head starts thumping with a full-on panic attack.
Shit isn’t the word.
There’s a knock at the bathroom door. ‘Cal?’
‘Donna, I…’ What the hell am I going to say?
‘You okay in there?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. “I can’t move.’ The door clicks. ‘No, don’t come in. I mean it.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Can you call someone? Just don’t come in.’
She pushes open the door and I try to move under some bubbles. She stands there with a weird look on her face.
‘Jesus, Donna, what’d I say?’
‘It’s my flat and you’re being a fucking baby. Now can you really not move?’
My voice cracks. ‘You think I’d make this up?’
She grabs a large blue towel from the rail and throws it into the bath. ‘Cover yourself up. I’ll help you out.’
It’s a tough job; I’m a dead weight. But we manage, me holding the towel to my waist, her with her hands under my arms. It’s the most she’s ever touched me, and I feel like asking for dinner and dancing first, but neither look possible with my legs fucked. Thinking that makes my throat hurt and I have to fight back the urge to cry. It’s not manly.
We make it to the couch and I drop and adjust myself. I’m still wet from the bath, the couch cover sticking to me. We both let out a long breath at the same time.
‘You really can’t move,’ she says.
“I really can’t move.’
She looks me up and down, then leaves the room. I can hear her on the phone, her muffled voice urgent. Thank Christ this happened here. If it had happened on the road, I’d be dead right now.
When she comes back in, she goes into the kitchen and pours us both a stiff drink. She hands me the glass and says, ‘Doctor should be here soon.’
I take a drink. ‘Thanks, Donna.’
‘He says it’s probably just temporary, but he wants to take a look himself.’
‘Christ…’
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘How about you drink up? No sense in feeling sorry for yourself.’
‘Look, Donna ‘
‘Save it,’ she says. And takes her drink into another room.
The doctor looks like he should be on the front cover of a Mills amp; Boon novel, an honest-to-goodness clean-cut poster boy, Dr Kildare without the latent homosexuality. When he walks into the living room, he’s in the middle of a conversation with Donna. He stops talking when he sees me sitting on her couch wearing nothing but a towel. I’m glad; this doctor has the plummy voice of another class way higher than mine.
When he smiles, he shows the same American teeth Donna does, but they look false. A pair of expensive- looking specs sit on the end of his nose. It’s an affectation, I’m sure.
‘Callum, right?’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
‘Richard.’ He extends his hand. I shake it. He looks back at Donna.
‘The waist down, Doctor,’ she says.
‘Ah.’
He’s too gentle to be a bona ride doctor, but he talks like one. I need X-rays. I need to see a specialist. An MRI is mentioned. So are the words ‘fracture’, ‘chiropractor’ and ‘h ck brace’. It’s enough to put the fear of God, the Devil and 11 the Nolan sisters into me.
‘I’m not saying all this will happen, but you’ll need to get checked out thoroughly. We don’t take chances with the spine. It could be that you’re just bruised and your muscles have just seized up. Or it could be that you’ve suffered severe spinal damage and you might never walk again.’
‘Oh, cheers.’
‘I’m just saying “might”, Cal. It’s not paralysis, I don’t think. Not yet. And I don’t want to treat this lightly.’
‘I don’t want you to treat this lightly.’
‘You’ll need bed rest,’ he says, then turns to Donna. She nods and sips her third drink since he walked through the door. ‘But you’ll also need to take some light exercise. Go for a walk. Don’t overdo it.’
‘Ah, right. Let me get my trainers on and I’ll be out of here,’
I say.
He writes a script and reads the drugs off as he’s writing them.
Ibuprofen, codeine if the pain gets worse. Diazepam. And he peers at me over his glasses as he writes the last one: ‘And from what Donna’s already told me, you’ll need some antidepressants.’
‘Cheers, Doc’
‘You’ll be alright with him?’ Dr Dick asks Donna.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she says.
‘Then I’ll leave you to it.’
She follows the doctor out into the hall and there’s more muffled conversation. At one point, I think I can hear her saying, ‘I’ll be fine, Richard, okay? Just let me handle this.’
The front door closes with a clatter. When Donna reappears in the doorway, her lips are tight.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
You okay?’ She drains her glass, sets it on the coffee table and avoids my eye.
‘I’ll be okay, yeah.’
‘I’ll pick up your scripts.’
Donna’s gone for about an hour. I know, because I watch the clock on the video until she comes back. I’ve made this drink last because I’ve had to. The bottle on the coffee table cries out for me to up-end the bugger into my glass, but I can’t reach it. Donna must have left it there on purpose.
Doctor Dick. Yeah, he wasn’t a doctor. He looked like one, but he didn’t act like one. I’m grateful for the prescriptions, but if he’s NHS, I’ll eat my socks. And Donna doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who’d have private healthcare. Nah, Dr Dick is a friend of the family, maybe more. The more I think about it, the more it burns me up. I need to get out of here, but I can’t bloody move, and that burns me up even more.
I really want a drink. I try to move on the couch, but the towel starts slipping. The last thing I need is to be found face down on her carpet with my arse bared. No, I can wait.
I’m not paralysed. I’ve just seized up. But Doctor Dick can’t be sure. Christ knows what I’d do if I end up paralysed.
Yeah, it worked for Ironside, but I’m not Raymond Burr. I don’t have his courage. And he could walk – he was just a lazy bastard.
Shut up, Innes.
I hear the front door open and hope that it’s not a burglar.
‘Donna?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. The clinking sound of bottles. She sounds tired. ‘I got your prescription.’
‘Just take the cash out of my wallet,’ I say.
‘Don’t worry, I will. And I know you shouldn’t drink with the pills, but I want one.’
‘That’s fine with me.’
I drink with the pills anyway. Donna doesn’t stop me. After a couple, though, I’m ready to pass out. We make it to the bedroom before I lose consciousness. And just before I go, I’m sure I can feel her hand brush my forehead. My foot twitches as the bed sinks around me.
Maybe there’s hope after all.
When I open my eyes, I have to blink against the daylight. I had bad dreams, violent, full of those screeching choirs and the heart-thumping fear of being recalled to Strangeways. If I slept, it was in thirty-minute stretches at most. A quick look around the room with blurred vision, and Donna’s nowhere to be seen. I rub the crusted drool
