Frozen Read Free

a waiting room and insisted that we see a doctor before we went in to Verity. He arrived quickly. He swept into the room and scanned us impassively. He was a young man, younger than me, with the brisk but slightly dazed manner that junior hospital doctors always seem to have. I wondered how many hours he had been working without sleep. Twenty? Thirty?
    “Mr...” He glanced down at a clipboard. “... Hadley?” He looked up expectantly. Gabriel rose wearily from his plastic bucket seat.
    “Excellent. Good, good,” said the doctor, leaning steeply forward to shake his hand. He was already looking at me before their hands had touched. “And you are Mr...?”
    “Harry Waddell. Family friend,” I mumbled. He shook my hand too, so lightly that I was hardly sure it had happened.
    “Excellent,” he said again. “I'm Mr Balasubmaranian.” (That's what he said, honest.) “I'm the senior house officer on duty for ITU and neuro on Mr. Oxley's team.”
    That last bit slipped straight past me, partly because he was speaking incredibly fast—he'd obviously said the same thing to hundreds of people on hundreds of occasions—but mostly because I was gobsmacked by his name. Let's be honest, it's not a name your average white middle-class Londoner comes across all that often. He had a faintly northern nasal accent, which I couldn't quite place—Lancashire, maybe. There was no trace of Indian, Tamil, Malaysian, or whatever. I'm sure I have his name right, though, because I spent the rest of our brief chat trying to read it from the little badge on his lapel (well, quite a big badge, in his case). I learned it by heart. It was definitely Balasubmaranian. And he was definitely a reassuring, thoughtful, and exhausted man. I liked him. That was why I wanted to learn his name, so I could thank him by name when we were done. Hospitals always make me behave oddly. I feel as though I have to work that much harder at being human. Whatever; the name was so striking that it has stayed with me ever since.
    What mattered, though, was what he told us. There had been minimal internal bleeding, which they had easily contained, he said. By some miracle, none of the fractures had punctured anything vital. Many of her organs were bruised and her whole body was in shock, but those symptoms would rapidly disappear. She had lost very little blood. The broken bones would heal with time; none of them were serious. With luck, none of these injuries would kill her.
    But her skull had been partially crushed. There was damage to her brain, and brain damage, Balasubmaranian told us, can often kill for no reason that anyone understood. She might die, or she might survive. They might switch off her life support and find she could breathe for herself, that her heart kept pumping, that bags of liquid food alone were enough to keep her alive—or they might not. He didn't know, he couldn't say, it would be inappropriate to speculate... but he did tell us one thing: it was unlikely that she would ever recover consciousness, and even if she did, she would never again be the Verity we had known. In effect, he said, if she didn't die, she would either be unconscious with her eyes closed or with her eyes open. She would sit there, immobile, staring, blank. This was her future.
    “Verity's tough,” I said. “She'll fight it. You'll see.”
    Almost immediately I felt stupid. I don't know what I was thinking. That somehow she'd overcome the limits of her own shattered brain, I suppose. That sheer force of will could transform her prognosis. Not that she'd ever had much willpower.
    I saw a film once where that happened—I don't remember its name. Come to think of it, films are full of it: people come back from the brink of death, or recover the use of their limbs. In movie land, miracles happen every day; people triumph over impossible adversity. But then, maybe films about people who suffer appalling accidents and then just survive, comatose, for years, don't have