Gemma's Journey

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘Hello darling,’ she said, her voice full of sympathy. ‘How’s it been?’

  But it was her daughter Susan who answered. ‘Pretty dreadful,’ she said, as if she’d been expecting the question. ‘It was a major incident, I’m afraid. Twenty-seven fatalities at the last count, and a hundred and eighty-two injured. The news has been coming through here all afternoon.’

  Catherine was shocked. ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘Yes,’ Susan agreed. ‘It is. There’ve been some ghastly stories. Apparently one of the injured had to have her leg amputated to get her out. Has it been on the television yet?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been in the clinic all afternoon. I missed the early evening news.’

  ‘So did I,’ Susan said. ‘It’s been a hell of a day. We shall have to watch at ten o’clock.’

  ‘I shall hear about it when your father gets home.’

  ‘Ah,’ Susan understood. ‘He was on call.’

  ‘Yes. I’m waiting for him now.’

  ‘I thought he’d be there,’ Susan said, ‘being south London. Give him my love. Tell him there’s going to be an inquiry and they’ve asked me to organise it.’

  Catherine caught the pride in her voice. ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘That’s a feather in your cap.’

  ‘It is rather,’ Susan agreed. ‘If I do it well.’

  ‘You will. Where will it be?’

  ‘London, I expect. I’d rather it was York but being a London incident, we shall probably have to come down to take evidence.’ She’d lived in York ever since she married, which was nearly fifteen years ago, and would have preferred to have been based there but for a job as prestigious as this one she had to be prepared to go anywhere.

  ‘So we shall see you,’ Catherine hoped.

  ‘Yes. I’ll make sure you do.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Quite soon I should think. It’s a top priority.’

  ‘Will you bring the girls with you?’ The thought of seeing her two granddaughters again made her warm with pleasure.

  It was short-lived. ‘No,’ Susan said. ‘I don’t think so. Not unless it runs into half-term. They’d have to be left on their own all day and they’d hate that.’

  ‘I could take a few days off and look after them,’ Catherine offered, adding, ‘if you’d like them here with you.’ Now that she worked part-time it shouldn’t be too difficult. She could swap shifts with Marjorie.

  The offer was dismissed – brusquely but cheerfully. ‘No, no. There’s no need for that. They’ll manage. They’ve got their nanny. And Rob. They’re used to me being away. Anyway they’ll be at school. There’s no need to uproot them.’

  Catherine sighed. Sometimes she thought there was something a little too ambitious about this daughter of hers. It was understandable that her career was important to her – after all, not many women made it to an executive post with British Rail – but she really ought to consider her children just a little more. She didn’t always seem to realise how much you have to compromise when you’ve got children. ‘I wouldn’t mind looking after them, you know.’

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ Susan said. ‘They’re used to it. They’ll cope.’ And when her mother was silent, ‘Oh come on, Mum, I’m a working woman. Just like you. You worked and I coped, didn’t I? I can’t remember a time when you weren’t working.’

  ‘That was slightly different,’ Catherine pointed out. ‘I was a single parent. I had to work. And I was always just round the corner, now wasn’t I? I never left you. Not when you were in infant school, anyway.’

  ‘Helen’s in the Juniors,’ Susan corrected, and now her mother could hear irritation in her voice; ‘she’s nearly ten, for heaven’s sake. I wish you wouldn’t exaggerate.’

  She’s still young, Catherine thought, and Naomi’s only seven. It wouldn’t hurt you to let them come down here and stay with me for a while. School’s not that important. But she decided it would be judicious to change the subject, especially now, when she needed her energy to support Drew. ‘How’s Rob?’

  ‘Up to his neck in greenery,’ Susan said, glad to be able to talk about her husband. ‘He’s got a huge order for Christmas. Hotel chain. Chrysanthemums …’

  As she put the phone down after the call, Catherine couldn’t prevent another sigh. It would have been so nice to see the girls again. But there wasn’t time to brood on it. She picked up her kitchen knife and set to work on the onion again, slicing neatly and rapidly before the juice could make her eyes water. Within seconds she had relaxed into the comfort of cooking, contented in her comfortable kitchen, at ease in her familiar house.

