Easy words for her to say.
There are so many questions I want to ask. If I’m stable, I presume that means I’m not going to die. Not yet anyway, we all die in the end, I suppose. Life is more terrifying than death in my experience, there’s little point fearing something so inevitable. Since I’ve been lying here, what I fear the most is never fully waking up, the horror of being trapped inside myself for ever. I try to quieten my mind and focus on their voices. Sometimes the words reach me, sometimes they get lost on the way or I can’t quite translate them into something that makes sense.
It’s been such a long time since my family were all together like this so it seems strange that we are reunited around my hospital bed. We used to spend every Christmas together, but then that stopped. I’m the centrepiece of this family gathering but I’m still invisible. Nobody is holding my hand now. Nobody is crying. Nobody is behaving as they should and it’s as though I’m not here at all.
‘You look really tired,’ says Claire, the caring daughter. ‘Maybe we should go and get some food?’ Nobody speaks and then my father’s voice breaks the spell:
‘Hold on, that’s all you have to do.’
Why does everyone insist on telling me to hold on? Hold on to what? I don’t need to hold on, I need to wake up.
Paul kisses me on the forehead. I don’t think he’ll go with them, but then I hear him walk to the door and follow them out of the room. I don’t know why I am surprised about being abandoned, I always have been. Claire takes everyone I love away from me.
I hear rain start to fall hard against the invisible window in my imaginary room. The watery lullaby helps distract my mind from my anger, but it’s not enough to silence it.
I won’t let her take anyone else away from me.
A silent rage spreads like a virus in my mind. The voice inside my head, which sounds so much like my own, is loud and clear and commanding.
I need to get out of this bed, I have to wake up.
And then I do.
I can still hear the sound of the machines that breathe for me, feed me and drug me so that I cannot feel what I must not, but the wires are gone and the tube has been removed from my throat. I open my eyes and sit up. I have to tell somebody. I get out of the bed and run to the door, fling it open and rush through, but I fall and land hard on the ground. That’s when I notice how cold I am, that’s when I feel the rain. I’m scared to open my eyes and when I do, I see her, the faceless little girl in the pink dressing gown, lying in the middle of the road with me. I can’t move my body and everything is still, like I’m looking at a painting.
I can see the crashed car and the damaged tree, its thick roots come to life and snake over towards me and the child. They wrap themselves around our arms and legs and bodies and squeeze us together, pinning us to the tarmac where I fell until we are almost completely covered and hidden from the rest of the world. I sense that the child is frightened, so I tell her to be brave and suggest that maybe we should sing a song. She doesn’t want to. Not yet. The rain starts to fall harder, and the painting I’m trapped inside starts to smudge and blur. It feels like the rain is trying to wash us away, as though we never were. The water falls so hard that it bounces off the tarmac into my mouth and up my nose. I feel myself start to drown in the dirty watercolour, then, just as quickly as it started, it stops.
Stars cannot shine without darkness, whispers the little girl.
My body is still being held in place by the roots of the tree, but I turn my head up to see the night sky. As I stare up at the stars, they become brighter and larger and more real than I have ever seen them. Then the little girl starts to sing.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, if you’re down here who’s in the car?
The roots release me, an army of goosebumps line my arms and I look over to where the child is now pointing. Sure enough, there is a shadow of someone inside the car. The driver door opens and a black figure gets out and walks away. Everything is silent. Everything is still.
The sound of a lock turning brings me back to my sleeping body in my hospital cell. Everything I could see and feel disappears. The nightmare is over, but I’m still afraid. There was someone else in the car that night, I’m sure of it. And now there is someone in my room and everything feels very wrong.
‘Can you hear me?’ It’s a man. I don’t recognise his voice. Fear floods through me as he walks towards the bed.
‘I said, can you hear me?’ he repeats. He’s right next to me when he asks the same question a third time. He sighs and takes a step back. He opens something next to my bed and then I hear the sound of a phone being turned on. My phone. I hear the security code that I never change; whoever this person is, he’s listening to my voicemail. There are three messages, faint but audible. The first voice I hear is Claire’s. She says she is just calling to see if everything is OK, but her tone suggests that she already knew that it wasn’t. It’s followed by an angry message from Paul: he wants to know where I am. Then the stranger in my room plays the third message and it’s his own voice on my phone.
I’m sorry about what happened, it’s only because I love you.
It feels like my whole body ices over. I hear a beep.
Message deleted. You have no new messages.
I don’t know this man. But he knows me. I’m so frightened that even if I was able to scream, I don’t think that I could.
‘I do hope you’re not lying there feeling sorry for yourself, Amber,’ he says. He touches my face and I want to shrink back down into the pillow. He taps me on the head repeatedly with his finger. ‘In case you’re confused in there by anything you’ve heard, this wasn’t an accident.’ His finger slides down the side of my face and rests on my lips. ‘You did this to yourself.’
Then
Wednesday, 21st December 2016 – Morning
I turn off the alarm, I won’t need it. I’ve hardly slept at all and it’s pointless trying now. The insomnia should be a symptom of my concern for my missing husband, but that isn’t what I’ve been lying awake thinking about. I keep remembering the dead robin, its tiny lifeless body. All night long, I kept imagining that I could hear its wings flapping inside the bin as though it wasn’t dead. I worry that perhaps it was just unconscious, that maybe I threw it away when it was only sleeping.