If his mind was a pane of glass, a stone smashed it. The fragile screen between himself and catastrophe ceased to exist; the division between safety and disaster ever a flimsy partition. And when the delicate bulb of thought and feeling inside his skull found itself subjected to so vast and swift a change in temperature, it simply cracked.
Later, he found time to believe that when the floorboard struck Gracey’s little face, the light of the hall also brightened to alter the very atmosphere of the house with a sudden starkness. Time itself oozed gelid and slowed to a speed best suited to hopelessness.
There were seconds of gaping when no activity or useful thoughts were possible. One shard of his fragmented consciousness developed a silly persona. Don’t panic , it said meaninglessly. She’s going to be all right. Okay. All right. Fine, it proclaimed unconvincingly.
Another splinter of his mind fell vertically in a most direful direction and declared that his daughter was dead. Killed outright. A message so ominous he’d become horribly weightless as if he’d been plunged through a trapdoor. Yet he’d remained riveted to a ground upon which he was vapour, instantly rendered to a ghost of who he’d been only seconds before.
The remainder of his thoughts flurried into appeals and nonsense that soon scattered, never to be recovered from the unlit places of the head.
If only he could breathe, move his feet.
Fiona’s scream infiltrated the timber frame of the house. Then she was off the mark, her feet seeming to glide soundlessly over the wreckage in the hall to arrive beside her fallen child.
Gracey’s face was concealed by the plank. A mask of grainy timber hid most of the horror below. But Fiona still forced a smile through an expression of fixed trauma; a smile that might soften her voice when she rediscovered it. As a mother, she’d recognised a moment in which a child required the deepest fathom of maternal kindness and reassurance. And Fiona would fake anything just to turn down Gracey’s terror by one notch.
Tom had felt so grateful that his wife was there. He’d have wept with relief that she was, had there been time.
But Fiona had been afflicted with the same thoughts as Tom, he could tell. As she knelt by the small, twitching body and beheld the terrible syrupy drip drip drip from the little girl’s head, into the foundations of that rotten building, she’d grimly confronted the possibility of their only child dying before their eyes.
* * *
Tom had little recollection of getting Gracey onto the rear seat of his car. Perhaps it was too awful to ever recall, getting out of the hall and to the car. The board was joined to their child, like an upside down stretcher. They didn’t dare remove it. Until she was swept into surgery, it had remained affixed to her head. An actual floorboard. But a silent child and the plank she wore like a coffin lid, fused together by a nail, were somehow ferried by him and Fiona onto the drive and jiggled onto the back seat of his car.
Fiona was a better and quicker driver, with a newer car, but she was needed on the backseat, so Tom had to drive his clunker. Though so nervy did he become by the time he was seated, he couldn’t make his hands work. Three attempts to fix his seatbelt failed. The third was a yank at the strap which locked.
As if dementia had downloaded itself in his whiteout of shock, he’d stared at the car keys and wondered what to do with them.
The simple task managed, the stereo came on, the volume and sentiment of the music inappropriate.
With jittery hands and only a residual memory of how to operate a car, he proceeded to set off the windscreen wipers and an indicator. The handbrake dragged like an anchor and stalled the car twice before he remembered that a car even had such a device.
Once they were moving more smoothly, they slid backwards into a darkness made more profound by not having the headlights switched on. He’d felt they were sinking slowly into the dying functions of his daughter’s brain.
While driving, only once did he dare glance over his shoulder and at the back seat. But after what he’d seen , just that once, he’d nearly driven off the road.
His eyes had locked onto what was visible of Gracey – one side of her body, her skin as pale as death. Yet the small head and neck were rippled a lurid scarlet when the yellow glare of a street light flashed through the interior. Under the wood, she’d shivered, as if suffering a high fever.
A stampede of panic had surged through Tom’s gullet like vomit and he’d come close to hysteria. He’d then fought for control of the car that slid sideways and glanced the grassy verge.
‘What are you fucking doing!’ Fiona had screamed at him and broken him back to his senses. His wife was arched over the plank, one foot in the footwell, one leg kneeling between Gracey and the backrest, one hand on the parcel shelf, the other gripping the headrest of the driving seat. She’d travelled the entire journey in that position. Forty minutes that had felt like a year.
Twice Fiona thought Gracey had gone. His wife’s voice had risen strangled, throttled by anguish. Twice he’d pulled over and on filleted legs no more substantial beneath him than inner tubes, he’d clambered round the car and sunk into the dark, crowded rear to seize at Gracey’s tiny wrists.
Twice a pulse was found. Small hidden beats finally distinguishable from the palpitations that boomed the bones of his own face. Twice he’d returned to the driver’s seat knowing his daughter was still among the living.
At this stage of the ordeal, exhaustion mercifully blunted the sharper edges of his torment. But there was little relief because quieter thoughts turned to a grisly reasoning. Grim eventualities were entertained of missing eyes, brain damage, septicaemia, the effects of an old nail driven into a child’s head. A thought process more gruelling and nauseating than he could have imagined possible.
From the rear, Fiona’s words at one point, atremble and interspersed with swallowed sobs, put through a call to the hospital they drove to. But the roads elongated into forever and enforced their rules. There were so many stops at every red signal that you might only otherwise catch in a nightmare in which you never arrive at your destination.
Approaching the hospital, the night became a smear speckled with rain. Wet tarmac, an ocean. Innumerable signs blared on tiny roundabouts about where to park for the alphabetised departments; signage that might have been written in Mandarin for all the hope Tom had of interpreting them.
