She awoke in the Royal Hospital. A large boy in an electric wheelchair was staring straight at her. He looked like he'd been there for some time. Why is this unhinged person looking at me so intently she wondered? She pulled her bedclothes over her chest and stared back frightened, ‘Who are you?’ she blurted out suddenly. She recognised him from somewhere.
’This g-going to sound s-strange..’ The boy had then spoken for a while but the words had merely drifted over her meaninglessly. Then his tone seemed to change and it gave her a jolt. His strangled words became clearer and the sounds and phrases suddenly clicked in her mind.
‘..W-what you saw. It's all t-true. It wasn't a dream. It never was a gas explosion. I know who you really are. We need your help. My name is Danny. See me w-when you get out-please.’
She took the business card that Danny held out with his teeth. With that the boy put his mouth to the joystick and trundled back to his own ward. Jodie watched the back of the boy’s head recede. She watched him fade into the distance until he had blended into the hospital walls from which he appeared to have sprung.
The days had become weeks, and she wasn’t sure if the weeks were becoming months. She didn’t want to think about all that. She wouldn’t think about it. It was too uncomfortable. Once she had recovered from the rude awakening and the strange boy, she began to settle down. She looked at the white hospital clock on the far wall. It said 6am. She wondered about the boy. Why had he said such strange things? How could he have known so much about her? In fact, she seemed to have forgotten more about herself than she cared to remember. Maybe she had lost part of her mind in the library explosion.
She felt her nose. It was still slightly crooked and a bit too big. A perfect nose job from the blast was too much to expect. She let out a small sigh. People tell me I am beautiful, she reasoned. Somehow she knew though that it was a quirky beauty. She had her life and should be glad of that she told herself.
The hospital stay had increased her sense of loneliness, and her sense of comfort, simultaneously. She had always been strong as far as the outside world could see. There was good reason for that. She had lost her mum when she was six and had never fully recovered. She had swallowed her anger at having to look after her own father. The bitterness she felt at the emptiness of her own life rarely surfaced. She didn’t want much after all.
Following the explosion she had slowly recovered the use of her limbs. Most of her memory was still intact. Her former life, as a junior librarian in the library, seemed more than a million miles away right now.
What the boy in the electric wheelchair had said greatly disturbed her. She had just about got used to being a random, senseless, victim. But the strange, cold dreams just wouldn’t leave her alone. Her mind was not at peace with the reality she had been led to believe. And then the full realisation hit her head on. He was the one the newspapers had talked about. The boy in the wheelchair was the ‘explosive’ local celebrity. She remembered seeing one of the nurses, Jane, talking about him.
The papers had described how the boy had been right next to the strike of the immense and bizarre lightning. The powerful, oddly coloured lightning strikes had destroyed a large tree and illuminated the entire town. Yet, it had left Danny more or less intact.
Everyone in the city had seen the fabulous weather phenomenon. Not only did the boy survive the freak storm but on a visit to the Central library there had been another massive explosion. Again the boy, and his friend, had lived through it. But afterwards, if you looked at it in a half-focused way, the whole library appeared to shine a beautiful soft blue. The newspapers steered clear of reporting on strange nocturnal glows. The odd passer-by, that cared to see such things, would guess such effects were not due to a gas explosion.
Someone, other than the emergency services, had been seen dumping people in the library foyer. They were merely dazed - but entirely without memory of the incident. Then there was the military helicopter hovering above the building. The strange dish and tube device on the roof had also been noted. Rumours and speculation were alive and well.
Jodie turned over in bed, which was quite a feat in itself. Most of the tubes, drains and drips had been taken out before she had left the High Dependency Unit. Her body though, still ached and groaned.
‘Want an early cuppa?’ the night nurse asked. She was a big Jamaican lady in her late fifties. The nurse straightened her bed and left her a nice cup of hot tea.
The early cup of tea always made her feel special. The night-nurses didn’t make that one for everybody. Jodie was very easy to nurse. She regained her self-care quickly and she waited patiently for the nurse-in-charge to come round before she asked for painkillers. Jodie always smiled for the world.
In some ways she quite enjoyed being on the ward. As the nurses said, she was, 'Out of the woods,' physically and not in too much pain now. It was like being in a big extended family. The disabled boy had, somehow, prompted the courage to think about the disturbing dreams.
