To the Edge of Shadows

Chapter One

This is what I was. I was nothing; I was lost in the darkness. For a long time I was only the sharp bloom of agony, the rush of adrenalin, the light tingling of someone else’s movement against my skin. There was silence where I drifted and the quiet became vast in the shadows, it was bigger than me, bigger than everything. I was invisible against it, a fragment of black on black. And time passed. I felt it flowing past me like oil and had no way to measure its depth, its length. Until suddenly there was something more and I didn’t know where this other began or where the silence ended. I recognised its absence, yet did not see it leaving.

Into that moment moved a shadowed hand in vague focus, a staccato beep, a sharp sigh of murmured platitude that shrunk the silence to something softer, more tangible. What I heard and what I saw, they were noise and shape, yet still unknown with their blurred edges. And abruptly it seemed that there were monsters of a kind in the darkness, roaring monsters with gaping mouths at the edges of a vision that seemed new and tenuous. I felt fingers grasp at my wrists and sharp teeth sink into my skin, I felt them pull at me, dragging me with them deeper and deeper into the billowing darkness. I was lost.

There was pain and confusion where I drifted in the emptiness. Words were familiar inside my head; they made sense to me there where no-one could see them but they lost their way in my mouth, drifted against the edges of my teeth and stuck there, sour and worthless. My lips would not open and in my head I was screaming and screaming, willing my teeth apart, my tongue to move, my voice to sound a klaxon into the stagnant uncertainty.

Should I talk to her?

My mouth didn’t move, these were not my words, I could not claim them. They were soft and small and there were tears in them, they swam in the air around my head and I tried to follow them, recognise them but they were chased away by a reply, a deeper voice.

Of course, if you would like to. She may be able to hear you.

And the words in my mouth drifted deeper, higher as I tried to say that I could hear them; that I was in there and they could not see me in the dark.

There was warmth in the palm of my hand, soft and small. It clenched lightly, curving around fingers that felt weak and could not squeeze back. Somebody’s hand in mine, a small fingertip tracing the bones in my wrist. The hand touched only the places where I did not ache, the tiny spaces where there was no pain and in its gentleness there was a kind of loss, an urging to respond, a resignation.

Into that moment the music fell. Quiet at first, shy almost, I felt my ears strain to catch the sounds as they gathered momentum, becoming firmer, less shaky. Baby love, my baby love, I need you oh how I need you. I did not recognise the tune, the words were unfamiliar. It was sung with a sorrow that worked against the tempo and the voice hitched, faltered, started again. The softness in that voice was like texture on my skin, I felt it caress my cheek, touch at the corner of my mouth.

She smiled! the music left instantly as her voice called out with breathless urgency. There were squeaky footsteps, the sound of breathing. I’m sure she did, only a little, but I saw it.

In that instant, light flooded into my eye, chasing agony beneath the hard curve of my skull. I tried to blink against the finger holding my eyelid open but I was frozen until the hand moved away and the darkness brought relief. I faded away into the nothing behind my eyes and I swam there for a time that had no measure.

The next time there was sound something had changed, it was less muted, more real, it could be grasped, held in my mind, examined. I opened my eyes to greet it and across the void I saw neat blonde hair. I looked into blue eyes that held tears and exhaustion. I did not recognise them and the person they belonged to stared back at me for long moments, a frown spreading across her forehead as she looked at me. Her eyes flicked to somewhere beyond my shoulder then back again. The clarity hurt my head and I winced against it as she gestured to someone I could not see and then footsteps approached.

Another woman bent over me, shone light in my aching eyes, watched for a reaction. She must have seen what she wanted to see because she nodded to herself and scattered words over her shoulder like salt at the waiting woman with the worried eyes.

I’ll get the doctor, she said and I heard the other woman’s breath catch.

Can you hear me, Sarah?

I wanted to reply but I was thinking, ‘is that my name? Is she talking to me? Of course she must be, it’s only the two of us here now’. But the name was unfamiliar and I did not recognise the voice that spoke it.

I felt tiredness sweep over me and struggled against it, wanting to hold back that moment of return into the nothing. I fought to be free of it and it was a birth of sorts, a squeezing into life, a labouring. This was the moment I began, the moment of my first cohesive memory. I would feed it over the years until it grew with me, became more adult, more solid. This was the time of my becoming and I floundered helpless and weak as a newborn. But I was not new, I was older, grown, and later I would find out that my life began there, in the month of my fourteenth birthday.

