Page 35

This must be what it feels like when you die.

When she first fell in, the shock of the water had almost finished her off, as her mouth gaped open and closed; she knew she had to control her breathing if she was going to have any chance of survival.

Once or twice, she’d seen patients who’d taken a tumble into stretches of fast-moving water; that was enough experience to know that managing to breathe for the first minute meant the difference between life and death.

But a minute had passed now, and she was still grasping at something, any kind of way out. She’d managed to stay calm for a moment, but the peace had passed and now she was panicking.

Flailing, desperate for something to grab onto, she kicked into the rocks underneath her – and then buckled as a hot jolt of pain rushed across the top of her right leg.

The front of her thigh had snagged, at violent speed, on something rough and sharp in the stream.

She caught a flash of red changing the colour of the water. Shit.

This is it; it’s all over now, surely.

Her life didn’t flash before her eyes exactly, like people said happened right before you die. It was more random images, random pictures, memories. The tiny seed in her belly, about the size of a grape right now, whose life would end the very same moment hers did. Her children.

Oh God, my children.

How would Elodie and Marcus cope without her?

They had her mother, at least. They would be loved; they would be cared for.

But who else would understand them the way she did?

Who else would fight for them, claw, tooth and nail, to get them the support they needed?

Her mother was nurturing and wonderful – but did she have the energy for all those battles?

And then, triggered by the image of her little boy’s face, a flash of memory: one of his fixations.

A temporary obsession – he had one after another, and Naya supported and encouraged them; she knew that it was how he calmed himself and that these passions brought him so much joy – and this one had been about rivers.

He’d learned the names of the biggest rivers in the world, where they started and ended, what country they were in, with encyclopaedic precision.

When he discovered a new special interest, he needed to absorb it entirely, and sometimes that meant veering off on random tangents, travelling down knowledge rabbit holes.

Rivers were no exception. But my God, what a useful rabbit hole.

He’d found something, in one of his Google searches, about what to do if you fell into the water. She could picture his eyes, fervent with excitement, as he told her: ‘Did you know, you’re supposed to not struggle, maman ? You have to stay calm, and go with the water. Isn’t that crazy?’

Stay calm. Go with the water.

What else, what else did he tell her? There was something about feet – yes, that was it : you were supposed to keep them up.

Don’t try to touch the bottom, that’s how you get injured .

She’d remembered that one too late. But that was the shape she needed to be in now – feet up and together, knees bent, arms out to make a kind of fin.

Back stroke – that should slow you down a bit.

Wait for an eddy created by a rock, sprint in front crawl to the edge of the water and get the hell out .

Forcing her shocked, exhausted body to comply with her instructions took every ounce of strength, but she did it: pulled her feet up and in towards her knees, stretched out her arms. Immediately, she felt her body begin to slow, just a touch, but enough to give her hope.

Next, she tried a few backstrokes. At first it was frustrating, making no difference, but gradually, as she got into a rhythm with the water, she made progress: she had managed to reduce her speed.

She was moving more slowly, giving herself time to look at what was around her and see if she could use any of it to get herself out of the water.

Come on, Naya. You can do this.

And then she saw it. Stretching her neck higher out of the water, Naya caught sight of a large rock coming up on her right-hand side – large enough to grab onto, if she could just slow down enough as she got nearer.

Just past the rock, the stream looked as though it forked into two distinct paths.

If she could grab hold of it, though, then from there, it was only a jump or a long step onto some smaller rocks that led all the way out of the stream.

Slow and steady. Slow and steady.

As she got closer, she pushed against the water with everything she had left to slow herself as much as she could; her hands made contact with the edges of the stone, grabbed hold – her left hand kept slipping off, leaving her flailing wildly, trying to find something to catch onto.

She tried again, felt a ledge, small but it was something, and grabbed at it with her fingers.

Now both of her hands were holding tight; carefully, inch by inch, she lowered her legs, then curled them around the edges of the rock as tightly as she could.

