Read Starting Over for Free Online Page B

watched him go, wishing that I had the words to make him feel better, to make him understand that you don’t whine and quibble and go on Google in the face of a miracle.
    How could I explain it to him? I was feeling stronger. Feeling good. Feeling happy. Feeling young again.
    Feeling – what’s the word?
    Alive.
    ‘Uncle Keith,’ Ruby said, and she got up to hug him as he came into the room.
    I was glad that she still called him Uncle Keith, even though he wasn’t her real uncle or any kind of blood relation. I was glad that she wasn’t too cool or grown-up for that.
    ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he said. ‘How’s the patient?’
    The pair of them smiled at me sitting up in bed. ‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you two alone.’ A flurry of anxiety crossed her lovely face. ‘I’ll just be in the café,’ she told me.
    I nodded. It was fine. I didn’t want her to worry so much,even though I knew that was asking a lot. When Ruby had gone, Keith pulled a chair up to my bed and began eating the grapes he was carrying.
    ‘Not dead yet then?’ he said.
    I looked at my watch. ‘It’s still early.’
    He smiled. ‘We need to get our story straight,’ he said.
    ‘Our story?’ I said.
    Keith nodded his enormous head. ‘Why you were on that roof. Why a canteen cowboy was out chasing naughty people. Why you were in the car instead of my twelve-year-old partner.’
    I thought about it. ‘We were going to lunch and we saw uniformed officers in need of assistance.’
    He leaned back in the hospital chair. It creaked in protest, not really designed for the likes of Keith. ‘Yeah, that might work,’ he yawned. He popped a fistful of grapes in his cakehole, and ran his weary eyes over me.
    ‘Nice grapes?’ I said.
    ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Sorry, mate – you want one?’
    ‘No, you’re all right.’
    And then he got this sly grin, and pulled out the unwrapped packet of Low Tars.
    ‘For emergencies,’ he said, and I nodded my appreciation as I slipped them deep inside the pocket of my dressing gown. He held out the grapes.
    ‘So – how are you feeling?’
    I chewed a grape and it tasted of nothing because of the drugs. Under my stripy pyjamas I could feel the scar on my chest pulsing. It was not the heart that I felt. You would think it would be the heart. But it was the scar.
    ‘Never better,’ I said.
    Keith laughed, shook his head. ‘Hard, aren’t you?’
    I smiled. ‘Harder than you,’ I said.
    He snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’ He was cutting me some slack. Apart from eating my grapes, he had a lovely bedside manner. I appreciated him coming. I knew it wasn’t just about getting our story straight. But I was a bit sick of people feeling sorry for me. I rolled up the pyjama sleeve on my right arm. Keith narrowed his eyes.
    ‘Don’t provoke me, shiny-arse,’ he said.
    I laughed and started to roll down my sleeve. ‘More chicken than Colonel Sanders…’
    He was on his feet, rolling his sleeve right up to his shoulder. I had said the ‘c’ word. There was a tattoo of barbed wire around his biceps that had blurred with the years. We pulled the table that sat across my bed between us. As we placed our elbows on it, we could feel it sagging. It wasn’t really built for arm wrestling.
    ‘Bit springy,’ Keith said.
    ‘Stop moaning,’ I said. ‘Best out of three?’
    He was on the verge of beating me for the second time when Lara walked into the room, carrying flowers and a portable DVD player. Her smile faded as she watched Keith force my arm down on to the little hospital table with a triumphant roar from him and a yelp of pain and defeat from me. Keith only stopped laughing when he saw my wife.
    Lara stood in the doorway of the hospital room, holding the flowers and the DVD player, and staring at us as if we were a pair of big stupid kids. I looked at Keith, his meaty head hung low, and felt like blurting, ‘Best out of five, Granddad?’
    But I stifled my anarchic laughter, and said