There was a long jarring moment of silence before the screams began. Some came from the riders behind me; some rose up like vapour from the ground below us. Was one of those voices Sasha’s? Had she been looking upward, smilingly following my thrill-seeking ride when we crashed?
Reality came back in tiny increments, as though waking from a dream. I could feel fingers touching my face, tentatively pushing back the hair that had been whipped free from my hairband. I tried to open my eyes, but something sticky and thick was steadily dripping on to the lids. I blinked, until my vision cleared from red to pink.
‘Are you all right?’
I forgave the man whose blood was dripping on to me for the ridiculous question. An ugly jagged cut ran from somewhere unseen beneath his thick dark hair and emerged, like a wizard’s brand, on his forehead.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, my voice a terrified gasp. I could feel pain everywhere, each individual agony vying for supremacy. I tried to move, struggling as panic gripped me even more tightly than the twisted, crumpled metal that was imprisoning me. ‘I don’t think I can get out!’
The man pressed his hand with surprising firmness on my shoulder. ‘Don’t even try. You could make things worse.’
Worse than being trapped in an unstable roller-coaster carriage, God knows how many metres above ground? Wasn’t that already as bad as it could get?
‘What happened? Why was there another car on the track? Why didn’t they stop us in time?’ My voice was rising with each question. I’d never been hysterical before; I’d always believed I was a good-in-a-crisis kind of person. But then I’d never been in a situation this dire before. I suppose very few people ever had. Emotions were roiling through me, like lava looking for fissures in bedrock. An eruption felt inevitable, and I was pretty sure that once it started, stopping it would be beyond my control.
‘You have to try and keep calm,’ he urged. I nodded, imagining the tether on my control as if it were a dog’s leash that had to be wound more securely around my hand. Strangely, the analogy to something that was so much a part of my everyday life did help. A little.
‘Good,’ he said in response, his tone calming. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
I considered challenging that statement, but there was something strange about his voice that worried me. He sounded suddenly weaker than he’d done only seconds before. ‘They’ll have help on the way up to us very soon. I’m sure they’ve already—’
The rest of his sentence was lost as he suddenly pitched forward, his upper body landing on me in a breath-stealing thump, as heavy and as immovable as a dropped sack of grain. The crash had crumpled our carriage in such a way that when the man slumped forward, he had nowhere to fall except on top of me. One moment I could breathe, and the next my face was lost beneath the breadth of his shoulder.
He was a dead weight, innocently suffocating me; taking my life and never even realising it. It took all my strength to push the flat of my hand against his shoulder. Even though he was unconscious, I could feel the solid wall of muscle beneath my palm. With each ineffectual shove I could feel my panic begin to rise. I could not, would not, survive this accident, only to die slowly and ignominiously beneath the weight of another casualty. I’d like to think it was my fighting spirit that found the strength to push him free of my face, but it was just as likely that he fortunately regained consciousness before inadvertently smothering me.
I gasped in a huge lungful of air, like a drowning person, shrieking at the pain of a thousand sharp shards that felt as though they were piercing me from the inside out. I had no need of an X-ray machine to confirm that some of my ribs were broken.
‘Sorry,’ my companion apologised, as though we were commuters who’d accidentally encroached on each other’s personal space during the rush hour. I saw the effort it took him to brace his weight on one elbow to free me from his body. I looked up in concern. The small amount of colour he had left was fast disappearing from his skin even as I watched, as though the accident was gradually erasing him. Was that how I looked too?
‘How badly are you hurt?’ he asked, each word coming out in a husky rasp.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, hearing the panic in my voice. ‘My chest hurts when I breathe in, and my legs—’ Panic rose in me like mercury in a barometer. ‘I can’t move my legs!’
He glanced down to where the lower half of our bodies disappeared in the convoluted remains of our carriage.
‘That’s hardly surprising. I think our car took the brunt of the impact.’
I nodded, my ears tuning in to the cries of passengers from the other carriages.
‘Are there other people hurt?’
He lifted his head, and I saw his blood-streaked forehead crease in a frown.
‘Maybe,’ he said carefully, his eyes as inscrutable as a poker player’s. What was he seeing? What wasn’t he telling me?
