Rubbernecker by Bauer Belinda

Author:Bauer, Belinda
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781446465929
Publisher: Transworld

PART THREE

30

JEAN BOTTI HAD worked on the neurological ward for seven years, so she’d seen it all. Miracles and murders.

Oh, they happened – both of them – although neither was ever acknowledged by the hospital.

Since starting work on what was commonly known as the coma ward, she knew of three reliable miracles and two less reliable murders. The miracles were not of the walking-on-water, feeding-the-five-thousand variety. That would be silly, even to a staunch Catholic like Jean. But, in Jean’s eyes, they were events of such startling recovery that they would have challenged the story of Lazarus.

There was sixteen-year-old Amy Russett, who spent a year frozen in a coma and then, one chilly March night, got up, walked down the corridor and took herself to the toilet – marking the start of a rapid and unexplained recovery.

Then there was Gwilym Thomas, a sixty-six-year-old farmer, who had never been beyond the Welsh border but who, after being gored by his own prize bull, awoke speaking only French. Even more bizarrely, the only English he seemed to remember was the name of the bull. Jean could recall it even now: Barleyfield Ianto.

Mrs Thomas had proved to be a stoic, and hadn’t taken it personally. After a brief flurry of confusion, she had armed herself with a Linguaphone course and started a new, more Gallic life.

Jean’s personal favourite was Mark Strickland, who crashed his car as a drunken lout, and emerged from his coma six weeks later quoting a Bible he’d never read, and humbly asking the Lord for help as he sweated through the agony of physiotherapy.

Miracles all, in Jean’s eyes.

Then there were the murders.

Jean couldn’t help thinking of them that way, even though she knew they were not malicious. She would have preferred to think of them as ‘mercy killings’, but in her heart she knew that God didn’t agree with her.

Of course, just as the miracles were never official, neither were the murders.

Just a few months after she’d first started work on the ward, a boy named Gavin Richards had come in after being mugged. He had been hit so hard in the head that the shape of the claw hammer was clearly outlined in his shaven skull.

At first his family hoped for a miracle. They all did; it was only natural. But, as the days started to pass into weeks, and the weeks into months, it became apparent to everyone that seventeen-year-old Gavin was never going to make it. Everyone except his mother, that is. Gavin’s mother came in every day and spent hours holding his hand, clipping his nails, putting cream on his raw bottom, and singing childhood songs to him in a gentle, quavery voice barely above a whisper, while her other children – a boy of nine and a girl of fourteen – suffered the twin loss of a brother and a mother. Tragedy upon tragedy.

Despite the best care, Gavin slid slowly downhill towards death. Soon the doctors would start to speak to his family about withdrawing life support and allowing him to slip away.

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