Brodmaw Bay Read Online Free PDF Page A

around slowly. The nurse gave him a drink of water and then left them to their privacy, promising to return in a little while with soup. James looked at her objectively, noticing her in physical detail beyond the uniform and her busy efficiency, for the first time, as she glanced at him before leaving. She was slight and blonde and pretty, drawn and a bit pale with tiredness, blue-eyed, her hair restrained by clips. Of course she was tired, he thought, as she smiled briefly at him and left. She was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three and she was manning a front-line resource.
    James sat and held his son’s hands in both of his on the blanket of the bed. ‘Do you remember what happened, Jack?’
    ‘Dad? Where am I?’
    ‘You’re in a hospital bed.’
    ‘Where’s Mum?’
    ‘She’s at home, with Olivia.’
    Jack nodded. ‘I remember all of it. Well, I remember it all up to the point where they beat me unconscious. I must have a hard head, Dad. It took a lot of blows.’
    ‘The doctor says you’re going to be okay, son. You’ll make a full recovery, he’s confident of that.’
    ‘I tried to fight back. But there were three of them and one of them had a tyre iron. It isn’t like in a film, where they queue up and Jet Lee or Jason Statham or somebody takes them on one at a time. In real life, they all come at you at once.’
    ‘Did no one on the bus try to help?’
    Jack smiled. ‘Get real. This was Peckham High Street, Dad. Peckham’s a place where heroes are thin on the ground.’
    Jack nodded, which was pointless because his son’s eyes were bandaged and therefore blind. He felt relief and shame, both emotions very strong in him and struggling for ascendancy. He thought that shame was winning. He should have been a better father than to put his son at risk. He would never do anything so irresponsible again. He would protect his children as a father should who was deserving of the name. He would get his family out of the war zone London had become. He was resolved.
    ‘I’d like to see Mum.’
    ‘You won’t be seeing anything for a while, Jack.’
    ‘You know what I mean.’
    ‘I’ll call her.’
    Lillian brought Olivia with her. She had established over the phone that Jack was a fit sight for his sister to see.
    ‘There’s no blood, just bandages,’ James said. ‘She’ll be relieved, I think. He isn’t slurring his words or anything, Lily. The trauma seems to be entirely physical.’
    ‘Time will tell where that’s concerned,’ Lillian said. ‘But it sounds as though it’s better to bring her than not.’
    They burst into the room less than an hour after the summoning call, a beautiful woman and her equally beautiful daughter, both possessed of a careless glamour their ordeal of concern over Jack had done nothing to diminish. They looked stylish and prosperous and a little fraught. And then they looked dismayed at the quantity of gauze wrapping the head and concealing the features of the prone figure on the bed.
    Jack sensed the presence of his mother immediately and managed to sit up as James got out of the way and she sat and hugged him hard, holding his damaged head against her chest, the tears leaving her eyes so forcefully with sorrow that they dribbled down her cheeks. Olivia had started crying too. She turned to her father for comfort and he put his arms around her and her face, hot and damp now, not composed and beautiful, sought refuge and consolation against his chest.
    There was a clock on the wall of the hospital room. It was an old-fashioned item with a ridged case fashioned from black Bakelite. It was an electric clock, not battery-powered, the movement fed by a current that sent the second hand coursing smoothly in its circular progress rather than jerking around the face by the second.
    James Greer looked at the clock, quietly recording time, as it must have for decades. And he thought about how unbearable that moment and the moments to follow it would have been had his son