He turned back to face me. ‘Mostly I can just see a lot of very frightened people back there.’
‘In here too,’ I added, my voice wobbling on the tears I could no longer hold back.
His hands came up, gently cupping either side of my face. In other circumstances, it was probably the way he tenderly held a woman just before he kissed her.
‘Don’t be afraid. You’re not alone. I’m right here with you.’
‘I don’t even know your name,’ I said stupidly, as though that somehow mattered. And strangely it felt as though it did.
‘My name is Will,’ he said, his eyes even managing to crinkle at the edges in a smile.
And that was how I met the man who changed my life.
*
‘How long do you think it will take before help arrives?’
Will paused in his attempts to lever up the safety bar. Beads of perspiration had broken out all over his face and his efforts had made the blood flow even faster from his head wound. The bar, not surprisingly, hadn’t budged a centimetre.
‘Soon,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here soon…’ He seemed to struggle for a moment to remember my name, even though I’d only told it to him a minute or two ago. People with a serious head injury were probably not meant to exert themselves the way he was doing. ‘Bella!’ he completed, conjuring up my name like a forgetful magician.
Of course, he had no way of knowing how quickly help was on the way, but I wanted so much to believe him that I didn’t challenge his answer. Will returned his attention to the bar, this time attempting to use his shoulder to release the restraint. He grunted like a wounded animal, then swore using words I’m certain weren’t in ‘mild-mannered’ Clark Kent’s vocabulary. The bar stubbornly resisted all movement, confirming that his similarity to Superman really was only skin-deep.
‘Fuck it!’ he said, thumping angrily on the bar with his fist. ‘It won’t budge.’ He glanced back along the length of wrecked carriages, shaking his head as he watched other trapped riders with the same idea reluctantly come to the same conclusion. ‘No one is getting out of here by themselves.’ He wiped his hand across what he probably imagined was a sweat-drenched brow and looked almost surprised when his palm came away scarlet.
‘You’re bleeding quite badly,’ I told him, biting my lip in concern. ‘Perhaps we should try to stop it?’ The steady flow was continuing to drip on me, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. What if he passed out again from loss of blood, what if he stopped breathing?
‘My head is the least of our worries,’ Will said, craning his neck and looking down at the figures on the ground, who were scurrying around like displaced ants.
‘Can you see what’s happening down there?’
He squinted, and repositioned his glasses a little higher on the bridge of his nose. I noticed for the first time that one of the lenses had cracked in the accident. It made him look strangely vulnerable.
‘They’re moving everyone away from the ride,’ he said, his breath fanning my face as he leant over the edge of the carriage to get a better look. I could smell sweet aftershave and bitter perspiration, and a strange metallic odour that I’d read somewhere was the smell of blood. ‘It’s chaos down there,’ he concluded, manoeuvring himself back as far as he could into his own space.
From one of the carriages down the ride a woman was screaming for help, her cries growing increasingly hysterical. Another voice angrily told her to shut the hell up. It was frightening to see how the veneer of civilised behaviour was so quickly stripped away in a crisis.
‘Once they figure out a way of getting us down, everything will be fine.’ You had to admire a man who could lie with the skill of a second-hand car salesman, but he wasn’t fooling me. Nothing about this was fine, and might possibly never be again. There was no way of telling how seriously either of us was injured, and the fact that I could no longer feel my legs was more terrifying than being in agony would have been.
‘I think my ankle’s probably broken,’ Will admitted, almost reluctantly, when I pressed him for a summary of his injuries.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I broke it playing football years ago, and it felt pretty much like this, as I remember.’
‘At least you can feel something,’ I said, my words a terrified whisper. ‘My legs are just numb.’
We both looked down at the twisted metal that held us in its jaws like a steel trap. Will’s eyes – which I could now see were the same shade of blue as the summer sky – darkened as he turned to me. ‘Still no feeling in either of them?’
I shook my head, and swallowed down the terror that was trying to claw its way out of my throat. ‘No. But that must be because they’re squashed up in there, right?’
‘Yeah. I’m sure that’s it.’
