Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

16 страница из 98

The inside of the chopper was furiously dark, crowded, vibrating and noisy. I felt sick and claustrophobic, strapped down. Panic started to rise. He was indeed dishy, the winchman, in the rare moments he crossed my limited field of vision. He’d taken off his helmet. Mostly it was his voice I hung onto. I told him that I couldn’t breathe and he leant over me, speaking softly but urgently to me above the noise: ‘Yes you can. Keep breathing for me, girl. We’ll be there in six and a half minutes. Do it for me.’ Pure Mills & Boon. It felt profoundly intimate, romantic – but also heart-splintering, because in that same instant, deep down, I knew with absolute certainty that never again would a man lean over me wanting to make love to me. Those paralysed thighs would never part. A brief wave of insight and intense loss washed over me. I can be that precise: in a few seconds, in that maelstrom of noise, my sexual identity died. Lust is only one letter removed from lost.

The crew of the Sea King from HMS Gannet, based at Prestwick, treated me as an emergency, aware that with a high spinal injury I could easily lose the power to breathe. The pilot requested a direct route and air traffic control temporarily cleared our path of commercial aircraft so that the helicopter could fly straight to the hospital. In those days, before the Southern General was rebuilt into a high-rise city, the helicopter pad was on the ground, just next to A&E. I remember being transferred to a trolley, remember trying to be polite and thank the RAF crew as they wheeled me away. Already, by then, there was the sense of detachment. This is just too bad; it can’t be happening to me, and I felt weary.