Could It Be Magic?

‘I know, Dad. I promise I’ll call if I need you.’

‘Bye, lovely. Take care.’

‘Bye, Dad.’

I replaced the receiver and went into my little kitchen to put the kettle on for a cup of tea. The conversation with my parents had churned up old feelings of needing to prove myself to them in some way, especially to my mother, who thought I’d failed if I didn’t settle down with a nice average guy and have two-point-four children on whom they could both dote. I just wasn’t ready for those things. I had a career to forge. I wanted to take my law degree and be someone in the world; a self-made someone of standing—not just someone’s wife or someone’s mother. Maybe Mum had been happy with all that, but I wanted something more from life.

The rest of the afternoon passed pleasantly enough. I watered my plants, picked a few dead-heads off the still-flowering begonias in the window box, made myself and Frankie some supper, and headed for the bath and an early night. If I felt okay when I woke in the morning, I told myself, I would probably struggle in to work. The office was always busy on Monday mornings and I wouldn’t want to let my boss down.

I settled myself as comfortably as I could in bed. It was difficult, as I liked to sleep on my side and the shoulder with the burns was tender, chafing against the soft fabric of my pyjamas. I knew I was tired, because my eyes felt gritty and dry, but it seemed my brain was refusing to give in to sleep. I tossed and turned, each time having to allow for the sore area on my shoulder, picturing the images I’d conjured up in my mind the previous night, wondering where and how I’d dreamed up the phantom family. I suppose I must eventually have dropped off, because soon I was waking again and the dream became blurred and faded.

Opening my eyes, I sat up and stared around me in disbelief. The first thing I did was to glance down at my left hand. The thin gold wedding band gleamed back at me, just visible beyond the spaghetti junction of fine hospital tape holding the canula securely in place in the back of my left hand. The drip, I noticed, was no longer connected to the canula, which had some sort of rubber bung on the end, presumably, I thought, to stop my blood running out of the open vein all over the crisp hospital sheets.

Shock presents itself in different ways, and with me it seemed to manifest itself in a bout of hysterical laughter. I sat and giggled stupidly. The thing was, I tried to tell myself sternly through the shaking sobs, this was just the dream again. And it definitely wasn’t funny. Soon I would wake up and this place would disappear. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and tried to return to sleep, but it seemed my brain was wide awake, and sleep wouldn’t come. I opened my eyes again and sat up, the nervous giggling starting again.

The room was quiet apart from the wheezing I was making as my shoulders shook with silent panicked laughter. I vaguely registered that I was no longer connected to the ECG machine, which now stood silently behind my bed. I stopped laughing with a jolt, realising that I actually remembered the nurse disconnecting my drip.

Because the side room was windowless, I couldn’t judge what time it was, but I had a horrible, gnawing feeling I knew exactly what the time was, just as I feared I knew that the drip had been disconnected just after two thirty in the morning.

Perspiration broke out on my whole body as I thought back. I’d gone to bed early, soon after eight o’clock. I’d tossed and turned for around an hour, which meant I’d probably dropped off soon after that. If it was around 9.15 p.m. at home, did that mean it was the same time in the morning here?

Twisting around, I found the buzzer and held my finger down until Nurse Sally appeared, looking flustered. ‘Thank goodness you’re awake at last!’ she exclaimed as she bustled round me, plumping the pillows and tidying the sheets. ‘I was about to bleep Dr Shakir to come take a look at you. I’ve been trying to wake you for the last two hours. I’ve never known anyone sleep so deeply, Lauren.’

‘What time is it?’ I asked.

She glanced down at the watch pinned to her uniform. ‘It’s nine twenty already. And you haven’t even had breakfast yet.’

‘What time was my drip disconnected?’

‘I’m not sure exactly, the night nurse said the last of the saline had run through and she disconnected it sometime in the early hours.’

‘Could you look it up in my notes?’ I persisted. ‘Please?’

She gave me a searching look, as if wondering what my interest was, but merely nodded and hurried out. As soon as she had gone, I rummaged through the bedside cabinet, which was back where it was supposed to be on the right side of the bed, and found one of the newspapers Grant had brought in for me the previous afternoon. It was a Sunday paper, which meant that yesterday had indeed been Sunday, 19 October. It ought to be Monday morning now, unless time had gone as haywire as everything else. Was this a dream? My mouth felt dry and my hands were suddenly sweaty with fear. I breathed as shallowly as I could, hoping to somehow melt into the bed and disappear from this place of nightmares.

Nurse Sally returned with a breakfast tray and the announcement that my drip had finished and been disconnected at 2.30 a.m. by the night staff.

‘Your husband is bringing the children in to see you in about half an hour,’ Sally continued cheerily, unaware of the sickening feeling of inevitability that her words had invoked in me. ‘I was hoping to have you up and bathed this morning now that your drip is down, but I think we’ll have to postpone that until they’ve gone. You’ll be able to get up today and dispense with the monitors and bedpans, that’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I mumbled unenthusiastically, poking at the dry toast in front of me. I wanted to shout, to tell her that in my other life I’d never been this ill to start with. The lightning had left me virtually unscathed; Jessica was at home and recovering. That this was a step in a direction I didn’t want to take at all.

