Six Months to Get a Life

by Ben Adams

  I sat and stroked Amy’s fingers. Even her right hand was bandaged, presumably from when she put it out to break her fall. The news about her eye is awful but if her brain doesn’t recover sufficiently for her to breathe for herself, then whatever other damage there is will be irrelevant.

  After a while we heard Stuart and Lucy arrive on to the ward. Imogen and I withdrew from Amy’s cubicle and went down the two flights of stairs and outside for a bit of fresh air, leaving Stuart and Lucy to sit with Amy. And that’s where the questioning started.

  ‘How long have you known Amy for?’ her mum opened with. I gave her a potted history of Amy and me, mentioning things like the dog walking and our trip to the Lake District but leaving out any mention of Jack and any encounters with my ex. When Imogen asked me if I had met Lucy much before today, I just played a straight bat and said yes.

  ‘I am going to stay at Amy’s for a few days so that Lucy can come home,’ Imogen announced. ‘I can’t bear the thought of her staying with that man, even if he is her dad.’ So there is no love lost between Imogen and Amy’s ex then. I expect the affair with the au pair now shapes Imogen’s opinion of him.

  Eventually, after exchanging phone numbers with Imogen, I left her at the hospital entrance waiting for Lucy to emerge with her dad. I had no desire to have another faceoff with Amy’s ex, particularly in front of Lucy.

  When I got home I listened to my phone messages. I had several missed calls from my ex’s number. I wasn’t sure whether it was her or Jack phoning. I dialled the number and my ex picked up.

  ‘I am sorry to hear about what has happened, Graham,’ she said.

  In view of her previous intervention in mine and Amy’s love life, I suspected she was anything but sorry but I didn’t have the energy for a confrontation. I asked her to put Jack on.

  ‘How is Lucy’s mum, dad?’ my boy asked once he had been handed the phone. I filled him in on the latest developments. He had probably heard them all already from Lucy but he wanted to check in case things had moved on.

  ‘Lucy wants me to come to the hospital with her tomorrow,’ Jack informed me.

  ‘But it’s a school day tomorrow son,’ I rather stuffily told him.

  ‘Mum says that if it is OK with you then I can come,’ he pleaded.

  I agreed to think about it. If I take Jack along tomorrow then Imogen will get to see the full me/Amy, Jack/Lucy picture, but then why shouldn’t she see it? I phoned her once I had got off the phone with Jack and arranged to drive Lucy to the hospital in the morning. I didn’t mention Jack though. I offered Imogen a lift too but she said she would make her own way there a bit earlier than the 9 o’clock I was suggesting.

  It has been a long weekend. I am mentally and physically exhausted. I hardly slept last night. Tonight I have had a couple of fingers of Scotch to help me relax. I don’t think I have eaten anything all day so the whisky has gone straight to my head.

  I put the telly on to take the edge off the silence in the flat. The first image I saw was a photo of Amy. As well as describing Amy’s condition as ‘critical but stable’, the local news was appealing for witnesses to the accident. The car driver hadn’t stopped at the scene.

  When you gossip about someone being injured, you immediately talk about how it happened. But when that someone happens to be someone close to you, all that matters is that they get better. Until now I hadn’t even given a thought to how the accident had happened. Now though, as well as being wracked with panic over the possibility of losing Amy, I have found a bit of room in my heart to hate the bastard who, to all intents and purposes, left Amy for dead on Garratt Lane.

  I have said before that shit happens to those that let shit happen. It also obviously happens to those that don’t. Basically, shit happens. I shouldn’t mess with a well-established phrase.

  Monday 8th September

  Jack and I picked Lucy up from her Wimbledon Village home and took her to see her mum. It was heartwarming seeing Jack sitting in the back of the car holding hands with Lucy, being there for her in her time of need. How my eldest son has grown up over the last few months. I wish he hadn’t had to grow up so fast but now that he has, he is doing an excellent job of it.

  My boy has been doing his research on brain injuries too. He reminded Lucy about Jesse Ryder, the New Zealand cricketer who made a full recovery from a coma. I notice he didn’t mention Michael Schumacher though.

