This was my grandmother’s teacup! I don’t want it to get damaged!
And the second:
I am really, really hurting myself. This may in fact be how I die . . . and this simply will not do. I must finish my letter!
When it was finally over, she found her reaction to be an equal mix of shock and relief. It was a shock that she had fallen and a shock that she had survived; relief came at the realisation that her ordeal was over, all seven seconds of it, before she welcomed the dark cloud of oblivion which now wrapped itself around her.
‘Auntie Molly! Oh shit! Oh no – Auntie Molly!’
Molly opened her eyes and saw the jowly face of her great-niece, Frances, hovering over her upside down. As the middle-aged woman lowered her rather bulky frame onto the floor beside Molly, her broad knee came down on the dainty cup and saucer on the floor and crushed it. The same cup and saucer that had once belonged to Frances’s great-great-grandmother and had survived two world wars and, miraculously, the tumble down the stairs.
With the crunching sound Molly felt the first jarring bolt of pain, in her legs, arms, ribs, head . . . everywhere! She opened her mouth to speak and what came out was a long, creaking whine of nothingness, like a laboured yawn or the scrape of wood from a barn door unused to opening onto cobbles, a rasp. Nothing more than a dry echo of irritation where her once lubricated vowels had slipped over a tongue loaded with words both whip smart and razor sharp.
The fact that her voice had gone frightened Molly more than the physical pain, the headache, the confusion.
Not only her voice, but apparently her words too, with only a tangle of letters in her brain, like an upturned tin of Alphabetti spaghetti. A muddle from which she could decipher only two words:
Igloo . . . igloo . . . igloo . . . igloo . . . over and over in a pointless, maddeningly frustrating monologue, and then a new addition, which came from nowhere: paws . . . paws . . . paws . . . paws . . . And the crazy thing, the craziest thing, was that even if she had been able to get the words out, the very last things she wanted to say out loud were either ‘igloo’ or ‘paws’, when what she actually wanted to do was shout at the top of her voice: ‘My letter, my letter to Joe! I haven’t finished it – it’s in the book . . . the book on my bed! ’
The urgency of her desire left her breathless and frustrated as again she slipped from consciousness. The offer of dark escape, too tempting to resist . . .
Molly peeped gingerly through her tender eyelids. She hated the harsh overhead strip lighting of the hospital corridor. It offended her senses with its glare, doing nothing to beautify anything it touched, quite unlike the soft lamplight that filled the rooms of her cottage. The place was noisy, chaotic. Busy with preoccupied people coming and going. Her visible bruises, she noticed, sat in clumps, as if someone had inserted bundles of blackberries under her skin. She could feel the swelling of her eyes and face and her head pounded. The only way to keep the intense nausea at bay and to ensure any level of comfort was to lie perfectly still. This was made easier by the plaster cast that encased her arm, the bandages that tightly bound her ribs and the clumpy boot-like contraption on her right leg. It came as no surprise to her that she was more than a little broken. It took all of her energy to move her head, while inside she was shouting, ‘There’s a letter in a book on my bed – it’s for my son! It’s very important. Please! I need to get it to him!’, but what left her mouth was a low whine that anyone listening might have mistaken for a howl of physical pain.
Frances was somewhere off to her right, her niece’s voice loud enough to break through the fog of semi-consciousness as she chatted on her mobile phone.
‘Yep, yep, she’s still here, aren’t you, Auntie Molly? Hanging in there. Yes, yes, a stroke, apparently. Poor old thing. They don’t know if she had a stroke and then fell, or fell and then had a stroke.