The Friend Who Lied by Rachel Amphlett

Author:Rachel Amphlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781999368364
Publisher: Saxon Publishing

30

Bec

There’s a solitary blackbird pecking at the stunted grass outside the window of the ground floor hospital ward, its wayward zig-zagging progress interrupted from time to time by a grey squirrel darting between the haggard rhododendron bushes.

I’ve been watching them for the past half an hour, although I haven’t been concentrating on whether the bird has managed to find something to eat.

My mind is elsewhere, my jaw clenched as I try to piece together the last twelve days of my life.

No one ever talks about what happens after someone’s attempted to kill themselves.

I glance down at the thick gauze dressings around my forearms and pray that the painkillers kick in soon. My skin and muscles are on fire, ripped to pieces by the cheap kitchen knife I bought in the hardware store down the road from my house the day after I moved in.

I don’t remember doing it, but it seems I was pretty accurate.

Another half a centimetre and I’d have severed a major artery, according to the surgeon who stitched me back together and ensured new blood was pumped into my system within moments of the ambulance crew getting here.

She looked down her nose at me as she detailed everything she’d done to save me, making it quite clear without actually using words that she had better things to do than preserve the life of someone who’d done a good job of trying to end it an hour before.

I haven’t seen her since.

For the past few days, I’ve been in the care of the specialist ward nurses who are kind, orderly, soft spoken.

I’m cut off from the outside world, my mobile phone back at the house and my only visitors are my parents whose concern turned to confusion as the days progressed.

I have no answers to their questions. No reassurances to provide.

I turn my back on the window and settle into the chair, my book forgotten on the table in front of me. An exhaustion settles across my shoulders; a familiar sensation that seizes my limbs and makes my eyelids heavy.

Normal, they tell me. All that blood gone, and my body adjusting to the trauma. It’ll take time, they say. Rest.

I can’t.

There’s a memory I can’t grasp; a conversation or something I’ve seen that I know is important.

I recalled it, just before I passed out, and my addled brain is struggling to find it, locked away in my subconscious.

Stuck here, unable to communicate with the outside world until the medical experts reckon they can risk it without me having a second attempt to kill myself, I start to appreciate how Lisa must’ve felt in the days following her kidney transplant.

Lonely, bored, with too much time on my hands, I understand now why she was so angry that I didn’t visit.

Until I told her the truth.

The detective, Forbes, took some persuading. For a moment, I didn’t think she was going to let me go. I thought she’d found something, which was both ridiculous and terrifying.

The police officer – Phillips – looked as exhausted as I felt by the time Forbes escorted me out of the station.

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