Black Chalk Read Free Page B

tried anyway, sprinkling my wishes with realism. It was morning and I was on my way to school, another day except that physics had been cancelled.
    The ambulance slowed suddenly. Something rattled, a soft sound of metal on metal, and the spell broke. It started to come to me, a swirl of sensations sweeping all in their way, gathering speed, shimmering outside a familiar building, materialising in anticipation, and entering brashly into an unwary classroom – I stopped the thought. There was no need to go any further, I knew it all so well.
    â€˜That’s right, we’re almost there. You only need to hold on a little longer. You’re very brave, you know. We’re in Marston already, yes, it’s not far.’ She was holding my arm. It seemed like she was whispering in my ear, keeping me from wasting into nothingness with her murmurs.
    ***
    My memories of A&E are incoherent. Like a childhood condensed, I remember things I didn’t do and events I wasn’t at. Liz had left me, or I had left her. And perhaps necessity unlocked an awareness that let me see my mother drive towards the hospital, or perhaps the vivid details that come to my mind are nothing but the product of a pronounced delirium. Yet there she is, coming out of a lecture and hearing of the shooting. Immediately deciding to drive to the John Radcliffe Hospital instead of my school.
    Meanwhile, my flesh was in a large rectangular room on a table that paraded as a bed, surrounded by a team of doctors in garbs. I see them all wearing the same loose sober greens, asexual and indistinguishable. As I was wheeled in, I noticed two teams waiting and one already at work. Grace being brought in ahead of me; I had time to see her unit set up before the curtains were drawn shut. Her team seemed military: a stout man – his silhouette rises out of the fog – delivering curt orders, everyone following them, his soldiers either moving purposefully or standing at attention.
    They ignored the shout-fest coming from the team on the other side of the room, but I couldn’t. There, looking past two blurry greens, I glimpsed a foreign face: pale and drawn. It was her hair, ash darkened by damp, which I recognised.
    A doctor gave me something for the pain: this will make you feel like you’ve had five pints, I heard. My carcass stopped mattering as its suffering washed away. What was left of my attention, the spirals which had survived the doctors’ concoctions, listened to the enumeration of expletives coming from my left. And then I heard her staunch the profane. Was she speaking? My limbs weren’t responding, surgeons were at me, I couldn’t get closer and decipher her groans. I started to empathise with her pain, but too soon they were barking over her, and I was left to myself. Alive. Alone.
    Loneliness was sweeping me towards a hollow, defeated and drained, when I saw my mother by my side. It’s the last memory I have of that decisive day, the last memory before I gave in to the inevitable slide. She had followed someone through the electronically locked doors, bravado carrying her past hospital protocol. She stood and looked at me a full minute before anyone saw her. When asked to leave, she approached me. Her fingers covered mine. She squeezed them until she knew I could feel her.

Two
    The memories of my early convalescence are of ash and soot. My eyelids too heavy to respond, I was at the mercy of a slow current. My consciousness dragged me through greys and blacks. Through the ash, I glimpsed a small house with no door. I tried to get closer but we were floating in the same river. For all I knew, the house could have been a pile of granite and burned wood. It left me behind when the soot settled.
    Respite came when sleepless dreams congealed into dreamless sleep. There were voices around me and then they were gone. I did not have the will to understand them. All my strength veiled the blunt pain that spread through me