Try Not to Breathe (15 page)

I
’ve been trying to look down but I can’t get my stupid head to move. I just want to know what I’m wearing, because I don’t remember choosing anything. Did I go out last night? Was I at The Sleeper? I need to talk to Jenny because I’m having a massive blackout. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself, I’m not very good when I’m drunk. I get louder and louder until I throw up. It’s like I can see it’s going to happen, but once I’m on that path I know I’ll follow it to the end anyway.

I must have just slept funny, cricked my neck or pinched a nerve or something. It happened last summer too, maybe that’s my summer thing. Maybe I’ll have to work around a few days of paralysis every summer for the rest of my life. That’ll make it hard to book holidays when I’m older. “I’d love to elope with you, Jared Leto, but it’ll have to be in August, I’m stiff as a post in July.”

Last year it happened just before the summer fete. I woke up early and tried to sit up and I’ve never felt pain like it. Mum reckoned I’d pinched a nerve in my back. Bob had to carry me to the toilet, I’ve never been so embarrassed. He’d plop me down and turn around while I went. Mum would come in and wash my hands for me and then Bob’d carry me back to bed while Mum flushed the chain behind us. I’d hold it for so long that I’d feel like an overfilled hot water bottle ready to burst. I barely ate or drank for two days.

Jenny had rung while I was in bed and my mum told her what had happened so by the time I turned up back at school, shuffling in painfully to make a grand entrance at the fete, Chinese whispers had declared me a full-blown wheelchair-bound cripple.

I was the talk of the school for a few hours, and I’m not going to lie, I totally milked it. But it was just a trapped nerve. Maybe that’s what I’ve done this time, but at least my bladder doesn’t feel like it’s bursting. That’s something to be grateful for.

F
uck. It was her again. Alex Dale. Jacob felt her eyes boring into him, as if she was scanning him for data, taking down his vitals. What did she know? Why had she wanted to talk to him before, but didn’t want to talk to him now? Had she found something out since he last checked? What game was she playing?

Jacob had been scared for so long. The fear he had when Amy went missing had never fully gone away, it had just ebbed and flowed into new places. He had been so scared that he would be arrested, and then he was scared that no one would be arrested. He’d been scared to see her and then he’d been scared to stop.

Fear was the undercurrent, always threatening to whip his legs from under him. Fear was a secondary heartbeat only he could hear, which could get so quiet it was almost imperceptible or so loud it drowned everything else out.

But it was always there.

It was there on his wedding day.

It was there in the seconds before he first saw his gray splodge of a baby on the sonographer’s screen.

It was there today as he plunged his right hand into his pocket and fingered the worn corners of the business card, the details of which he knew by heart.

Jacob really hated journalists, almost as much as the one person he hated above all else. Journalists had taken unbearable pain and printed it over and over again, thousands of times. Lies about Amy, accusations about her poor dad, photos of her in her school uniform, to be gazed upon and speculated about. Day after day. And then dropped when the next lost schoolgirl came along.

Jacob’s index finger was raw from being dragged over the rough corner of Alex’s business card, which had remained in his pocket like Kryptonite, ever since he’d been given it.

So far, he hadn’t found anything to either quash his fears or give shape to them. He needed to look again. He needed to know what she knew. Did she know who he was? Did she know about his lies?

Jacob had moved on to lovely Natasha, and yet the journalist had lingered nearby, eavesdropping. If she had really wanted to see Amy, why had she stayed there, craning her skinny neck to the side of his shoulder?

He stayed with Natasha just a few minutes, just long enough so that it didn’t look like he was fleeing the scene. As he pushed out of the ward, Jacob looked over to Amy’s cubicle and saw the curtains tugged shut.

As Jacob stood in the corridor, trapped by indecision, he heard a smash from inside the ward. A tray of drinks had probably been dropped, but it unnerved him. The ward, with its mechanical whistles and hums, was his quiet place. When he was in a situation he felt hemmed in by, he would close his eyes and take his mind back to the quiet of the cubicle, and the cool of Amy’s skin.

Jacob stayed just outside the double doors to Bramble Ward, unsure what to do. He would have stayed there even longer, worrying and panicking, if it hadn’t been for the scream. Before he could catch a hold of himself, the surprise had sent him bursting through another set of double doors and half flying, half running down the bleached stairs.

His heartbeat bashed his head from either side, and he was too dizzy to think about anything but getting to daylight and away from bloody Alex Dale.

He could hear doors above and below swinging open onto the stairwell. He had absolutely nothing to be afraid of really but he was running helter-skelter. He was running for his life.

And then he wasn’t.

He was in a heap, teetering on the edge of the next set of speckled gray, highly bleached stairs, a full flight down from where he had been seconds before.

Blood whooshed around his ears and his face was wet. Jacob felt cold. Then hot. Then freezing. He slowly reached up to his face like he’d forgotten how his body was put together and couldn’t find the controls.

He tentatively touched his temples, and looked at his fingertips. They were thick and sticky with the brightest blood he’d ever seen. Then the pain came.

There was a deep throbbing in his face but far worse was the agony of his leg. From his right ankle to his knee surged a pain so intense that he needed everything he had to cope, he couldn’t use a single unit of energy for calling or crying out.

