Читать книгу Could It Be Magic? - Melanie Rose - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe dream was still with me when I awoke an hour later, disconcerting me. Frankie was curled obediently at my feet. I knew she wasn’t asleep, but just being quiet for my sake, and I reached down and patted her head. Getting up, I stretched, then went to the telephone and dialled my parents’ number.
Dad answered, and his familiar voice was somehow calming.
‘Hello, Jess lovely; how are you?’
I found myself smiling at the warmth in his voice. He’d called me his ‘lovely’ for as long as I could remember, and I was eternally grateful no one was confusing me with a mother of four called Lauren. ‘I’m fine, Dad.’
We chatted for a while about his garden and the village show, where he was hoping to win best marrow competition, and then I said hesitantly, ‘I had a bit of an accident yesterday.’
‘What do you mean, an accident?’ Are you all right?’
‘I’m okay now. Did you and Mum have a storm down in Somerset on Saturday afternoon?’
‘We had a bit of rain, not what I’d call a storm. Why?’
‘I was walking Frankie on the Downs when a storm blew up. There was thunder and lightning and I was caught out in it.’
‘You are all right, aren’t you?’ he butted in. ‘I heard on the forecast that there were going to be pockets of severe storms dotted across the south-east during the weekend. What happened?’
‘You’re not going to believe this but I was actually hit by a streak of lightning. I’m fine now,’ I added hastily in response to his exclamation of horror. ‘I was taken to hospital but I’m okay now, honestly.’
I could hear Mum in the background asking what he was exclaiming about.
‘Your mum’s trying to take the phone from me. I’ll hand you over and you can tell her all the details…’
‘Jessica? What’s this about you being hit by lightning?’ My mother’s anxious voice came through the receiver loud and clear. It sounded as if she was only in the other room.
‘I was walking Frankie yesterday afternoon when a storm blew up,’ I explained. ‘The lightning struck me on my shoulder but that old coat of yours took the worst of it, and although I ended up in hospital I’m virtually unscathed.’
‘Virtually?’ she repeated, picking up on the word immediately. ‘So why did they take you to hospital?’
‘I blacked out,’ I confessed. ‘A dog-walker who was caught in the storm with me took me to hospital in his car. They kept me in overnight, but apart from a sore patch on my shoulder, I’m fine. They let me out this afternoon.’
‘That’s it. We’re coming up to see you.’
‘You don’t need to, Mum, honestly, I’m okay. The doctors wouldn’t have let me out otherwise.’
‘You always did have that independent streak,’ my mother tutted. ‘I suppose you don’t want us cluttering up that flat of yours. One day you’ll realise you need somebody else in your life, Jessica. You can’t always handle everything yourself. Your brother is as bad, going off to New Zealand like that. I don’t know why you couldn’t both just settle down locally and live quiet, ordinary lives.’
I sighed. The last thing I needed was a lecture from my mother about my working-girl lifestyle and what she saw as an inability to commit to a relationship.
There was a short pause at the end of the line, and then, ‘What about the man who took you to hospital? I hope you thanked him?’
A picture of Dan popped into my head and I smiled despite myself. ‘Mum, I’m not a child, of course I thanked him.’
‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t need us…’ My mother was ending the call. ‘I’ll put Dad back on to say goodbye to you. Take care, Jessica, and do remember that you’re not Superwoman. If you feel at all unwell, then call us.’
‘Yes, Mum. Bye.’
Dad came back on the line, his voice gruff. ‘If you feel at all poorly, then ring us, lovely, won’t you? You know your mother and I would be there like a shot…’
‘I know, Dad. I promise I’ll call if I need you.’
‘Bye, lovely. Take care.’
‘Bye, Dad.’
I replaced the receiver and went into my little kitchen to put the kettle on for a cup of tea. The conversation with my parents had churned up old feelings of needing to prove myself to them in some way, especially to my mother, who thought I’d failed if I didn’t settle down with a nice average guy and have two-point-four children on whom they could both dote. I just wasn’t ready for those things. I had a career to forge. I wanted to take my law degree and be someone in the world; a self-made someone of standing—not just someone’s wife or someone’s mother. Maybe Mum had been happy with all that, but I wanted something more from life.