  Imogen was at the hospital when we arrived. I introduced Jack.

  ‘I have heard all about you from Lucy,’ Imogen said to Jack, ‘and I am pleased to finally meet you, young man.’

  Turning to me, ‘But I didn’t know Jack and you knew each other?’

  ‘I have known him since he was born,’ I told her. Imogen smiled and we left it at that.

  The doctors were in with Amy when we arrived. To give them a chance to give us the full picture without having to worry about sweetening the pill for the sake of the children, I sent the two young love birds off with some money to get themselves a snack. The hospital staff wouldn’t have allowed the four of us in to see Amy at the same time anyway.

  Eventually the two doctors emerged from Amy’s cubicle, notes in hand. As soon as I saw them emerge, I started looking for any tell-tale early signs as to whether the news was good or not. The younger of the two was smiling and nodding away at his older colleague’s words. The older one, who subsequently introduced himself as Mr Crane, wasn’t smiling but he didn’t look unduly pensive or concerned either. Mr Crane shook my hand but mainly addressed his update to Imogen because he didn’t know how I fit in to the plot.

  ‘Your daughter is still seriously ill but we do think there is some reason to be optimistic,’ he informed us, to our immense relief. ‘This morning’s scans have shown us that the swelling on her brain has continued to decrease. We are really pleased with the progress she is making. We will have a much better idea about her prospects by tomorrow. In fact, the next few days are critical.’

  You don’t exactly have to be a brain surgeon to see that.

  Mr Crane also reminded us how lucky we were that the accident had happened so close to the hospital. And not just any hospital but St George’s in particular. “This hospital is a major trauma hospital and has an excellent neurology department. We had the staff and equipment to operate straight away. If your daughter’s accident had happened anywhere else, we might be having a very different conversation right now.”

  Mr Crane’s words left me feeling cold. It’s hard to think that someone is lucky when they get run over but in this case, it seems that Amy certainly was. I don’t want to imagine what would have happened if she had been run over somewhere else.

  I stayed at the hospital for the morning. I had told Jack on the way over to picking Lucy up that he may not get in to see Amy, but that if he did, he should be prepared for what he would see. In the end, Lucy went in with her grandmother. Jack and I waited outside.

  ‘What if she’s brain damaged?’ Jack asked me when we were on our own.

  If truth be told, I haven’t got a clue what will happen if Amy doesn’t recover fully. She lives on her own with Lucy. If she comes through the accident but with a loss of some of her mental or physical faculties then who would help look after both of them? From what I know of Amy, she would hate to rely on her ex for anything. How much would her mum help? How much could I help?

  I don’t even know the answer to that last question. I have just got myself a full-time job. Practically, how much could I do? I know I am sounding a bit of a sap but I have fallen for Amy big time. She has put the colour back into my life over the last couple of months. When I am with her I am no longer a divorced man but a man with a life. She makes me smile. She is the first person I want to share life’s events with.

  But is all that enough? What if she doesn’t regain all her faculties? What if she isn’t the woman I fell in love with? They do talk about people who have suffered a brain injury changing their personality, becoming more snappy and moo
dy. I couldn’t cope if Amy turned into my ex all over again.

  All I could think of to say to Jack was, ‘Let’s hope we don’t have to cross that bridge, son.’

  Much to Jack’s annoyance, I dropped him off at school at lunchtime. I then nipped round to see if my ex was in. She was. I needed to talk to her about the whole relationship thing. Adult to adult. I don’t yet know whether or not Amy will make a full recovery. I am trying not to dwell on the negative thoughts though. When she does come out of hospital, fighting fit and ready to resume her life, I want our relationship to go back to how it was before my ex stuck the boot in. Which was why I found myself sitting in my old kitchen having coffee with my ex this lunchtime.

  ‘You look as though you haven’t slept in days,’ she observed once she had invited me in.

  I didn’t really know where to start. I didn’t have the mental capacity to plan the conversation out in my head so I just jumped right in.

  ‘Has Jack talked to you about Lucy?’

  ‘Yes, all the time,’ my ex admitted. ‘He tells me she is his soul mate and that if I try and get in the way of him seeing her, he will move in with you.’

