Dead Scared

I DIDN’T GO back to my room after leaving Dr Oliver. I’d found the box-like space, stripped of all traces of its previous occupant, oddly depressing. So, instead of returning to college, I headed for my car and drove to the hospital on the edge of town where I knew I’d find Bryony Carter.

The nurse in the burns unit indicated a private room about three-quarters of the way down the corridor. I paused for a second at the open door. I’d seen the photographs. I knew what to expect.

So much worse than I’d expected. I couldn’t go into that room, I just couldn’t.

I’d imagined something clinical: clean, neat, white and sterile. I hadn’t realized there would be blood and other fluids seeping through the dark-stained bandages. I hadn’t expected that the skin covering her face and her hairless head would be open to the air and would look like something I’d only ever seen before on corpses. I didn’t know that her left arm had been amputated just above the elbow.

The room was so hot. And the smell … oh, Christ, I couldn’t do it.

‘She’s not in any pain. She’s very heavily sedated right now.’

I’d been transfixed by the sight of the lifeless figure under the transparent tent. I hadn’t noticed anyone else in the room. The man speaking to me was standing by the window, dressed for the outdoors in a thick blue woollen sweater and blue jeans.

‘She had a bit of a setback earlier,’ he went on. ‘They’ve been weaning her off the ventilator over the last few days but her oxygen levels plummeted. They’ve put her back on it for twenty-four hours, just so she can stabilize again.’

I swallowed hard. The smell would be tolerable if I breathed through my mouth. I’d come across worse.

‘Are you a friend?’ he asked, and I looked at him properly for the first time. In his mid-thirties, he could have been a model in a country-living magazine: tall and slim with curly hair the colour of a wet fox. ‘If you are, you’re the first to make it through the door,’ he went on.

Without noticing, I’d crossed the threshold. ‘I’ve just moved into her old room,’ I said, having cooked up a cover story on the way over. ‘And I found this tucked under her bed.’ I pulled the book from my bag. ‘There’s a page corner turned down. I think she must have been reading it before it happened.’

‘Jane Eyre,’ he read, looking down at the Penguin Classic paperback. ‘Doesn’t the hero get very badly burned?’

‘I didn’t think of that,’ I admitted, feeling stupid. ‘I should just take it away again.’

‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Let her parents decide, when they come back.’

I made myself take another look at the girl in the clear plastic tent. ‘Why does her face look like that?’ I asked. ‘Her skin looks dead.’

‘That’s not her skin,’ the man replied. ‘And it is dead. That’s cadaver skin covering her face. Tell you what, I was just about to get a coffee and you look like you need one. Come on.’