The paramedics handled him very gently as if wary of breaking or tearing his skin. They listened to his heart and wrapped him in silver heat blankets and warming pads. When Daniel tried pleading with them to sit in the front of the ambulance, they didn’t seem to hear him. He thought it was because his speech was so slurred he could not make himself properly understood.
When the vehicle started moving, he cried out as he lay strapped to the stretcher, imagining the road was going to catch him out again if he wasn’t watching it. Gradually, his sore red hands relaxed as the tarmac held and the tyres kept rolling, but all the time he was lying there, staring at the ceiling, he kept wondering about what was beneath them, his heart jumping every time the vehicle braked. Sometimes his brain felt so cold he forgot where he was until another bump of the tyres jerked his thinking back and he recalled what was happening.
Daniel tried to ask questions whenever he remembered.
‘Where’s my dad?’
‘He got out, right?’
‘He’s OK?’
But the words came out of him quiet and muddled and meaningless, and he gave up trying to ask anything else when a paramedic placed a mask over his mouth to give him warmed oxygen to breathe. As Daniel lay there, trying to think clearly through the cold, an IV was pricked into a vein in his arm and warm, soothing fluids crept into his body.
The paramedic stayed focused on warming Daniel, checking his vital signs, telling him he was going to be all right because he was a strong, healthy boy.
‘We’re taking you to Addenbrooke’s Hospital,’ she said. ‘It’s in Cambridge. It’s not far.’
When they pulled into the bay at the hospital and the driver cut the engine, the paramedic leant in closer. Daniel squirmed, trying to grab her hand, because he wanted to ask again what had happened to his father, but he was too weak and the mask was still on his face anyway. All he could really do was stare at his panicked face reflected in the woman’s eyes.
The hospital staff cut away the rest of Daniel’s dirty clothes and wrapped him in new blankets and heat pads. They injected more warm fluids into his body as he kept inhaling oxygen. He was taken to a ward and he drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few hours, falling into dreams where he was still underground with the water flowing beside him. Sometimes, when he woke up, he thought he was still there, crying out for a moment, his fingers flexing as he wondered where his phone was until his brain caught up and told him what was going on.
He recovered gradually through the day. Nurses and doctors monitored him and he began to understand what they were saying. They told him he was suffering from acute hypothermia, but that he was young and strong and was going to recover. The farmer and his wife had helped save his life by handling him very gently, knowing what not to do to make his condition worse. Daniel nodded, as both his body and his mind came back to him, as though not one single piece of him had been left underground.
Eventually, he found enough strength to ask a nurse where his father was and she bent close and whispered to him. ‘They found him. He’s here in the hospital too. That’s all I can tell you though. Wait until you’re stronger.’
But it was enough for Daniel and he nodded and said thank you because knowing such a thing made his heart glow, and the warmth coming off it was stronger than anything the doctors or nurses had given him to help him get better.
Later in the afternoon, he felt strong enough to sit up and he inspected the dressings that had been applied to the cuts on his arms and legs. There were bruises like blooms of lichen on his white skin.
Soon the IV line was removed and Daniel lay on the bed in his gown, sipping soup, its heat turning his stomach golden.
No one told him anything he didn’t know already. That he was lucky to be alive. That he had no broken bones, but was battered and bruised and still recovering from being hypothermic. That he needed time to rest and recover. He asked again about his father, but no one said anything more than the nurse had told him before. Finally, when the consultant and nurses had run out of things to examine and questions to ask and forms to fill in, Daniel swung his legs round and stood up beside his bed, wobbly as a newborn lamb, and stared at them.
‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know about my dad,’ he said, ‘I’m going to walk through this hospital shouting until I find him.’
The silence deepened. But Daniel kept staring. And then the consultant helped him out of the cubicle around his bed and on through the stares and the whispers in the rest of the ward.
They walked slowly down corridors, Daniel’s ill-fitting hospital slippers slapping the floor. When they passed a ward with its double doors open, Daniel saw elderly patients frocked in green tunics, like some weird cult seeing out its end of days together.
They came to a quiet corner of the hospital and the doctor spoke into an intercom on the wall and they were buzzed through. Then on into a ward of eight single rooms linked in an octagon, each one with floor-to-ceiling glass that faced on to a nurse at her station in the centre, light from her desk lamp splashing on to the paperwork piled in front of her.
Standing beside a door to one of the rooms, Daniel could see through the glass that somebody was lying in a bed, their two feet like tiny tent poles beneath the sheet.
Before he could ask anything, the consultant pushed the handle and waited for him to go in.
His father was lying, tubed and silent, wearing a white smock just like Daniel’s, his arms resting on top of the sheet. His head was bandaged. A ventilator was breathing for him.
Daniel touched the top of his father’s hand and felt the warmth coming off it.
‘He’s been placed in an induced coma,’ said the consultant. ‘That means he’s being kept asleep for now. Your father needed life-saving surgery because his brain was bleeding and now it has to have time to recover. The team on the ward here will be able to tell you more.’
Daniel squeezed his father’s hand harder. ‘Can he hear us?’
The consultant shook her head. ‘He’s heavily sedated. Daniel, your father is very poorly. Who would you like us to contact? There doesn’t seem—’
‘There’s just us.’
‘No other relatives?’
‘Only my aunt. But she lives in America and I’ve never met her. My dad doesn’t speak to her because they fell out, so I don’t think she’d come. Can I stay with him for a bit now?’
The consultant was about to ask something else, but then she just nodded. ‘For a little while. You need to rest as well. Get yourself stronger too.’
When the consultant closed the door, Daniel looked round, shocked by the gentle click.
‘Dad?’ The walls began fraying at the edges of Daniel’s eyes because it was always his father who had told him about the important things. ‘Dad, I’m here. But I don’t know how.’