Dany Atkins - Fractured

I packed my bag mindlessly, not really concerned about what I took. It was only for three days, and then I’d be back in my own flat, able to lose myself once again in the anonymity of a big city. To many, I’m sure it might sound peculiar, but I’d actually come to relish living somewhere where ‘everybody didn’t know your name’. The only items I took more care in packing were my outfit for the hen night dinner and the deep burgundy velvet dress I had bought to wear for the wedding itself. Thank God Sarah had eventually given in and had accepted my refusal to be her bridesmaid.

‘But you have to,’ she had pleaded, and for a second it could have been the old school-days Sarah, imploring me to become involved in some crackpot scheme or caper she had cooked up. Only this time I had held fast in my refusal. I’d felt bad, of course. But then I’d known what she was going to ask me, even before the words had left her lips.

It wasn’t often that she visited me in London, even though we kept in touch every few weeks by phone. Her job in the North kept her busy and of course her boyfriend Dave, fiancé I mentally corrected, lived there too and quite rightly occupied most of her free time. I’d suspected what was coming when she had invited herself down for the weekend, and so saying ‘no’ hadn’t been as difficult as I’d imagined, when I’d had sufficient time to rehearse it.

‘Oh Rachel, please think again,’ she had implored and she’d sounded so crestfallen that I had actually felt myself wavering, ‘There’s no-one else in the world I want as a bridesmaid except you, please say you’ll do it.’ And when I’d shaken my head, not quite trusting myself to speak in case she heard the chink of doubt in my resolve, she had inadvertently asked the one question that allowed me to abdicate from the role without her pursuing it further. ‘But why won’t you say yes?’

And it was then that I’d taken the coward’s way out; answering her question by lifting the heavy swathe of hair I wore in a side parting away from my face and revealing the silver forked-lightening scar that ran from my forehead to my cheek. She’d pursed her lips and sighed, and in that moment I knew she had conceded defeat.

‘Ah, so she’s pulling the old disfigured face card again, is she?’ I’d smiled in response. Of everyone I knew, who pussy-footed around the issue, Sarah was the only one who had the courage never to dress up her words in anything less transparent than the truth.

‘Well, if that’s what it takes to keep me firmly seated in a back pew and not wearing some frothy pink creation up near the altar, then yes.’

She’d looked at me mulishly for a second, and I thought she was re-grouping her argument for another try, but then appeared to reconsider and backed down, only murmuring in her defeat ‘I wouldn’t have made you wear pink, you know’.

I’d hugged her then, knowing I’d let her down in a big way and loving her because she had let me do it.

Before closing the case, I reached over to pick up the small brown bottle of pills on the bedside table, intending to add them to my toiletry bag. I frowned when I felt the weight of the container, holding the bottle up to try and count the contents by the weak light filtering through the window from the overcast December day. There were less there than I’d thought, barely enough to last for the next few days. That couldn’t be right, could it? I checked the date on the front of the prescription label. It was only ten days old. I knew the headaches had been getting worse, but I hadn’t realised I’d gone through this many painkillers so quickly. A cold tremor meandered down my spine. This wasn’t good. And while I could lie to my Dad when he asked how I was, and even (stupidly) had tried lying to the doctors when the headaches had first started, I knew that sooner or later I’d have to face up to the truth. This was the warning sign they had told us to be on the alert for all those years ago. This was the reason why every phone call from my Dad in the three years since we lived apart would follow the habitual pattern of ‘How are you? No headaches, or anything?’ And I’d been happy to report for the first two and-a-half years that I’d been fine, and for the last six months I’d been lying and saying I was still fine. Eventually I’d made an appointment to see the specialist I hadn’t had to visit since my early days of recovery from the accident. He’d seemed concerned when I had told him about the headaches and their frequency, and I was concerned because I’d actually played down their severity quite considerably. The pills he’d prescribed were not the answer and he had urged me to make an appointment to go back to hospital for further tests. I’d taken the prescription, but not his advice and had put off making the appointment I knew that I could no longer avoid.

And all of this I had kept from my Dad. He had enough to worry about with his own health problems. He needed this time to try and get well, without worrying about me all over again. He’d done far too much of that already. However bleak the outcome of his consultation with his oncologists were, he always would end by saying, ‘But at least you are alright now, thank God.’ I didn’t have the courage to take that away from him.

I’d sometimes wonder exactly how many mirrors we must have broken, or how many gypsy curses had been hurled our way to account for my family’s unfortunate history. First Mum; then my accident; then Dad’s illness and now these headaches. It made me wonder if there was some family out there who had been blessed with twenty-odd years of good health and luck because we seemed to have been given their share of dark misfortune as well as our own. And it didn’t matter that Dad said that no one was to blame for his illness, because I knew that he’d only begun smoking again after my accident. It had been his way of coping with the stress. And if he hadn’t been doing that, then he probably wouldn’t be ill now.

So many terrible things were linked to that one awful night. A blinding twist of pain, worse than even the severest of my headaches stopped my thoughts suddenly in their tracks before they were allowed to venture down that forbidden avenue.

I intended to leave first thing in the morning and had looked up the times for the first train from London. I’d already booked two days off work, for although everyone wasn’t meeting up until the Thursday evening for Sarah’s hen night dinner, I hadn’t wanted to arrive late in the day. In reality I knew I would need the time to compose myself for the three day visit and I had no way of knowing just how hard that was going to be until I was actually there.

I had refused Sarah’s offer to stay at her parents’ place. Much as I loved her family, they had always been more exuberant and excitable than my own, and I didn’t think I’d be strong enough to face that particular brand of crazy in the run-up to their only daughter’s wedding. They had seemed to understand and hadn’t appeared offended when I’d declined their offer and had instead booked a room in one of the town’s two hotels. Many of the guests would be doing the same, I imagined, although of course quite a large number probably still lived in the area.

As the train slipped out of the station and began the two-hour journey, I allowed myself to think of the people I would be meeting again that night. My friends from the past. It seemed strange that the bonds I had thought would bind us forever had not proved as resilient as I had always believed. And it hadn’t been the passing years that had slowly severed the threads apart. No, they had been sheared away by a young man’s moment of insanity and an out-of-control stolen vehicle.