After a few moments the double doors nearest to him flew open and a middle-aged woman with a visitor’s badge sauntered out, took one look at Jacob and screamed.

And that’s when he saw his leg. And passed out.

Apart from the days following his own birth, Jacob had never so much as sat in a hospital bed.
On,
many times, but never
in
.

Waking up strapped to a stretcher-bed in the emergency room was never part of the plan.

Jacob’s leg wasn’t as badly damaged as they had first thought, the doctor said cheerfully, his bright white hair framing his jolly face.

Oh, the leg was still broken, he chuckled, but it could be fixed and it would eventually be as good as it ever was. And then he’d frowned and leaned in, asking, “Unless you’re a sportsman?”

Jacob shook his head, looking down at the patterned hospital robe, identical to the ones Amy was dressed in day-in, day-out, and wondered who had stripped him.

“Oh good. Then yes, you’ll be good as new.”

“When can I leave?” Jacob asked, suddenly putting two and two together and making Fiona. He tried to sit up, but he was strapped in.

“Oh, soon, soon,” said the doctor, unstrapping Jacob’s torso and subtly moving the unforgiving hospital robe where it had ridden above the crotch.

“We had to strap you in to make sure you didn’t wake up and try to move. You could have done yourself even more damage.”

Jacob nodded, as if this were something he encountered all the time.

He looked past his drip and up at the clock. It was nearly 1:30 p.m.; he’d lost several hours.

“Will I be able to leave before five?”

The doctor looked at Jacob like he had asked if he could still catch his shuttle to the moon.

“Most certainly not. We’ll move you up to the ward and then you’ll need to stay in for several days at least. You fractured your lower leg and you need to keep off it entirely. Even a fit and healthy young man like yourself needs to be careful.”

The doctor clasped his hands together.

“Right, then, we do have a couple of forms that we need you to fill in.”

“I see. Christ. Okay. I’ll need to ask someone to come and get the car. I’ll need to call work and let them know, and my wife. Oh God.” Jacob looked up at the chipped ceiling tiles. His car was in the hospital car park. He’d fallen down the stairs in a building in which he had no reason to be spending time. And then there was work. He was at a dummy meeting at a made-up prospective client’s office. Oh God…

The little doctor was still smiling but with his mouth only.

“I’ll ask an orderly to bring you a pay phone and we’ll get you up to a ward later this afternoon. I’ll have those forms brought over in a little while.” And with that he swept the curtain to one side and left.

Without waiting for the pay phone, Jacob leaned over to the chair that had his clothes piled onto it. Who had done that? Who had folded his socks and boxers? His boxers. He tugged his jeans until they came away in his hand. He could sense from their weight that his phone was still in place as he worked his hands around carefully until he found the right pocket.

Work was easy enough; he told Marc that he’d gone to the hospital to pick something up for Fiona as he was on his way back to the office when he’d fallen down the stairs. He’d made it as absurd and funny as possible, lots of wincing and sighing. True to form, reliable, laid-back Marc had laughed and passed the phone on to Geoff, their boss. Geoff had sighed and told Jacob his appointments would be taken care of and to get well soon.

And now for Fiona. He couldn’t exactly tell her he was picking something up for her.

The blood beat faster in his temples.

It had to be unquestionable. He had to have been here, in the hospital, for a reason that was
unquestionable
.

He pressed “Favorites,” then “Fiona” on his BlackBerry.

Jacob swallowed away the taste of sick and blood. The pain in his leg, while dulled, was still creeping up his body. His head swam from the morphine trailing into his arm.

“Hi, J.”

“I don’t want you to freak out but…”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing serious, but I’m in the hospital.”

“The hospital?”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to worry you but a while ago I thought I’d found a lump…you know…down there.”

“Oh my God! A lump?”

He could hear her breathing hard.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s fine.”

“Why didn’t you say anything? Why are you still in hospital?”

“Oh, Fi, I’m really embarrassed. The consultant practically laughed with my nuts in his hand because it was so obviously not a lump. It was just a normal part that I’d not noticed before.”

“Oh, thank God!”

“Well, I was so relieved that I just ran down the stairs instead of taking the lift and I fell and broke my leg.”

“What?” Fiona was laughing. Thank fuck, Fiona was laughing.

“I’m still in Casualty, they’ve strapped my leg up and I’ve got some nasty cuts but nothing that won’t heal.”

“Oh my love, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to say. Let me come over there—”

“They don’t want anyone to come and visit me while I’m in Casualty but you can come and see me in the ward later this afternoon.”

“Which ward?”

“I’m not sure yet but I’ll text you as soon as I know. I have to go, I’m not supposed to have my phone on.”

“But, Jacob?”

The curtains suddenly ballooned toward him so he hung up and stuffed the phone under the covers.

He could feel the phone vibrating as Fiona called back but he tried to keep a neutral expression while the orderly was wheeling the pay phone into position next to his elbow.

“There y’are, I’ll come back and get it in a few minutes,” the thin young orderly mumbled from under some kind of ratty, trendy hairstyle.

“Okay, cheers.”

As soon as the curtains were still again, Jacob pulled his phone back out. Three missed calls in the last two minutes.

He called Fiona back. The call connected: “Can’t talk, I’m driving. I’ll be there in a minute.”