Aunt Agnes, I know I'm lucky not to live in a war zone. But I do happen to be extremely hungry. I haven't eaten for twenty-four hours, and then it was only a slice of toast.'

The lanky man returned with two impressive-looking menus. Unfortunately they were for lunch and dinner, not breakfast.

‘This not breakfast,' she said, unconsciously lapsing into pidgin.

‘You not want breakfast?'

‘Yes, I
do
want. But this isn't it.'

His soulful eyes stared at her in bafflement.

‘D'you think I could have a boiled egg?' Best to keep it simple. If she mentioned kippers or black pudding, God knows what would turn up. ‘Boiled egg,' she repeated slowly, wondering whether to mime the action of tapping an egg with a spoon. Except it might confuse him into thinking she wanted a hammer (if the hammer hadn't gone the same way as the saw).

She reached across to her bedside drawer for a pen and a scrap of paper. ‘Boiled egg, tea and toast,' she printed clearly. If he couldn't understand it, maybe someone in the kitchen would. She passed it to him with an encouraging smile, but he looked still more dismayed. Perhaps he imagined it was a
billet-doux
– a lonely female patient making unwanted advances to him.

‘Give note to kitchen, please,' she instructed, wishing she'd brought a translator with her, or, even better, a private chef.

To pass the time she studied the two menus, which were illustrated with colour pictures of fruits and vegetables. The food sounded remarkably good, despite the spoilsport caveats: ‘Unsuitable for Diabetics' or ‘Not Recommended for Slimmers'. Ignoring the healthy dishes, she selected the highest-fat, highest-sugar options, restraining herself with difficulty from ticking two choices for every course. While she was deciding between banoffi pie and tiramisu, the phone rang – Ralph, asking how she was feeling.

‘Ravenous!'

‘Well, that's a good sign. Blast! The other phone's ringing. I'll call you back.'

Ten minutes passed without the promised call, so she turned on the television. Gruesome pictures of the massacre, close up. She switched to another channel: violence in Ireland now. The shrill of the phone coincided with an explosion in Belfast. ‘Hello, darling,' she muttered, shuddering at the carnage.

‘It's not darling, it's Anne.'