  She and Drew had lived in the place for the last twenty-eight years, ever since 1968, when he first decided to set up in general practice. It was a detached, double-fronted Victorian house on the east side of Putney Hill and a very pretty one, built in the Italianate style with a long back garden full of established fruit trees and a short front garden full of flowering shrubs. They’d loved it from the moment they first saw it and Andrew always said that buying it was the best move he’d ever made, even though the mortgage had been more than they could really afford. The repayments were so large in that first year that the thought of them had kept Catherine awake at nights. She’d been easily worried in those days, perhaps because she’d had a lot to worry about. Their marriage was a mere two years old, Christopher had been a babe in arms, and very fretful, particularly at night, and his half-sister, Susan, had been a surly eleven-year-old, self-consciously wearing glasses for the first time, hating her new school, still not quite sure about her new stepfather and struggling not to be jealous of her unwanted brother.

  But they’d settled down with surprising speed. By the time Nick was born, two years later, Chris had become an entertaining toddler, Susan was doing well at school and had grown really fond of her new father and they were so much at ease in their rambling home that it was hard to believe they’d ever lived anywhere else.

  Now it was almost an extension of their personalities. It contained them, as it contained their memories, of the early days when they ran the surgery in two of the downstairs rooms, of the children growing up, the years when Gran lived with them in her little flat – dear Gran – Susan leaving for York and Chris for Quebec. It was a family house, the place they returned to for rest and recuperation. They knew every creak and quirk of it, every scent and sight, season by season. The very dust was familiar.

  The soup was simmering when Catherine heard Drew’s key in the lock. She went out into the hall at once to put her arms round his weary neck and comfort him. They stood cheek to cheek until he had relaxed a little.

  ‘Bad?’ she sympathised, standing back from him at last.

  He covered his mouth with his hand, pretending to rub the dusting of stubble on his chin. ‘Hideous.’

  The gesture told her more than any words could have done. She kissed him briefly but lovingly. ‘Whisky’s on the sideboard,’ she comforted.

  He picked it up on his way through to the kitchen and sat at the table with the glass between his hands, his shoulders hunched, staring into the middle distance. Yes, she thought, reading his body cues, it has been hideous. You’re done in. But she didn’t prompt him to talk about what had happened and she didn’t tell him about Susan’s phone call either. What he needed now was peace and quiet and the space to recover.

  So he had his bath and shaved and put on his clean clothes and they ate their soup together in companionable silence in the kitchen with the radio playing soothing music turned down low. It was the best room in the house for recuperation, a warm, welcoming place, with its range of wooden units and its rich colours – that maroon oven had been an inspiration and so had the red saucepans. They sat in their accustomed places at the farmhouse table with everything they needed easily to hand and the curtains drawn against the night and the world. By the time he set down his spoon, he’d recovered himself enough to smile at her.

  ‘What would I do without you?’ he
said lovingly, admiring her. Such a good, strong face she had, with those fine blue eyes – air force blue he’d always told her – and that tangle of short curly hair. When they’d first met it had been a sort of pale auburn colour; now it was partly white and partly sandy, like salt and pepper. Not a beauty his Kate, neither of them had ever pretended that – her features were too irregular, her nose too large, her teeth too crooked, her chin too small – but it made him yearn with affection just to look at her.

  ‘Cook your own supper, I expect,’ she said lightly. ‘Are we going to watch the news?’

  The question brought him up short. Did he really want to be taken back to the accident? Now that he was home and he’d put it behind him, he wanted to avoid it and forget it. But, at the same time, he was proud to think he’d been part of an incident that was going to make the national news and he couldn’t help being curious about what they would show. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said, ducking the decision.

  She recognised his hesitation, understood it and answered it, as he’d intended she should. ‘I think I’d like to see it,’ she said and led him into the living room.

