Sean came up blowing like he’d been underwater. “Jesus! That’s beautiful. If it kills him, I’d say it’s worth it.”
“Told you,” Dec said, reaching for the flask. “To living dangerously.” And when he lowered it, smiling beatifically: “Ahhh. Chapeau to me, if I say so myself.” But when I held out my hand, he didn’t pass it back to me. “Save the rest, yeah? In case you need a little pick-me-up later on. This place would have anyone browned off.”
“I’m not browned off. I get to lie around all day with women in, in nurse outfits bringing me breakfast in bed. Would you be browned off?”
“Still. There’s not a lot left; hang on to it. Just stick it in here—” He started shoving stuff aside on the shelf of my bedside locker.
“Oh Jesus, not like that. Give me it.” I grabbed the flask off him and started rooting through the locker for something to wrap it in. “The nurse in charge, or whatever they call it, she’s batshit crazy. I had a fan, right? She took it off me because she said it would spread germs. If she catches me with this she’ll, I don’t know, give me detention or—”
The locker was on the right side of my bed, and in order to reach it more easily I had switched the flask to my left hand. I felt it slipping free, grabbed wildly for it, and watched powerlessly as it slid through my fingers like they were made of water, bounced off the blanket and thudded dully onto the floor. The cap was loose; a trickle of whisky spread on the rot-green flooring.
There was an instant of frozen silence: Sean and Dec wide-eyed and uncertain, me unable to breathe. Then Sean leaned sideways to pick up the flask, tightened the cap and passed it back to me. “Here,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. I managed to get the flask bundled into a plastic bag and stuffed into the bedside locker, with my shoulder turned to the guys so they wouldn’t see how hard I was shaking.
“They get your hand?” Dec asked, easily. Sean found a paper napkin on the trolley table, tossed it on the floor and started wiping up the spill with his foot.
“Yeah. A kick or something.” My heart was skittering out of control. “It’s fine. The doctors say there’s some, like, some nerve damage, in my wrist? but no big deal. A couple of months of physio and I’ll be fine.” The doctors had in fact said nothing of the kind. The neurologist—a flabby, ponderous old guy with the clammy pallor of someone who had been held in a basement for several years—had refused, smugly and flatly, to tell me anything at all about whether or when or to what extent I might expect to get better. Apparently that depended on a lot of factors, which he had of course no intention of listing for me. Instead—talking over me every time I stumbled or slurred, eyes sliding off me like I was beneath his attention—he had drawn me helpful cross-sections of my head with and without hematoma, informed me that my residual disabilities (“that means the problems that haven’t gone away yet”) were “really very minor” and that I should consider myself lucky, told me to do my physical therapy like a good little boy, and then left while I was still trying to find some way of getting it through to him that this was actually my business. I still got light-headed with fury just thinking about him.
Sean nodded, balling up the wet napkin and looking around for a bin. After a moment Dec said, “At least it’s not your wanking hand.” The burst of laughter from all three of us was just too loud and too long.
By the time they left we were finishing off a bag of crisps and laughing easily again; Sean and I were advising Dec to take advantage of being in the hospital to get himself checked out for whatever lurid diseases Jenna had given him, and he was threatening to rat me out to the head nurse for drinking if I didn’t shut my gob; from the outside everything would have looked fine, completely fine, three great pals shooting the breeze and having a grand old time. But a while later, when I pulled out the hip flask—getting really fucked up felt like an excellent idea, and whatever the booze-and-meds cocktail ended up doing to me, I was fine with it—it looked ridiculous, its cocky silver curves ludicrously out of place amid all the uncompromising functionality and institutional hospital colors. It looked like a joke, a sneer straight in my face for actually thinking—stupid, pathetic—that all it would take was a few slugs of booze and ta-da! everything would be totally back to normal! The sour reek of the whisky turned my stomach, and I put it away again.
* * *
?A few days later they let me go home. They had taken a staple remover to my head, leaving behind a long red scar surrounded by red dots where the staples had gone in, and disconnected me from my painkiller IV—I had been a bit nervous about that, but the pills they had given me instead were working OK, and anyway my ribs and my tailbone were a lot better and even the headache wasn’t constant any more. I had had a visit from a physiotherapist, who had given me a bunch of exercises that I had promptly forgotten and a card with an appointment time for some clinic somewhere, which I had promptly lost. I had also had a visit from a social worker or a counselor or something, a scrawny woman with enormous glasses and a gooey smile who had given me a huge sheaf of brochures about Brain Injury And You (very very simple block-figure covers in bright monochrome, diagrams of a block figure putting things into his Memory Filing Cabinet and taking them out again, explanations of why I should eat plenty of colorful vegetables, “At first I didn’t want to take naps after lunch, but they really help. I still get tired but I feel much better”—James from Cork, plus lots of helpful planners—Important Things to Do Today; Things That Went Well Today) and suggested that if I felt anger I should hang a towel from my washing line and whack it with a stick.
I had also had another visit from the shitbird neurologist, which had been fun. All my questions (When can I go back to work? when can I go for a few pints? have sex? go to the gym?) had been either ignored completely or met with the same offhand, infuriating “When you feel ready,” which of course was exactly what I was asking to begin with: when was I going to feel ready? The exception was When can I drive? which it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask: the neurologist (pasty chins tucked down, eyebrows raised forbiddingly over his glasses, he just stopped short of wagging a finger in my face) had informed me that I was absolutely not allowed behind the wheel of a car, in case of seizures. After six months, if the seizures hadn’t materialized, I could come to him for a check-up and ask nicely if please sir I could have my license back. I was trying very hard not to think about the possibility of seizures, but at that moment my entire remaining brainpower had been concentrated on how passionately I wanted to kick the neurologist in the nads, so I had made it through the conversation without spiraling into horror (Things That Went Well Today!).
My mother was due to come pick me up in an hour and I was wandering uselessly around my room, trying to make up my mind what the hell to do with the accumulation of stuff heaped on every surface. I didn’t think I wanted any of it (where had a blue plush rabbit even come from?) but maybe some of the food would look more appetizing when I was home and didn’t feel like going to the shops, and surely I would be up to reading some of this stuff at some point, and my mother’s flowers were in vases that she might want back . . . Two weeks earlier I would have cheerfully dumped the whole lot in the bin, told my mother I had no idea where her vases had gone, and bought her new ones.
I was staring helplessly at the plush rabbit in my hands (would Melissa really have brought me this thing? would she expect me to keep it?) when there was a tap at the door and Detective Martin stuck his head around it.
“Howya,” he said. “Gerry Martin; remember me?”