In a Dark, Dark Wood(13)

We all shook our heads and she took the tray and went through to the kitchen. Melanie took out her phone and checked the signal again.

‘Well, that was weird,’ Nina said flatly.

‘What?’ Melanie looked up.

‘Flo and the quote-unquote “perfect hen”.’ Nina spelled out. ‘Don’t you think she’s a little … intense?’

‘Oh,’ Melanie said. She glanced out of the door towards the kitchen and then lowered her voice. ‘Look, I don’t know if I should be saying this but there’s no sense in beating round the bush. Flo had a bit of a breakdown in her third year. I’m not sure what happened but she dropped out before her finals – she never graduated as far as I know. So that’s why she’s a bit, you know, sensitive, about that period. She doesn’t really like discussing it.’

‘Um, OK,’ Nina said. But I knew what she was thinking. What had been alarming about Flo wasn’t her reserve about what happened after uni – that was the least odd part of the whole thing. It was everything else that had been unnerving.





4


I WANT TO sleep, but they shine lights in my eyes. They test and scan and print me, and take away my clothes, stiff with blood. What’s happened? What have I done?

I’m wheeled down long corridors, their lights dimmed for night, past wards of sleeping patients. Some of them wake as I pass, and I can see my state reflected in their shocked expressions, in the way they turn their faces away, as from something pitiable or horrifying.

The doctors ask me questions I can’t answer, tell me things I can’t remember.

Then at last I am hooked up to a monitor and left, drugged and bleary and alone.

But not quite alone.

I turn painfully onto my side, and that’s when I see: through the wire-hatched glass of the door is a policewoman sitting patiently on a stool.

I’m being guarded. But I don’t know why.

I lie there, staring through the glass at the back of the police officer’s head. I want so badly to go out there and ask questions, but I don’t dare. Partly because I’m not sure if my woolly legs will carry me to the door – but partly because I am not sure if I can bear the answers.

I lie for what feels like a long time, listening to the hum of the equipment, and the click of the morphine syringe driver. The pain in my head and legs dulls, and becomes distant. And then at last I sleep.

I dream of blood, spreading and pooling and soaking me. I am kneeling in the blood – trying to stop it – but I can’t. It soaks my pyjamas. It spreads across the bleached wood floor …

And that’s when I wake up.

For a second I just lie there with my heart pounding in my chest and my eyes adjusting to the dim night-lights of the room. I have a raging thirst and a pain in my bladder.

There’s a plastic cup on the locker, just by my head, and with a huge effort I reach out and hook one trembling finger around the rim, pulling it towards myself. It tastes flat and plasticky, but my God, drinking never felt so good. I drain it dry and then let my head flop back on the pillow with a jar that sets stars dancing in the dim light.

For the first time I realise there are leads coming out from under the sheets, connecting me to some kind of monitor, its flickering screen sending dim green shadows across the room. One of the leads is attached to a finger on my left hand and when I lift it up I see to my surprise that my hand is scratched and bloodied, and my already bitten nails are broken.

I remember … I remember a car … I remember stumbling across broken glass … one of my shoes had come off …

Beneath the sheets I rub my feet together, feeling the pain in one, and the swollen bulge of a dressing on the other. And across my shins … I can feel the stretch and pull of some kind of surgical tape across one leg.

It’s only when my hand strays to my shoulder, my right shoulder, that I wince and look down.

There’s a vast spreading bruise coming out from beneath the hospital gown, running down my arm. When I shrug my shoulder out of the neckline I can see a mass of purple spreading out from a dark swollen centre, just above my armpit. What could make such an odd, one-sided bruise? I feel like the memory is hovering just beyond my fingertips – but it remains stubbornly out of reach.

Have I had an accident? A car accident? Was I … was I attacked?

Painfully, I slide my hand beneath the sheets and run my palm across my belly, my breasts, my side. My arms are slashed with cuts but my body seems OK. I put my hand to my thighs, feel between my legs. There’s some kind of thick nappy-thing, but no pain. No cuts. No bruises on the inside of my thighs. Whatever happened, it wasn’t that.

I lie back and shut my eyes, tired – tired of trying to remember, tired of being afraid – and the syringe driver clicks and whirrs and suddenly nothing seems as important any more.

It is just as I’m drifting off to sleep that an image comes to me: a shotgun, hanging on a wall.

And suddenly I know.

The bruise is a recoil bruise. At some point in the recent past, I have fired a gun.





5


‘FLO,’ I STUCK my head around the kitchen door. Flo was loading the dishwasher with cups. ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that all by yourself. Can I help?’

‘No! Don’t be silly. It’s done.’ She slammed the dishwasher shut. ‘What is it? Anything I can help with? I’m so sorry about the coffee.’