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RACHEL
It was John who had cried out in pain. I found him on the corner of the street, fallen, his head smashed
open against the side of the kerb, his face damaged too, his ear pulpy. The amount of blood on his face
and beneath him was sickening. It was matted in his hair, sticky and dark on the pavement, and it
soaked into my knees and covered my hands as I knelt beside him.
He was unconscious; eyes glassy. I peeled off my jumper and pressed it against his head, trying to
stem the blood flow. I screamed over and over again for help.
When the paramedics came they moved quickly and worked with a quiet urgency that frightened
me. There was no joking, and no smiling. Uniformed police officers arrived too. They lent me a
phone to ring Katrina, and I told her and then handed the phone to one of the paramedics who
instructed her to meet them at A & E at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
When they were finally ready to move John, they rolled him carefully onto a stretcher and eased it
into the ambulance, one of them seated in the back beside John’s inert form. It was shocking, that, the
absence of him. That, and the amount of blood.
‘Will be he all right?’ I asked.
‘Head injuries are very serious,’ they told me. ‘Unpredictable. You did well to call us so quickly.’
There were no reassurances.
Part of me didn’t want to let him go on his own, but the police knew Katrina was meeting him at the
hospital and they wanted to take a statement from me. As the ambulance disappeared into the night
underneath its pulsing halo of blue light, I walked back down the street. A uniformed officer
accompanied me. Two police cars were still parked at drunken angles, blocking off the scene.
In the house, they took my statement. More officers arrived and took photographs, and then they put
the brick in a plastic bag and took it away. They helped me clear up the glass while somebody they’d
organised boarded up my window. They said they’d station somebody outside the house for the rest of
the night.
One thing the police all agreed on, and they even had a laugh about it, was that it was ironic that
nobody from the press had been there to witness the incident. The three journalists and one
photographer who’d had the stamina to stake out the house overnight had wandered down the road to
get food.
They’d reappeared, kebabs in hand, shreds of iceberg lettuce falling from them, as the ambulance
doors had been slammed shut and John had been driven away.
It was the only thing to be grateful for.
I slept in the front bedroom that night, in my own bed, wanting to know that the police car they’d
stationed there for the night was just outside, wanting the security of that. In case I had to shout out.
Bang on the window. In case I heard somebody creep into my house, wanting to do me harm.
I took Ben’s duvet and pillow from his bed and brought them with me. I stripped away my own
bedding, piling it on the floor, and arranged Ben’s stuff carefully on my bed, with his nunny, and his
Baggy Bear.
I listened all night for the sound of footfall again, and I lay rigid when voices loomed out of the
darkness. They were the usual Saturday night revellers returning home, but their shouts and their
drunken laughter sounded hostile to me now. Every noise I heard that night was laced with menace.