Chapter Two

Where do words come from? Were they born in me, absorbed somehow from a mother I couldn’t recall? Did they wait latent and calm for the starter’s whistle when they would rush into my mouth and announce themselves? And if not, if they were painstakingly learned, patiently taught, then why were they there in my vacant mind, why did I still know them when everything else had gone?

The words filled the silent spaces; they were grasped from the air around me when the nurses thought I slept. I heard them talk about my emptiness, about being broken and all the things I could not do and, in their conversation, I saw that words were all that was left of the person I once was. Apart from the woman who watched me, who seemed to fit there in that space as much as I did, who became as familiar as the ever-closed blinds and the routines of checks, refreshments, lights out.

She had small features, large eyes, an air of sadness. I took in the gentle, youthful femininity of her and there was no-one in her face that I recognised, she belonged only in that room, a patch of bright, floral fabric against clinical white and beige. I did not know her at all and when I told her this, light, whispered words carried on weak breath, the pain of the knowledge rippled across her face.

You will, she said and her hand touched mine as if she sought to assure me of her reality, her presence, I’m your Aunt Leah.

It seemed that she was ever-present. I did not know what the chair beneath her looked like, I had never seen it empty. I had not yet woken from sleep to find her gone. There was comfort in her presence, in her increasing familiarity; the room would not be complete without her. In the vague moments of waking, when I was not quite there, not quite anywhere, she was the anchor that drew my eyes and held me still.

The doctor came in as I drifted, talked to her in hushed tones. There were signs of improvement, of growing stronger. He referred to me as ‘she’ as if he too had forgotten who I was and I wanted to tell him, shout out loud that I am me, I am here. But I didn’t know where here was and even in my own mind I was Sarah, and that was all.

The chair creaked as she sat down and I realised that I didn’t want to open my eyes while it was vacant. I did not want to question the solidity of the things I knew for certain: my name was Sarah, Leah always sat in the chair, the doctors always spoke in whispers.

There was a magazine open in her lap, her eyes skimmed across the surface, never stopping on any one thing long enough to take it in. She turned the page, the sound soft and appealing in the silent room, I felt the gentle breeze of its turning on the back of my hand.

I wanted to talk into her reverie, to ask her questions, but I was afraid then of what she would tell me and what she might keep hidden. I wanted to ask how I came to be there but then I wondered ‘where else is there?’ It seemed that all I had ever known was right there in that moment.

There came a subtle shift in the balance of sleeping and waking. Moments of clarity become less haphazard, stretched into measurable time. I marked them against the ticking clock on the bedside table. No longer fragmented and sporadic, time formed patterns in front of my open eyes. I woke and watched the gentle play of morning light against the edge of the window, I felt sleepy when it grew dark.

The nurse came to change the dressings on my head. Small movements chased dizziness through me, and flooded limbs with weakness. I wanted to stand, to walk, to see if I remembered how but I was fed water from the too-heavy glass by my bed, other people’s hands held it to my lips; it seemed I could not be trusted to get even that right. Leah moved the straw slowly to my mouth, wiped at my chin with a tissue when I pulled away too quickly and all the while I looked over her head at the blinds covering the window and wondered what was beyond them.

Eventually I asked the question.

What happened?

She sighed theatrically. I was the prompt that fed her the beginning of the line she had practiced over and over in her head. She turned her blonde head away from me, breathed deeply before she answered.

There was an accident, a car accident. Your sister and your dad, they didn’t make it. Her voice caught against the simplicity of the words and she began to cry, quietly so as not to intrude on the grief I too should be feeling.

My emotions were strange, twisted things. I did not know how to react, what to say or do. I felt a sense of sadness coil through my chest, hitching at my breath. Somehow it was not complete, not whole. I felt sorrow at the idea of these people, the fact that they were there and gone, my eyes grew wet at the sight of someone else’s tears, someone else’s grief. But the depth of that grief was not my own, and tears were shed for no more than the emptiness, the nothing that they were. I had no memory of them, I cried only over their absence from me, from my thoughts.

What about my mother? I asked. Where is she? and it felt strange to ask because I only knew the word, not the person it belonged to. There was something in Leah’s face, a tightening, a closing. As if she recognised that the moment was not then, that I had heard too much in too short a time. Even before she opened her mouth I knew that there was no answer in it.

