Less Than Perfect (11 page)

‘Caitlin! Caitlin!' Derek's hand is urgently shaking my shoulder.

I'm too shocked to speak.

‘Caitlin?
Fuck!
Answer me!'

I roll over slowly and lift myself up on my elbows. He looms over me, his helmet still on. His trousers are shredded at the knees. I can see blood.

‘You're bleeding,' I say faintly.

He shrugs and holds out an impatient hand. ‘Come on. Get up. We need to get out of here.'

I allow him to pull me up. But it's too soon; I can't keep my balance.

He steadies me, looks me coldly in the eye. ‘I need you to hold it together. We need to get out of here. Quickly.'

I look back at him, dazed. What's the rush? What exactly does he mean about holding it together? I think I'm remarkably calm, considering.

‘Are you okay over there?'

We both turn towards the voice. It's a girl, the spokesperson of a bigger group, four or five in total.

‘Yeah, we're fine,' Derek answers tersely.

‘Need help?'

‘Could do with a hand lifting the bike.'

He limps towards the bike, two male helpers following him. I'm left with the girls, three of them. They're young, late teens or early twenties, their faces soft and plump.

‘We saw it happen from a distance,' one of them says.

I nod and everything around me tilts, just like I'm taking another corner on the bike.

‘You need to sit down.'

‘You're hurt.'

What they're saying makes sense. I should sit. I'm hurt. I have pain somewhere, but I'm numb too, a rather weird combination. I make a conscious attempt to focus. The pain is coming from my left arm. I twist it and see an angry red gash at the back, matted with the torn fabric of my jacket.

The girls recoil at the sight. ‘Oooh.'

Somewhere else is hurting too. I pull back the waistband of my pants and see a mess of blood and gravel on my hip. For a few seconds I'm dizzy again. I realise that the helmet is still weighing heavily on my head. With the help of the girls, I take it off. I shake my hair free and for a second feel better.

Derek has the bike up. He's wheeling it back towards me. Surely he's not expecting me to get back on?

‘It's driveable. I'll take it home. You can get a taxi.'

‘There's an ambulance coming,' one of the girls tells him. ‘We called triple zero.'

‘You
what
?' Derek's livid. ‘Why the hell did you do that?'

‘It looked as though you were both hurt.'

He slams his hand against his forehead. ‘Fuck! Fuck!'

I watch him, confused, unable to get my befuddled mind to work. ‘What's wrong, Derek?'

He turns on me. ‘What's
wrong
? What's wrong is that I might be over the limit, and I might be charged …'

‘Oh.'

‘And if that's not bad enough, my girlfriend will freak out when she inevitably discovers there was another girl on the back of the bike at the time of the accident! That's what's wrong,
Caitlin
.'

The girls swing their eyes to me.

‘Sorry,' I mumble, anything else I might have added being cut off by the distant song of sirens.

Derek shakes his head, swears again, and puts his hand on my lower back to propel me to the side. ‘Don't tell the ambulance crew we were drinking,' he hisses in my ear.

‘I'm not going to lie,' I hiss back.

‘This could be disastrous for me.'

‘Yeah, just think of yourself, Derek.'

We stare at each other, any attraction from earlier now vanished. I turn away from him and go to sit on the kerb.

One of the girls parks herself next to me. ‘Did you know he had a girlfriend?'

‘Yes,' I reply, eyes downcast. ‘I knew.' I knew that Derek was attached, just as I knew he'd been drinking. What was I thinking?

You weren't thinking, Caitlin. As usual.

It's my father's voice, stern and judgmental, his expression disapproving as he assesses the events of the night, identifying one wrong turn after another. I feel his presence so strongly that he could be standing right here beside me. He's right, absolutely and unequivocally right, even though he's just in my head and not here in person. It hurts, him being right. It hurts more than the gashes on my arm and hip.

The ambulance arrives in tandem with a police car, their sirens becoming unbearably loud before they mute to rotate in silence. The paramedics, a man and woman, usher Derek and me into the back of the ambulance to be examined.

‘What are your names?' the woman asks.

I answer for both Derek and myself.

