‘What’s taking them so long?’ Strand by strand, like a disintegrating rope, my control was slowly starting to shred.
‘They’re probably still trying to work out the safest way to reach us.’
For the last thirty minutes we’d been receiving snippets of information from someone several carriages back. Unlike ours, their mobile phone was still working, and they’d been receiving updates from friends on the ground, which they’d passed in relay along the line of carriages. The messages were delivered in a series of shouts, which the wind kept trying to whip away.
It was surprisingly breezy for such a hot day, and with every gust I panicked that the carriages might become uncoupled from the track and hurtle like lemmings off The Hybrid to the ground below.
‘Another fire engine has just arrived,’ a voice behind us shouted out. ‘That makes six in total and twelve ambulances.’
Two helicopters were still swooping overhead, like buzzards circling roadkill. It was a horrible analogy, but one I couldn’t seem to get out of my head. With the sun now high in the sky, the day had grown excruciatingly hot. The weathermen had promised the warmest day on record, and unfortunately it looked as though they were going to be proved right.
‘I’m so thirsty,’ I said, my lips as dry and parched as my throat. I thought longingly of the water bottle that had been in my bag, no doubt crushed like the rest of my belongings.
‘Try not to think about it.’ Will’s face was also running with rivulets of sweat and yet his voice was cool and calming. I was beginning to realise that he wasn’t just good in a crisis, he was amazing. His steady voice and unflappable attitude stayed my panic, in a way I’m not sure would have happened with anyone else. How would it have been if Sasha were beside me now? Or Aaron? As disloyal as it might be, I instinctively knew that my boyfriend wouldn’t have handled things as well as Will was doing. Aaron wasn’t good around illness, a fact he freely admitted. Even when his grandfather had been desperately ill in hospital, he’d had to steel himself to visit him. ‘I just don’t cope well around sick people,’ he’d said at the time, wrapping his arms around me and kissing the side of my neck. ‘So don’t you go and get ill, hmm?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I’d told him. It had been in the early days of our relationship, when I was still falling too fast to see his attitude as anything to worry about.
‘So,’ Will prompted, snapping me out of my thoughts of Aaron. ‘Tell me some more about yourself. Let’s start with your job. What do you normally do when you’re not skiving off on a hen party?’
‘I own a dog-grooming business.’ Will’s eyes widened in surprise and he nodded encouragingly, clearly wanting more. ‘It’s called Doggy Divas, and we’ve been going for almost two years now. It’s doing quite well, actually,’ I admitted, unaware that a note of pride had crept into my voice. ‘It’s hard work, but I have the best partner in the world, who I love to bits.’
‘Phil?’ Will guessed.
I frowned, worrying all over again about his head injury. Why would he think I worked with Sasha’s fiancé, or that I loved him for that matter?
‘No, I’m talking about Wayne, my business partner.’
‘Who you love?’
I smiled, visualising my uber camp, over-the-top friend. ‘Everyone loves Wayne.’
‘Ahh… I thought you meant “partner” as in boyfriend.’
I shook my head, and then instantly regretted it. I was getting the most dreadful headache, which I suspected was caused by dehydration, and every movement seemed to make it worse.
‘No. My boyfriend’s name is Aaron.’
Will was now looking more than a little confused. ‘I’m not sure I’m following this. You love your business partner Wayne; you’ve got a boyfriend called Aaron; and yet you’re about to get married to Phil? And you said your life wasn’t interesting!’
My laughter came from somewhere unexpected, given our current situation.
‘I’m not marrying Phil – Sasha is. Why did you think it was me?’
In answer, Will looked down at the pink sash my friend had slipped over my head what felt like half a lifetime ago. It had slipped around my body, the only letters still visible spelling out the word ‘Bride’. I tugged on the pink satin, and heard a ripping sound as it snagged on a jagged piece of metal and tore in two. The sash came free in my hands.
Will’s eyes flickered over the letters that had been hidden: ‘smaid’. For some reason, they made him smile.
Whatever he might have said next was lost – the sound of a heavy boot on metal made us both look up as the first rescuer to scale the hundred-metre climb to reach us finally arrived.
*
Over the next fifteen minutes, more firefighters climbed The Hybrid to join us, their faces unreadable masks as they surveyed the task ahead of them. It was more the things they didn’t say than the things they did that worried me.
Miraculously, most of the other passengers had sustained only minor injuries, and were released carriage by carriage from the ride and then led to a platform, where a cherry picker would lower them to the ground. But our own release was considerably more complicated.
