Free Beyond the High Blue Air by Lu Spinney

and check his oxygen saturation level, then sits back in her seat. He continues to judder and I think he must be sensing something through his comatose state, that his unconscious registering of the change in his environment is triggering these severe spasms. I can do nothing to soothe him, except let my hand linger on the top of his head and try to will my love through to him, to enfold him and cocoon him with all the force of my love.
    Ridiculously the plane lands at Biggin Hill, with its connotations of Biggles and schoolboy comics; how Miles and Will would have loved that as small boys. It’s a beautiful day and as Miles is lifted out of the plane and on to the runway I realise it is the first time the sun has shone on him for six weeks. His skin has a ghostly sheen, his immobile eyebrows and closed, thick eyelashes unsettlingly dark in comparison. I can see that the two young men wheeling his stretcher try not to look at him too obviously, but it is unusual to see someone in a coma at close hand and they are both fascinated and repelled. Miles is still a handsome, powerful, athletic-looking young man in spite of his pallor; his rigid unconsciousness shocks. An ambulance is waiting outside the small airport and the cheerful driver helps me in. You sit next to me, love, in the comfortable seat, he says. You must be a bit out of sorts after that flight. The medics can go in the back with him. He’ll be all right, don’t you worry, love.
    He talks all the way to London, turning on the siren whenever the traffic looks bad ahead. That’s the joy of these things, he says, gets you where you want to in no time.

II
    The ambulance drop-off point is in a small street at the back of University College Hospital, one of London’s great flagship modern hospitals. Two porters wheel Miles on his stretcher up to the third floor Intensive Care Unit. I follow with the Austrian doctor and nurse, and entering the unit we are met by a young man with a harassed expression and a junior doctor’s badge pinned to his white coat. Take the patient into this room, he says, pointing it out to the Austrians, and then to me, Please wait in the reception area while I examine your son. I have time to see Miles handed over to two nurses waiting in his empty room, to see him being slung, rigid, from the slightly higher Austrian stretcher on to his new bed so that he lands awkwardly with a jarring thump. I register the first inkling that something is different here. For the past six weeks the Austrian doctors and nurses have done what they had to do with a kind efficiency that I assumed to be the norm.
    Waiting as instructed in the empty reception area, I close my eyes and feel myself falling exhaustedly through deepening layers of incomprehension. But I’m back in England, I tell myself, and things will be easier now, things should become clearer. Eventually the young doctor reappears and as I instinctively search his expression for any glimmer of hope, there is nothing. I’m afraid the Austrians seem to have got it wrong, he says, without preamble. I don’t understand why they appear to have increased your son’s score to 4 on the Glasgow Coma Scale whereas in fact he’s only 3 . It’s not a very clear report, he says (the Innsbruck doctors had taken the trouble to translate it into English). And I’m afraid too, he adds, that since he’s arrived on a Sunday the on-duty neurologist will have to be called, which may take some time.
    As I wait for the neurologist in Miles’s room, I stand at the window and stare out over the teeming Euston Road below, cars streaming in both directions, hundreds of people going about their Sunday oblivious to the crises of lives they are passing by. Each time I close my eyes the sensation of falling returns. The neurologist finally arrives, flustered; I realise it must be irritating to have been called away from her Sunday