Eventually, the car’s headlights swirled across the impossibly bright reception of Accident and Emergency. By that time he was nearly on his knees between the pedals of the footwell.
They’d carried Gracey out of the car.
Three smokers by the door of A&E turned to stone.
Fiona had screamed and screamed for help. People had stopped walking and talking and stared. Everyone shut down around them. Until a woman in blue scrubs and crocs appeared. She exuded an innate kindness that had made them both well up. They’d wept pleas for help.
Professionals took over then. Two doctors who looked as young as sixth-formers ran to meet them. Another couple of nurses appeared, carrying a stretcher. Their child was put first.
Neither he or Fiona wanted to release Gracey’s little wrists and ankles, as if this family of three were at the gates of extinction. But they had to let her go, into the great, glaring white light.
* * *
Outside the theatre where emergency surgery was being performed on Gracey, Tom’s agitation ratcheted up a notch and his body came close to convulsing. It was his shaking and pacing that set Fiona off.
She’d been sitting on one of the plastic chairs provided, her face in her hands, her hair draped over fingers that might have been making strawberry jam. His extreme discomposure, the bending over and exhaling, the wringing of his own stained hands, the terrible waiting for someone to come and tell them the worst… He knew he’d been unbearable. And by this time too, a cloak of remorse and shame for what he’d done to Fiona and Gracey had wrapped his skin from head to toe like heated towels and sweated him for the fool he was.
In the eyes of this woman with whom he’d tried to make a life, a family, a home, he’d rolled the dice on a lunatic’s gamble and lost it all. He’d reduced the remainder of their lives to wretchedness and desolation, because he’d recklessly pulled up the floorboards of their home to locate and retrieve artefacts charged with folk magic . Items that were charmed and that had made them accursed. Within the scrutiny of a hospital’s lights – this great hall of science, this pinnacle of human progress – the thought processes that had convinced him of the necessity of such a cleansing of their home must have appeared pitiful, even abhorrent to her.
While she waited to see if her only child would survive the next hour, Fiona must have discovered an opportunity to change the tack of her thoughts. To set them a new course along an exploration of her husband’s actions that day. Finally, her musing must have docked at the consequences of the aberrations that Tom had embraced – his burying bowls of milk and honey in their lawn, his ripping up of the old floorboards. And she was out of the chair and in his face with a speed that knocked the breath from him. Her plastic chair slid away like a foal on ice.
The first slap closed one of his eyes and switched his head from north to south. As he stumbled from the first strike, the second blow struck. That one wiped all sense from his mind, knocking his head from east to west.
Exploding from an ominous, patient silence, Fiona had looked especially terrible in that hospital corridor. Lit up with a sickly luminance, tears carving her cheeks, her forehead swiped and crusting with her only child’s blood, she’d gone wild.
When she’d raised her stained hands to him again, he’d flinched. But that time, she’d torn at his hooded top and pulled him into her. He only remembered some of what she shouted at him but had understood the entire message.
‘You! Bastard! You did this!’ Her spittle had hit his face like sea spray on the bow of a cross-channel ferry.
His first reaction was to lay the blame elsewhere. Impossible for him, he found, even at such a time as that, to deny deferment of the worst thing he had ever done in his life. ‘Fi’. They… It’s a curse.’
‘There is no fucking curse! It’s all in your head, you stupid bastard!’
He let her hit him again and his ear had buzzed hotly for hours afterwards.
A nurse ran at them from somewhere in the distance. He remembered the squeak of rubber soles closing on the tiled floor.
‘Get away from us! Leave us alone!’ Fiona had screamed at him and he’d heard two people, who were sitting ten feet away and waiting for their own terrible news to arrive, suck in their breath.
Dumbstruck and punch-drunk, Tom had watched Fiona turn and flee. She’d passed the nurse who’d run to get between them.
‘I’d fuck off if I was you,’ the nurse had said to Tom as he’d reeled. She’d looked at him as if he was a wife-beater and a child-abuser. She must have thought that he’d battered his own daughter. Must have thought that he’d put her in surgery. Must have thought that he would hurt a four-year-old girl. In the eyes of womanhood he was utterly despised. If he’d been on a bridge, he’d have sent himself off it and down, to shake himself away and out of this body.
He’d then sat in the car for another two hours. Cried for much of it. Went into the hospital numerous times to ask after Gracey.
She was in a critical condition, he was told the second time. Fiona was nowhere to be seen.
They were trying to save her eye , a young doctor whispered the third time he went in, while she held his elbow. That’s when his legs went out from under him.
Three people got him into a chair like a drunk who’d gone face-down on a bender.
He’d needed air and had gone back outside and stood in the rain, sobbing.
Then he’d sat in the car again but in silence, so immobile he could have passed for dead. He didn’t dare call Fiona.
He was cursed. No such misfortune was natural. His skull filled with images of lead tablets inscribed with ancient words, a petrified cat’s silent scream, bones wound with red thread and the skull of a devil buried under his floor. He’d thought of the tiny weight of Archie’s body as he’d tipped that pup into the soil.
His face had boiled and throbbed from his wife’s blows. They were never coming back from this.
Finally, his mind had filled with a memory of little Gracey and he’d known, in an instant, that he was entirely forsaken. Only then, after hours and hours and hours of being sick with grief, anxiety, remorse and fear, did his rage return.