Waking Broken Read Online Free Page A

endanger his life.
    ‘You were lucky,’ said one nurse, her tone suggesting he had cheated in some way. ‘You must have a skull like a rhino.’
    Now he was outside, Harper felt more like his head was made of tissue paper and cobwebs. However, he had no intention of going back to confess.
    He looked around, frowning. His memory was blurry and concentration tricky. Small objectives like walking were manageable but trying to cast his mind further seemed impossible. If he tried, his thoughts seemed to go off into a grey soup. It was disconcerting. Little unseen thoughts whispered at the back of his mind. He had a sensation of something out of place but was unable to focus on it enough to work out what was bothering him.
    Harper swallowed. The best thing was to get on. Give his head time to calm down on its own. The impact was sure to have shaken a few connections. But, importantly, nothing was broken.
    He tugged his denim jacket tighter as a gust of wind whipped around a parked ambulance. As he did so, Harper scowled at the tatty old garment. It was familiar enough but not right. His bike’s disappearance was upsetting. But he could sort that out another day. The thing with his clothes, though, was bizarre.
    He had arrived at the hospital by ambulance. He was unconscious when they picked him up but already starting to wake as they unloaded him onto a trolley and wheeled him into casualty. As he came to, Harper was unable to remember anything of the day leading up to that point. All he had was a vague memory of going to bed the previous night. Then waking on a hospital trolley.
    To begin with, he was too woozy to worry about why he was being taken into hospital. Watching the lights swimming overhead, he realised it was an odd way to start the day but puzzling over it seemed troublesome. Only later, as he lay there waiting to see a doctor, did the fog start to recede.
    His memory gradually returned: getting up early, taking out his bike and cycling out of the city. He remembered seeing trees, riding somewhere cold but sunny, enjoying himself: feeling good. After that, it was still all a bit uncertain.
    He asked about his bike while discharging himself but the nurse did not appear to know anything about it. ‘I was told you were crossing the road when you were hit,’ she said.
    At the time, Harper had not wanted to argue. It seemed more important to get out of hospital. Showing confusion might have increased their reluctance to let him go. Besides, he was thinking clearly enough to know he was in no fit state to ride home.
    Much more puzzling though were his clothes. The sketchy images produced by his mind showed him dressed in his usual riding gear. But that wasn’t what he found himself wearing in hospital.
    It only began to sink in as he limped out through the main foyer and checked to see if he had enough money to pay for a taxi. Going through his clothes, he found his empty wallet in one pocket and less than three pounds in change in another. At that point, he started getting really confused. He more or less recognised the clothes: some faded jeans, an Africa Calling T-shirt, a fleece top bought years ago in the Lake District, as well as an ancient denim jacket he barely remembered. On his feet he had an old pair of trainers.
    His clothes, sure enough, but nothing he would wear for cycling. He did not even realise he still owned the jacket. Which made it doubly strange. He calculated he was at the hospital for five or six hours at the most. He was also convinced he had been more or less conscious since his arrival. So the clothes on his body must be the same ones he was wearing when the paramedics picked him up off the road.
    Besides which, it was not as if he had been in overnight and Becca had brought in a change of clothes. Harper shivered. They would hardly have changed his clothes in the ambulance. And where could they have found them? And why an old jacket that must have been lurking at the bottom of a