Page 32 of Just Say Christmas
“You’ve changed your hair,” he went on, thankfully not noticing her bout of nausea, “and your face, and your clothes, too, even though I don’t understand why, but you haven’t changed that much. Something’s odd here. Something’s twisted, and it’s not your ovary. Right, I didn’t tell you back then, or you didn’t tell me, or something. We’re here now. Tell me now.”
“Just what I told you. That I had an accident.”
“What?”
“You’re saying ‘what’ a lot.” She still hadn’t said, “Fuck you,” and she hadn’t shouted, but she was doing better. Wasn’t she? “And my hair and face were disastrous. You know they were. That’s why I changed them. We won’t even discuss my clothes.”
“Disastrous how?”
“Kane.” She sighed. “You know they were.”
“You don’t have any real eyebrows,” he said. “That’s not better. It took me two days to suss out what was different, but it’s that. Your hair’s missing its curls, your face is missing its freckles, and you barely have eyebrows. How is that better?”
“Excuse me?” She was outraged. Sort of. “All of this is striking. Making the most of my unusual features. Saying I’m here, and I’m confident, although personally, I think I look too much like Queen Elizabeth.”
“You do not,” he said, “look like Queen Elizabeth. Not even close. The woman’s over ninety.”
“The first one, obviously, not the current one. It takes so much upkeep, too. I may as well be a farmer, there’s so much cultivation involved.”
“I liked the old way better. I felt like I . . .” He seemed to be groping for words. “Like I could see you.”
“Oh.” That took the wind out of her sails.
“Back up,” he said. “To the accident.”
“I told you. Didn’t I? I wassureI told you.”
“Pretend you didn’t, and tell me now. What accident?”
Thinking about it made her feel so stupid, which was one reason she’d hidden at home for more than a week. Well, that and that her face had been a mess, she’d been missing one of her front teeth, and her brain had been scrambled. “Bike accident.”
“You were riding a motorcycle?” He looked confused now.
“No. Pushbike. I got to the hotel,” she started to explain, because he reallydidn’tknow. “I had hours before your game, and I was a bit nervous, so I thought I’d do some cycling around the harbour. I’d been trying to get more fit, you know, because of you. Rugby, and so forth. Presentation.” Her arm was moving in a way she’d never have allowed herself in court. She was out of control of the next words out of her mouth, too. Also not allowed. “Desirability, et cetera. Back then, I thought fitness was the important part, not my hair and face and so forth.”
“Which it is,” he said. “Fitness matters, and your hair was brilliant. Never mind. You were cycling, and you had an accident. I rang your hotel, though. I rang the police, too.”
“You rang thepolice?”
“You realize that you’re repeating everything I say. Yeh, I rang the police. I was bloody worried.”
“But I texted you.”
“‘Something happened’? ‘Sorry can’t make it’? In what world is that, ‘I had an accident and injured myself?’”
“I’m sure I said. Well, almost sure. I knocked a tooth out. I broke my nose. I was also a little confused. A little concussed. As I mentioned.”
“Weren’t you wearing a helmet?”
“I led with my face. No helmet for your face.”
“How?”
She took a breath and tried to focus. “You really want to make me suffer, don’t you?”
“No,” he said, and his face was nothing but honest. Nothing but real. “I want to stop you from suffering.”
All right, that wasn’t fair. How was she meant to answer that? “Oh. Well, I was trying to zip my jacket, because Dunedin’s bloody cold. I had one hand on the handlebar, and it was the wrong hand. I had a hand on the front-wheel brake, and not the rear one. I’m not the most physically adept of people, in case you didn’t notice. A car pulled out of a carpark ahead of me,Ipulled on the brake, and I went straight over the handlebars and onto my face. Which rattled my brain, bouncing around in there. How do you do anything after you get one of those concussions, by the way? How do youthink?I could barely hold a thought for weeks. All my logic skills . . .” She waved a hand. “Poof. How do you manage?”
