Double Vision Read Free

She’d been managing better the last few days, and she knew the physiotherapist was pleased with her. Another fortnight and she’d be all right, perhaps even well enough to do without the bloody assistant. Alec still hadn’t got back to her on that.
    Angela looked sideways at Kate, thinking the surgical collar looked a bit like a ruff, reflecting light on to her face, emphasizing the lines of tiredness, the blue shadows underneath her eyes. Kate said she hadn’t been sleeping well in hospital, but then nobody could. Footsteps squeaking up and down the ward, blinds on the corridor side left up because you had to be observed all the time, and then there were admissions, sometimes in the middle of the night. The memories of her hysterectomy were fresh in Angela’s mind. Poor Kate, she thought, and such a bad patient.
    They were approaching the scene of the crash. Angela slowed down – had to, it was a dangerous bend – though, imagining what Kate must be feeling, she would have preferred to pick up speed and get past as soon as possible.
    ‘Do you mind if we stop here?’ Kate said.
    Surprised, Angela pulled over on to the grass verge. Kate got out. It was a struggle and Angela came round the car to help, but by the time she got there Kate was shakily standing up.
    ‘Why do you want to stop?’
    ‘I just want to see where it happened.’
    Kate walked along the verge, thinking she might not recognize the spot, but there was no danger of that. Skidding off the road, the car had left scars, flattened bracken, made tyre tracks in the mud, smashed stripling trees – and then her nemesis: the tree whose branches, broken by the impact, had reached through the shattered windscreen to get at her. She had a flash of it happening again and closed her eyes. The trunk had proved solid, though the roots had been disturbed. She looked down and saw how they’d been prised loose from the earth. At that moment a light wind started to blow between the trees, a current of air moving at ground level, quickening the forest floor. Dead leaves rose up and formed twisters, little coils and spurts of turbulence, and the shadows of branches danced and shook on the snow-stippled ground.
    Then it was over and the wood was as quiet and still as it had been before.
    Kate was aware of her breathing, the sound, the movement of her ribs, and the sight of it too, furls of mist escaping from her lips to whiten the air.
    Angela shifted behind her. Coughed. She thinks I’m being eccentric, Kate thought. Well, she can talk.
    There was something else, something she needed to get clear, a memory that bulged above the surface, showed its back and then, in a burst of foam, turned and sank again. It was the sound of her breathing that had summoned it. She groped after memories that dissolved even as she tried to grasp them. She had a sense of missing time. The minutes – how manyminutes? – she’d drifted in and out of consciousness, while somebody had stood by the car, breathing, watching, not calling for help.
    But all her memories were confused, and for large stretches of time she had no memory at all. Nothing about the ambulance journey or the arrival in hospital, nothing about the emergency treatment, the fitting of the back brace and the surgical collar, nothing about that. Nothing, in fact, until she woke the following morning to find her mother and Alice by the bed. So probably her memory of the man who’d stood and watched her was a distortion. A symptom of concussion.
    Two days after the crash a young woman doctor had sat by her bed for half an hour, asking her questions about what time it was, who she was, where she was, why she was there, and, although she hadn’t felt confused or uncertain of the answers, she’d got most of them wrong.
    It was a relief to turn and see Angela’s worried face.
    She made herself smile. ‘Lucky escape.’ She was thinking of another road, in Afghanistan, the road Ben had died on. For a moment she felt a deep