Josie Metcalfe - Miracles in the Village

‘Whazat?’ he mumbled.

‘Morphine, and metaclopromide, to stop you feeling sick from the morphine.’

‘’S lovely,’ he replied. It was. The pain was going, fading a bit, less global.

‘Right, that’s as good as it gets,’ Joe said.

‘OK.’ That was Ben. ‘Mike, can you get your legs out yourself? Just slowly and carefully.’

He took a deep breath of the Entonox, wriggled his left leg free, took another suck of the gas and tried to move.

Pain lanced through him despite the drugs, and he swore viciously, suddenly wide awake. ‘I need a hand, guys,’ he said, sweat beading on his brow. ‘Just pull me out, nice and carefully. I can’t do this myself.’

‘It is free,’ Ben said, feeling round his leg gently. ‘We should be able to do it. It’s a very unstable fracture, though, and I don’t want to drag you. And you need a spinal board.’

‘To hell with that. What I need is to get out of here now,’ he muttered as the tree groaned again. He felt it shift against his calf, and yelled, ‘Just get me—Joe and Nick maybe?—and he could feel Ben’s hands on his leg, steadying it. On the count of three they pulled, he gasped and swore and bit hard on his lip, and then he was free, and they were dragging and lifting him away from the tree while everything went black for a second and he fought the urge to scream with the pain.

As they put him down and shifted him to his back, Fran’s white, terrified face swam into view. He thought she was going to yell at him, but she just smiled a little shakily and said, ‘I didn’t know you knew half of those words.’ And then with a last tortured groan the tree slipped and fell the last few feet with a thundering crash, and she burst into tears.

‘What the hell were you doing down there on your own with the chainsaw?’

He gave a rueful smile, and Fran felt a terrible urge to smack him. She’d hung on as long as she could, but the ‘what the hell’ question just wouldn’t stay locked up any longer, and she sat by his bed in the hospital and clamped her hands together. So she didn’t strangle him, or so they didn’t shake?

She didn’t know. She didn’t care. All she cared about was that Mike was alive—damaged, but alive—and only because Ben, Joe and Nick had got him out when they had.

She and Kate had got there just as he had been yelling at them to pull him out, and she’d watched in horror as his face had blanched and he’d let fly a string of words she’d never heard him use before.

And then the trunk had dropped, right where he’d been lying, and one of the firemen had been lucky to duck out of the way of the flying branches.

It could have been so, so much worse.

Infinitely worse. Unimaginably worse—

‘I’ve done the milking for you, you idle skiver—and can you stick to Monopoly and not pick-up-sticks in future?’ Joe said, walking up behind her and saving him from the strangling he so surely deserved.

‘Hi, Joe,’ she said with a smile of welcome. ‘Give your brother a hard time for me, could you? I’m just going to ring your mother again and let her know they’ve moved him.’

‘She’s here. She and Dad have just pulled into the car park. I told them where to come.’

Ensconced in his hospital bed, Mike groaned. ‘Did you have to? They’ll make such a fuss.’

‘A fuss? A fuss!’ Fran all but shrieked. ‘I’ll give you fuss, Michael Trevellyan! If that tree had fallen a minute earlier—ten seconds, for heaven’s sake—’

‘Michael! Oh, my goodness, are you all right? We came as soon as we heard but we were on our way back from Plymouth and there was a huge tailback because of this accident—’

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ he said, grimacing as he caught sight of his father’s stern face.

‘How many times have I told you—?’ Fran’s father-in-law started, and Fran just smiled, stepped back and left them to it. She didn’t need to strangle him. His parents would do it for her. In the meantime, she might go and get herself a cup of coffee.

‘So how’s the invalid?’ Ben asked as she bumped into him at the ward entrance.

‘Getting an earful from everyone,’ Fran told Ben with a wry smile.

Ben smiled back, but his eyes were gentle with concern, and she felt hers fill again. ‘You OK?’ he asked, and she nodded, then shook her head, then shrugged a little helplessly and laughed, her traitorous eyes welling.

‘I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. At least he’s alive.’

‘He’ll be fine. He’ll be going to Theatre shortly to have it plated, and he’ll be in for a couple of days, then they’ll send him home in a cast to rest.’

‘He’ll be horrible. He’ll be so bored,’ Fran said with a sigh, and Ben raised an eyebrow.

‘So entertain him,’ he said with a smile. ‘He’ll be laid up and fizzing over with all that pent-up energy. I’m sure you’ll be able to find something to do together to alleviate the boredom!’

She felt herself colour slightly, and found a smile. If only, she thought. ‘I’ll buy him a Sudoku book,’ she said, and Ben chuckled.

‘Yeah, right. Like that’ll do it!’ He tipped his head on one side. ‘You going anywhere important?’

‘Yes—to get a coffee,’ she said, wondering if it mattered if she started Kate’s diet a day later and deciding that today justified it. She could have lost Mike—so easily. And today had proved to her beyond any doubt that she wasn’t ready to lose him. Not in any way. There was nothing like staring that dreadful possibility in the face to bring it home to her, so, yes, today justified a delay in the start of the diet, because at the moment whether or not they had a child was way down the list of her priorities.

And Mike—her beloved, darling, infuriating, broken Mike—was right at the top.

‘Mind if I join you?’ Ben was saying. ‘I was just about to make a drink when I called him, and I still haven’t had one yet. I’ll even treat you to a chocolate muffin.’

She laughed. ‘You truly know the way to a woman’s heart,’ she replied, and wondered when she and Mike had last laughed like that, about nothing in particular, just for the sake of laughing. Ages. A lifetime.

But they would again. She’d make sure of it …

THEY were sending him home on Friday, and he couldn’t get out of hospital quickly enough.

Not that he’d really known that much about it for the first twenty-four hours, because he’d been in so much pain he’d been drugged up to the eyeballs.

It was the bottom of his fibula where it joined the tibia on the outside of his ankle—the lateral maleolus, or some such bone—that had sheared off, and his fibula was fractured again just above the ankle joint. Such a skinny little bone to cause so much pain, although the ligaments between the two bones hadn’t ripped. This, apparently, was a good thing, or it would have been ages before he could bear weight.

Even so, he’d have to be in a cast for weeks.

Fabulous. In the summer, when he relied on the longer hours of daylight to do all those endless jobs about the farm that he couldn’t simply do in the dark. Hedging, fencing, repairing the fabric of the buildings—cutting up fallen trees?

But on the bright side, luckily the skin hadn’t broken. It seemed a very slight thing to worry about, considering they’d had to cut it open anyway, but apparently it made a great difference to the sort of repair they could do, and it meant it could be plated and screwed, and he didn’t have to have an external fixator.

Thank God, because there was no way he could work on the farm with a metal frame on the outside of his leg and pins going through into the bone, carrying filth and infection right into the heart of the injury. And, anyway, even the sight of them made him feel sick. There were several people in the orthopaedic ward with them on, and others in traction, even one screwed into a special revolving frame, bolts into his head and shoulders and hips and legs …