  I was too tired to smile at that. Even if I wasn’t too tired I am not sure I would have smiled. We can’t have the kids playing one of us off against the other. I still believe in presenting a united front to the kids when possible.

  I did my best to convince my ex that I was an appropriate adult, acting appropriately. ‘I know it must be hard for you because you aren’t as involved as me in that part of his life, but I do supervise what they are up to. They still operate within ground rules.’

  ‘I know,’ she acknowledged, ‘it is just that he is growing up. He’s having new adventures and I am not involved in them.’ Welcome to my world.

  She went on to ask me whether I had talked to Jack about sex.

  ‘I have talked to him about kissing, but as far as I can tell he was embarrassed enough about that. There is no way he is going to be getting his willy out any time soon.’ That seemed to pacify her.

  We then talked about Sean and the effect that the father and son, mother and daughter thing might have on him. Sean has never said a bad word about what is going on. He seems to like Amy. That, above everything else, is probably the hardest part for my ex to deal with. She did though seem genuinely sorry that she had threatened to get her solicitor involved if I carried on seeing Amy. ‘I was at a low point,’ she confessed. ‘Mark and I had split up. You were getting your life back together, Jack was growing up. It just felt like it was me and Sean against the world. I lashed out at you. I’m sorry.’

  My ex is very into rotas, lists and ground rules. She has rules for everything, from who is washing up each night right through to a behaviour code that the children must abide by. By the time I had drunk my latte and headed back to the hospital, I had agreed a set of four simple ground rules with my ex that would govern mine and Jack’s relationships with Amy and Lucy. I undertook:

  Not to sleep over at Amy’s when I am looking after Jack and Sean.

  Not to let Amy and Lucy sleep over at my flat when Jack and Sean are there. This rule is unnecessary because my flat isn’t big enough to accommodate a mass sleep-over. I didn’t bother pointing that out to my ex though.

  Not to let Jack spend extended periods of time alone with Lucy upstairs. This one will be harder to enforce because he goes to Lucy’s without me being there sometimes.

  Not to let Sean ever feel like the odd one out.

  I was quite happy to agree to abide by these rules if it meant that my ex got off my back. I had pretty much come to these conclusions on my own anyway.

  I felt slightly happier as I drove back to the hospital. Now all that remains in the way of mine and Amy’s relationship is Amy’s recovery and her acceptance of my baggage.

  Tuesday 9th September

  The long road to recovery has started. Imogen phoned me first thing this morning and gave me the good news. I rushed straight over to the hospital. I got to the intensive care ward and received the shock of my life when I saw an empty space where Amy’s bed had been. A nurse soon put me straight, telling me she had been moved out of the intensive care ward and into a high dependency neurology ward upstairs. I guess Amy not being in intensive care now must be a good sign.

  When I found the right ward, I joined Imogen in another sterile waiting area.

  There are no miracles in life. Amy didn’t smile at me, sit up and give me a hug as soon as I walked in to her room. But she did blink a few times with her right eye. Her left eye is still swollen and covered. Holding her hand felt different. It sounds stupid but it felt like she was more ‘there’ than she was yesterday. Her fingers moved, not to the extent that they gripped mine or anything, but I could feel movement.

  As the day wore on, blinks graduated to attempts at smiles. Finger movement moved on to positive gripping and Amy began to move her head, albeit painfully and slowly. She definitely recognised us all. The initial signs are that she hasn’t suffered any catastrophic brain damage.

  I was about to leave the hospital for the day, feeling tired but slightly more chipper now that Amy is noticeably on the mend, when a nurse told me there were two police officers in the hospital’s main reception area waiting to talk to Imogen and me. On the way down to find them, we speculated that they had come to give us news of who had knocked Amy down. It turned out, though, that they wanted to discover information rather than impart it.

  The two officers, a Sergeant Atkinson and his sidekick PC Reynolds, wanted to talk to me first. I sat with them answering their questions for about ten minutes. They were pleasant and genial with me but it all felt a bit odd. Until that point I had assumed that some idiot had run Amy down through a simple lack of attention to their driving. From the nature of their questions though, it sounded as though the police had other ideas. At one point, they asked me where I was at the time of the accident.