‘You came off a motorbike?'

‘Yes. I don't know what happened.'

‘How fast were you going?'

‘Not very – we were taking a corner.'

‘How far were you thrown?'

‘I don't know. A few metres.'

‘Five? Ten?'

‘Three or four, maybe.'

‘You weren't wearing any protective clothing?'

I look across at Derek, who doesn't seem inclined to answer any of the paramedic's questions. He stares angrily back at me.

‘No,' I say. ‘The bike ride wasn't planned.'

The woman grimaces. ‘Those kinds of rides are usually the ones that end up like this.'

She's young and attractive. The man, who's treating Derek, is equally good-looking. They look like part of a TV cast rather than real-life paramedics.

Gently, she peels back the fabric from my upper arm.

‘Ouch.'

‘Sorry. Didn't mean to hurt you. These abrasions are quite deep. They need to be looked at by a doctor.'

‘I have to go to hospital?'

‘Accident and Emergency. I'll give you some pain relief now. It's going to hurt when the shock wears off.'

I nod. It's already hurting, stabs of pain that have ripple effects in other parts of my body.

‘Do you have any allergies?'

‘No.'

‘Are you taking any other medication?'

I hesitate and glance at Derek again. ‘No.'

Through the open doors of the ambulance, I'm aware of the police officers talking to the witnesses and examining the bike. One of the officers comes to the door. He stares at me, his eyes blue and piercing beneath the peak of his hat. ‘Everything okay in here?'

The male paramedic replies, ‘Yes. We don't think we need collars – no spine or neck injuries as far as we can tell. But both have deep abrasions that may need grafting.'

Grafting? Does he mean Derek or me? Suddenly I feel quite queasy and I clamp my hand over my mouth.

‘Are you okay?' It's the officer. He's looking at me as though he can see straight through me.

I nod, breathing deeply until the nausea subsides.

The officer gives me another long stare before flicking his eyes to Derek. ‘You were the rider of the bike?'

‘Yes,' Derek says abruptly.

‘Were you drinking tonight?'

‘I had one or two beers.'

‘Was it one or two?'

‘Two.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Some wine with dinner.'

‘How many glasses?'

‘Two.'

The officer's jaw clenches in irritation. ‘You know, the risks of motorbike riding are high enough without adding alcohol to the mix.'

Derek doesn't answer.

‘You're bloody lucky that your injuries aren't worse.'

Derek's eye twitches, his only reaction.

‘The hospital will take a blood sample. I'll speak with both of you later.'

The officer leaves, the ambulance doors shut, and I'm left alone with Derek. His face is grey, his mouth twisted in a grimace, pain evidently wrestling with anger. He refuses to meet my eyes and it's clear he holds me fully responsible for the situation we're in.

Accident and Emergency is in the throes of its Friday night chaos, complete with screaming fevered toddlers, volatile drunks, teenagers with homemade slings and a stressed triage nurse. We wait while everyone is dealt with in order of priority. I glance intermittently at Derek. It feels as though the silence between us is becoming more unbreachable by the minute. I chew on my lip, praying that Derek will realise that it's extremely childish and unfair of him to blame it all on me. Maybe he'll be more reasonable when he's had time to calm down. Maybe he'll feel better, more objective, by Monday.

We wait for close to an hour and then our names are called, Derek's first, mine a few minutes later. We're allocated cubicles on opposite sides of the large treatment room, putting an end to any further opportunity to make amends.

Another wait follows, twenty minutes, before the curtains are swiped back.

‘Well, who do I have here?' asks an accented voice.

‘This is Caitlin,' a nurse replies from behind me. ‘She came off a motorbike tonight.'

‘Ah! She was with the other fellow, was she?'

‘Yes.'

The doctor looks at me. He's Indian with caramel skin and dark, assessing eyes. ‘Well, Caitlin, I would like to know everything that happened,' he says in a bouncy voice. ‘How fast you were travelling, how far you were thrown, if you were able to get up straightaway …'

I relay the same details I told the paramedic in the ambulance. While I speak, he examines my cuts, his eyes close to the torn skin.

