It was his first fall. Stepping on something sharp, he fell forward and bounced on the carpeted floor. Damn it. The man took a quick look at his foot, where two droplets of blood grew like two violent, violet jewels. He went for his handkerchief and removed the droplets of blood and, for a moment, contemplated the wound. A sharp pain was born out of the two violet dots and began to invade the entire foot. Hurriedly, he tied his handkerchief around his foot and tried to raise himself off the floor. The foot pain increased with a sense of a bulging tight feeling and suddenly the man felt two or three twitches flashing like lightning from the wound irradiating up to his mid-calf. He was now having difficulty moving his leg, a metal dry feeling was forming in his throat, followed by a burning thirst, and he spewed out a fucking something.

Under his handkerchief, he examined the wound again. The two purple dots had disappeared into a stream of blood running from the centre of the monstrous swelling of the whole foot. He wanted to call out to his wife, but she was dead, and his voice broke into a hoarse dry shout. The devouring thirst made him long for water. He imagined his wife running towards him with a jug from which he swallowed wholesale only to feel nothing in his throat.

‘Well, this is getting ugly’, he muttered, looking at his foot which was lustre livid and its meat overflowed like the opening up of a monstrous black pudding. Lightning pains succeeded in continuous flashes. The appalling dry throat again increased. When he tried to sit up, an explosive vomiting kept him with his head resting on the dusty carpeted floor.

He wondered how long it would take before they found him. It was early Saturday evening. The rugby had been good, the two bottles of wine even better. He thought it must have been his wine glass. What the hell was he doing without his shoes and socks on? It would be at least twelve hours before they rang.

He crawled to the telephone in the living room but, after twenty feet, he lay exhausted on his chest. In the silence of the room, he could not hear a single sound. The black window panes seemed like an eternal dark wall beyond which a river rushed in endless swirling muddy water. He felt his garden and the outside landscape about to invade his comfortable home, where dead silence reigned.

Forgetting is a release. The warmth of the hospital bed flowed through my body. I had been put in a room on my own.  I had lain three hours in a ditch prostrate with pain, looking up at a hard, clear, blue sky. I had been hit and my body bumped from the saline green verge into the putrefactious pit. The hedgerow was bare except for some berries. It was a crisscross of prickly branches, the thorns clearly visible like spiky railings. Black birds perched ominously on an enormous oak. Pain became numbness and a real deadening cold, slowly numbing my mind into black nothingness.

I suppose they found me. The doctors came. One was a tall, frank Scot with a red face; the other was a studious, rather nervous, young man with beautiful brown coffee coloured skin, probably Thai.

‘How are you feeling, Beatrix?’ the Scot inquired.

The Thai was looking at the digital screens of the machinery wired up to my body and then suddenly took the thermometer from under my armpit, studied it briefly and started scribbling his notes. 

I nodded and said, ‘Okay.’

‘I have to ask you some questions. In fact, the police want to talk to you. I have told them they’ll have to wait. They can wait. Do you remember how you hit your head?’

A silence descended on the room as I thought about his question and the police. But there was still snow on my brain and I could think of nothing.

I answered bluntly, ‘No.’

‘Well, if you remember anything, tell the nurse and we will chat later. It’s probably the concussion.’

‘Concussion?’

‘Yes, you’ve got a nasty blow on the back of your head.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ll leave you to rest now. Just tell the nurse if you need anything.’

‘Thanks, doctor.’

When I was alone with my mother, I remembered and said,

‘He did it.’