Sticks and Stones

by Susie Tate

  Focusing on the face hovering above hers she let herself take in the features she’d seen so little of over the last year. Despite everything that was happening around them she almost felt a surge of relief to be this close to him again, and allowed the longing and love she usually kept under rigid control to come to the fore. Tears were glistening in his eyes now and she wanted to reach out to him but couldn’t move her other arm.

  ‘S’okay,’ she whispered, slipping away again, but wanting to stem that awful pain in his eyes before she did. ‘I’ll be okay.’ Her eyelids fluttered closed but she just managed another whisper, barely audible above the chaos of resus. ‘I miss you,’ she got out before the dark descended again.

  *****

  Frankie slipped her arm around Dylan’s stiff shoulders as she sat on the plastic chair beside him. She tried to push a Styrofoam cup of the minging brew the hospital coffee machine produced into his hand, but he just pushed it away. Every muscle in his body was held in a state of extreme tension, and had been for the two hours they had been sitting in the waiting room. He was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his thighs and his face buried in his hands. As soon as Frankie had arrived she knew he was at breaking point. Rosie and Ash had filled her in on all the details; all Dylan had been capable of was repeating ‘She’ll be okay; she said she’d be okay. She promised,’ over and over until it sounded almost like a prayer. His face was streaked with tears but it was like he’d gone beyond crying at this point, only retaining a wild, frantic look in his eyes.

  Upon registering Dylan’s loss of control Frankie managed to tamp down her own panic and be the strong one in the situation. Frankie knew that people underestimated her, but just because she was shy didn’t mean that she was weak. Her childhood spent with parents descending into alcoholism, the eventual death of her mother, and the ongoing problems she had with Papa, had given her the ability to deal with grief and loss foreign to most people. Lou had been strong for Frankie since they met, had dragged her out of herself and given her a life she never thought would be within her reach. It was her turn to be strong now.

  The door to the waiting room opened and Frankie shot to her feet as the ITU consultant Dr Cassandra Tobin came in. Her eyes swept through the room and came to settle on Frankie. Dylan had also risen to his feet and was holding himself perfectly still.

  ‘Right, well…this is an unusual situation seeing as you’re not actually Louise’s family but – ‘

  ‘Yes we are,’ Frankie cut him off. ‘We’re her family. We’ve been her family for the last twelve years.’ She took Dylan’s hand in hers and squeezed.

  ‘It seems that Dr Sands would agree with that; you are both listed as next of kin and emergency contacts on her medical records. No mention of her parents or her brother.’ Frankie’s eyes flashed as the mention of Lou’s parents, but she continued in as calm a voice as she could muster.

  ‘As I said, we’re her family. She wanted us to make decisions for her, not her parents.’

  Dr Tobin nodded, then glanced at the rest of the room. It was packed with Lou’s friends and colleagues, a clogging atmosphere of fear in the air.

  ‘Would you both like to come through,’ he asked and Frankie nodded quickly, pulling on Dylan’s hand to move him forward towards the door. Dr Tobin led them into ITU and Frankie’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of beautiful, vibrant Louey lying completely lifeless on the hospital bed. A ventilating tube was in her mouth; blood was hanging from the drip stand and going into a wide bore cannula on her arm, the monitors steady beeping and the whirring of the ventilator filling the air. Dylan had frozen next to her in shock, and when she tried to move forwards she realized that he was as good as welded to the spot.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, reaching up to his shocked face to pull it down so he was looking at her. ‘She needs us now, honey. We need to walk over to her and talk to her so she knows we’re here and that we’re not scared.’ Dylan’s eyes flicked away, taking in Lou on the bed again, and when they returned to Frankie’s they were swimming with unshed tears.

  ‘She looks…I can’t…’ he trailed off as one of the tears escaped and fell down his cheek onto Frankie’s hand. Frankie knew exactly what he was trying to say. The Lou on that bed didn’t look like their Lou at all; her face was devoid of all the usual animation, her body limp and hooked up to machines. Lou was always larger than life, a force of nature, and seeing her so still and lifeless was horrifying.