His hand moved along the padded bar and found mine, his long fingers sliding between my own. His hand was larger than Aaron’s and his grip much firmer. It should have felt weird holding hands with a stranger like this, but I was already praying he’d not release me yet.
‘So, a hen do, right?’ Will’s tone was light, and you didn’t need to be a genius to work out he was trying to distract me. For just a moment, I was happy to let him.
‘How did you guess?’
He smiled, his eyes dropping to the pink sash I was wearing.
‘When’s the big day?’
‘In three weeks,’ I said sadly, already certain I wasn’t going to be there to see my best friend get married.
He smiled. ‘The groom’s a lucky guy.’
I’d spent most of my teenage years accepting that boys were always going to notice Sasha before they looked at me, and I thought I’d long since stopped feeling irritated whenever it happened. It was quite a surprise to find that I still minded.
‘Phil definitely is,’ I agreed.
The whirring sound of rotor blades filled the air and our heads jerked up in unison. A helicopter had arrived before the fire engines, and everyone trapped in the wreckage started to go a little crazy with excitement. There was shouting, and arms were waving, semaphoring like windmill sails, as though we were marooned on an island and the pilot might possibly fly past without seeing us.
Will had shielded his eyes with one hand, and I saw the moment when his smile changed into a frown. ‘Vultures,’ he muttered in disgust.
I squinted into the sky, half expecting to see a swooping bird of prey, but there was only a circling helicopter.
‘It isn’t a rescue helicopter,’ he explained, his lips twisting as though he’d tasted something bitter. ‘It’s from a TV station. I guess we’re breaking news.’
Dread filled me at his words. ‘Oh no. My dad always has the news on in his workshop. He’s going to be frantic when he hears about the accident.’ I looked down in despair at the crumpled front of the carriage. Somewhere among the twisted metal and debris was my mobile phone, or what was left of it.
‘Do you have a phone on you?’ I asked Will desperately.
He read the panic on my face and immediately understood. ‘Back pocket of my jeans. Right-hand side. But you’re going to have to reach it, because I don’t think I can.’
I slid my hand around his waist as far as I could reach, my palm moving from fabric to skin as it travelled beneath his ripped T-shirt. I grazed over his hip bone and the taut muscles of his back, pausing at his sudden indrawn breath.
‘Sorry. Am I hurting you?’ I asked, wondering if he’d played down the extent of his injuries, but Will just shook his head.
‘It’s just bruises,’ he said, nodding for me to continue.
My fingers were slower now, more cautious about causing him pain. I found the band of leather of his belt and dipped lower, seeking his pocket. My search had brought us so close there was literally no space between us. I could feel my breasts crushed against his chest, the soft skin at my waist pressing into the buckle of his belt, and the zip of my jeans gnashing its teeth against his. But anything lower than that was felt only by Will. Below my hips I still had no sensation.
My fingers slid over a firm buttock and dived into his pocket. I wriggled them down in the impossibly small gap until they grazed against something flat and metallic, which I hooked out like a heron with a fish. But my victory was fleeting, because from the broken screen and dented casing I already knew his phone was broken beyond repair.
‘Maybe your friend will let your dad know what’s happened,’ Will suggested, looking lost as fresh tears began to fill my eyes.
‘She might. But she won’t be able to tell him that I’m all right. Hell, even I couldn’t have told him that… but at least he could have heard my voice.’
‘She’ll probably call Phil too,’ Will added consolingly.
I nodded, wiping the back of my hand roughly across my eyes to brush away my tears. I couldn’t lose control now. I had to keep my head together.
‘I guess you have people you’d have wanted to call too? Parents, or a girlfriend?’
Will shook his head.
‘A wife?’
That one brought a wry smile. ‘No takers in that department, although I came pretty close last year.’ His eyes flickered, and I guessed that whatever had happened was not a happy memory. ‘And as for my parents, they’ve retired to the South of France. Hopefully we’ll be out of here long before news of what’s happened today travels that far.’
A muted cheer rose up from the ground below us, which was quickly drowned out by the sound we’d all been waiting to hear. Sirens. Lots of them. I reached instinctively for Will’s hand, not even surprised to find it already outstretched and waiting for mine. Help was finally here.