  The crash was the lead story and it started arrestingly with a close-up of that poor girl being carried away on her stretcher, drowsy and bloodstained, with the cradle mounded over her leg. The shock of seeing her again was more profound than Andrew had expected. It brought back all his irritation and anger but before he could tell Catherine anything about it, they were featuring some asinine bureaucrat in a clean suit who was holding forth in praise of the emergency services.

  ‘So I should think!’ Catherine said. She’d recognised his anger and this was a chance for him to give vent to it.

  ‘Nothing about the impact this’ll have on normal service in the NHS, you notice,’ he grumbled.

  Then, suddenly and shockingly, there was his own face blazing at him from the screen. Good God! he thought. Do I really look like that? His face seemed lop-sided, as if it had been twisted out of shape. Very odd. Then he realised that this was not his mirror-image that he was seeing but his face as others saw it. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

  Catherine was listening to his voice on the television. ‘Accidents don’t happen. They’re caused.’

  ‘Quite right,’ she agreed.

  He shrugged. ‘But not politic to say so, perhaps.’

  ‘There are always people who don’t like hearing the truth,’ she conceded, ‘but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be told.’

  He was speaking on screen again, so they both listened, she impressed by what he was saying and thinking how handsome he looked, he with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. Rabbie Burns was right, he thought. It’s chastening to see yourself as others see you. The camera zoomed in on his face, revealing his anger. ‘We value money more highly than human life,’ his mouth said. ‘That’s the message of this accident. It’s a very sick world.’

  ‘I was thinking of what Susan said,’ he explained, as the next item of news began. ‘You remember. About the state of the rolling stock. The way they’ve cut back on maintenance. She foresaw this. She said there’d be an accident sooner or later and now we’ve had it.’

  That alarmed Catherine. ‘You didn’t mention her name, did you?’

  He brushed that aside. ‘No. Of course not. Give me credit for a little tact.’

  She retracted her implied criticism by changing direction. ‘I wonder what she’ll think of it.’

  ‘She might not have seen it.’

  ‘Oh no. She’ll have seen it. She was going to watch. She told me so.’

  He remembered the engaged phone. ‘She called you this evening.’

  ‘There’s going to be an inquiry. She’s been asked to organise it.’

  He was impressed. ‘Good for her.’ Then he grinned. ‘This is turning out to be quite a family affair. Nick was there too. Did I tell you that?’

  Her eyes widened with concern. ‘At the crash?’

  ‘With John. Yes.’

  Now there was anxiety on her face. ‘Was he all right?’

  ‘He was fine,’ he said, but there was more annoyance in his voice than reassurance. ‘Bit too fine to tell you the truth. He’s getting too bloody cocky for his own good. Thinks he knows it all. He was trying to teach me my business, saucy young devil.’

  So that’s what the anger’s about, she thought, as he ploughed into an account of Nick’s impertinence after the accident.

  ‘You should be glad to think he’s so confident,’ she said, springing to the defence of her young. ‘I’d say that was an asset.’

  ‘Confidence is one thing,’ his father growled, ‘arrogance is another.’

  She smiled at him. ‘He’s just like you,’ she said, ‘only you can’t see it. You were over-confident when you were his age.’

  Now it was his turn to be defensive. ‘I was not,’ he said, half teasing, half serious. ‘I’ve always had a perfect sense of my own fallibility.’

  And that made them both laugh because it was so obviously and manifestly untrue.

  ‘You were over-confident,’ she repeated. ‘You made me feel you could cope with anything. It was one of the things I liked about you.’

  Now they were teasing and easy again. ‘Well I’m glad there was something you liked about me,’ he joked.

  ‘That among other things,’ she joked back.

