The nurse tells me that my brother is outside, the only smoker who never leaves his hospital bed. They wheel him out apparently, his loud and frequent visitors; wheel him down the eggshell corridors through plastic flexi-doors and out into the loading bay, then huddle like prisoners, penned in by the lines and arrows on the tarmac. No parking, says the sign, but they park Damon by the double doors; kick down the brake pad and prop up his pillows. They light his cigarettes and push his bed round in circles on the compass point of its one braked wheel.
"He shouldn't be smoking," says the nurse without conviction.
Mum prepared me for Damon's face but not his hands. When I see them, twisted and crab-like, even under the plastercast, I can't keep the rushing sounds inside. Embarrassed, Damon's friends find a reason to move back inside the building.
We are alone, my younger brother and I. There is so little to say, and on such a massive scale that the only thing to say is, how are you?
"Wicked! Thanks for asking."
Damon's voice is slurred. I want it to be the morphine, or at least the swelling, but no. Damon's jawbone snapped like a balsawood airplane wing and his teeth scattered like dice. He's slurring because the planes of his face no longer fit together the way they should. His hands are mashed potato. One leg, the left, is twisted like a bent spoon. Damon was roof running, wasted, along the tiled slant of Whitehawk Flats. When he reached the end of the last roof he just kept on running. I can imagine him treading air like Wile. E. Coyote. Four floors up.
"Mum says she'll be up after work." I tell him.
Above Damon's bed, swinging from the chrome headboard is a soft toy-a DangerMouse with velcro arms. As he talks, Damon bats the toy around in a full three-sixty arc. By the bed is a card in our sister's year seven handwriting-Get well soon, Damo. Don't be such a DANGERMOUSE!!
"Was it just the drink?"
"Oh, you know-bit of this and that. Be off the that for a while."
"What did the doctors say?"
"One of them called me a selfish little shit. Mum wouldn't stop crying — that's why he said it, I mean. Just to me though; leaned in and hissed it at me. Dr. Shithead."
"About your hands and face. And your leg."
"Hands are fucked. Face will be ok. Jaw will fuse and they can give me new teeth. Leg needs resetting but they can't do that yet. Probably have to re-break it. Looking forward to that."
I can picture mum here; too big for the plastic chairs. Trying to stretch her courage over the full visiting hour. Not managing it. I want to grab Damon's wrists and push his broken hands into the squash of his spoiled mouth. I want to get it over with.
"It rained while I was walking up the hill but it didn't register," he's saying. "Stupido, huh? So, there you go; a surfeit of ale, a slippery roof. Lucky I managed to break the fall with my chin. How's work?"
"You're killing them, Damon."
"It was an accident."
I've always hated hospitals. Suddenly I hate nurses and doctors too. And orderlies, and patients and their visitors. "Work's work. How long before they let you out?"
"I can't smoke in my room."
"You can't anywhere now, can you?"
"Can you wheel me back in? Dad's coming at ten."
I kick up the brake and put my back into propelling Damon down the long ice-cream corridors towards his bay in Kestrel ward. His friends appear at the crook of the corridor, gangling and boisterous. One of them has an unopened can of beer.
Leaning in close, I can hear hospital air whistling between the gaps where Damon's bottom teeth used to be.
"It wasn't an accident, was it?"
"What do you think?"
"Are you going to try again?"
Damon looks up at me, holds my gaze for a second then looks down at his papier-mache hands and the unnatural kink of his plastered leg. He sends DangerMouse on another loop-the-loop.
"Not for a while," he says.
Matt Plass lives in Brighton, England.