Second Wind

Prologue

Delirium brings comfort to the dying.

I had lived in an ordered world. Salary had mattered, and timetables. My grandmother belonged there with her fears.

‘But isn’t there a risk?’ she asked.

You bet your life there’s a risk.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No risk.’

‘Surely flying into a hurricane must be risky?’

‘I’ll come back safe,’ I said.

But now, as near dead as dammit, I tumbled like a rag-doll piece of flotsam in towering gale-driven seas that sucked unimaginable tons of water from the deeps and hurled them along in liquid mountains faster than a Derby gallop. Sometimes the colossal waves swept me inexorably with them. Sometimes they buried me until my agonised lungs begged the ultimate relief of inhaling anything, even water, when only air would keep the engine turning.

I’d swallowed gagging amounts of Caribbean salt.

It had been night for hours, with no gleam anywhere. I was losing all perception of which way was up. Which way was air. My arms and legs had bit by bit stopped working.

An increasingly out-of-order brain had begun seeing visions that shimmered and played in colours inside my head.

I could see my dry-land grandmother clearly. Her wheelchair. Her silver shoes. Her round anxious eyes and her miserable foreboding.

‘Don’t go, Perry. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.’

Whoever listens to grandmothers.

When she spoke in my head, her mouth was out of sync with her voice.

I’m drowning, I thought. The waves are bigger. The storm is worse. I’ll go to sleep soon.

Delirium brings comfort at the end.