Page 31 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

I lost myself for a while.

There were voices and lights and questions, all of which swirled in a background that moved and had changed every time I forced my eyes open.

My lids wouldn’t stay apart though, and I’d find myself drifting away from the noise into a comfortable sea of blackness, where I bobbed about dreamlessly for a while, only to come back and repeat the performance.

Eventually I found my eyes staying open for longer and longer and at last I could focus on my surroundings.

On the wall in front of me was a huge clock, the minute hand jerking every so often to a new position, although at present, time meant nothing and it all seemed very random.

When I moved my head, the pillow underneath it crackled.

Another half-turn and I could see a drip stand with lines running down to disappear under the edge of a sheet, and Flynn.

He was crumpled into a small chair, glasses askew, asleep.

‘Flynn?’ My mouth was so very dry that the words came out cracked, but he jerked awake, sliding upright in the chair and righting his glasses as though it was a subconscious motion.

‘Fee? You’re awake.’

‘Apparently,’ I chipped out. ‘Water. Please.’

Flynn fetched a glass from a side table. There was a straw in it. I didn’t like the look of that straw. It had all the appearance of incapability about it. What was wrong with an ordinary glass? ‘Here. Have a little, go carefully.’

That first taste of water was fabulous, even though it was flavoured with antiseptic and at a temperature that suggested it had been drunk once already.

‘Hate to say this,’ I said, when he’d returned the glass to its shelf.

‘But where am I? And what happened?’ The words came out in little puffs.

I was still as breathless as if I’d run a mile.

My eyes had got used to the white walls and the drip stand now, and I could look properly at Flynn. He had a narrow line of stitches along one cheek, stark against his skin, which was very pale.

‘What the hell happened?’ I repeated, shock getting hold of me again. ‘Is everyone all right?’

I grabbed at the tattered remnants of memory: loud noise and things flying about, blood and pain and a strange numbness, Margot and Wren…

Flynn took a deep breath. ‘Everyone is recovering,’ he said.

‘More or less. It was a bomb, Fee. Those guys who came in that night with the bag, they left an explosive device. An amateur, home-built one the investigators think, not much more than a timer, a detonator and lots of messy black powder. But effective, obviously.’

‘Why? Why would anyone do that?’ I looked thirstily at the glass of water again and Flynn refilled it. ‘And that night? How long have I been here?’

‘A week.’

‘A week!’ I jerked my head up off the pillow and something somewhere went beep. A quick mental audit told me that my back hurt, my legs were tingling as though I had ants running under my skin, and the upper left quadrant of my body didn’t seem to be there.

Flynn held the glass carefully up to my face again. ‘I think – the police think it was something to do with Dad,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t see what I’d done to upset anyone, but Dad can be a bit abrasive sometimes and they thought some business rival might have wanted to make a point.’

I shook my head, which took some coordinating. ‘Have you got the film from the cameras?’

‘I’ve sent a copy to the police. They’re hunting those two men down. That explosion was the biggest thing they’ve had to deal with in months, so they’re being quite enthusiastic about it.’

There was a moment’s silence. In the background, I could hear voices outside in the corridor, someone laughing distantly.

Cars passed outside a window I couldn’t see out of, set high in the wall as though this were some kind of prison.

‘So, how bad is it?’ I asked eventually, when Flynn obviously wasn’t going to say anything else.

He swallowed and I saw his eyes travel over my face, flick to my left shoulder, then come back again to their resting position, staring at his hand on the edge of my bedsheet. ‘The doctors need to…’

‘Flynn. I want you to tell me.’

‘All right.’ He gave me a small smile. ‘Not as bad as it could have been, and not as bad as they first thought, actually.’

‘I’m alive, that’s pretty good going from where I’m standing. Lying, I mean.’ My heart was solid in my chest. ‘Look, just tell me.’

‘Fee, you understand that nothing is definite? They’ve got great treatments now and we can afford the best…’

‘Flynn.’

‘Right. You’ve lost the use of your left arm and hand, and your face – well, you aren’t going to be able to disappear in a crowd, put it that way.

But,’ he added hastily, as I struggled to lift the left hand that felt as though it wasn’t there, ‘plastic surgery is brilliant these days and your arm might well recover, they aren’t sure about the extent of the nerve damage.

You’ve also got three broken ribs, a shattered cheekbone and your eyebrow-shaping bill isn’t going to be troubling you again for quite a while. ’

I blinked. My legs tingled. ‘Can I walk?’

