felt like an embrace.
Then came the pain. It didn’t sweep in or sneak up, but landed like a jackhammer in his head, crushing all thought. His body stiffened with the intensity of it, every nerve ending alive with the stimulation, sending screaming messages to his brain. His brain. Pulsing and throbbing and aching, it felt as if it was desperate to escape his skull, blinding flashes across his forehead and temples, thrusting round to the base of his neck and back again, no escape.
He smelled burning. Maybe his brain frying in the pain. He heard voices. Talking about him, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He heard a click then a few moments later received an overwhelming wash of relief, a familiar dampening down, a monumental suppression of the agony, like a glacier pushing down on the land beneath it. Morphine. Sweet fucking beautiful morphine.
More voices, drifting away as he receded into the glorious relief of a dreamless sleep.
Eventually he bobbed back up. He sensed that time had passed. The pain was still there, but like an echo of before, a repressed memory.
Voices again. Two men. He recognised one of them.
He took a slow, careful breath, as if using his lungs for the first time. He opened his eyes.
Charlie and an older man at the end of his bed. He was in hospital. White doctor coats and antiseptic. Their lips were moving but the sound was out of sync, like a badly tracked movie clip. He closed his eyes, felt the intense weight of his eyelids, then opened them again.
The older man looked at him, said something to Charlie, then walked away. Charlie turned to him and smiled. It was a genuine smile, but it also hid something.
‘Hey, Bro.’
Billy tried to speak, but no sound came out. Charlie poured a cup of water and raised it to Billy’s mouth.
‘Here, small sips.’
Billy wet his lips and tongue, felt the cool liquid slip down his throat. He pushed away the cup.
‘What happened?’
‘Take it easy, all in good time. You in much pain?’
Billy felt the ghost of his earlier distress. He wasn’t in pain, but he nodded anyway.
Charlie pushed a button connected to a drip in Billy’s arm, and more morphine flooded his body, a thick, fuzzy glow of detachment.
Charlie sat on the bed, gearing himself up for something.
‘What is it?’ Billy said.
‘I won’t lie to you, Bro, it was fucking scary, but you should be OK.’
Charlie looked down for a second then back up.
‘According to the MRI scan you had a cerebral aneurysm.’
‘What?’
‘It’s basically when some of the blood vessels in your brain burst.’
‘How?’
‘Causes vary, it can be because of high blood pressure or atherosclerosis…’
‘Wait…’
‘That’s high cholesterol in the blood.’
Billy’s head pulsed away. He felt his throat constrict.
Charlie looked nervous. ‘Aneurysms can also be caused by head trauma.’
Billy stared at him for a long time. ‘The accident?’
Charlie looked around him. ‘Keep it down. Yeah, maybe the accident. Could be that some of the cerebral artery walls were weakened in the knock you got. Just waiting to blow whenever you got the blood pumping.’
He looked closely at Billy.
‘Speaking of which, do you remember where you were when you passed out?’
Billy closed his eyes. A mess of blurry visions swam in his mind. His face melting in a mirror. A line of white powder on ceramic, snorted up through a steel straw. Adele slapping herself until she was crying, her skin raw, hair tangled over her face.
‘Yeah.’
Charlie edged closer. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’
Billy shook his head.
‘Fucking the widow in a pub toilet?’
‘How…’
‘She did good, the widow. Got help straight away. Your pants were still at your ankles when the paramedics showed up. I’ve managed to keep that from Zoe. What the fuck is going on, Billy?’
Billy struggled to breathe.
‘I know about the coke. Blood tests came back. I’ve managed to keep that quiet as well. I’m pulling in shitloads of favours to cover for you, I hope you realise that. You know the coke probably set off the aneurysm, that and the sex. Holy shit.’
Billy’s lungs were full of wet concrete. Swathes of morphine still coursed through his veins, soaking into his bones, but he could already feel the smothering effects wearing off, the spectre of pain lurking in the back of his mind, ready to pounce.
‘Jeanie?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I had Jeanie with me. In the pub. She was tied to a table.’
‘While you were in the bogs snorting and screwing? Nice.’
‘Where is she?’
Charlie shook his head and sighed. ‘I’ll find out. She’s probably still at the pub. Either that, or your friendly widow took her home. She turned down the offer to ride in the ambulance with you, by the way. Probably for the best, in the circumstances, don’t you think? What are you going to tell Zoe? She’ll be in to visit soon.’
Billy pushed the heel of a hand into his eye socket, just to feel something.
‘I don’t know.’
‘She needs looking after, you know. You’re not the only one suffering in this whole mess. She doesn’t need you cheating on her with the widow of the man…’ He trailed off. ‘This is so fucked up.’
Billy lifted a hand to the bump on his temple, and was surprised to touch bandages. Several layers of thick, rough cotton, by the feel of it, wrapped round the top half of his head. He ran a hand over his crown and down towards the back of his neck. Charlie reached out quickly and pulled his hand away.
‘Careful.’
Billy felt a shiver go through him. ‘What?’
‘You’re lucky to be alive.’
‘What happened?’
‘You had to undergo surgery, it was a life-threatening situation. I signed the release forms.’
‘What kind of surgery?’
‘The brain surgery kind.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘A cerebral aneurysm causes intracranial pressure. That’s pressure in the brain, in the cerebral arteries, in the cerebrospinal fluid. Your brain swelled up. Basically, your skull was like a pressure cooker. That pressure had to be released.’
‘How?’
‘There are different ways, but you weren’t responding. It was a last resort. They had to take drastic action.’
‘Like?’
‘That guy I was talking to before, he’s a brain surgeon. He performed an emergency decompressive craniotomy.’
‘Fucking hell, Charlie, in English.’
‘It’s a procedure where part of the skull is removed. It gives the swelling brain room to expand without getting damaged.’