The rest of the afternoon passed pleasantly enough. I watered my plants, picked a few dead-heads off the still-flowering begonias in the window box, made myself and Frankie some supper, and headed for the bath and an early night. If I felt okay when I woke in the morning, I told myself, I would probably struggle in to work. The office was always busy on Monday mornings and I wouldn’t want to let my boss down.
I settled myself as comfortably as I could in bed. It was difficult, as I liked to sleep on my side and the shoulder with the burns was tender, chafing against the soft fabric of my pyjamas. I knew I was tired, because my eyes felt gritty and dry, but it seemed my brain was refusing to give in to sleep. I tossed and turned, each time having to allow for the sore area on my shoulder, picturing the images I’d conjured up in my mind the previous night, wondering where and how I’d dreamed up the phantom family. I suppose I must eventually have dropped off, because soon I was waking again and the dream became blurred and faded.
Opening my eyes, I sat up and stared around me in disbelief. The first thing I did was to glance down at my left hand. The thin gold wedding band gleamed back at me, just visible beyond the spaghetti junction of fine hospital tape holding the canula securely in place in the back of my left hand. The drip, I noticed, was no longer connected to the canula, which had some sort of rubber bung on the end, presumably, I thought, to stop my blood running out of the open vein all over the crisp hospital sheets.
Shock presents itself in different ways, and with me it seemed to manifest itself in a bout of hysterical laughter. I sat and giggled stupidly. The thing was, I tried to tell myself sternly through the shaking sobs, this was just the dream again. And it definitely wasn’t funny. Soon I would wake up and this place would disappear. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and tried to return to sleep, but it seemed my brain was wide awake, and sleep wouldn’t come. I opened my eyes again and sat up, the nervous giggling starting again.
The room was quiet apart from the wheezing I was making as my shoulders shook with silent panicked laughter. I vaguely registered that I was no longer connected to the ECG machine, which now stood silently behind my bed. I stopped laughing with a jolt, realising that I actually remembered the nurse disconnecting my drip.
Because the side room was windowless, I couldn’t judge what time it was, but I had a horrible, gnawing feeling I knew exactly what the time was, just as I feared I knew that the drip had been disconnected just after two thirty in the morning.
Perspiration broke out on my whole body as I thought back. I’d gone to bed early, soon after eight o’clock. I’d tossed and turned for around an hour, which meant I’d probably dropped off soon after that. If it was around 9.15 p.m. at home, did that mean it was the same time in the morning here?
Twisting around, I found the buzzer and held my finger down until Nurse Sally appeared, looking flustered. ‘Thank goodness you’re awake at last!’ she exclaimed as she bustled round me, plumping the pillows and tidying the sheets. ‘I was about to bleep Dr Shakir to come take a look at you. I’ve been trying to wake you for the last two hours. I’ve never known anyone sleep so deeply, Lauren.’
‘What time is it?’ I asked.
She glanced down at the watch pinned to her uniform. ‘It’s nine twenty already. And you haven’t even had breakfast yet.’
‘What time was my drip disconnected?’
‘I’m not sure exactly, the night nurse said the last of the saline had run through and she disconnected it sometime in the early hours.’
‘Could you look it up in my notes?’ I persisted. ‘Please?’
She gave me a searching look, as if wondering what my interest was, but merely nodded and hurried out. As soon as she had gone, I rummaged through the bedside cabinet, which was back where it was supposed to be on the right side of the bed, and found one of the newspapers Grant had brought in for me the previous afternoon. It was a Sunday paper, which meant that yesterday had indeed been Sunday, 19 October. It ought to be Monday morning now, unless time had gone as haywire as everything else. Was this a dream? My mouth felt dry and my hands were suddenly sweaty with fear. I breathed as shallowly as I could, hoping to somehow melt into the bed and disappear from this place of nightmares.
Nurse Sally returned with a breakfast tray and the announcement that my drip had finished and been disconnected at 2.30 a.m. by the night staff.
