At Pilgrim Hospital, Chapter One

Through the ward window Presh gazed on a girl who lay bandaged and comatose beyond the glass.

Sonica had been attacked.

The moment Presh read of it in the Boston Standard she’d set off at once for Pilgrim Hospital on the outskirts of town, despite the late hour and the night’s pervasive damp. It was the sort of news which up until now had only ever seemed to happen to other people. You just couldn’t imagine it, thought Presh, befalling somebody you…

Well.

Actually, even now, Presh wasn’t sure she did know Sonica.

That one’s distinctive cerise-coloured hair, spread out behind her head on the white hospital pillow, was ringing the faintest and dullest of bells. But that was about all.

Still, it was the sort of thing that shouldn’t have been, and Presh didn’t think anyone could deny that. Moreover, to her it seemed part of a greater unravelling which had been going on for some time. There’d been that short stretch when life had seemed perfect, though Presh couldn’t have said at just that minute what had preceded it, or how it had been worse. Then along had come that Mini-Flash Juniper. Then the netball tournament, when Presh had discovered she didn’t have a single so-called friend who’d hesitate to gang up on her. And then her boyfriend Mini-Flash Robin, instead of trying to patch things up, had done a disappearing act.

It had been a lot.

Presh however couldn’t help but notice this Sonica had played no part in any of it.

So the questions remained, who was she, and why should her injury have brought Presh hurrying to her bedside?

A kindly nurse approached along the corridor, slipped an arm around Presh’s shoulders, and murmured that Sonica was lucky to have such friends. This of course was preamble to letting the latter rest, but Presh knew as much, so obediently let the nurse steer her towards the waiting-room and from there the exit.

That was the way good hospitals were.

It was comforting for Presh to know at least a few things still behaved exactly as you expected them to.

Presh didn’t know it, but if this hadn’t been so, Pilgrim Hospital wouldn’t have been there.

It wasn’t that the young Joe, with his luxury-laden attic and his cat family and his favourite restaurant up in the sky, had been unmindful he lived in Pre-Nottingham Earth. Rather, it had fairly swelled his heart that society’s degradation might be staved off by bulwarks atop which he fancied he stood. Pilgrim by night had ever been a slab of luminescence on the port town’s otherwise underwhelming horizon, and Joe awake in his comfortable warm bed was frequently moved to picture those souls who strove there the dark hours through. Thence perhaps came some of his earliest accurate intimations as to what heroes were. Be that as it may, and real as the hospital seemed to Presh, in actuality she walked a well-lighted web of impressions and assumptions. No cinderblock or steel had contributed to its meshing, merely Joe’s childhood conviction that doctors were brave men who made you better.

In other words, if Sonica was lucky to have friends like Presh, she was luckier still Joe had once seen the world that way.

Her vital functions at the present time were dependent on life-support apparatus which in every sense including the literal ran on good intentions.

Always assuming she survived at all, she’d be a medical first.

Not even her own technologically advanced galaxy had yet tapped the therapeutic potential of absolutely nothing at all.

Even the nurse was lifted straight out of what had been Joe’s favourite teatime drama. She showed Presh to the waiting-room then melted away unseen.

END OF CHAPTER ONE