  ‘I know. But you can and you will,’ she said firmly, and then turned to Dr Tobin. ‘Is she…? I mean how long will she be…?

  ‘They removed her spleen in the emergency laparotomy,’ Dr Tobin told her. ‘Luckily the other stab wound didn’t hit anything vital. She’s lost a lot of blood. We’ve induced a coma for at least the next twenty-four hours but after that she should be on the mend. I’d anticipate an ITU stay of about two days.’

  ‘Thank you Cassie,’ Frankie said then started tugging on Dylan’s hand again. He unfroze and allowed himself to be pulled forward towards Lou.

  When they reached her bedside Frankie bent down, grabbed Lou’s hand and started talking in her ear. ‘Hey Louey,’ she said in a low, calm voice. ‘You had us all worried you know, always the drama queen. You’re going to be just fine now. They’re keeping you asleep for a bit so you can get all that energy back and start giving everyone jip. Ash’s in the waiting room and, I don’t know if he’s in shock or something, but not a single proverb in two hours; can you imagine? It’s weird.’

  Frankie glanced up at Dylan and saw that he was standing on the other side of the bed, but about a foot away from it. His eyes were fixed on something at the other end of the unit, and the expression on his face was so fierce that instinctively Frankie let go of Lou’s hand and made to move around the bed towards him.

  ‘Dyl – ?’

  ‘You’ve got to be shitting me,’ Dylan forced out through his clenched teeth. Frankie followed the direction of his gaze, and saw a large man with what looked like severe head and facial injuries lying on a bed on the other side of the unit. One look back at Dylan’s face and she realized who the patient was. She rushed to Dylan and laid both her hands on his chest to hold him back, but he started moving forward as if she wasn’t even there.

  ‘Why the fuck is this arsehole in here?’ he bellowed and the whole unit turned to see what was going on.

  ‘Dylan, calm down.’ Frankie grunted in the fruitless effort to hold him back.

  ‘I’m going to fucking kill him.’ Dylan’s voice was cold; he meant what he said. The last few hours had pushed him over the edge. As he got closer to the bed Frankie looked over her shoulder and saw what must have been the patient’s wife stand up from the plastic chair she was sitting in, her pinched face pale and locked on an advancing Dylan.

  ‘Cassie,’ Frankie shouted. ‘Send the boys in from the waiting room and call security. Get him out of here now.’

  Dylan kept walking to draw alongside the bed, completely ignoring Frankie’s frantic attempts to hold him back. When he was level with the bloody-faced large man he drew his arm back and Frankie screamed, but just as his fist was about to connect with the man’s face three sets of much stronger arms managed to push him back. Despite their size Tom, Ash and Miles still had great difficulty pulling Dylan away. Miles received a vicious punch to the jaw and the others didn’t fare much better as Dylan struggled wildly to get to his target. When they finally managed to drag him out of the unit he started banging on the locked door to get back in, and Frankie decided that she was done.

  ‘Dylan,’ she clipped and he stopped pounding for a moment, likely taken aback by her tone; Frankie was not the type of person to clip anything. ‘How will this help; braining the guy responsible whilst he lies defenseless in ITU?’

  ‘It’ll make me feel a fuck of a lot better,’ Dylan said to the door, his voice still cold.

  ‘Well boo-hoo,’ Frankie shouted. ‘Poor little Dylan is cross and having a tantrum, so he wastes time beatin
g up somebody who is not worth going to prison for. Ruining your life. Maybe even ruining the chances of having that piece of filth properly punished for what he did? Don’t you think I want to hurt him too? But I want him to be punished the right way. I don’t know what prison is like but I would imagine that for someone who’s stabbed a woman, a doctor, that it’s pretty blinking uncomfortable.’

  Dylan had stopped pounding on the door mid Frankie’s tirade and was now facing her. She moved forward and grabbed both his hands in hers. His were still balled up, but she worked her small fingers inside the fists and he allowed her to slowly uncurl them.

  ‘She needs us Dylan,’ she said, more softly now. ‘We’re her family and she needs you here, not locked up.’ She watched as the anger slowly faded from Dylan’s eyes, the green again beginning to swim with wet.