‘You are lucky, Caitlin. It is only the superficial layer that is gone. There is no tissue or muscle damage, unlike your friend.'

‘You mean Derek?'

‘Yes.' His dark eyes flick up to my face. ‘He will need some grafts on his knee. The nurse will clean and dress your cuts now and you'll need to visit your GP to have the wounds checked and the dressing changed in a couple of days. I'll give you a script for antibiotics to prevent infection …' He straightens and throws me another assessing look. ‘And maybe you will think twice before getting on a motorbike again without appropriate protective clothing!'

I nod, tears clogging my throat.

The nurse begins to clean the wounds, flushing them with water and then dabbing gently, staining the white gauze with blood and dirt and specks of gravel. ‘The police want to talk to you,' she says sympathetically. ‘I told the officer to wait until I'm finished.' She's a few years younger than me and looks as though she knows what it's like to have a fun night end in disaster. ‘What a spunk, though!'

‘Who?' I flinch as she uses a brush to remove some stubborn flecks of gravel.

‘The officer.' She grins. ‘Makes it almost worth it.'

I don't agreee and can't summon even the slightest smile in return.

She bandages my arm and hip with layers of crêpe and stands back to admire her handiwork. ‘Okay, you're done! I'll send him in.' She smiles, a soft caring smile, the sort a mother would give. ‘Good luck.'

The police officer is the same one who talked to us earlier. Up close, he's big,
very
big, tall and substantial, and I can feel myself shrinking in his presence, becoming even more insignificant
than I am. He has his hat off, revealing his features in full: mid-brown hair cut uncompromisingly short, blue eyes set into the deep tan of his face, a symmetrically square jaw which, I already know, clenches when he's annoyed.

‘The nurse says you're good to go home.'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm Sergeant Blake.' He slips a hand into his shirt pocket to extract a card. ‘My contact details are here. Now, I need a statement on what happened tonight.'

I take the card from his outstretched hand and hold it without looking at it. His pen is already poised, waiting to make a formal record of everything I've done wrong. I begin to speak, my voice subdued. Once again, I repeat the details of what happened. Some of it he takes down, some not.

‘Did you know he'd been drinking?'

I nod.

‘Do you know how dangerous motorcycles are? How many fatalities?'

Again, I nod.

He stares down at me, scorn swimming in his blue eyes. ‘Pretty stupid thing to do, wasn't it? Getting on the back when you knew the driver had been drinking?'

He's being deliberately provocative, making sure that I've learned my lesson. There's nothing I can say in my defence. I've been incredibly stupid, and as a result I've put the proposal and all my hard work in jeopardy.
Please God, don't let five million dollars have just slid through my fingers!

‘Yes,' I answer him in a small voice. ‘It was stupid of me, and clearly the wrong thing to do.'

*

It's after midnight when I get home. I flick on the lights and immediately see Jeanie's plastic futuristic-looking suitcase standing in the hallway. My flatmate is home, for at least a few days until she's required to dash off to the next trouble spot. I'm glad to see the suitcase. I don't want to talk to her right now – I feel too vulnerable and tired – but it's good to know she'll be here in the morning, nursing a coffee and a grin and ready to listen.

I head for the kitchen and gulp a glass of water at the sink. Still thirsty, I down another glass before swaying to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. My bedroom is as neat and tidy as always, testament in itself to my upbringing. Methodically, I move cushions from the bed to the armchair where they'll spend the night. Then I coax my limbs into a short, sleeveless nightdress. Sitting on the side of the bed, I'm at last able to give my body what it needs. I wince at the sting of the needle: I've hit a bad spot. Still, I welcome the added pain. I'm in control of it. And it's utterly deserved.

Turning off the bedside lamp, I slip gratefully under the covers and fall asleep within minutes.

The next morning I wake to the sound of a poorly tuned radio and Jeanie's singing. I smile sleepily; there's never any mistaking that Jeanie's home – if the radio or telly aren't blaring, then she's usually yakking on the phone or banging and clattering in the kitchen. The noise and bustle that follows her around only seem to accentuate her calm and collected personality.