Gasping, retching, she clung on, waves of nausea racking her body now that she’d come to a standstill within the dizzying motions of the currents.

Once she’d caught her breath, she began to slowly pull herself around the rock, clinging on with all four limbs and shifting along its slippery edge.

She could not afford to let go; could not afford to fall back into the water.

She had no strength left to fight the currents again.

As she approached the other side of the rock, her feet jarred suddenly against something; and again. A solid surface. There was ground underneath her feet; the stream became abruptly shallower here, on the other side of the rock, just as she’d hoped it would. She could stand; she could walk.

Naya pushed her legs forward, stumbled out of the water, then collapsed onto the stony ground at the edge of the stream.

I’ve made it.

By some miracle, Naya wasn’t dead. But her whole body hurt – everything, from head to toe, now starting to register the knocks, bumps and hits she’d taken.

By the state of her breathing, the numbness that was creeping across her body, the way she needed to fight against a desperate urge to close her eyes, and the throbbing, stinging pain that was starting to ramp up on her mid-thigh – she knew she was not in a good way.

First things first, she needed to get out of her wet clothes.

Despite the muggy warmth of the afternoon, she was soaking and cold; she’d take an age to warm up if she left these things on.

She felt for her waterproof – waterproof, what a joke, the thing is sodden – jacket, its arms still miraculously wrapped around her waist in a firm knot, untied it and lifted up her hips to wriggle it out from beneath her.

The motion took a surprising amount of energy; after she’d pulled it free, she lay back down on her back, gasping for breath, gathering her strength.

The pain in her leg was screaming at her now that the shock was starting to wear off; she was afraid to look at it.

One step at a time.

Hauling the top half of her body up to sitting, she began to peel off her T-shirt; the fabric clung to her arms, resisting her every move.

Once she’d managed to take it off and lain back down again to catch her breath, her hands reached instinct-ively towards her belly; she clasped her shaking fingers together and laid them over her stomach for a moment. She breathed.

Unzipping her shorts next, she shuffled them a little way down her hips, but the pain and thought of the nasty gash in her thigh stopped her from taking them all the way down.

One step at a time.

Forcing herself to sit up again, her whole body now shaking violently, she rubbed her arms briskly, then set about wringing as much water from her clothes as she could.

The waterproof outside of her jacket had dried off now; she turned it inside out and put it on, dry side against her body.

Glancing down at her right leg, she could see blood seeping through her shorts and into the ground beneath her.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. She needed to pack the wound to stop the bleeding, but wrapping a compress on top of sopping wet shorts would stop her warming up, and mean she couldn’t examine the wound, or clean it. As much as it would hurt, she needed to get her legs free and take a closer look.

Steeling herself with a deep breath, she yanked the shorts down her left leg first, then, an inch at a time, started to pull the right side down, the pain intensifying as she got closer to her wound.

She realized with a sickening lurch that as the tightness of her wet shorts was pushed down closer to the injury, it was forcing out more blood – she could see the spurts trickling down her thigh, her calf; pooling at her ankle, into her shoe.

She needed to wrap it tight – and fast.

Pushing through the searing pain and the increasing flow of blood, Naya wrung as much of the water from her T-shirt as she could, then pulled her shorts the rest of the way off her leg, rolled up her top and tied it around her thigh as a tourniquet.

Immediately it became soaked red with blood – it was far from ideal, but it was all she had for now.

She held the makeshift bandage around her thigh as tightly as she could, waiting for the bleeding to stop, or at least slow down, which it did after a few moments.

But how much blood have I lost?

And how far away from the others have I travelled?

She had lost all concept of time, of distance, when she was in the water.

For all she knew, she could have been hauled downstream for hundreds of metres.

Peering through the trees and foliage that led back into the jungle’s dark undergrowth, she saw nothing she recognized.

And she certainly couldn’t see, or hear, anyone else.