You look tired. We’ll talk about this another time, when you are rested.

And of course she was right. The exhaustion was there in the pale sheen of sweat against my top lip, in the trembling in my chest as though I had run for too long. I looked at the room that was my world and felt as if I had always been there. I wondered, if I were to open the door and see beyond it, would the smells out there be different, would the light be the same as here?

I pointed to the dressing on my temple, careful when I moved the hand with the needle in so that there was no pull against tender, bruised skin. The bandage was smaller than it had been when I first became aware, when I first ran my fingertips gingerly over its rough surface, its thick wadding.

What’s wrong with me?

She dried her tears before turning to look at the white beneath my fingers, her eyes were rimmed red and she sniffed twice.

You hit your head, really hard. Your skull was fractured and your brain swelled up. They had to remove a little piece of the bone there. You were in an induced coma for two weeks to give your brain a chance to rest, to recover. It took three more weeks after that for you to wake up. Then when the swelling had gone down they gave you an operation to put a small plate in.

I ran my fingers up my left cheek, feeling the tenderness beneath soft skin. I felt where the edges of the dressing began, to the left of my eye, just above the swollen curve of my cheekbone. There was bruising there, I felt the difference in sensitivity as I explored. I followed the path of the fabric across my temple, behind my ear, stretching upwards almost to the top of my head. Around the edges where the dressing ended there was the soft spiking of newly growing hair. I pressed against it and moved my hand across my crown where the growth was longer, less brutal. I knew that its colour was dark and dull, I saw the longer threads curl across my right shoulder. But I did not know what it looked like; I did not know the colour of my eyes, the shape of my face. I wouldn’t recognise my own reflection.

I want to see it, I said.

Leah drew her bottom lip between her teeth and bit down gently for a long moment.

I’ll bring a mirror in with me when I come back in the morning.

I realised then that she was not always there after all, that she did not sleep in the chair waiting for me to wake up. I realised that I did not want her to go, that I didn’t want to open my eyes and find her absent, I wanted things to stay exactly as they were so that I knew where I was.

What’s the matter?

Her hand reached up and brushed tears from my cheeks before she moved to the edge of the bed and perched awkwardly on the mattress. I felt the tension in her muscles as she ignored her discomfort in order to hold me carefully while I cried.

I don’t want you to leave, I said as I breathed in deeply and found her scent soft and unfamiliar. She held on as tightly as she could as if she, too, were afraid to go. I winced against her and it was a full stop falling into the moment.

I’ll stay until you’re fast asleep, I promise.

I wanted to protest but I knew that it would not be long before she was given that freedom. Everything, however small, exhausted me. And crying took its toll all too quickly. I drifted and did not hear the door close as she left.

Chapter Three

The doctors and nurses all walked like it was the easiest thing in the world, a dance almost, as they placed one leg in front of the other, adjusting their weight easily. Aunt Leah moved with a kind of grace that the others didn’t quite have, she swayed gently, her full skirt skimming around her knees, the kind of walk that people must surely envy.

How did I walk? With stumbling lack of grace, with hands that blistered against the frame I leant on, with pain in every part of my body. Leah walked alongside me, pushing my intravenous drip stand so I didn’t drag it with me like a reluctant dog. A large, round nurse with a voice softer than it should be encouraged me forwards, and I felt the trembling begin in earnest, the weakness take over, the collapsing.

There were arms behind me that did not let me fall, arms that held me as the wheelchair slid beneath my bottom. Those arms, which belonged to a healthcare assistant, pushed the chair, with me in it, back to the side of the bed. I knew that when my heart rate was normal, when I was breathing more calmly and slowly, when the sweat on my forehead had dried, they would encourage me to get into bed by myself. They would go over the techniques they had already shown me, ways in which I could compensate for my weakened muscles.

They waited for me to grow still and calm but inside I was raging at myself, for being useless and pathetic, for being stuck there and yearning desperately to be elsewhere, anywhere. The anger grew, blossomed inside me. It tingled in my sore hands, my aching arms and felt powerful and alive. Without thinking I reached for the mirror that Leah had brought with her, the mirror that showed me wide brown eyes in a pale face that perhaps once was pretty but had grown too thin, framed by bandages and spiked hair. I threw it as far as I could, which was only feet away but felt like it should have been further. In my head I saw it smash against the far wall, but instead it limply fell down on the tiled floor and shattered in its wooden frame.

