Games People Play

by Voss, Louise

  ‘Only very small,’ said the woman.

  The snowboarder said something in Italian, and they began nodding vigorously, expressions of concern on their tanned, lined faces. They looked so alike, as some couples do. Even in the middle of my anxiety, I wondered if Billy and I would ever have grown to resemble one another.

  The boarder turned back to me. ‘I have asked them for to see if your daughter she is …down,’ he said, jabbing his thumb downhill. I didn’t know if he meant ‘down’ as in fallen, or just ‘further down’, but I nodded too.

  The couple skied off slowly, and I waited. I wasn’t aware that I was holding my breath until the shout came, and then I let it out with a big gasp.

  ‘Come,’ said the boy, holding his hand out to me.

  ‘They are not far down.’ Together we edged sideways down the slope. It was such hard work, and I was so desperate to reach Rachel, that I felt like flinging myself on to my belly and body-surfing down. But he held my hand, even though he was still dabbing at the wound on his head, and in a couple of minutes we made out the shapes of the two skiers in their matching red jackets. The man was removing his jacket and placing it over Rachel’s body. She lay face down, motionless in the snow.

  My heart nearly stopped, and I cried out, the cry I should have cried when Billy left me; the cry I had been holding in for weeks now, keeping it trapped inside me, begging to be let out. I cried out so loudly that we were lucky I didn’t trigger an avalanche. Skidding the last few feet, I hurled myself into the snow next to Rachel, cradling her head to me, ripping off my glove and desperately trying to find a pulse with my cold fingers against her colder neck. One arm was twisted behind her back, as if the mountain had captured her and was getting ready to frogmarch her away somewhere; and her left leg was bent at an unnatural angle. Her trousers had somehow got torn all the way up one shin. Irrationally, I thought: what a shame, she loved those pants. At first, I couldn’t feel a pulse. I had no idea what to do.

  ‘Help,’ I said, looking up at the three horrified spectators, tears flowing down my face in warm tracks of desperation. ‘Get help, please, now.’

  The snowboarder jabbered something, and the Italian couple hastily conferred. Then the man skied off without another word, flying away down the mountain, leaving his jacket under Rachel’s head.

  The woman planted a little stockade of upright skis in a circle around Rachel, enclosing her.

  I prayed then, to the God I knew I loved but didn’t communicate with nearly enough. I prayed that he loved Rachel as much as I did, that there was nothing seriously wrong. That she’d get up in a minute, and be fine…

  Chapter 22

  Rachel

  My legs won’t move.

  Shit. I’m so dizzy, and my mouth is dry. It’s that Natasha. She must have lobbed me and I fell over when I was running back to get it. That’s it. She hates me. It’s written all over her face. I can’t understand why she hates me so much, I’ve never done anything to her. I’ve never even met her before – or have I? Oh Lord, I threw up, didn’t I? With Eurosport filming it and everything. I wonder if they showed it on TV in England, if Mark saw it. He’ll be here soon, at least.

  Kerry will have rung him and told him to come to me.

  This must be a Swiss hospital. It’s dark and quiet, maybe it’s night-time. Why do I feel paralysed if it’s only a tummy bug? I’ve never been in hospital before.

  I don’t like it, it smells funny and it’s too quiet. But I’ve been feeling sick all day. I’m never drinking alcohol before a tournament again, no matter how much Kerry tries to persuade me …Maybe I didn’t throw up on court. Maybe that was later. I can’t remember. No, I know – I was sick in the locker-room loo.

  Oh. There’s something on one of my legs. It feels smooth and cool, but aches inside, as if everything in there is liquid. My knee feels like a mint humbug. I wonder if I can play like this?

  No, Rachel, you moron. Of course you can’t play.

  There must be some kind of mistake. I can’t really have broken my leg, surely I’d have remembered that when I was puking in the locker room? Perhaps there’s been a mix-up at the hospital, like when babies get sent home with the wrong parents. They put my leg in this wrapped-up thing when they should be giving me antibiotics for my stomach bug …

  But if it’s a mistake, or a tummy bug, then why does it hurt so much? Where’s Mark? Where’s Kerry? I don’t want to see Dad but I can’t for the life of me think why, not right now. I feel too sleepy. I really need a drink of water.

