Chapter Two: The Hospital Road

I did not want to go to hospital, which won’t shock anybody who’s met me for more than ten minutes.

Most blokes I know would rather bleed into a tea towel in their own kitchen than sit under fluorescent lights while a stranger asks when they last had a tetanus shot. I was no different. Add in the fact I’d just been knocked into a brick wall, cut in a ditch, and had Renee Mercer whisper the sort of sentence that can split your life straight down the middle, and yeah, I was not especially willing to queue up under a bright sign that said EMERGENCY and let the night get any more official than it already had.

Mum took one look at my sleeve and ended the argument before I opened my mouth.

That’s one of her tricks. She can be soft enough to make you feel bad for swearing in front of her, then turn around and look at you in a way that says if you push this one inch further, I will finish the discussion for both of us and you won’t enjoy my method.

Mia backed her up.

Jonah took my keys off me, which was worse.

So ten minutes later I was in the passenger seat of Jonah’s ute with a tea towel wrapped around my arm and blood drying into my shirt while Mum followed behind in Mia’s car. The memorial hall got smaller in the mirrors. Floodlights. Ambulance doors open. Half the town standing around in black clothes talking too much because that’s what people do when they’re frightened and don’t know where to put their hands. Nobody wants to be the quietest person near it.

I kept looking back.

Don’t know what I thought I’d see. The bloke in the mask standing by the oval fence, maybe. Talia Voss with a cigarette on and that bored, ugly little half-smile still on her face. Nathan yelling at the ambos like louder words might make them do their jobs harder.

Nothing there.

Just the hall, then the road, then dark paddocks and fence lines and gum trees catching the high beams for half a second before dropping away again.

Jonah drove with both hands on the wheel and his jaw tight enough to crack nuts. That was how I knew he was rattled. Normally he drove like the ute belonged to him in some ancient legal sense and the road would sort itself out around that fact. One wrist over the wheel. Shoulders loose. Looking like a man on his way to fix a mower, not star in a police statement. Tonight he was sitting forward a bit, paying too much attention to everything. Mailboxes. corners. dead grass. one dead roo on the shoulder near the turnoff, silver in the headlights and stiff as driftwood.

I pressed the tea towel harder onto my arm.

Bad move.

Pain went up into my shoulder sharp and hot enough to make my stomach turn over.

“Keep pressure on it,” Jonah said.

“Thanks.”

“You look pale.”

“I’m bleeding.”

“You’re also pale.”

I looked across at him. “Very comforting.”

He didn’t smile.

That bothered me more than it should have.

The district hospital sat fifteen minutes out and looked exactly how those places always look after dark. Too bright. Too clean in the wrong ways. Like if something truly serious happened there, the building itself would look embarrassed for not being built larger. He pulled up under the emergency sign and killed the engine. Before I got my door open, he said, “You dizzy?”

“No.”

He looked at me.

I looked back.

“Bit,” I said.

“Right.”

He was around my side before I had both feet on the ground. That annoyed me, which is how I usually know somebody’s being useful.

“I can walk.”

“Good for you.”

Mum and Mia came in behind us. Mum was out of the car before the engine had stopped properly. Mia came around the bonnet looking like she already hated the next hour and was prepared to hate the one after that as well.

Mum took one look at the towel on my arm and put her hand against my face.

“Oh, Luke.”

“I’m alright.”

“No, you are not.”

“I’m upright.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

Fair enough.

Inside smelled like disinfectant, burnt coffee, floor polish, and the particular stale cold hospitals get after midnight when the doors keep opening onto the dark. A woman at the desk looked up, saw the blood, sighed in a way that suggested I wasn’t even close to the oddest thing she’d seen on shift, and waved us through.

“Name?”

“Luke Barlow.”

“What happened?”

“Got cut.”

She looked over the top of her glasses.

“At a wake,” I added.

That got a pause.

Then she wrote it down and moved on, which I respected. Some people hear a sentence like that and start pecking around for a story. Others hear it and think, yes, that sounds like the kind of rubbish people bring me after midnight, and keep their pen moving. She was the second kind.

They put me in a curtained-off treatment bay with a bed too narrow for comfort and one plastic chair for relatives to sit in and look worried. Mum took the chair. Mia stayed on her feet. Jonah leaned against the wall near the door with his hands in his pockets like he didn’t trust them out where people could watch what they wanted to do.

A nurse came in with a tray, looked at the sleeve, and cut it open without wasting any energy on soothing noises.

Not young. Not old. Hair pinned back hard enough to mean business. Face already set for whatever stupidity had crawled in under its own steam and started dripping on the lino.

“Deep enough to be annoying,” she said.

“Brilliant.”

“You hit your head?”

“Bit.”

“Vomited?”

“No.”

“Blurred vision?”

“Only when people around here start talking.”

She looked at me.

I shut up.

Then she flushed the cut and I had bigger things to think about anyway.

It hurt exactly how you’d expect. Hot, direct, and pointless. No grand revelation in it. No mystical clarity. Just pain. I got hold of the side of the bed with my good hand and looked at the curtain rail while she cleaned dirt and blood out of it. Mia noticed straight away, of course.