It was ridiculous but part of him had hoped the swelling wouldn’t be noticed. He’d overdone it, he’d pushed himself trying to go up and down the stairs at home a few times rather than only going up and down to the bedroom. He’d thought of it as training, although he hadn’t cleared it with the physio and would be unlikely to admit how many times he’d done it if she asked him at his next session.
‘I was doing stairs, to help strengthen it.’
‘That’s good. You need to move,’ said the doc, ‘but you’ve pushed it too far if there’s swelling. And it’s hard for me to know if that’ll happen every time or not. Injuries like this vary from person to person.’
‘I know some firefighters with similar injuries who were back within six months.’ Gio had done his research, hadn’t cared whether the articles he read were evidence based; he’d wanted the assurance and belief that it could happen for him too.
‘As I said, with this level of swelling, I’d recommend pulling back a bit for now. Use the crutches again, let the swelling really go down, then let’s start from there.’
Start? That word felt as though he’d been thrown right back to the day of the injury when the whole of his recovery was lying in wait for him.
‘Have a talk with your superiors, see whether you could return to work in a different capacity for a while?’
‘An office job, you mean.’
The doc came round to Gio’s side of the desk and perched his behind on the corner, hands clasped on his lap. ‘A job that doesn’t mean you’re twisting, jerking or doing anything unpredictable with this knee for a while. Getting from A to B on your feet is a lot different to the demands of a firefighter. You don’tneed me to tell you that. The only other thing you have control over is patience and not pushing it too soon and re-injuring yourself. Let’s look after that knee joint, reassess in a month or so. In the meantime?—’
‘Get back on my crutches and start accepting I’ll be at a desk for the foreseeable.’
‘Until we know more,’ the doc tactfully corrected.
Not returning to a fully functioning firefighter was his worst nightmare. It was all he wanted to do, all he could imagine doing.Until we know morewasn’t what he wanted to hear. It wasn’t what he’d expected to hear either. He had a sudden vision of sitting at a desk at the fire station, the alert of the alarm sounding, listening to the thud of footfall on the stairs as the crew raced to get ready for a shout, the blare of the sirens as they roared out of the fire-station doors, leaving him behind. And the highlight for him might have been taking the call in the first place if he was lucky.
No, that couldn’t happen.
He couldn’t let this be taken away from him.
And yet he had a sinking feeling he had little choice in the matter. He’d given physiotherapy his all, he’d never backed off once, and still it hadn’t been enough.
Gio had left that appointment feeling as if all the positivity had been sucked out of him.
He stood at the front window of his house, watched another couple of kids run on past, one of them dragging a red, plastic sledge behind her.
If he didn’t get outside soon, he’d be certifiable.
He wanted to feel alive, he needed to feel like himself.
He wanted to feel the slap of cold against his skin, the raw bite of winter that had the town in its grasp.
He put on a jumper, his coat, grabbed the crutches andopened the door to a bright day that would be beautiful if he could enjoy it properly.
He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care if he fell.
What was the point of anything when a return to the person he really was still felt so far out of his reach?
25
Bess crunched her way through freshly fallen snow on her way to the gym. She’d tried calling them to cancel her membership but she was locked into a direct debit agreement and they wouldn’t listen. It was so black and white to whoever had answered her call – you signed up for a year so it didn’t matter whether anything else came your way, that was that. She was on the premier membership too, which made it worse, and the most galling thing was that she barely used it. She’d signed up determined she would, but then like so many others they probably had on their books, she’d just become a contributor to their profits, getting nothing back for herself. It was her own fault, but she was getting more and more desperate and this seemed an easy thing to get rid of if only they’d hear her out. And that was why she was heading there now – it got her out of the house on a day off and perhaps if she spoke to them face to face, she might have better luck pleading her case.
She was almost at the gym when her phone rang. It was Nadia. The Skylarks were desperate for a fill-in after Kate on the blue team had gone home sick.
The gym would have to wait. Bess doubled back home and got her things, picked up her car keys and carefully drove to the airbase. The roads closest to town had at least been ploughed and gritted so weren’t packed with snow like the pavements, but Bess knew from news reports and social media that a lot of roads in this part of Dorset remained impassable.
Vik and Brad were in the office when she reached the airbase but it wasn’t long before The Skylarks were called out on a job.
Bess took the call from the HEMS desk and while they didn’t have much to go on, they did know that there had been a sledging accident at Wildacre Meadow, renowned for its steep slope that in summer, kids often slid down on steel trays, which was a bit like sledging except without the snow. Bess remembered it as a kid, the thrilling speeds you could reach.
But before Bess hung up the call, she had to ask the person on the other end to repeat the name she’d just given her. ‘Are you talking about Gio Mayhan?’ Because the woman had said Gio, right?
