In those few days afterwards, staying in the hospital and growing stronger, the corridors were a strange comfort to Daniel. White and bright and dry with signs that took him wherever he wanted to go. He mapped them, and the walkways and stairways that connected them, by heart, grateful he could never become lost, always returning to his father and sitting with him whenever he was allowed. Whispering to him that he was there. Stroking his arms. Helping to wash his hands in a bowl of warm water after the nurse had shown him how.
He noticed the doctors and nurses nodding when they passed him in the corridors. Occasionally, they paused and asked how he was. Patients did too. Sometimes those who looked the most ill touched his arm as they spoke to him, as though he was a charm that might bring them good luck.
Daniel smiled it off at first.
But, on the morning of the third day after arriving in the hospital, he passed by the shop on the ground floor and stopped when he saw the newspapers calling his survival a ‘miracle’. The word was written in a headline next to his photo, and the longer he stopped to look at it, the more it sent his mind whirring. When a man bent down to ask if he was all right, Daniel reeled away, flushed with embarrassment, until the corridors were winding him back exactly where he wanted to go.
He sat by his father’s bed in his hospital dressing gown, then closed his eyes and asked for another miracle. Over and over he repeated it inside his head, like a prayer, or a piece of magic that would only work if he really believed in it, trying to remember exactly how he had asked for help underground.
But, when he looked, nothing had changed. His father was still lying there in exactly the same position. Eyes closed. The ventilator inflating his lungs, then sucking them small.
Daniel studied the small undulations in the rubber floor, trying to imagine how many people had walked in and out of this particular room and what their stories were.
‘I hate seeing you like this,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m scared you won’t wake up and be like you were, that things aren’t ever going to be the same again.’
Daniel leant forward in his chair until he could see the pores in his father’s nose. ‘You have to make sure you get better,’ he whispered. ‘Please. I don’t know what to do if you don’t. I don’t know how long I’ll be staying here or what’ll happen when I go home. The social worker who came to see me yesterday was talking about getting in contact with Aunt Jane.’
When the door opened, Daniel sat back abruptly in the plastic chair. But it wasn’t a nurse or a doctor. It was a man, wearing a dark, single-breasted suit, with wide turn-ups resting on the laces of his brown shoes. Beneath his jacket was a white shirt and a dirty yellow tie, dangling like a strip of flypaper as he set his black briefcase on the grey rubber floor where it stood like a low headstone.