  Chapter 4

  Gemma was swimming in a warm sea, lying on her back with her long hair streaming like silk in the water, moving her arms languidly, kicking her feet so that spray leapt and dazzled before her eyes. The sky above her upturned face was cobalt blue and the beach was a crescent of sun-bright sand edged by the greenest of trees. She was supremely and effortlessly happy, young, tanned, well-fed, relaxed, drop-dead-gorgeous. If only that wasp would stop buzzing.

  She put up a hand to brush it away but it was right in front of her face and she couldn’t shift it. Right in front of her face and getting bigger and bigger, a huge, dust-covered, metallic horror, with great wheels coming to squash her, slimy with grease and spitting gobbets of impacted dirt as it shrieked towards her. It was enormous, obscene, grinding her down, the weight of it compressing her ribs. She had to struggle to breathe, pushing with all her strength against the horror of it, the heavy, filthy, unspeakable horror, fighting like a mad thing, frantic to escape. She had to get away from it. She had to get away. She had to. But she couldn’t move because both her legs were set in concrete. She was pinned to the ground as it screamed and crumpled, in a blur of blue and white and scarlet so that blood gushed in the air in long, red plumes like the red breath of dragons, and she knew that it was going to crush her and kill her and she couldn’t do anything about it.

  ‘She’s waking up,’ Sister said to her junior. ‘Gemma. Can you open your eyes for me, dear? That’s fine. We’re going to take your blood pressure again. Just lift your arm up a bit, there’s a good girl.’

  Gemma opened her eyes but horror still weighed her down and for a few seconds she couldn’t think where she was. Although she had a vague memory of coming round in a very white room and of somebody offering her a sip of water. She lifted her left arm obediently and tried to gather her thoughts, recognised that she was very, very tired and that her arm was surprisingly heavy, gradually took in the blue checked curtains round her bed, the blue uniforms, the distinctive smell of the place. Hospital, she thought. Yes, that’s it, I’m in hospital and in a ward. But her mind was too full of nightmare to cope with anything more than that.

  The nurse began to take her blood pressure and, turning her head to watch, she saw that the bedclothes were mounded over a support of some kind and then she recalled it all, everything, all at once, with a return of terror that constricted her throat and an overwhelming pain pulsing in her memory. They were going to cut off her leg. That white-haired doctor had been explaining it to her. They were going to cut off her leg and she had to let them do it because it was the only way to get out of the wreckage. Oh God! They were going
to cut off her leg. How could she endure it?

  But even as panic washed over her, she could feel both her feet quite clearly. One was in plaster and very heavy and the other was irritating, really rather badly. She could feel the irritation right down to her big toe. She would have to put down a hand and scratch it when they’d finished taking her blood pressure. So they couldn’t have done it, after all. They must have got her out some other way. What a relief! Thank God! Thank God!

  ‘That’s good,’ the nurse said, removing the stethoscope from her ears. She was a pretty West Indian with an easy smile and friendly eyes. ‘How about a cup of tea?’

  The thought of tea brought a lump to Gemma’s throat. It was so blessedly normal. But when she tried to sit up to drink it, she discovered that she was attached to a trailing tube and felt a great deal weaker than she’d expected.

  ‘That’s just to help you over your operation,’ the nurse explained, supporting her as she drank. ‘It looks worse than it is. You lost a lot of blood, so we’re putting it back.’

  Loss of blood sounded ominous. But she didn’t dare ask questions in case she was told something she didn’t want to hear. ‘What time is it?’ she compromised.

  ‘Half-past eleven.’

  That was a surprise. ‘Half-past eleven?’ It couldn’t be half-past eleven. I caught the twenty-past ten train and I was hours in the wreckage. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Friday. You’ve been sleeping.’

  All that time, Gemma thought and she looked up at the drip and wondered how mobile she could be. ‘Can I get out to the loo?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ the nurse told her. ‘You’ve got a catheter in.’

  Oh how vile! How demoralising! ‘Do I have to have it? Can’t it come out? I could get down to the loo, couldn’t I? I know my right foot’s in plaster but my left’s OK, isn’t it? I mean they haven’t plastered that I can feel my toes.’