Joe Peters Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the pictures that kept going round and round in my head, having no idea what it was all going to mean to me. It didn’t occur to me for a moment that my dad might actually die; I didn’t know what death was at that age. I was worried for him and horrified to have heard him screaming so terribly, but I assumed the doctors would make him better and he would be back to look after me soon with nothing more than a few scars to remind us of that terrible day – just as they had made Thomas and me better when we had been burned.
    Marie tried to talk to me and prepare me for what might happen. ‘Sometimes, when people are very badly hurt,’ she said, ‘they die and they go to Heaven to be with God. It’s a beautiful place, and they can look down oneveryone they love and watch out for them from up there.’
    I listened, but as if she was telling me a fairy story. I didn’t for one moment think that she was saying this might happen to my dad. I was just waiting until I could see him again, convinced that he would make everything all right once the doctors had fixed his burns.
    I wasn’t allowed to go in to visit him until three days later. I don’t know if the hospital had been permitting visitors before that, but Marie must have known Mum would be there and perhaps she didn’t want to take me in and risk her snatching me away. Or maybe she had thought it would be too traumatic for me to see Dad in that state but I just nagged until she gave in. She must have been as shocked by the accident as I was, even though she was a grown-up. All her instincts must have been to run to be by the bedside of the man she loved, but I suppose she was nervous about Mum starting a fight on the ward. By the time she did take me in to see him they knew that he was going to die and she must have decided I should be given a chance to say goodbye. He was already brain dead but I had no idea about that as I walked in holding tightly to her hand.
    I clung to Marie as we passed through the seemingly endless corridors of the hospital, constantly on the watch for Mum, expecting her to jump out round every corner we turned. When we finally reached the intensive careward it was all quiet, each bed surrounded by equipment that buzzed and blinked as it supported the lives of the patients it was attached to. We stopped beside a bed and I tried to work out what I was looking at. The bandaged figure lying unconscious on the mattress with tubes coming in and out of him didn’t look like my dad. At first I didn’t believe it was him. I thought they’d made a mistake and brought me to the wrong bed.
    ‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked Marie. ‘What have they done with him?’
    ‘This is your dad, Joe,’ Marie said gently and I could see there were tears glinting in her eyes.
    It must have been just as upsetting for her to see him like that as it was for me but she had to stay brave and not break down in front of me. A nurse was standing by the head of the bed checking something on a monitor, and she gave me a sympathetic look.
    I turned again to the bandaged figure on the bed. Parts of him were covered in clear bags of fluid, which seemed to me at the time to be dripping and seeping with blood and raw flesh but it was probably just that I could see through them to the terrible burns underneath. The machines made a heavy sighing sound, and Dad’s chest was moving up and down but his face was so heavily bandaged that I couldn’t see his eyes or his mouth.
    ‘Dad?’ I said tentatively, but the word came out funny, as if it was catching in my throat.
    ‘He can’t talk,’ Marie explained, stroking my hair.
    I started to back away from the bed, overcome with horror at the sight before my eyes. Marie must have realized that she had made a mistake in giving in to my nagging and bringing me to the hospital, but it was too late by then. Suddenly Mum appeared on the other side of the bed, making me jump and shiver with fright, certain she was going to launch