By My Side

1

Five months later

I hear her coming upstairs. The jangling of her gold bracelets gives her away.

I sense her hovering outside my bedroom door, summoning the strength to enter. The handle moves and in she comes, in a bright red sundress, her vanilla scent overpowering.

'Morning!' She strides across my room in her high heels. I don't think Mum has ever worn a pair of flats. 'The God of height wasn't on my side,' she'd once said.

'What a lovely day!' she says with gusto, opening the curtains to allow the sunshine to stream in. 'I thought we could go out for lunch, just to the pub opposite?' Clocking my hesitancy, she says, 'Or how about a nice drive?'

'Maybe.'

She picks my tracksuit trousers off the floor, hangs them on the back of my chair. 'Or we could go for a walk. maybe see a film?'

I don't move. 'I'm fine, Mum. But you go.'

'Oh, Cass, it's been weeks!' she says, raising her voice for the first time since I returned home from Stoke Mandeville Hospital at the end of April. 'You can't fester inside, day after day.' The telephone rings. 'I'll be back in a minute,' she warns me.

I'm testing her patience, but I don't feel ready to face the world yet. Minutes later she returns, notepad in hand this time. 'That was Sarah,' she says, sitting on the end of my bed. 'I told her you'd call back.'

Sarah's the one Sean and I shared a flat with at King's. She was my clinical partner, which basically means we did everything together. In our third year, when we were pushed out of our safe lecture-room environment and thrown into the world of real-life patients, Sarah and I clung on to one another in fear, scared they might bite. I see us turning up on our first day at hospital, dressed in long pleated skirts, white shirts and navy cardigans. We looked as if we were in school uniform. When I was asked to clerk a patient Sarah came with me, and as we walked down the long airy corridor we were too nervous to talk; all we did was make sure our stethoscopes were placed squarely round our necks. Sarah is in her final term of year four. She told me she was planning to go to Gibraltar during the summer break. At the end of year four we had to organise a two-month placement abroad. I was planning to go to a bush hospital in Africa.

I feel a prod. 'Cass?' Mum says.

'Hmm?'

'Oh, Cassandra, you haven't heard a word I've said.' Impatiently, Mum flicks open her notepad. 'I was saying you have a baseline.' She draws a thick horizontal line across the paper. 'The fact of the matter is-' she takes in a deep breath, as if she's about to plunge herself into icecold water - 'this is how it's going to be for the rest of your life. We can't change that, but what we can do-' she sketches neat arrows going upwards from this baseline - 'is change how we manage it.'

I raise an eyebrow. 'Will you be doing a PowerPoint presentation next?'

She puts the pen down. 'You need to think about your future.'

'What future?' I burst out. Why doesn't she understand? 'Everything I loved. everyone I loved.' I trail off.

'I've damaged my spinal cord,' I'd said to Sean when he'd visited me in hospital for the first time since the accident. I saw the colour literally drain from his face; he knew exactly what that meant. 'I'm paralysed, Sean, from the waist down.'

Ironically one of his favourite subjects was neurology and spinal cord injury. Sean didn't shed a tear. He looked as if he wanted to punch the living daylights out of the next person who came into the ward. I searched his face, looking for signs that he was going to stick around, but all I could see was anger and helplessness in his eyes. Part of me wanted to ease his pain, tell him he was free to go. I didn't want him to stay with me out of pity.

The other half wanted him to get off that chair and give me a hug, and tell me everything was going to be all right, and that he still loved me.

As I looked at him, all I could think was how could life change so quickly? Only days ago we were dancing, fooling around in bed and making plans for the New Year. He had invited me to Dublin. I was going to meet his parents for the first time.

He stood up, turned his back to me. 'This is my fault.'

Tears came to my eyes. 'No. Don't blame yourself.'

'Visiting hours are over,' said an abrupt Georgina, my assigned nurse, examining my medical notes on her clipboard. 'Off you go, now. She needs her rest. You can see her tomorrow.'

Sean gathered his coat and scarf. He hesitated before kissing my cheek and touching my hand. 'I'm so sorry,' he said. As he reached the door, he looked over his shoulder. 'Will you come tomorrow?' I called out, my voice as fragile as my broken body.

I was in hospital for four months. Sean did visit again, ten days later. He left a letter on my bedside table, telling me not to open it until he'd gone-

'Cassandra!'

I shudder when I feel another prod on my shoulder. 'I give up,' she says with resignation. 'What can I do?'

'Why don't you go back to work?' I suggest. Mum runs a successful property-letting company. She founded the business in London, where we'd lived until I was sixteen. Mum agreed to Dad's demands to move out of the city, to Dorset, on the proviso that she could expand her company to the West Country. Her company now deals with properties in the southwest region, covering Somerset, Dorset and Devon.

She looks indignant. 'I am working.'

'I mean full-time, in your office?' Mum has an office in Dorchester.

'Not yet. A, I can work from home and B, if I wasn't here, I'd come home in the evening and find you still in bed.' She looks at me, concerned. 'Would you like me to arrange some counselling for you?'

'No! I'm fine, I promise.' I say, praying to be left alone.

'I want you up. Five minutes.' She grabs my dressing gown from the back of the door and throws it at me.

I push the gown away from my face. 'I feel sick, Mum.'

Dad walks in now.

'She won't get up, Michael.'

'Cass can stay in bed a bit longer, can't she?' Dad reasons.

Mum's temper explodes like a pressure cooker. 'Wrapping her in cotton wool isn't going to help anyone,' she says, 'least of all Cass!' Next thing I know, Dad grabs her by the arm and pulls her out of my room.

'I need your support!' Mum says in protest, shaking her arm free. 'My parents are hopeless, not one single visit. Mum can't even be bothered to pick up the bloody phone.'

'Look, it's going to take time,' Dad says in a low voice. 'The doctors warned us Cass will be abnormally tired in the first year.'

I hear them walking away. I strain to hear what Mum's saying now. Something about me getting out of my bed and doing my exercises. 'She's depressed!' she shouts in exasperation.

I close my eyes, feeling guilty that I'm causing this grief.

Five minutes later Dad stands at my bedroom door, his face creased with anxiety.

'Dad, I'm sorry.'

'Could you try and get up this morning?'

I nod, my lip quivering.

Ten minutes later Mum is back with the shower chair on wheels. 'You haven't undressed yet.'

Slowly I unbutton my pyjama top. My hand is shaking. 'I'm trying.'

'Well, try harder,' comes back the harsh reply, like the smash of a tennis ball into the body of an opponent. I can feel her stare as she waits for me to transfer myself from the edge of the bed across to the shower seat. Finally she wheels me into the bathroom.

'Cass, I shouldn't have snapped earlier but I hate seeing you like this. You have to stop feeling so sorry for yourself.' She turns on the shower and tests the temperature of the water. 'You need to make some kind of plan.'

'I had my heart set on medicine.'

'I know you did. You could go back to King's. Why don't you talk to Doctor Lewis?' She reverses the chair into the right position before putting the brakes on.

Doctor Lewis was my clinical supervisor.

'He's used to dealing with all kinds of problems and I'm sure he'd want to-'

'No,' I cut her off. 'I can't.' Sarah has also tried to convince me to return, but each time I try to imagine it, all I see is disabled accommodation and pity on people's faces. How would I cope bumping into Sean or seeing him with someone else? It's too raw. It's too soon. And even if I did qualify, what would a patient think when they saw...