  ‘He hurt her,’ he whispered. ‘He hurt my Lou. They’ve unzipped her whole stomach. They’ve taken bloody organs out of her for Christ’s sake.’ Frankie moved forward and hugged him round the middle. There was a second’s pause before the tension drained from his body. He crushed her to him fiercely, as if trying to absorb her strength.

  ‘Look,’ she said after finally pulling back. ‘Have a break – ‘ He started shaking his head but Frankie cut him off before he could respond. ‘She needs her things around her. You’ll know what she’ll want. Tom will drive you back to her flat and you can pack a bag for her.’ Dylan nodded. He needed to get himself together. There was no way he could go back into the unit like this, and by the time she was awake he needed to be in complete control.

  Lou had put him down as her next of kin. He didn’t care what had happened over the last year, the fact that his name was on that form meant that she was still his Lou and he was going to make goddamn sure that everyone, most especially her, knew it.

  Chapter 24

  We’ll talk about that later

  ‘Shouldn’t we be getting one of the girls to do this?’ Tom asked as he watched Dylan rifle through Lou’s underwear drawer and shove a handful into the hot pink wheelie bag he had out on the bed.

  Dylan shrugged. ‘It’s not anything I haven’t seen before mate. You know what Lou’s like; this stuff is her daywear around the flat, summer or winter.’

  ‘Still, I think I’ll just…’ Tom started backing away from the pile of brightly coloured silk and lace now sprawled across Lou’s bed. Dylan knew it would be entirely fruitless to search for more appropriate, possibly cotton-based, underwear. Just like he knew that there was a raggedy old, grey bit of cloth under her pillow that she’d had since childhood. The same one that she had stuffed up her sleeve and taken to every test or exam she’d ever done. He knew all these things because he knew Lou, inside and out. He didn’t give a monkey’s if him rooting through her stuff was a tad inappropriate; he was the one who would know absolutely what she wanted to have in hospital with her.

  The sense of numbness and unreality still had him firmly in its grip as he started digging into the pile of clean clothes on the bottom of her wardrobe, looking for some sleepwear that was vaguely decent for a hospital stay. After realizing that nothing Lou had was decent, and grabbing all the tiny sets of what passed in Lou’s eyes for pyjamas he could, he stood suddenly and banged his head on the shelf above him. Something fell onto his head and then what seemed like hundreds of photos, bits of paper and random objects rained down on him. He blinked when he his own smiling face staring up at him from the floor.

  As he took in the rest of the chaos he realized that it wasn’t just one image of him amongst hundreds of others of their friends; all the photos were of him. Sometimes he was alone in the picture and sometimes he was with other people but he was always the focus. It was weird seeing himself in so many different poses: happy, pissed off and giving the camera a one-finger salute, drunk, half naked on the beach (he noted with some satisfaction that that photograph was particularly dog-eared). There were bits of paper too with his handwriting all over them, sometimes combined with Lou’s. He recognized them as some of the notes he’d passed her in lectures at Uni, and more recently in the Grand Round teaching at the hospital. Looking back on it he’d sent more notes to Lou than anyone else. There was something about being the one to make her do what he called her ‘blowfish face’: the face she made when she was desperately trying to hold in a laugh (because let’s face it, his notes, which were often accompanied by liberal illustrations, were bloody funny) that gave him a feeling of huge achievement.

  He lifted up a creased piece of A4 notepaper, and was taken back in time to a biochemistry lecture ten years ago. He’d drawn a caricature of Professor Thomas in dominatrix gear spanking a cheeky-looking mitochondria (this had been sparked off by the prof saying how some intracellular organisms could be naughty in certain circumstances). He could remember Lou’s snort like it was yesterday as it filled the lecture theatre, rapidly followed by the loud sounds of her choking on her bottled water. Her face had been bright red, her eyes watering and still she was so incredibly beautiful it almost hurt to look at her.