  There’s a strange kind of noise somewhere around here. I wish it would stop. It sounds like someone mowing the grass, although it can’t really be that. It’s dark. No one cuts grass at night.

  The noise is getting louder. It doesn’t sound like a lawnmower any more, it sounds like a sort of creaky mooing.

  I try to sit up, but I can’t move. There’s pain shooting up my leg. The mooing gets louder and louder, it’s really annoying …

  Someone is talking to me, her face looming into mine, but I don’t recognize the words.

  ‘I don’t speak German,’ I say. ‘Water?’ The face is lined, and wearing a silly hat. The umpire?

  ‘When’s my next match? I think it’s tomorrow. I’ll be better by then, won’t I?’

  The umpire just smiles at me and pats my free hand. Her face vanishes and is replaced by another one.

  ‘Rachel, darling,’ says the other one, slowly and clearly. She looks like my mother, but it can’t be. ‘You are in hospital.’ She snakes an arm around my shoulders, and lifts me up enough to take some sips of water from the plastic cup she’s holding. Her hands are small, brown and veiny, like she spends too long in the sun. Maybe she is an umpire too.

  ‘I know,’ I reply, allowing myself to be lowered back against the pillows. ‘In Zurich.’

  ‘No,’ says the one who looks like Mum. She even has a faint American accent like Mum. ‘In Italy. You had an accident on the mountain.’

  The mountain? I tut. Really, the administration in this hospital is appalling. They have all their patients’ notes mixed up.

  ‘I wasn’t on a mountain. I puked after a match. They said it was a tummy bug. I have to be out of here by tomorrow. I think I won, so I’m in the next round.’

  The face frowns, and tilts on one side. I frown too. Perhaps I didn’t win. Or was it the next one I lost? Wait …Did I fall? Someone fell.

  ‘I’m confused,’ I say, in a small voice. ‘I want Mark.’

  ‘Try to sleep now, darling. It’s just the painkillers which make you feel confused. Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.’

  I am gently pushed down again and, I have to admit, it feels more comfortable. I am getting really sleepy again, and trying to figure everything out is making my head hurt as well.

  Must conserve my strength for the next round. I could win this tournament, I know I could. That’s all I need; one big win. Get my ranking up inside the top 250. I could do it …I could be the outsider. It just takes time …I’m getting there …One foot in front of the other …Keep practising …keep hitting …keep your eye on the ball, Rachel …

  Chapter 23

  Susie

  It was the emotional equivalent of being freezing cold, too cold to form words. That was how my heart felt. I don’t remember how long I knelt in the snow by my unconscious daughter, but it was ages before I even realized that my salopettes and thermals were soaked through. Mountain rescue arrived, a flurry of men in red jackets, and after they’d examined Rachel and put a neck brace on her, they moved her on to something which looked like a sleeping bag with a tent around her head, and I watched her being dragged away down the mountain on ropes, pulled by one skier. Then I was whisked away too, on the alpine equivalent of a jet-ski, but my eyes were shut tight and my arms wrapped around one of the red-jacketed men.

  They let me go in the ambulance with her, and, mercifully, she had by then regained consciousness.

  She had done something to her knee:
they cut her trousers off and we watched it swell out before our eyes, like a loaf rising; and she had concussion from hitting her head on something as she went down, probably the edge of the Italian boy’s snowboard. I thought her arm would be hurt too, after seeing it twisted like that, but they said it didn’t seem to be.

  They gave her something for the pain, but she was moaning and muttering, something about not wanting a stretcher, asking where Kerry and Ivan were, and saying that Mark would ring her soon, now the match was finished. I remembered her being sick after that win in Zurich, when she was on the phone to me. She must have got confused and thought that she was still in Switzerland. Still, I thought it was better for her not to really know what was going on, not yet. I couldn’t bear to think about it myself either. Nor about what Ivan was going to say …

  The hospital was thirty miles away. I stayed with her, or hovered outside thick flappy double doors, while they X-rayed and CAT-scanned her. She was so woozy from concussion and painkillers that she was barely aware of what was going on, so the surgeon came out and showed me the X-ray of her knee. It was just the way you always see in hospital dramas on TV: the delicate fingers pushing the black film against the light box, the purple ghostly image of shattered bone lit up, the earnest explanations.