There was a pause, long and deep as the sound of breaking faded away. The three of them stopped like statues when the music fades. No-one knew what to say into that moment, it was a pause, a nothing. I held my breath. And then as if a switch was flicked they began to move as one. The healthcare assistant, whose name badge said Becky, moved to the destroyed mirror and began collecting the larger pieces, the nurse left the room and returned with a broom. Leah came close to where I was sitting and sat on the edge of the bed, reaching for my hand.

Nobody spoke, not then. Leah’s hand was warm in my own and anger dissipated into her palm leaving a feeling of embarrassment and shame. Becky left, came back with a wet cloth and wiped it across the floor, gathering any tiny shards that the nurse’s broom had missed. The two of them left the room together and I watched as the damp smear caught the light and shrunk on itself, becoming dry and dull before disappearing altogether. The room was as it had always been, nothing had changed.

Do you want to talk about it? Leah asked into the stillness.

I looked down at our hands, her nails were polished a pretty shell pink and she wore a ring shaped like a flower. My hand was covered in the yellow-green tinge of an old bruise and the pinky roughness of sticking plaster that held the needle still beneath my skin.

I feel weak and stupid. I’m sick of these walls, sick of this room. I just want to get better and go home. And then I paused, hitched in a shaky breath because I did not know what home was anymore, where it was, who would be there. Beneath the urge to get well, to be strong, there was fear to keep my frustration company and perversely I realised that there was safety here, in these boring walls. Beyond them there was an unknown world that I would have to find my way through.

It won’t be long now, I’m sure. Your drip is coming out today and your wounds are healing nicely. As soon as we can get you a bit more mobile you will be able to come home.

Wherever that is. I tasted my own bitterness and spat it out with greater force than intended.

Leah blinked her eyes against it but nothing more. Your home is with me, Sarah. It always will be. We still have each other.

Her sentences were clipped, her voice low and she was close to tears, so little time had passed since she lost her brother and the grief never seemed far from her thoughts. It was not just for my sake that she was there with me.

Where’s home?

In a little terraced house in Exeter. It has two bedrooms so you will have your own room.

I nodded a little but her words did not paint a picture for me, I was no less blind. I don’t know Exeter, I said and it was meaningless, unnecessary because we both knew that I didn’t know anywhere, that everything was forgotten.

You grew up in Exeter, you were born at the old maternity hospital there. You lived in the city until you were almost ten but then your parents separated and you went to live near Glastonbury with your dad and sister. Maybe coming back to Exeter will help nudge your memories a bit, help to bring them back.

I wondered if it were possible, if the familiarity of a place I used to know would fill in the blank spaces of my mind, give me a past, something to mourn. There were things that I could still do: I could talk, I could move, albeit slowly, I could think and write. But I was void and empty of the many images that surely existed inside me before. I looked again at our joined hands and tried to absorb my childhood from the only person I knew who had known me then.

What was I like?

She smiled and lightly touched my face. You were smart, funny sometimes, often serious. You were enormously protective over your little sister and acted more like a mother to her at times. You took your role as the eldest child very seriously and you were incredibly close to your dad. He adored both of you girls so much and sometimes, in the school holidays, he brought you to stay with me and we would do fun girl stuff like shopping and going to the park or the swimming pool.

I wish I could remember, I said and she smiled again softly, consolingly, before leaning over and pressing her soft lips to my hollow cheek.

You will, she whispered against the shell curve of my ear. We just need to give it a little while longer.

And in that moment I believed her, I thought it could only be a matter of time until I was whole again. But she was wrong. Mine was a dandelion clock memory and the wind blew too strongly and scattered it.

Chapter Four

When I walked out of the hospital next to Leah it was no longer on the shaking legs of a newborn foal. My back was straight, my stride small, careful. I felt the tension of determination lock into the sinew and muscle, holding me more upright than I should have been under the circumstances. Leah pushed the wheelchair ahead of her; it held my suitcase and nothing more. It did not hold me, I held me and there was a strength in that, a sense of relief.

Tucked somewhere amongst the folds of the few clothes I was taking with me was the sheet of exercises that the physiotherapist had told me I must continue with. And I knew I would even though I hated them with a passion. It was the exercises, painful and arduous as they were, that gave me back my legs, my ability to walk properly.