Flynn had obviously decided not to prevaricate any longer. ‘You will be able to. There was spinal cord trauma, and the doctors were a bit dubious, but they think you should get full use of your legs back eventually. You might have a bit of a limp, that’s all.’

I sighed. ‘I knew being a private detective was a pipe dream. Unless I can operate in crowds entirely made up of people who look like Igor – is it that bad?’

‘No. No, not at all.’

‘You’re lying.’

He sighed. ‘Sorry. I’m not very good at it, am I? And I’m going to have you moved to a private rehab unit. You’ll get the best care that money can buy.’

Everything was crumbling. That bright, shiny new future that I had thought I was walking into – well, limping into, now, was falling apart in front of me.

Cautiously, I lifted the hand that would obey me, and it came up, trailing wires, clips and drips, and touched my face rather harder than I’d intended.

‘Ow.’

‘No need to slap yourself. It wasn’t your fault.’ Flynn grinned at me and I realised that at least this part of my life seemed to be steady. ‘Hold on, there’s a mirror here.’

I didn’t recognise myself. My face was swollen and bruised, there were lines of stitches criss-crossing the whole of the left side and half my scalp was bare.

‘You were closest to the blast,’ Flynn said, trying to sound neutral. ‘But nobody looks good, if that’s any consolation.’

You do, I thought. You might have stitches and a cut that makes you look as though you’ve had an amateur nose job, but you still look fabulous. Though that might be because you’re actually here, which I notice is a state that my family don’t seem to have entered.

At that moment, there was a tap on the door and Margot put her head around. ‘Is she…?’

‘She’s awake,’ and the tone of relief in Flynn’s voice told me all I needed to know about that state of tension he’d been living in for the past week.

Margot’s head withdrew and there was a moment of hissed conversation in the corridor. Then it popped back again. ‘Is she up to visitors?’

‘You can ask me directly, Margot,’ I said, managing to get some strength into the words. ‘I’m injured, not mute.’

Another withdrawal, another conversation. After a few moments, the door opened fully and Margot, Wren and Fraser trooped in, looking a little chastised.

‘It’s Monday,’ Wren said. She and Margot were holding hands, I noticed.

‘Can’t miss a Monday meeting,’ Fraser said jovially, glanced over at me and winced. ‘Bugger me. You look like you went through the mincer.’

Margot glared at him, although her glare had lost some of its previous power.

She seemed to have softened around the edges; the power hairstyle had given way to something more casual and she was wearing the yoga outfit that she’d worn the night the club came to rescue me from Dexter.

It made her look younger and happier, or maybe that was Wren’s proximity.

She did, however, have some technicolour bruising across her forehead that made her look like a mobile sunset.

Wren herself looked cheerful and bubbly and less birdlike than she had, despite a swollen lip. ‘So, we thought we’d all come over and see how you were doing,’ she went on, ignoring Fraser, who was bobbing about like a tethered balloon.

‘And Annie says to get well soon. She’s going to pop in when Eddie gets the car out,’ Fraser added.

We all looked at each other. ‘It’s in the garage,’ Flynn said. ‘Why does she make it sound as though they have to go and rope it in like a wild horse?’

We all shrugged. Well, the others shrugged, I managed a one-sided motion that set the machines beeping again. It reminded me of why we were here. ‘Have you got access to the security film?’ I asked Flynn.

‘I can source it via my phone.’

‘Ooh, get you, Mr Mission Impossible!’ Fraser bounced over and sat on the edge of my bed next to Flynn.

‘Ow, you’re sitting on my drip.’

‘Sorry.’ He moved a couple of centimetres. ‘Let’s have a look then. I want to see the big explosion.’

‘Fraser!’

‘Sorry, Margot, but I does. I was practically a hero, and it’s the nearest I’m ever going to get to being a hero.

’ Fraser looked a little crestfallen. ‘But Minnie was right impressed when I told her. I had to have clips put in,’ he added to me.

‘Look,’ and he lifted his hair to show a line of tiny clips that kept his scalp together. ‘It’s like hair extensions, only skin.’

‘Fraser, you are revolting,’ Margot said firmly. ‘But it would be nice to see the film, Flynn. Have you watched it?’

‘Endlessly.’ Flynn was scrolling on his phone. ‘I’ve even shown it to Dad, but we don’t recognise the goons. He’s in the middle of some takeover in the Middle East somewhere, we thought this might be rivals wanting to put him off. Ah, here it is.’