  ‘It is a significant fracture of the tibial plateau,’ said the surgeon, in precise but heavily accented English.

  He had a hank of black hair flopping across his left eye which gave him a far more youthful appearance than his baggy face suggested.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked anxiously. For a moment I wondered if he was misusing the word ‘significant’, and what he actually meant was something else, something like ‘minor’.

  But then he said, ‘I am going to operate on it tomorrow. It will take three hours. I must screw in a metal plate, and make a bone graft from your daughter’s hip, to help repair the bone. See here, underneath the kneecap, where it is all smashed. I must put in new bone, how you say it? Mashed up, to fill in the gaps.’

  I felt sick. I’d somehow thought that even if it was broken, they could just bung her leg in plaster and tell her to put her feet up for a couple of weeks. This sounded positively Frankensteinian.

  ‘How long before she plays tennis again? She is a professional tennis player.’

  He tutted and shook his head. ‘Well then, this is not very good. She must not put any weight on the leg for three months. We say usually it takes one year for a full recovery.’

  I sank on to a plastic chair and put my head in my hands. One year…poor, poor Rachel. Oh God, this was all my fault. Ivan was going to kill me.

  ‘They’re going to operate tomorrow, my darling,’ I said to Rachel some minutes later, once I’d finally been able to gather my composure enough to go back and talk to her. Talking itself was increasingly difficult, as if I was back there in the snow. My legs still felt frozen even though an English-speaking nurse had lent me some dry blue hospital scrubs, which I was now wearing, with just my ski socks and no shoes. (Where had I got changed? And where was my wet ski gear? I had not the faintest idea.) I just kept lightly stroking the hair back from her forehead as her eyelids fluttered open and closed.

  Later, the nurses made up a camp bed for me next to Rachel’s bed, but I don’t think I managed to sleep for more than half an hour. I had to be there if she woke up. I couldn’t bear to think of her, confused and in pain and believing that she was alone, so I kept getting out of the bed and stroking her forehead again.

  She was so pale, but at least looked peaceful. I had a flashback to when she was a little girl, when I used to check on her before I went to bed myself. She’d never been a peaceful sleeper, though: after even just a couple of hours’ sleep, her nightdress would be twisted indecently up around her middle and her duvet would be making minimal contact with the bed, having mostly slithered on to the floor. She was usually squashed up with her nose touching the wall, and a plethora of cushions and soft toys taking over the space in the middle of the mattress that was rightfully hers. It looked weird to see her now, so straight and still like that. At least they had put her knee into a temporary plaster cast, just around the back of her leg, so it was immobilized.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Rach,’ I kept whispering in her ear, dreading on her behalf the pain and incapacity and misery she still had to come. I felt as if I’d done nothing but apologize to my daughter. And this was the biggest thing yet I had to apologize for.

  They operated on her knee the following afternoon. For me, the day passed in a sludgy blur of waiting, drinking bad coffee and having small chats with various medical personnel who spoke English in varying degrees of proficiency. I decided not to ring Ivan and Gordana until after the operation, so at least I could report on her progress (and, if I was honest, not have to call them again to tell them how it had gone. I was dreading making the first call).

  Rachel herself was very quiet after she came round. She did at least know that I was there, and what had happened, but she barely said a word other than to ask for more morphine. The rest of the time she just lay there, her leg in a strappy brace with a big dressing over the incision, with an expression of confused disbelief on her face. I was so tired that I could barely keep my eyes open, but I tried – to no avail – to cheer her up. I couldn’t bear to tell her that she wouldn’t be walking for three months, let alone playing tennis again any time in the near future.