No two of the dreams were ever quite the same but the theme never varied. There was something dark and menacing about them that chilled her to the bone. They would start off by her being chased. She would trip, but then instead of hitting the ground she would fly. She found she could vary her own gravity with her mind.
Next she would be soaring high above a dark industrial landscape. She'd spot the dome of a nuclear reactor and feel a longing to escape through it. The mysterious entities chasing her would try and follow. She was terrified but sad. To add to her pain she would notice, next to the dome, that there was a forlorn looking scrap metal yard. The muted shapes of twisted metal caught in the yellow twilight. Here her poor father would be sat alone, lost and aimless.
She would attempt to escape the entities that followed her by moving through an old fire-escape door set into the nuclear reactor dome. Inside, Jodie would be transported back to the library. It was brightly lit in stark contrast to the bleak industrial landscape outside. Where there should have been books there were now supermarket items - but they were old and mouldy. She would wander over to the next aisle, completely alone within the library. There she would see the wheelchair bound boys tied by their wrists to their chairs. She would look at her hands only to discover she had none. An awful feeling of falling would grip her and then she would suddenly wake heart in mouth, in a cold clammy sweat.
Soon one of the nurses would come and mop her brow, providing a comforting arm. When she calmed down fully she yearned for someone she could tell her dreams to. Who would understand? Who would listen? Somehow she knew that despite forgetting most of what the strange boy had said, he would understand her. He would know why.
And so she had made up her mind. The early shift domestic picked up her empty tea-cup and scuttled off with a cheerful, ‘Morning love!’ She would go and see that boy, as he had requested, just as soon as she was able.
The following days passed much as they always did, though sometimes the time flew by and other times it marched past slowly. Still she liked being a bystander, looking at life snugly from the outside.
The seasons were changing and it was no longer high summer. The doctors were talking about the need to discharge her. A couple of the days ago the consultant had asked the registrar why she was still on the ward, ‘Does she not have a home to go to?’ he had asked bluntly.
Before she knew it, she was leaving. Two plastic bags, one full of clothes and the other full of dressings, made up her entire worldly possessions, or so it felt.
The nurses on shift all made a point of coming to say goodbye. They would be sad for a bit. They were losing their little star.
Jodie Temple passed the heavier of the two bags to her father who was making inane conversation with a student nurse. He seemed a bit nervous. He had never been good around authority figures. Hospitals and their staff made him especially ill at ease. She ignored his chatter. Instead, she chose to stare out the tower block window, observing the pigeons going about their daily business.
When Jodie got home to her small flat on the council estate she noted that her carefully tended flowerpots on her balcony were lying in pieces. The cream-coloured concrete walls still had that weathered and unloved look. At least the thin trees, in front of the three storey flats were still there. The council had planted them a year or two back to try and brighten up the area. The rubbish bins she tidied up every week were askew amidst floating bits of rubbish and broken glass. The place had sorely missed her influence.
Now she was out of hospital she would be expected to cook the Sunday roast for her father. It was Saturday night, she'd been out of hospital just hours, the neighbours were blasting the telly and she'd just about had enough. Life was a comfortable cocoon back on the ward. Maybe she could just go back there and explain she felt unwell.
'Well that’s enough day-dreaming for you,' Jodie told herself. She packed an overnight bag and trundled downstairs. Getting into her small and battered old British Leyland Mini she motored over to her father's house on the other side of the council estate. She wished she had one of those new and powerful German Minis. She would look good in one of those, though her own car would have been a valuable antique if it had of been in better nick. At least she'd get a decent night's sleep she told herself. It was quieter at her Dad’s place.
The next day she made the Sunday roast whilst her father watched TV.
‘I haven’t half missed you, you know love,’ he’d said during the adverts at half-time.
‘I know you have Dad,’ Jodie grabbed him a can from the yellowing fridge. After the match, Jodie and her dad ate their meal. Her father didn't notice her unusual level of silence. She’d always been a quiet girl.
After eating Jodie picked up her car-keys and headed for the address Danny had given her in the hospital. She pulled away from her dad's two-up, two-down, cream-walled semi.
It was a small miracle that the twelve-year-old light-blue car was still going. She had expected it to be burnt out at the very least. It even had all four wheels. Her dad had thoughtfully lent the car to a mate of his from down the pub, just for safekeeping, during Jodie’s stay in hospital.