‘Your husband is bringing the children in to see you in about half an hour,’ Sally continued cheerily, unaware of the sickening feeling of inevitability that her words had invoked in me. ‘I was hoping to have you up and bathed this morning now that your drip is down, but I think we’ll have to postpone that until they’ve gone. You’ll be able to get up today and dispense with the monitors and bedpans, that’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled unenthusiastically, poking at the dry toast in front of me. I wanted to shout, to tell her that in my other life I’d never been this ill to start with. The lightning had left me virtually unscathed; Jessica was at home and recovering. That this was a step in a direction I didn’t want to take at all.
Grant arrived while I was still brushing my teeth into a white plastic bowl on the bed-table that Sally had brought in for me.
‘You were so groggy yesterday, I didn’t think you’d need this,’ she’d explained as she’d wheeled the table in.
‘And you didn’t want anything cluttering the room in case I flat-lined again,’ I’d murmured, thinking of the bleeping monitor to which I’d been attached.
She had stared at me, hand on hip. ‘Well, that too, I suppose.’
‘Can you fetch me a mirror?’ I’d asked, moments before Grant and the children had arrived. ‘I haven’t looked at myself since the accident, and I want to make sure I look all right…for the family.’
In the end, the family arrived before the mirror did, but it appeared Grant had shown willing and had been doing some homework on memory-loss patients. He walked in with a large photo album tucked under his arm. I allowed him to kiss me chastely on the cheek, and I smiled at each of the children in turn. After all, I reasoned, whatever was happening was no fault of theirs. Three of them at least thought I was their mother, and I hadn’t the heart to tell them any different—even if I could work out what was going on.
Sophie, the eldest girl, was wearing embroidered hipster trousers and a cropped top that showed her flat eight-year-old stomach. When I caught her eye she stared back almost defiantly and stuck her iPod earpieces into her ears, effectively shutting out any kind of conversation. I wondered what sort of relationship she had with her mother.
Nicole, on the other hand, hovered round me anxiously and sat as close to me as she could without actually getting into the bed next to me. If I glanced at her, she smiled hopefully as if silently begging me to remember her, and when I ran my tongue lightly over cracked lips she reached out immediately for the plastic beaker and straw.
Toby seemed like any other four-year-old boy: bored with being stuck in the bland hospital room and ready to make a game out of anything. I watched him lying on the floor opening a paper bag of sterile antiseptic wipes, which he used to scrub his trainers before trying to cut the laces with a pair of blunt-ended suture scissors.
Teddy, I noticed, was hanging back again, still clutching the squashy ball he’d had with him yesterday. I realised he was watching his brother’s experiments with the hospital equipment, but seemed to have no desire to join in.
The girls spread themselves over the bed and tucked into the seedless white grapes they’d brought me, while Grant opened the album.
‘I’ve read that memory loss can be rectified by showing images of the patient’s life, listening to your favourite music, or watching your favourite programmes,’ Grant explained. ‘Here, look, this is a picture of us on our wedding day. I didn’t bring in the whole wedding album, as there are some of the best pictures in here, plus holidays with the children…’
I had stopped listening to him, my eyes riveted on the photo of the bride and groom smiling outside an old church. Grant didn’t look hugely different, maybe a little less lined round the eyes. The bride smiling innocently beside him was about my height and build, with golden blonde hair falling in soft curls round her shoulders above the white dress. The eyes staring into the camera were a mesmerising blue with tiny grey flecks.
‘You always liked that close-up one best,’ he continued when he saw me staring at it. ‘Of course, your hair isn’t quite that blonde now, but you’re as pretty as ever, isn’t she, children?’
‘Arms not blue now,’ Teddy commented from the corner of the room, where until that point he’d been watching us in silence.
‘Were my arms blue?’ I asked Grant. I snatched at the comment as if, by thinking about that, I wouldn’t have to acknowledge the mind-blowing fact that I appeared to be sitting here in someone else’s body.
‘The doctor said it happens sometimes after a high-voltage injury,’ Grant said. ‘There’s a huge medical word for it. Apparently your upper and lower extremities were cold and mottled blue when it happened, but it cleared in a few hours.’ He squeezed my hand. ‘You look wonderful now.’