Grant arrived while I was still brushing my teeth into a white plastic bowl on the bed-table that Sally had brought in for me.

‘You were so groggy yesterday, I didn’t think you’d need this,’ she’d explained as she’d wheeled the table in.

‘And you didn’t want anything cluttering the room in case I flat-lined again,’ I’d murmured, thinking of the bleeping monitor to which I’d been attached.

She had stared at me, hand on hip. ‘Well, that too, I suppose.’

‘Can you fetch me a mirror?’ I’d asked, moments before Grant and the children had arrived. ‘I haven’t looked at myself since the accident, and I want to make sure I look all right…for the family.’

In the end, the family arrived before the mirror did, but it appeared Grant had shown willing and had been doing some homework on memory-loss patients. He walked in with a large photo album tucked under his arm. I allowed him to kiss me chastely on the cheek, and I smiled at each of the children in turn. After all, I reasoned, whatever was happening was no fault of theirs. Three of them at least thought I was their mother, and I hadn’t the heart to tell them any different—even if I could work out what was going on.

Sophie, the eldest girl, was wearing embroidered hipster trousers and a cropped top that showed her flat eight-year-old stomach. When I caught her eye she stared back almost defiantly and stuck her iPod earpieces into her ears, effectively shutting out any kind of conversation. I wondered what sort of relationship she had with her mother.

Nicole, on the other hand, hovered round me anxiously and sat as close to me as she could without actually getting into the bed next to me. If I glanced at her, she smiled hopefully as if silently begging me to remember her, and when I ran my tongue lightly over cracked lips she reached out immediately for the plastic beaker and straw.

Toby seemed like any other four-year-old boy: bored with being stuck in the bland hospital room and ready to make a game out of anything. I watched him lying on the floor opening a paper bag of sterile antiseptic wipes, which he used to scrub his trainers before trying to cut the laces with a pair of blunt-ended suture scissors.

Teddy, I noticed, was hanging back again, still clutching the squashy ball he’d had with him yesterday. I realised he was watching his brother’s experiments with the hospital equipment, but seemed to have no desire to join in.

The girls spread themselves over the bed and tucked into the seedless white grapes they’d brought me, while Grant opened the album.

‘I’ve read that memory loss can be rectified by showing images of the patient’s life, listening to your favourite music, or watching your favourite programmes,’ Grant explained. ‘Here, look, this is a picture of us on our wedding day. I didn’t bring in the whole wedding album, as there are some of the best pictures in here, plus holidays with the children…’

I had stopped listening to him, my eyes riveted on the photo of the bride and groom smiling outside an old church. Grant didn’t look hugely different, maybe a little less lined round the eyes. The bride smiling innocently beside him was about my height and build, with golden blonde hair falling in soft curls round her shoulders above the white dress. The eyes staring into the camera were a mesmerising blue with tiny grey flecks.

‘You always liked that close-up one best,’ he continued when he saw me staring at it. ‘Of course, your hair isn’t quite that blonde now, but you’re as pretty as ever, isn’t she, children?’

‘Arms not blue now,’ Teddy commented from the corner of the room, where until that point he’d been watching us in silence.

‘Were my arms blue?’ I asked Grant. I snatched at the comment as if, by thinking about that, I wouldn’t have to acknowledge the mind-blowing fact that I appeared to be sitting here in someone else’s body.

‘The doctor said it happens sometimes after a high-voltage injury,’ Grant said. ‘There’s a huge medical word for it. Apparently your upper and lower extremities were cold and mottled blue when it happened, but it cleared in a few hours.’ He squeezed my hand. ‘You look wonderful now.’

Nurse Sally chose that moment to appear in the doorway and I glanced up and saw the mirror in her hand. My face must have blanched, because concern suddenly creased her features. I held her gaze imploringly and shook my head. She tactfully backed out of the room again and left me to my supposed family.

‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ I asked this man, my husband, somehow recovering my voice. ‘And why aren’t the children in school?’

‘It’s half-term, Lauren,’ Grant told me. ‘We were going to take a few days off and do some day trips with them.’

I looked at the children, who were beginning to fidget in earnest now. The girls had finished the grapes and Toby had got up to inspect the silent ECG machine. Teddy was still glowering at me from the doorway.

‘You poor things!’ I said with forced cheerfulness, wishing they would all go off and leave me alone. ‘Fancy having to be here visiting me instead. Grant, why don’t you go ahead and take them out to lunch or something? It’ll give me a chance to have a bath and sort myself out.’

‘Lunch?’ Sophie repeated, pulling out her earpieces and making a ‘yuk’ face. ‘I want to go to Chessington World of Adventures!’

‘Yeah, me too, me too!’ cried Toby, rushing over and jumping on the bed again.

‘I don’t,’ Teddy muttered from the corner. ‘I’m goin’ wait here for Mummy to come back again.’

‘I want to stay here with Mummy too,’ Nicole said quietly from my side.

Grant looked uncertainly from the children to me, then seemed to come to a reluctant decision.

‘Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll go to Chessington and leave Mummy to have some time on her own.’ He glanced at Teddy. ‘You too, Teddy. You’ll like it when we get there.’

‘Shan’t,’ Teddy grumbled from the corner. He flashed me a malevolent stare as he was bodily picked up and presented for a kiss goodbye.