  Dylan grabbed the shoebox to start carefully replacing all the photos, and noticed something small rattling at the bottom. He reached in a pulled out a small pink and white shell. After staring at it for a second and turning it over and over in his palm he finally put it back in the box and sat down heavily, leaning against the side of the wardrobe. He spent a couple of minutes staring into space as the numbness of the last few hours started to lift. A slow smile spread across his face before he got up to sort out the mess. He needed to get back to Lou.

  *****

  Lou cracked her eyes open and turned her head to the side. She blinked as she took in an unshaven, sleeping Dylan swamping the hospital chair next to her. Her hand went to her neck against the burning in her throat when she swallowed. There was a glass of water on her side table and she made the mistake of trying to sit up to reach it. White-hot pain ripped through her midsection and she gasped, lying back down on the bed with both hands clutching her stomach. She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and when she turned to the side Dylan’s green eyes were staring back at her, his face splitting into a huge, and what looked like relieved, smile.

  ‘Hey sleepyhead,’ he rasped, his voice heavy with sleep.

  All Lou could do was stare up at him in shock. What on earth was he doing here? Her shock deepened as he reached down to tuck a chunk of her hair behind her ear, completely ignoring her attempt to flinch away from his touch. Unfortunately her stomach didn’t seem to like any sudden movement, and even that small flinch caused another shot of pain. She watched Dylan’s smile vanish as he noticed the tightening of her features. He frowned as he looked down at her hands, now clutching at the sheets over her abdomen. Before she knew it he’d nabbed her remote and pressed the call bell. A harassed looking nurse Lou recognized popped her head round the door.

  ‘Oh hi you’re awake,’ she said cheerfully looking at Lou. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘She’s in pain,’ Dylan answered for her and Lou narrowed her eyes at him. ‘If you wouldn’t mind getting some morphine for her and I’d like to speak to the anaesthetist on call.’ Dylan’s voice was at his most amiable charm-the-knickers-off-the-nurses-to-get-what-I-want and was accompanied by his trademark ultra charming smile.

  ‘Right…okay. I’ve just got to finish the drug round so I’ll be there in about – ‘

  ‘She’s in pain now,’ Dylan clipped and Lou’s head whipped round to him in shock. His face was stony. Smiley, amiable Dylan a thing of the past. ‘She needs morphine now, and I want to speak to anaesthetics now. Or do I have to call the ward sister?’ Lou’s mouth dropped open; Dylan never spoke to any of the nurses like that. He never spoke to anyone like that. The nurse’s face had paled as she backed out of the room.

  ‘No problem, no problem,’ she said hastily, abandoning the drugs trolley behind her in her rush to get to the treatment room.

  ‘Dylan,’ Lou said in a hoarse whisper, unable to get anything else o
ut through her burning throat. ‘What are you - ?

  His eyes snapped back to hers and he smiled again. ‘Do you remember talking to the surgeons on ITU babes?’

  She frowned and concentrated. She remembered bright lights, pain, Frankie’s voice asking questions, Dylan’s voice telling her she was okay, his big warm hand engulfing hers.

  ‘You were pretty out of it,’ Dylan explained, after taking in her confused expression. ‘Do you remember what happened?’

  Lou nodded slowly and shivered when she thought of the knife going in like a punch to her stomach, and the horror of the blood surrounding her. Her eyes flew to Dylan’s again in a panic.

  ‘Benji,’ she whispered frantically. ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Dylan said, gently pushing her back down into the bed to stop her straining her stomach more than she already had. ‘Benji’s tough as old boots, so is Alun. The same cannot be said of that evil twpsyn* that attacked you. I doubt he’ll live down being beaten up by a five year old and a frail eighty-five-year-old recovering from a stroke in a hurry.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Lou felt a jolt of fear as she remembered Mr Talbot’s furious face and wild eyes when he shoved her back into the wall.

  ‘He’s still on ITU,’ Dylan told her. ‘Alun smashed his skull in pretty good. They had to drain a small subdural haematoma and it’s early days, but unfortunately they think he’ll recover.’

  Lou squeezed her eyes shut and tried to control her breathing. Her fear was in no way rational but she knew she’d prefer it if he were dead.