Nurse Sally chose that moment to appear in the doorway and I glanced up and saw the mirror in her hand. My face must have blanched, because concern suddenly creased her features. I held her gaze imploringly and shook my head. She tactfully backed out of the room again and left me to my supposed family.
‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ I asked this man, my husband, somehow recovering my voice. ‘And why aren’t the children in school?’
‘It’s half-term, Lauren,’ Grant told me. ‘We were going to take a few days off and do some day trips with them.’
I looked at the children, who were beginning to fidget in earnest now. The girls had finished the grapes and Toby had got up to inspect the silent ECG machine. Teddy was still glowering at me from the doorway.
‘You poor things!’ I said with forced cheerfulness, wishing they would all go off and leave me alone. ‘Fancy having to be here visiting me instead. Grant, why don’t you go ahead and take them out to lunch or something? It’ll give me a chance to have a bath and sort myself out.’
‘Lunch?’ Sophie repeated, pulling out her earpieces and making a ‘yuk’ face. ‘I want to go to Chessington World of Adventures!’
‘Yeah, me too, me too!’ cried Toby, rushing over and jumping on the bed again.
‘I don’t,’ Teddy muttered from the corner. ‘I’m goin’ wait here for Mummy to come back again.’
‘I want to stay here with Mummy too,’ Nicole said quietly from my side.
Grant looked uncertainly from the children to me, then seemed to come to a reluctant decision.
‘Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll go to Chessington and leave Mummy to have some time on her own.’ He glanced at Teddy. ‘You too, Teddy. You’ll like it when we get there.’
‘Shan’t,’ Teddy grumbled from the corner. He flashed me a malevolent stare as he was bodily picked up and presented for a kiss goodbye.
I smiled at them all and waved thankfully as they trooped from the room, then, as the door closed behind them, I breathed a sigh of relief and turned my attention to the photo album, which Grant had left open on the bedside table. I stared at the lovely bride for a second or two, then pulled a tuft of my almost shoulder-length hair round in front of my face, peering at it out of the corner of my eye. Blonde. Oh no.
Sally reappeared a moment later with the mirror. ‘I saw the family leaving,’ she said. ‘They seemed very excited about something.’
‘Grant’s taking them to Chessington World of Adventures,’ I told her.
‘Lucky them,’ she said. ‘Do you want me for anything, or shall I leave you alone for a little while?’
‘You can answer me one question, and then leave me alone,’ I replied, holding the mirror face-down so I couldn’t see into it. ‘Where exactly am I?’
The nurse had the decency to look shocked. It was strange how people took for granted the obvious things, the things that made up their own little universes. They knew I’d lost my memory, but it hadn’t occurred to anyone that I might not even know where I was.
‘You’re in St Matthew’s Hospital, near Little Cranford,’ she told me. ‘I’m sorry, Lauren, we haven’t been very understanding, have we? I’ll leave you to look at the photos and make yourself nice. The bathroom is right next door. You can just pull off the sticky pads from the monitor. Buzz if you need anything, I’m on until two.’
I was none the wiser as to my whereabouts. I had never heard of Cranford, Little or otherwise. I stared at the back of the mirror for several minutes once she had gone, willing myself to turn it over. Eventually, I plucked up the courage and peeked into the glass. What I saw literally took my breath away. Whether this was a dream or not, it was certainly a nightmare, because despite all my denials, it appeared I really was sitting here in someone else’s body. A pretty someone else, with clear English-rose skin and expensively highlighted hair, though I could see if I held the mirror up that the blonde locks were singed at the top of my head.
Lauren had a cute snub nose, pouty lips and cheekbones to die for. But the eyes, which I had expected to be the same clear blue as in the wedding photo, were a greyish green. My eyes, I realised with relief. Hazel eyes belonging to Jessica Taylor.
I remembered the old saying that a person’s eyes are the windows to their soul. Well, these windows, despite the fancy dressing, were reflecting my soul. Teddy had been right, I thought with a pang of conscience. His mother had gone, and here was I, stuck in her body, without the first idea what sort of person she was, or how the hell I had got here.