Until the arrival of the paramedics, Will had been holding my torn sash against his head as a makeshift dressing, and it was worrying to see that what began as tiny red rosebuds on the fabric had quickly blossomed into enormous scarlet flower heads. And yet from the moment the paramedics joined us, I felt we were in safe hands.
‘Well, this is all a bit of a pickle, isn’t it?’ declared a female voice with a thick Yorkshire accent. As understatements go, that had to be right up there with the best of them. Cathy introduced herself as though we’d just met at a party, over cheap plonk and sausage rolls. ‘You’ll meet my partner, Vince, in a minute – if the daft sod hasn’t had a coronary on the way up here. He’s nowhere near as fit as he likes to make out.’
Her chatter was jovial and irreverent, and totally at odds with her professionalism as she pulled on surgical gloves and began to examine us both with skilled and gentle hands. She was probably only fifteen years or so older than me, but there was something reassuring and maternal about her. It was there in the way she lightly stroked my shoulder before running her hands down the bits of my body she could reach. It was so long since I’d felt anything like a mother’s touch. I hadn’t even realised I’d begun to cry again until Cathy pressed a tissue into my hand.
‘Give your girlfriend a cuddle, Will. She needs one.’
I was about to explain that Will and I weren’t a couple, but his arm was already around my shoulders, pulling me against him. It was so comforting I completely forgot about correcting her.
‘Ah, Vince. So you decided to join us after all,’ Cathy cried, turning with a smile to greet the paramedic, whose bright red face clashed alarmingly with his green jumpsuit.
‘“Just a little bit of climb? More of a stroll, really?”’ the new arrival gasped, no doubt quoting his colleague. She grinned and reached for the bag he’d been carrying, delving into its depths for supplies.
As the pair applied dressings to our wounds and assessed our injuries, the banter continued. It was a distraction I imagined they regularly employed to calm their patients, and I had to admit, it worked. Almost without me noticing it had happened, Cathy had rigged up a drip, which was now feeding into my arm. Their routine was so slick it felt almost rude to interrupt it with the question I could no longer stop myself from asking.
‘Why can’t I feel my legs?’
Cathy’s eyes flickered, but it was Vince who answered.
‘It could be any one of a multitude of reasons, Bella. The doctors are the only ones who’ll be able to answer that properly, once we’ve got you out of here.’
Beneath my head, which was leaning on his chest, I felt the skip and subsequent increase in Will’s heart rate. It was weird how neither of us seemed to have noticed his arm was still around me.
Vince, who was squatting low on Will’s side of the carriage taking his blood pressure, looked up with eyes that promised nothing except straight talking.
‘I know what you’re thinking. You’ve gone straight up there to the worst-case scenario and there’s probably nothing I can say that’ll talk you down from there. So all I’m going to tell you is that it’s far too soon to know anything for certain. Just hold on to your positive thoughts – and to each other. And don’t go crossing any bridges until you absolutely have to.’
I nodded dumbly, seeing multiple versions of the paramedics as my eyes filled with frightened tears. It was impossible not to notice that they hadn’t said I was being silly. They hadn’t said, of course you’ll be able to walk. They hadn’t wanted to lie.
I looked up at Will and caught a moment I’m sure he never intended me to see, as he brushed a single tear from his eye.
*
It took them five hours to free us, far longer than I’d anticipated when that first red-faced, slightly out-of-breath firefighter had appeared beside us, and during that time Will and I fast-tracked from people who’d been strangers only hours earlier to ones who knew so much about each other we could probably have sat exams on the subject. I knew where he’d grown up – Oxfordshire, posh private school; that he was the middle of three sons – didn’t really get on with his oldest brother, who was a pompous idiot – his words not mine; and that he’d got into journalism quite by accident at university – after volunteering to write a review for the student newspaper. I knew he visited his parents twice a year at their villa in Nice – always on his mum’s birthday and sometimes on Mother’s Day too. And that he’d lost his heart for the first time on his seventh birthday – to a beagle pup called Lily; the same beloved pet who was also responsible for breaking it some twelve years later when she passed away. He could pretty much quote every line from the Star Wars movies – which I hoped he’d never prove to me; and openly admitted that he cried every single time he watched The Notebook – a fact that impressed me a great deal more.
As the hours went past, I felt that I knew this man better than many of my closest friends. I willingly admitted my initial assessment had been completely wrong. He was a good guy, a great guy; the kind of guy who’d make someone a wonderful boyfriend. Why he was single was a total mystery to me.
