Page 50 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
‘I’m here.’ He was too, right beside me, standing over me like an avenging angel all in black.
‘Come… with…’ I panted.
‘Of course.’ He grasped my feebly flapping hand.
‘We’re going to have to take everyone,’ the paramedic said, still unnaturally cheerful. ‘I hope we’ve got enough space.’
The mask dropped back over my face and everything went completely black.
19
I lost myself for a while.
There were voices and lights and questions, all of which swirled in a background that moved and had changed every time I forced my eyes open. My lids wouldn’t stay apart though, and I’d find myself drifting away from the noise into a comfortable sea of blackness, where I bobbed about dreamlessly for a while, only to come back and repeat the performance.
Eventually I found my eyes staying open for longer and longer and at last I could focus on my surroundings. On the wall in front of me was a huge clock, the minute hand jerking every so often to a new position, although at present, time meant nothing and it all seemed very random. When I moved my head, the pillow underneath it crackled. Another half-turn and I could see a drip stand with lines running down to disappear under the edge of a sheet, and Flynn. He was crumpled into a small chair, glasses askew, asleep.
‘Flynn?’ My mouth was so very dry that the words came out cracked, but he jerked awake, sliding upright in the chair and righting his glasses as though it was a subconscious motion.
‘Fee? You’re awake.’
‘Apparently,’ I chipped out. ‘Water. Please.’
Flynn fetched a glass from a side table. There was a straw in it. I didn’t like the look of that straw. It had all the appearance of incapability about it. What was wrong with an ordinary glass? ‘Here. Have a little, go carefully.’
That first taste of water was fabulous, even though it was flavoured with antiseptic and at a temperature that suggested it had been drunk once already. ‘Hate to say this,’ I said, when he’d returned the glass to its shelf. ‘But where am I? And what happened?’ The words came out in little puffs. I was still as breathless as if I’d run a mile.
My eyes had got used to the white walls and the drip stand now, and I could look properly at Flynn. He had a narrow line of stitches along one cheek, stark against his skin, which was very pale.
‘What the hellhappened?’ I repeated, shock getting hold of me again. ‘Is everyone all right?’
I grabbed at the tattered remnants of memory: loud noise and things flying about, blood and pain and a strange numbness,Margot and Wren…
Flynn took a deep breath. ‘Everyone is recovering,’ he said. ‘More or less. It was a bomb, Fee. Those guys who came in that night with the bag, they left an explosive device. An amateur, home-built one the investigators think, not much more than a timer, a detonator and lots of messy black powder. But effective, obviously.’
‘Why? Why would anyone do that?’ I looked thirstily at the glass of water again and Flynn refilled it. ‘Andthat night? How long have I been here?’
‘A week.’
‘Aweek!’ I jerked my head up off the pillowand something somewhere went beep. A quick mental audit told me that my back hurt, my legs were tingling as though I had ants running under my skin, and the upper left quadrant of my body didn’t seem to be there.
Flynn held the glass carefully up to my face again. ‘I think – the police think it was something to do with Dad,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t see what I’d done to upset anyone, but Dad can be a bit abrasive sometimes and they thought some business rival might have wanted to make a point.’
I shook my head, which took some coordinating. ‘Have you got the film from the cameras?’
‘I’ve sent a copy to the police. They’re hunting those two men down. That explosion was the biggest thing they’ve had to deal with in months, so they’re being quite enthusiastic about it.’
There was a moment’s silence. In the background, I could hear voices outside in the corridor, someone laughing distantly. Cars passed outside a window I couldn’t see out of, set high in the wall as though this were some kind of prison. ‘So, how bad is it?’ I asked eventually, when Flynn obviously wasn’t going to say anything else.
He swallowed and I saw his eyes travel over my face, flick to my left shoulder, then come back again to their resting position, staring at his hand on the edge of my bedsheet. ‘The doctors need to…’
‘Flynn. I wantyouto tell me.’
‘All right.’ He gave me a small smile. ‘Not as bad as it could have been, and not as bad as they first thought, actually.’
‘I’m alive, that’s pretty good going from where I’m standing. Lying, I mean.’ My heart was solid in my chest. ‘Look, just tell me.’
‘Fee, you understand that nothing is definite? They’ve got great treatments now and we can afford the best…’
