Free The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill Page A

forty-five degrees. For a moment the change of viewpoint is vertiginous and you feel like you’re about to tumble off the edge of a cliff.
    Then your head clears and the nurse puts a beaker of water to your lips.
    ‘Careful,’ says Jekyll. ‘Not too much.’
    Bastard! He’s probably one of those mean gits who put optics on spirit bottles so they know exactly how much booze they’re giving their dinner guests.
    When at last you get enough liquid down your throat to ease your clogged vocal cords, you don’t try to speak straight away. First you need a body check.
    You try to waggle fingers and toes and feel pleased to get a reaction. But that means nothing. You’ve read about people still having pain from a limb that was amputated years ago. With a great effort you raise your head to get a one-eyed view of your arms.
    First the left. That looks fine. Then the right. Something wrong there. You’re sure you used to have more than two fingers. But a man can get by on two fingers. Missing toes would be more problematical.
    You say, ‘Feet.’
    Jekyll looks blank but the nurse catches on quickly.
    ‘He wants to see his feet,’ she says.
    Jekyll still looks puzzled. Perhaps he had a hangover when they did feet on his course. But the nurse slowly draws back the sheet and reveals your lower body.
    The Boy David it isn’t, but at least everything seems to be thereeven if your left leg does look like it’s been badly assembled by a sculptor who felt that Giacometti was a bit too profligate with his materials. There’s a tube coming out of your cock and someone’s been shaving your pubic hair. So far as you can see, your scrotum’s still intact.
    You try for something a little more complicated than wiggling your toes but an attempt to bend your knees produces nothing more than a slow twitch and you give up.
    You say, ‘Mirror.’
    Nurse and doctor exchange glances over your body.
    They’re both wearing name tags. The nurse is called Jane Duggan.
    The doctor claims to be Jacklin, not Jekyll. A misprint, you decide.
    Jekyll shrugs as if to say he doesn’t care one way or the other, mirrors are a nurse thing.
    Nurse Duggan leaves the room. Jekyll takes your pulse and does a couple of other doctorly things you’re too weak to stop him from doing. Then Jane comes back in carrying a small shaving mirror.
    She holds it up before your face.
    You look into it and observer and experiencer unite in a memory of what you used to look like.
    You never were classically handsome; more an out-of-doors, rough-hewn type.
    Rough-hewn falls a long way short now. You look as if you’ve been worked over by a drunken chain-saw operator.
    Where your right eye used to be is a hollow you could sink a long putt in.
    Out of your left eye something liquid is oozing.
    You realize you are starting to cry.
    You say, ‘Fuck off.’
    And to give Nurse Duggan and Dr Jekyll their due, off they fuck.
ii
    It turns out you have been in a coma for nearly nine months.
    During the next nine you come to regard that as a blessed state.
    There is some good news. You’ve slept through another lousy winter.
    Your memories are as fragmented as your body. You’ve little recall of the accident, but someone must have described it in detail for later you know exactly what happened.
    It seems you’d been very unlucky.
    Normally in the middle of the day Central London traffic proceeds at a crawl. Occasionally, however, there occur sudden pockets of space, stretches of open road extending for as much as a hundred metres. Most drivers respond by standing on the accelerator in their eagerness to reconnect with the back of the crawl.
    You’d emerged in the middle of one of these pockets. The bus had lumbered up to close on thirty miles an hour. You were flung through the air diagonally on to the bonnet of an oncoming Range Rover whose superior acceleration had got him up to near sixty. From there you bounced on to a table set on the pavement outside a coffee shop, and