flask. “All right,” he said, raising it to me. “Here’s to living dangerously. A bit less dangerously from now on, yeah?”
“Whatever you say,” I said, still grinning, as he swigged. The booze had hit my system and whatever it was doing in there, it felt great.
Sean came up blowing like he’d been underwater. “Jesus! That’s beautiful. If it kills him, I’d say it’s worth it.”
“Told you,” Dec said, reaching for the flask. “To living dangerously.” And when he lowered it, smiling beatifically: “Ahhh. Chapeau to me, if I say so myself.” But when I held out my hand, he didn’t pass it back to me. “Save the rest, yeah? In case you need a little pick-me-up later on. This place would have anyone browned off.”
“I’m not browned off. I get to lie around all day with women in, in nurse outfits bringing me breakfast in bed. Would you be browned off?”
“Still. There’s not a lot left; hang on to it. Just stick it in here—” He started shoving stuff aside on the shelf of my bedside locker.
“Oh Jesus, not like that. Give me it.” I grabbed the flask off him and started rooting through the locker for something to wrap it in. “The nurse in charge, or whatever they call it, she’s batshit crazy. I had a fan, right? She took it off me because she said it would spread germs. If she catches me with this she’ll, I don’t know, give me detention or—”
The locker was on the right side of my bed, and in order to reach it more easily I had switched the flask to my left hand. I felt it slipping free, grabbed wildly for it, and watched powerlessly as it slid through my fingers like they were made of water, bounced off the blanket and thudded dully onto the floor. The cap was loose; a trickle of whisky spread on the rot-green flooring.
There was an instant of frozen silence: Sean and Dec wide-eyed and uncertain, me unable to breathe. Then Sean leaned sideways to pick up the flask, tightened the cap and passed it back to me. “Here,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. I managed to get the flask bundled into a plastic bag and stuffed into the bedside locker, with my shoulder turned to the guys so they wouldn’t see how hard I was shaking.
“They get your hand?” Dec asked, easily. Sean found a paper napkin on the trolley table, tossed it on the floor and started wiping up the spill with his foot.
“Yeah. A kick or something.” My heart was skittering out of control. “It’s fine. The doctors say there’s some, like, some nerve damage, in my wrist? but no big deal. A couple of months of physio and I’ll be fine.” The doctors had in fact said nothing of the kind. The neurologist—a flabby, ponderous old guy with the clammy pallor of someone who had been held in a basement for several years—had refused, smugly and flatly, to tell me anything at all about whether or when or to what extent I might expect to get better. Apparently that depended on a lot of factors, which he had of course no intention of listing for me. Instead—talking over me every time I stumbled or slurred, eyes sliding off me like I was beneath his attention—he had drawn me helpful cross-sections of my head with and without hematoma, informed me that my residual disabilities (“that means the problems that haven’t gone away yet”) were “really very minor” and that I should consider myself lucky, told me to do my physical therapy like a good little boy, and then left while I was still trying to find some way of getting it through to him that this was actually my business. I still got light-headed with fury just thinking about him.
Sean nodded, balling up the wet napkin and looking around for a bin. After a moment Dec said, “At least it’s not your wanking hand.” The burst of laughter from all three of us was just too loud and too long.
By the time they left we were finishing off a bag of crisps and laughing easily again; Sean and I were advising Dec to take advantage of being in the hospital to get himself checked out for whatever lurid diseases Jenna had given him, and he was threatening to rat me out to the head nurse for drinking if I didn’t shut my gob; from the outside everything would have looked fine, completely fine, three