Chapter 24

24

Gio didn't feel any joy today. Not even when he looked out of the window at the blanket of snow covering the ground and weighing down the branches of the trees, muffling everything around. The world seemed so quiet – his head was anything but. He couldn't get his thoughts in a good place at all. He was a grumpy sod.

The fact that he couldn't even enjoy the snow felt like yet another setback to him. And it didn't help that local kids were whizzing by outside on foot, dragging sledges behind them. Schools must be closed; it would've been declared a snow day today.

He knew where they were going. There was a steep slope not far from here in a public meadow; he'd been walking through it last year as the rain came down and he talked to his brother on the phone. His brother had had snow where he lived and Gio had looked at the slope and thought how much of a thrill it would be to go down it if they had snow in Whistlestop River.

He took his plate into the kitchen and dropped it into the water in the sink, already brown from the baking tray he'd shoved a meat pie on. It had been left over from the stocks his mum had bought when she was staying here. It hadn't tasted great – didn't help that he'd burnt it – but he was in the sort of mood where thinking about anything other than getting food from freezer to oven to plate was too much.

As he let the plate sink into the murky depths of the washing-up water, he thought back to his doctor's appointment the other day, the way he'd gone in with hope and an air of positivity and left feeling crap.

It was his fault. He'd pushed for straight talk, for blunt answers and facts, and he'd got them.

‘Gio, come in, sorry to keep you,' the doc had apologised after keeping him waiting almost fifty minutes. ‘How are you?'

Gio recapped the physio regime he'd been following, they talked about painkiller use, the doc examined his knee and took him through exercises as if to prove his claims.

Gio pulled his jeans back on, sure his quad muscle on the bad side was half the size of the other. He'd have to work on that.

‘When can I go back to work then, doc?' He had a smile on his face until he saw the doctor's hesitation. He knew that expression – it was the one they used when they weren't sure how to answer a question, the look which said they were buying time while the words churned over inside their head and would hopefully come out the right way.

‘You know I can't give cast-iron guarantees on outcomes.'

They couldn't, but surely by now, they knew more than they had at the start.

‘Ballpark,' he pushed. ‘One month, three, six—' The doc held up his hand and Gio filled in the blank for himself. ‘You don't know.'

‘I'm not trying to make you feel worse or take away any hope but if I tell you six months and you're not back at work, you'll be gunning for me. And your knee is a bit swollen again.'

It was ridiculous but part of him had hoped the swelling wouldn't be noticed. He'd overdone it, he'd pushed himself trying to go up and down the stairs at home a few times rather than only going up and down to the bedroom. He'd thought of it as training, although he hadn't cleared it with the physio and would be unlikely to admit how many times he'd done it if she asked him at his next session.

‘I was doing stairs, to help strengthen it.'

‘That's good. You need to move,' said the doc, ‘but you've pushed it too far if there's swelling. And it's hard for me to know if that'll happen every time or not. Injuries like this vary from person to person.'

‘I know some firefighters with similar injuries who were back within six months.' Gio had done his research, hadn't cared whether the articles he read were evidence based; he'd wanted the assurance and belief that it could happen for him too.

‘As I said, with this level of swelling, I'd recommend pulling back a bit for now. Use the crutches again, let the swelling really go down, then let's start from there.'

Start? That word felt as though he'd been thrown right back to the day of the injury when the whole of his recovery was lying in wait for him.

‘Have a talk with your superiors, see whether you could return to work in a different capacity for a while?'

‘An office job, you mean.'

The doc came round to Gio's side of the desk and perched his behind on the corner, hands clasped on his lap. ‘A job that doesn't mean you're twisting, jerking or doing anything unpredictable with this knee for a while. Getting from A to B on your feet is a lot different to the demands of a firefighter. You don't need me to tell you that. The only other thing you have control over is patience and not pushing it too soon and re-injuring yourself. Let's look after that knee joint, reassess in a month or so. In the meantime?—'

‘Get back on my crutches and start accepting I'll be at a desk for the foreseeable.'

‘Until we know more,' the doc tactfully corrected.

Not returning to a fully functioning firefighter was his worst nightmare. It was all he wanted to do, all he could imagine doing. Until we know more wasn't what he wanted to hear. It wasn't what he'd expected to hear either. He had a sudden vision of sitting at a desk at the fire station, the alert of the alarm sounding, listening to the thud of footfall on the stairs as the crew raced to get ready for a shout, the blare of the sirens as they roared out of the fire-station doors, leaving him behind. And the highlight for him might have been taking the call in the first place if he was lucky.

No, that couldn't happen.

He couldn't let this be taken away from him.

And yet he had a sinking feeling he had little choice in the matter. He'd given physiotherapy his all, he'd never backed off once, and still it hadn't been enough.

Gio had left that appointment feeling as if all the positivity had been sucked out of him.

He stood at the front window of his house, watched another couple of kids run on past, one of them dragging a red, plastic sledge behind her.

If he didn't get outside soon, he'd be certifiable.

He wanted to feel alive, he needed to feel like himself.

He wanted to feel the slap of cold against his skin, the raw bite of winter that had the town in its grasp.

He put on a jumper, his coat, grabbed the crutches and opened the door to a bright day that would be beautiful if he could enjoy it properly.

He didn't know where he was going. He didn't care if he fell.

What was the point of anything when a return to the person he really was still felt so far out of his reach?