I surprised myself by telling him about my mother – something I rarely did when meeting someone for the first time.
‘That must have been so tough to get through,’ he’d said gently.
‘I’ll let you know when I’m there,’ I replied soberly, which earned me a tender hug as he drew me even closer against him. His body was supporting almost all the weight of mine, which was just as well, for as the minutes ticked into hours, I could feel myself growing weaker and increasingly light-headed. I could tell from the muted conversations between Cathy and Vince that either my condition or Will’s was beginning to cause them greater concern. They were huddled for a very long time with the chief fire officer, and finally, after a trio of gravely affirmative nods, they approached the carriage.
‘Will, Bella,’ the senior officer began, his chirpy voice not quite matching the look in his eyes. ‘We’re all ready now to start cutting you free. I just wanted to run through how things are going to go from here.’
Will reached for my free hand, and squeezed it encouragingly.
‘Once we’ve cut the safety bar off, we’ll begin slicing through the carriage. We’re going to start on Will’s side first, so you’ll be getting the lucky first ticket out of here.’
‘No.’ There couldn’t have been a single head that didn’t turn towards Will in astonishment. ‘Get Bella out first. Once she’s free then you can work on me.’
The fire officer shook his head slowly, with an ‘I’ve-heard-it-all-before’ kind of expression on his face.
‘That’s very noble of you, son, but that’s not how things work around here. We get to decide the order of things, so we can keep everyone safe – my crew as well as you two.’
‘I don’t want to leave Bella alone,’ Will said, shaking his head slowly as though politely refusing the dessert trolley.
‘Hey. What are we? Chopped liver?’ said Vince, resting his hand on Will’s forearm. ‘We’re going to be right here with her all the time, mate. She won’t be alone. You can trust us to take good care of her until you see her again.’
Will still looked as though he was about to refuse, but I saw the way Vince’s fingers had tightened around the suntanned skin of Will’s arm. The two men locked eyes, and a silent conversation took place. This was more than just reverse chivalry, or even expediency. There was a reason Will needed to be out of the way before they set me free. One of us was in a far more serious condition than we realised, and I saw in Will’s eyes that he’d already worked out who it was.
‘I promised I’d stay with you.’
‘That’s okay,’ I whispered, feeling naked and vulnerable in front of the team of professionals listening in on our conversation. ‘I’m going to be fine.’
As the firemen began getting their equipment into position, Cathy and Vince were busy doing the same with their own.
‘It’s impossible to know how the situation will change once you’re both free,’ Cathy explained, checking that the neck brace she’d slipped around me earlier was still secure. Will was also wearing one, and as they slid a long board beside the track in preparation for lifting him away, I felt panicked by our imminent separation. He said he didn’t want to leave me, and more than anything I selfishly didn’t want him to go.
The sun was much lower in the sky when they were ready to begin slicing through the carriage with hydraulic cutters and spreaders. A heavy canvas sheet had been draped in front of us, which I imagined was as much to prevent us from seeing our injuries as it was to protect us from loosely flying pieces of debris.
The first sparks of pain began to pierce the numbness almost as soon as the safety bar had been removed. I took a draught of the gas and air Cathy was holding in readiness, grateful for the woozy half-drunk feeling it gave me.
Even with their sophisticated extraction equipment, it still took time for the firemen to cut open the twisted metal, but eventually the front of the carriage was peeled back as effortlessly as a sardine can.
For all his earlier bravery, Will was clearly in a lot of pain as experienced hands slipped beneath him to slide him on to the waiting board. Even so, he still held on to my hand until the very last moment, when Vince gently disengaged our fingers. The rescuers worked with efficient urgency as they strapped the man who’d shared every moment of this terrible experience with me on to the board.
With his head securely fastened Will could no longer turn to look at me, so his parting words were addressed to the sky as they carried him on to the cherry picker’s platform. ‘Stay strong, Bella. I’ll do everything I can to get a message to your dad when I’m down. I’ll see you very soon.’
I wanted to thank him, not just for remembering how desperately worried I was about my father, but also for everything else he’d done for me over the last five hours. But I didn’t have the words, and even if I’d miraculously found them, the pain that had started as an angry growl when they’d begun to free us had now become a ferocious roar. I sucked hungrily on the mouthpiece, gulping down enormous lungfuls of pain relief, as everything slowly swam out of focus.