The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [592]
Article in Yachting Monthly, July 1988
I was watching her, right up to the moment she was shot. She looked confused and tired as she walked back from the penalty, and the crowd roared when I shouted to get her attention, so she didn’t hear me. It was then that I saw a man vault across the barrier and run up to her. I thought it was a nutty fan or something, and the shot sounded more like a firecracker. There was a puff of blue smoke, and she looked incredulous for a moment, and then she just crumpled up and collapsed on the turf. As simple as that. Before I knew what I was doing, I had handed Friday to Joffy and jumped over the barrier, moving as fast as I could. I was the first one to reach Thursday, who was lying perfectly still on the muddy ground, her eyes open, a neat red hole two inches above her right eye.
Someone yelled, “Medic!” It was me.
I switched to automatic. For the moment the idea that someone had shot my wife was expunged from my mind; I was simply dealing with a casualty—and heaven knows I’d done that often enough. I pulled out my handkerchief and pressed it on the wound.
I said, “Thursday, can you hear me?”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were unblinking as the rain struck her, and I placed my hand above her head to shield her. A medic appeared at my side, sloshing down into the muddy ground in his haste to help.
He said, “What’s happened?”
I said, “He shot her.”
I reached gingerly around the back of her head and breathed a small sigh of relief when I couldn’t find an exit wound.
A second medic—a woman this time—joined the first and told me to step aside. But I moved only far enough for her to work. I took hold of Thursday’s hand.
The first medic said, “We’ve got a pulse,” as he unwrapped an airway, then added, “Where’s the blasted ambulance?”
I stayed with her all the way to the hospital and let go of her hand only when they took her into the operating theater.
A friendly casualty nurse at St. Septyk’s said, “Here you go,” as she gave me a blanket. I sat on a hard chair and stared at the wall clock and the public-information posters. I thought about Thursday, trying to figure out how much time we had spent together. Not long for two and a half years, really.
A boy next to me with his head stuck in a saucepan said, “Wot you in here for, mister?”
I leaned closer and spoke into the hollow handle so he could hear me and said, “I’m okay, but someone shot my wife.”
The little boy with his head stuck in a saucepan said, “Bummer,” and I replied, “Yes, bummer.”
I sat and looked at the posters again for a long time until someone said, “Landen?”
I looked up. It was Mrs. Next. She had been crying. I think I had, too.
She said, “How is she?”
And I said, “I don’t know.”
She sat down next to me. “I brought you some Battenberg.”
I said, “I’m not really that hungry.”
“I know. But I just don’t know what else to do.”
We both stared at the clock and the posters in silence for some minutes. After a while I said, “Where’s Friday?”
Mrs. Next patted my arm. “With Joffy and Miles.”
“Ah,” I said, “good.”
Thursday came out of surgery three hours later. The doctor, who had a haggard look but stared me in the eye, which I liked, told me that things weren’t terrific but she was stable and a fighter and I wasn’t to give up hope. I went to have a look at her with Mrs. Next. There was a large bandage around her head, and the monitors did that beep thing they do in movies. Mrs. Next sniffed and said, “I’ve lost one son already. I don’t want to lose another. Well, a daughter I mean, but you know what I mean, a child.”
I said, “I know what you mean.”
I didn’t, having never lost a son, but it seemed the right thing to say.
We sat with her for two hours while the light failed outside and the fluorescents