In the bathroom, I inspected my new body with a kind of bewildered detachment. I’d always felt my own face wasn’t unattractive, with skin that tanned easily and wavy shoulder-length brown hair. But Lauren had full breasts, a solid waist and long legs. I ran my fingers over the silver stretch marks on her stomach and thighs—my stomach and thighs—remembering that she’d been through three pregnancies, one of which had been with twins. There was bruising to the ribs, which I assumed must be the result of having been given CPR after the cardiac arrest. I winced when I touched the livid purple marks, but at least I was alive.
Groaning, I lowered myself carefully into the bath, taking heed not to get the hot water anywhere near my bandaged shoulder, then I soaped the new body wonderingly, surprised that it felt as if it belonged to me. Picking up the shampoo, I began to wash my blonde hair until a stinging sensation reminded me about Lauren’s head burns. Would I feel such discomfort if this was just a dream, I asked myself with a grimace? I felt so real. Surely this wasn’t simply some medicine-induced hallucination?
I rinsed my hair with great difficulty using a plastic container that Nurse Sally had given me. I had to tilt my head awkwardly to one side so the water wouldn’t run down onto the bandage. When I returned to the side ward, wearing one of Lauren’s clean nighties with a towel wrapped turban-like round my wet hair, I climbed back into bed and closed my eyes, exhausted.
Despite my tiredness, I knew I had to methodically process all the information I had if I wasn’t going to go stark raving mad. I knew I had been given painkilling drugs, but couldn’t believe they were strong enough to have caused me to conjure up a whole new identity for myself. There was no floaty haziness to what I was experiencing, it was just too real, too solid, and so I felt I must try to put these strange events in order.
Fact: I had been struck by the lightning at around two on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t yet know much about the details of Lauren’s strike except that it appeared to have been more violent than mine, and she seemed to be more badly injured than I was. We had both been unconscious for the remainder of Saturday and into Sunday morning. Lauren had suffered a cardiac arrest, but apparently I had not.
Lauren had woken up first, or rather I had woken up in her body. But she had slept again since then, and I was still here. I glanced at the newspaper Grant had brought in along with the photo album. It was Monday’s paper, with a piece about the royal family on the front page. I pushed it away bad-temperedly. If I was really here, then the obvious question had to be, where was Lauren now? I knew she wasn’t in my body, because I’d woken up there too, although if my suspicions were right, what appeared to be night here was day there, and vice versa.
My first inclination was that I should ask Dr Shakir about what might have happened. Perhaps this sort of thing had been documented before about victims of lightning strikes. I recalled reading an article once, about how a lightning-strike victim had tried to kill herself after being struck. She’d been reported as saying she couldn’t live with herself after the incident, that she’d felt differently about everything. She’d even been afraid to leave her own house.
I lay and chewed my lip pensively. Could she have experienced something similar to what I was going through now? Could she have come back into a stranger’s body?
On second thoughts, telling anyone about what was happening was probably not such a good idea. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days locked in a lunatic asylum, that was for sure. I imagined myself trying to explain that I was trapped in the wrong body, and how the medical profession would react to such a confession.
Sitting up, I towel-dried my hair, shaking out the damp locks and turning to rummage in my locker for Lauren’s hairbrush. No, I thought as I stroked the brush carefully through my hair, I would have to be much subtler in my quest for an answer to my present predicament.
An hour later a porter came with a wheelchair and took me for a head MRI scan, and I’d not been back on the ward more than ten minutes when Dr Shakir himself came to see me. He perched on the side of the bed and asked how I was feeling.
‘I still feel rather…unsettled,’ I told him carefully.
He nodded, patting my hand in a fatherly fashion. ‘You have been through a great deal, Lauren,’ he said. ‘When part of your memories are lost, your identity seems lost with it. It’s quite understandable you should be feeling disorientated.’
‘Is it usual for patients to lose all their memories?’