  Later that day, while she was having a nap, a face appeared at the porthole cut into the door of her room. A familiar-looking man was standing there, smiling hesitantly at me. I wondered who the hell it was for a moment, and then remembered: it was the popcorn-eating minibus driver from the hotel. Karl. I left the room to greet him, inexplicably relieved at the sight of him standing there, his van keys dangling from his thumb and a small bunch of cellophane-wrapped flowers tucked under his arm.

  ‘Mountain rescue contacted the hotel. Nadia should have come, but her ski boots have given her a very bad blister. I wondered if there was anything I could do to help. Perhaps you would like a lift? Or I could get you some change of clothes,’ he said. ‘I am sorry about your daughter. Is she OK?’

  ‘Who’s Nadia?’ I asked vaguely, wondering why I asked, since I couldn’t care less. I was feeling rather dizzy. I must have got up too quickly. Or else it was lack of food – I was starving, but had only managed little snacks here and there since I’d got to the hospital.

  ‘Your holiday rep,’ he replied.

  Oh yes, I thought, her. Only she could cite a blister as a reason for not carrying out her job. I was so tired that I could hardly bear to speak, but I forced a few words out.

  ‘Rachel’s going to be OK. She’s got a bad fracture just below her knee, and concussion. She’ll be here for a couple of days and then they’ll fly her home.’

  ‘And what about you? Are you OK?’ He bent his knees and his head a little as he spoke, bobbing down so that he could look into my eyes at the same time. I couldn’t reciprocate. There was such compassion in his voice that I was worried I might break down. ‘I thought you might like a lift back to the hotel. To get some things perhaps.’

  ‘Well …I’m not feeling too great, actually …but all the same, I think I can manage. I don’t want to leave Rachel. It’s very kind of you to offer, though.’

  ‘Not at all. Nadia should be here really,’ he said without rancour. ‘But I think you should come back with me. You need a rest also, I think.’ Alt-zo, he pronounced it.

  A passing nurse, the one who’d lent me the scrubs, stopped in the corridor. ‘Mrs Anderson, your friend is right. It is important that you have a good night of sleep tonight. You had a shock too. Rachel is still sedated. You can come back tomorrow. I get your ski gear for you.’

  I still wanted to tell them both: No, I don’t want to go back to that empty twin room, with Rachel’s stuff strewn over it, and no Rachel to chat to. I was just beginning to enjoy the experience of sensing her drift off to sleep in the identical bed beside m
e; my daughter, with me again…and now this.

  But I felt too jet lagged and exhausted to argue. My skin felt itchy with grime and fatigue. For the first time, I realized what I must look like: yesterday’s makeup, my hair untouched by a brush, no lipstick, wearing the unflattering hospital scrubs …I wanted a steaming bubble bath, some cleanser, my own clothes, a large alcoholic drink, and a hot meal.

  ‘It’s not Mrs Anderson, actually,’ I said wearily. The staff had been calling me that since we arrived, but I hadn’t had the energy to inform them that I went back to my maiden name after Ivan and I got divorced. ‘But OK. I’ll go, and come back to the hospital tonight. I need a change of clothes and my washbag. And I have to make a call to Rachel’s father.’

  Ivan was going to be so, so furious. He’d instantly blame me. But then, I thought, why wouldn’t he blame me? It was my fault.

  I looked through the porthole. Rachel was awake again, lying still, her big brown eyes gazing out at us without curiosity, in a sort of stunned vacancy. I pushed open the door and Karl followed me in.

  ‘Hello, Rachel,’ he said softly, proffering the flowers. ‘I am sorry about your accident. I brought you these.’

  She smiled faintly, looking more normal. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You remember Karl, from the hotel,’ I said, taking the flowers and laying them on Rachel’s locker. The nurse could put them in water. ‘He’s kindly offering me a lift back to get some stuff. I won’t be long, though, Rach, I’ll come back later and—’

  ‘Mum. Come back tomorrow. All I want to do is sleep.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded. I wanted to object, but I was so exhausted that I wanted to cry. The nurse came back in carrying my ski boots and a green plastic hospital waste bag containing my ski clothes. I thanked her, then turned back to Rachel

  ‘Right then, angel. Ring me if you need anything, you promise? Even if it’s a chat in the middle of the night. Anything. I’ll keep my mobile on all the time.’