Summer At Willow Tree Farm. Heidi Rice
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with a collection of charity shops, pound shops and chintzy tourist-friendly tearooms. The narrow pavements that headed up a steep hill were mostly deserted. Apparently Sunday opening hours still hadn’t made it to Gratesbury.
‘Now who’s being Princess Drama?’ she said, taking the side street at the top of the hill past the Somerfield supermarket.
They drove past a collection of old detached stone houses, their high garden walls lovingly decorated with trailing lobelia.
She’d once moaned incessantly about the lack of any fashion options for women under sixty in Gratesbury or the chances of getting a soy vanilla Frappuccino because they didn’t even have a Seattle Coffee Company café, which were all the rage in London, when her mother had brought her here during that summer. But in retrospect, weekend trips to the town had been a quaint and pleasant way to spend the afternoon – and the Women’s Institute market had done a phenomenal lemon drizzle cake.
The road narrowed ahead and seemed to be coming to a dead end. ‘Where is this place?’ she asked, wondering why she hadn’t spotted the sign.
Art stilled beside her. A brief glance confirmed his face had gone deathly white. Sweat dripped down his temple to furrow through the stubble on his jaw. It was a sunny day, and pleasantly warm, but not that warm.
She wondered how many more pints he could afford to lose, because the metallic smell had begun to permeate the whole car.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been to it before.’
He closed his eyes and pressed his head into the headrest, the tight grimace signalling how much pain he must be in.
She almost felt bad about the Princess Drama crack. The man was nothing if not stoic.
She slowed the car, and finally spotted a blue sign emblazoned with the NHS insignia. ‘At last, found it.’
He shifted beside her as she drove into an almost empty car park. The one-story utilitarian building had a glass front and an ambulance bay with a paramedics van parked in it.
‘I hope it’s actually open,’ she said.
Still no comment.
‘Do you want to wait here while I investigate?’ she asked, concerned he might be about to pass out for real.
‘Sure.’
The bloody towel covering his injured hand had started to seep onto his T-shirt.
She got out of the car and sprinted across the lot, propelled by panic.
Art Dalton might be a pain in the arse, but she really would prefer it if he didn’t die in her rental car. Not only would that be a difficult one to explain to the car hire company, but she had a sneaking feeling her mum would be devastated.
*
‘Art, wake up, it’s open and the receptionist says the doctor can see you straight away.’
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ Art dragged his eyes open, because some bugger had attached ten-ton weighs to his lids. Ellie’s intent green gaze roamed over his face.
He must really look like shit for her to actually be anxious about him, although maybe her anxiety was more to do with the threat to her upholstery than the threat to his health.
He certainly felt like shit. His hand was throbbing as if someone had tried to hack it off with a chainsaw – not completely untrue. But worse was the sick sensation in his belly, and the anxiety that had his chest in a death grip as he stared at the plate glass panel twenty feet away.
He hated hospitals. Really hated them.
He’d been trying to convince himself all the way here, this wasn’t strictly speaking a hospital, more like a glorified GP’s surgery. And it looked deserted. He wouldn’t walk in and be accosted with the sound of hurrying feet slapping against linoleum, the smell of blood and urine and bleach, or the beep of monitors, phones ringing, hushed conversations or shouted demands, or worse, the groans and mumbles of other people’s pain – everything that had haunted him in nightmares for years.
Even so, he’d rather risk losing his hand than have to walk through those sliding glass doors in the next few minutes…
Worst of all was the knowledge that if he hadn’t been thinking about Ellie, while he was supposed to be concentrating on sharpening the blade to start the cut-out on his latest commission, he wouldn’t have got into this fix in the first place.
‘Haul arse, Art, let’s get this over with.’ Ellie sounded exasperated and anxious.
‘Give me a moment,’ he said.
He needed to hide the fact he was not only terrified of going inside that building, but also terrified of losing it in front of her.
‘What for? Do you want to wait until you need a blood transfusion or something?’ The high note of panic gave lie to the snark.
And spurred him into action.
‘Fine, let’s do this thing.’ He tried to sound sure.
He gave his head a quick shake, to clear the fog enveloping him, and grabbed a hold of the car door while ignoring the rabbiting heartbeat punching his ribs. And the nausea sitting like a roaring lion under his sternum.
Do not puke.
He placed his feet on the tarmac, levered himself out of the car and staggered, his balance shot.
Ellie caught him round the waist. ‘Don’t you dare fall on top of me, Dalton.’ Banding a supporting arm around his back, she propped his good arm over her shoulder. ‘If you go, I’m going to go with you, because you’re too much of a big lummox for me to catch. And I’m telling you now, I will be severely pissed off if that happens.’ The snippy motormouth monologue was weirdly comforting.
‘I’m OK.’ He tried to take some of his weight off her, even though his equilibrium was iffy at best, the scent of her – summer flowers and sultry spice – as disturbing as the prospect of flattening her in an NHS car park.
‘Shut up, and lean on me,’ she said, holding him upright.
He gave up objecting – he didn’t have the strength to walk and argue at the same time.
The shaking hit his knees as the glass doors slid open, the electric hiss bringing with it the sucker punch of memory.
‘Don’t make a fuss, Arty. Everything will be OK. As long as you don’t tell, baby.’
His mummy’s voice whispered in his ear while the scary man with a white mask over his face kept prodding at his tummy, making the screaming agony a thousand times worse.
‘Art, you’re not really going to pass out are you? I can go and get a wheelchair?’ Ellie’s frantic questions beckoned him back to the present.
He breathed, ignoring the lion now roaring in his ears. And realised he’d yet to cross the threshold.
‘I’m fine, Princess Drama.’ But he didn’t feel fine, he felt terrible.
She didn’t comment, so he knew he must look terrible too.
He forced his feet to carry him through the door and back into purgatory, grateful for the feel of her flush against his side, her fingers digging into his hip. He clung on to her, reminding himself every step of the way that the throbbing pain was coming from his hand now and not his stomach. And wasn’t anywhere near as diabolical as it had been when he was a boy.
*
‘Ouch, nasty.’ The female doctor snapped on a pair of surgical gloves then unwrapped the layers of blood-soaked tea towels and dropped them in a surgical waste disposal unit. ‘How did you do this, Mr Dalton?’
‘Rotary blade slipped,’ Art supplied, in his usual talkative fashion from his perch on the gurney. The