The tall, gruff physiotherapist had guided me gently through the steps, never changing his tone, even when I cried or shouted at him, which was often. He rewarded my ill temper with the freedom to return to the home that had never been mine. I said thank you to him before I left, he smiled and told me I was welcome. As I walked towards the huge doors and smelled the morning in the air I realised that I was not effusive enough in my thanks and that it was too late to change that.

The ambulance that would take us home waited for us near the doors, the driver smiling our way as we emerged into the cool morning and I thought, ‘is it nicer for him that he gets to drive someone who is well, who is getting better? Do the journeys bring more joy when they happen this way around?’ And then I wondered if this was the same man who brought me here three months ago, if he recognised in me the wreckage of the child I was then.

Leah helped me tackle the too-large steps into the back and once there I laid down quickly. The lengths of the corridors were mapped out in trembling muscles and deep aches, I felt every step shudder through my body. She covered me with a blanket and I was grateful for it. During the last few weeks of my hospital stay, I spent more time in the gardens, watching as the flowers began to bloom and spring began to head towards summer. I was less pale because of it, health had returned to a face once hollow and shadowed. But I still felt the chill of outside too easily, the over-warm hospital preventing me from acclimatising quickly enough.

The drip had been gone from my hand long enough for the skin to show no sign of it being there other than a tiny mark, easily overlooked. The dressings had been removed from my head. I cried when I saw beneath them for the first time, the scar that I would always carry, this permanent reminder, a deep ‘v’ leading from in front of my temple, behind my ear and then up towards the top of my head. One line from the accident, one from the operation that saved my life; they met in the middle, pathways on a map that lead me somewhere new, somewhere alien.

The doctor said that in time the scar would fade, become paler, smaller; the opposite of my own transition back to health. Eventually my hair would grow to cover it, I would have a strange parting and the line that travelled from my eye to my ear, would be hidden by sunglasses on hot days, or by a strategically grown fringe. I reached up and pulled at an awkward tuft of hair, willing it to grow.

How long will it take to get there? I asked and Leah looked thoughtful for a moment.

Well it normally takes around an hour and a half from Bristol to Exeter, but that’s in a car rather than an ambulance, so maybe a little longer. I looked around me at the metal walls, the boxes holding medical equipment, the seatbelts, and there was something there that found its way into my lungs, I breathed it in and suddenly I was gasping for breath, I was drowning. I reached for the blanket and threw it to the floor as if the weight was crushing me, my heart hammered, bursting in my chest. My terrified screams echoed in my own ears and all other sound evaporated. I felt hands grab at me, saw mouths moving soundlessly in front of wide-open eyes. I fell headlong into darkness and there was no-one there to catch me.

When I woke up I was lying on a soft, squashy sofa in a front room with small windows and rose-patterned curtains. The metal walls were gone and they had taken with them my rapidly beating heart and the terror in my lungs. Leah sat on the floor next to me with eyes full of sorrow.

They sedated you, she said and there was guilt in her voice as though it were her fault. You slept for the entire journey. They are gone now. I’m so sorry, Sarah. It never occurred to me that you would react like that to being in a vehicle. I should have thought and I didn’t.

It wasn’t your fault, I replied and she nodded in response. I could see the disbelief in her eyes but she let it go and I watched it bounce away from her.

When you’re feeling up to it, I’ll show you around. There’s not much to see though, the house is tiny.

Okay, I said quietly and wondered how long it would take to find the patterns here, would the scents become familiar, or would day and night look the same as in the hospital?

As soon as you are well enough, we’ll go shopping to get some clothes for you. You can decorate your room how you like, obviously I’ll help you with that.

She talked in sharp disjointed sentences, her voice over-loud in the small room. She looked bleak, nervous and I asked her what was wrong.

I’m scared that I will let your father down. Tom and me, we were so close, and I want to get things right, to do the best I can for you. That’s all. In the light from the window, Leah’s skin was painted with youth. I reached out my hand to her and tried to smile, the kind of smile that was at once sympathetic and consoling, the smile I had seen often on her face as she watched over me.

How old are you? I asked and she smiled a little, as if the question were out of place in this moment.

I’m twenty-eight. Tom was ten years older than me.

There was discomfort in the slope of her shoulders. They seemed too small to hold the burden of me, the weight that I was. I wanted to tell her that it would be okay, that we would walk these days together but I could not bring myself to tell her something that could have been a lie. I didn’t know