She was there, and talking, and I heard her, and then she was gone and I felt sleepy. I drifted off into slumber, but this wasn’t like it had been before. This was restful and relaxing. When I woke up, I felt invigorated, though my body still felt stiff, and unable to move, and I was still strapped to an array of beeping, whirring machines.
An older guy with a kindly face came in to see me. I recognised his voice, though I wasn’t sure from where. He did some tests. I felt him fumbling around on my body, but it didn’t hurt. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing as I couldn’t lift my head up to see.
“Don’t worry,” he said to me. “You’re probably feeling a little disorientated right now. And that’s perfectly normal. So is that feeling of numbness and stiffness in all your limbs. You haven’t moved for a good long time.”
I tried to reply, but no sound came out.
“You keep resting,” he said. “You’ll be fine from here.”
I wanted to believe him. This room that I was in was claustrophobic, and being stuck on my back wired up to gadgets and gizmos wasn’t helping me. I felt anxious, and suddenly keen to be outside.
I wasn’t even sure where “here” was. The memories of my desperate flight up the stairs away from the beast were still with me, though details were fading. Had that really happened?
I frowned. Feeling in my face was starting to come back, so I wiggled my eyebrows comically as I pondered the meaning of what had transpired. I must have looked ridiculous, but fortunately the man had left by this point.
I was confused. What was real, and what was fake? She had been a prominent part of what I’d just been through, but then she was there when I woke up too, and it didn’t seem to add up.
I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. I felt as if parts of my body were slowly coming back to life. The sensation was distracting enough to divert my thoughts away from the confusion of my situation. I twitched my toes and my fingertips, though moving whole limbs still felt like an impossible task. I moved my nose in a sneer, and back down again, and wiggled my eyebrows again for good measure. I opened my mouth and tried to make a sound, but my throat was so dry it simply came out as a zombie-like gargling. I wanted to laugh at how absurd I must look right now, but it too much effort.
I heard the door go again and opened my eyes. I tried to move my neck, but it didn’t go anywhere. Before long, the older guy’s face was before me again. I think he was sitting or kneeling next to the bed on which I lay.
“Adam,” he said. “Welcome back. I’m sure you’re very confused, and you have many questions, and equally are finding it very difficult to answer them right now. So let me try and explain what has been happening to you.
“You have been in a coma for some time now. You took one hell of an overdose, but fortunately your ladyfriend was able to call for an ambulance and get you here in time to save you. She wasn’t with you when it happened, as you’d had a falling-out, but you’d sent her a text message — a technological suicide note, as it were. She did the right thing and saved your life by calling us straight away.
“Since that time, you’ve been unconscious. We’ve been monitoring you closely, and it’s clear that your brain was very active during that time — dreaming, in a sense. Not all coma patients dream — it depends on how much damage the brain has suffered, if any. But we could tell that your brain was still alive and well, if not what was going on.”
A dream? That would explain the vagueness of the memories I have of what I’ve been through, and why they’re fading so quickly.
“Evie came to see you almost every day,” he continued. “She never gave up on you. She’d spend time with you, talk to you, read to you. She gave up her life for you. It’s not often you see that amount of commitment to another person.”
“Guilty,” I eventually managed to murmur in a choked voice. “But… My fault.”
“No-one’s to blame,” he replied. “Or if either of you are, there’s no sense in assigning blame at this point. You’ve reached the end of one thing and the beginning of another. This is a turning point. Whatever happened before doesn’t have to matter now. You can start afresh — if you want to, of course.”
Although details of my long journey were slowly disappearing into the darkest recesses of my memory as we spoke, I still recalled the conversation I’d had with Evie over that table, and how I’d responded to her admission.
“ALPHA AND OMEGA WILL UNITE,” that strange text message had said. It had stuck in my mind because of how unusual and out of place it was, but now I understood.
The beginning and end will unite. It meant so many things. What I had thought would be the beginning of a new life with Evie and the baby turned out to be the end of everything. The end of the world was the beginning of my journey. The end of my journey was made up of the events which had caused it to begin in the first place. And now that chapter of my life was ending, causing a new one to begin.
I was ready to face that future. But was Evie?
As I felt my strength returning and my body awakening after its long slumber, I knew that the next day would be the true day of reckoning.
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