He hesitated and I guessed he didn’t really want to confound me with the hard medical facts, but then he continued hesitantly, ‘Well, it’s more usual for victims of lightning strikes to suffer anterograde amnesia, losing memories of the incident and suffering problems with memory afterwards. In your case you seem to be experiencing retrograde amnesia, a loss of memories before the incident.’
I thought about what he said, but I still had more questions for him.
‘I think it would help if you could answer some questions I have been worrying about,’ I said carefully.
He nodded, smiling benignly at me.
‘When I suffered the cardiac arrest, how long was I “dead” for?’
He looked taken aback by the bluntness of my question, but answered anyway.
‘We were working on you for almost forty minutes from the time you came in to when we got a sinus rhythm going. I believe the ambulance crew had been doing CPR for at least twenty minutes before that.’
‘Is it unusual for someone to be “gone” for that long and have no serious after-effects?’
He smiled rather patronisingly before answering. ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that, Lauren. Apart from the memory loss, you seem to be recovering well.’
‘But is it unusual?’ I persisted, wanting desperately to know if this body should clinically be dead.
He shook his head. ‘People respond differently. I suppose, to be frank, I was a little concerned there may have been some brain damage after so long without oxygen to the brain, but as soon as you came round my doubts were allayed.’
‘When you were working on me,’ I continued, ‘did you contemplate giving up on me?’
Dr Shakir fidgeted uncomfortably and refused to meet my gaze. Instead of answering immediately he got up, lifted my notes from the foot of my bed and began leafing through them.
‘At one point,’ he said quietly. ‘I confess I thought we were struggling to resuscitate you in vain. I contemplated “calling it”. I thought you might be too badly injured to survive. But then I heard your children outside the emergency room crying for you, begging us to save their mother. One of the little boys was chanting, “Mummy, come back; Mummy, come back!” We shocked you one last time, and here you are.’
Indeed, I thought wryly. Here I was. But not Lauren. Not the children’s mother.
He put down the notes and smiled at me, less disconcerted now that I wasn’t asking awkward questions and forcing him to justify his actions, which, let’s face it, could have gone badly wrong if Lauren had woken up brain-damaged and needing permanent care. How would Grant and the children have coped then? I wondered. From what I had seen so far, Lauren was the strong one, the one who held that fragile family together. The knowledge transfixed me. Could I possibly step into her shoes? Was I strong enough? Did I even want to try?
I shook my head, realising that I was straying into padded-cell territory again. Thinking too deeply at this point wouldn’t help anyone, least of all me.
I decided to return to trying to understand the medical possibilities instead.
‘Dr Shakir?’ I asked, in what I perceived to be a deceptively innocent voice—Lauren’s voice, not mine, I had realised, as I was using her vocal cords and facial bone structure. ‘When you came to see me yesterday you’d looked up some stuff about lightning strikes?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes narrowing with just a smidgen of suspicion.
‘Did you find anything about victims having new memories? Or people recollecting events they couldn’t account for?’
The doctor came and sat down on the bed again, trying to look concerned, though I could see the interest gleaming in his eyes.
‘There’s often confusion, due to the Pat Effect I mentioned to you before, but new memories?’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve not heard of it.’ He fixed his gaze onto my face. ‘You’re not experiencing anything like that, are you, Lauren?’
‘Good heavens no!’ I replied hastily with a forced laugh. ‘I was just wondering what you’d found out, that’s all.’
‘There are many documented cases of lightning-strike victims becoming disorientated, changed in character, for example,’ he replied, the gleam in his eyes evaporating as quickly as it had arrived.
‘Go on.’
‘The effect of lightning on the human brain is similar to that of patients who have undergone electroconvulsive therapy,’ he continued. ‘As I said, the vast majority who survive a lightning strike are confused and suffer anterograde amnesia for several days after the strike. Loss of consciousness for varying periods is common, as are neurological complications and difficulty with memory.’
He looked at me intensely as if to check I was keeping up with him, then he pressed on more boldly. ‘You have to understand that the cognitive and neurological damage caused to the brain by a lightning strike to the skull is similar to a blunt injury trauma.’