  ‘Look, what the bloody hell is going on here?’ I asked. ‘I thought Amy was knocked down by some drunk who failed to stop.’

  ‘She probably was,’ Sgt. Atkinson agreed, ‘but we wouldn’t be doing our jobs properly if we didn’t look in to all the options, would we?’

  So I told them about that Friday night, how Amy and I had met up in Wimbledon but subsequently gone our separate ways, my way being to the 164 bus stop and back to my flat.

  ‘Did you have an argument that night?’ the PC asked.

  ‘No.’ Strictly speaking, I wouldn’t classify our discussion as an argument.

  ‘Do you know whether Amy had any enemies?’ I felt like I was in the middle of a Mark Billingham novel and that any minute, Tom Thorne would grab me by the lapels (not that I had a jacket on) and try and shake a confession out of me.

  ‘I don’t know her friends, let alone her enemies,’ I replied. I can’t imagine that Amy would have any enemies. Who would want to run her down? That sort of thing just doesn’t happen to ordinary people, does it?

  Sitting back at my flat having the regulation Scotch before bed, I am totally relieved that Amy isn’t going to die on us. I won’t relax though until I have heard her speak, until I have heard her laugh.

  As well as worrying about Amy’s health, I have now started thinking about the hit and run. No matter how much I think about it, I can’t believe that this can be anything other than a tragic accident. I guess the police are right to pursue all options but on this occasion they must be barking up the wrong tree. Imogen agreed. Her verdict was that the police were just covering their arses.

  Thursday 11th September

  Amy is now able to talk. She was slurring her words a bit yesterday but even that has cleared up today. She is up and about but she is still unsteady, wobbly on her feet. She is still a bit confused too. She doesn’t remember anything from around the time she passed out. I have exhibited a few of these symptoms after a good night out.

  The first thing she said to me when I got to the hospital yesterday afternoon w
as, ‘You need a shave.’ I was impressed that she could see that much, what with one eye bandaged up and the other like an island in the centre of bruised flesh. Maybe she felt my stubble when I kissed her.

  She hasn’t got her head around her eyesight issue yet. The doctors haven’t totally written off her left eye but their brows furrow whenever they look under the bandage. An eye specialist is coming to see her tomorrow.

  Rather than her eye issue, Amy seems totally preoccupied with the amount of scarring she will be left with once the bruising subsides and the remaining bandages are removed. The first question she asks any medical professional who comes in to see her is, ‘How are my cuts healing up?’

  I am not proud of myself but her cuts and scarring concern me too. I know the arguments. Beauty is only skin deep, it’s the person inside that matters. That’s easy to say but it’s much harder to feel. The left side of her face is still one giant black, brown and green bruise with big welts of scratched skin running from under her ear, across her cheek to her nose. I can’t help worrying that Amy won’t ever fully recover her former unblemished skin, gorgeous eyes and smile.

  Imogen saw me looking at Amy. A bit later when I went to grab a sandwich from the hospital canteen, she asked if she could join me. I have spent countless hours with Amy’s mother over the past few days. We have got on well enough but our focus hasn’t been on each other. I haven’t discovered much about Imogen and she doesn’t know much about me. Imogen had obviously decided that it was high time we put an end to that state of affairs.

  ‘What are your intentions, Graham?’ she asked, just as I was taking my first bite out of my cheese and cucumber sandwich in the noisy canteen. It struck me as quite an old fashioned question, quite formal. But also quite pertinent.

  What are my intentions? I do want a long term future with Amy. In my mind at least, our relationship has already exceeded the ‘casual’ tag because of the extent of my feelings for Amy. I am not saying I necessarily want to marry her. I am not sure I will ever be the marrying type again. But I catch myself thinking of a future in which Amy and I are growing old together, dine at posh restaurants, take trips to the theatre and receive regular house-calls from our adult children, possibly with their own children in tow. I haven’t got anywhere near discussing any of this with Amy. I am really not sure if she feels the same, but I am certainly hoping she does.