‘Like being hit over the head?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Exactly. You were a very lucky woman, Lauren. According to your children, the lightning hit you directly on the head, back and shoulders. Your hair, I hear, stood on end and actually caught fire, and there are burns consistent with this.’
‘The burns aren’t deep, though, considering how hot you said lightning can get?’ I probed, twisting the unaccustomed wedding band on my finger as I spoke. ‘Would you have expected the burns to be worse?’
Dr Shakir smiled. ‘You are an inquisitive woman, Lauren, but I will do my best to answer you. Yes, I was surprised there wasn’t more burning to your head, but in the case of your shoulder, then no, I wasn’t surprised. Skin is the primary resistor to the flow of current into the body, causing the appearance of surface burns, but preventing deep tissue damage. With lightning the current is present in the body for a very brief time, causing short-circuiting of the body’s electrical systems: cardiac arrest such as in your case, vascular spasm, neurological damage and autonomic instability.’
‘So there was nothing about my case that was out of the ordinary?’
He paused and broke eye contact before shaking his head. ‘No.’
I stared at him, realising that what he had been holding back all along was the very thing I had been desperate to discover. Had Lauren’s injuries actually killed her? From what he had told me, and from the fascinated way he looked at me, I got the very clear impression that all Dr Shakir’s medical experience indicated that I should not be here. My living, breathing presence belied his gut instincts, confounding his diagnosis. No wonder he wouldn’t look me in the eye, I thought grimly.
I remembered suddenly what Dr Chin had said about possible deafness and the chance of developing cataracts at a later date, and put the question to Dr Shakir.
‘You are remarkably well-informed about your condition,’ he said.
He seemed happier now we were back in safe medical territory. I watched as his shoulders visibly relaxed. ‘This is accurate information regarding high-voltage injury, but I have checked you thoroughly, and you appear at present to be in the clear.’ He paused. ‘In fact, when we have had the results of the MRI scan, providing everything is normal you can probably go home.’
‘Today?’ I asked him apprehensively.
He shook his head. ‘I will come and see you again tomorrow. If your scan results are available then, and you are feeling generally in good health, we may be able to let you out tomorrow. If you are still experiencing memory loss at that time we could arrange an outpatient appointment for you at our psychiatric unit. Meanwhile, I suggest you get some rest. I’m sure it will be very difficult for you to get much peace and quiet once you are home.’
Grant came to visit me alone that evening. He said the children were exhausted after their day out. He’d put them to bed early and asked a neighbour to come in and keep an eye on them for an hour or two.
‘How is Teddy bearing up?’ I asked him, partly to show an interest in his children’s well-being and partly because, despite my denials, I was deeply affected by Teddy’s situation.
Grant shrugged. ‘He’s upset, obviously. He doesn’t really understand what’s happening, Lauren. He keeps crying for his mummy.’
I avoided his gaze, thinking that Teddy seemed to have a better grasp of what was happening than anyone else did.
‘Have they said when you can come home?’ he asked.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ I said, trying to keep my mind off the hideous possibility of such a thing.
Home. Another unknown step into the dark. A place where, unless I woke up as Jessica again soon, I would be expected to play a role I would have to guess at as I went along; to live a life that simply wasn’t mine. I wanted to go home all right, but I wanted to continue with my own life, to be in control of my own destiny. I thought of my mother’s comments about not trying to be Superwoman and bit back tears of frustration. I had always been my own woman—fiercely independent and determined to do things my own way. My life might not have been perfect, but it had been mine. And now I found I wasn’t in control of anything at all. I was being swept along; a mere passenger on a roller-coaster ride that was more terrifying than anything the children could possibly have experienced at Chessington.
I yawned widely, only just covering my mouth at the last minute. Sleep was what I needed now and what I hoped was the key to the door between these two worlds.
Grant got the message. I thought how tired he looked himself as he kissed me lightly on the forehead before heading for the door.
‘Goodnight, sweetheart,’ he whispered as he closed the door behind him. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘Goodnight, Grant.’ I sank back against the pillows, realising with a pang of guilt as I watched his retreating back that I was fervently hoping it might be the last I ever saw of him.
