'What happened then, gran?' The fifteen-year-old girl was laying on the rug in front of the fire, her eyes wide. 'She didn't actually die, did she?'
Her grandmother stopped rocking in her chair a moment and gave the girl a humorously disparaging look over her glasses. 'If my grandmother had died, then a long line of Dewhurst women, including yourself, would never have been born, and you wouldn't be here to listen to this tale, nor I to tell it.'
'So what did happen?'
'If I am to be allowed to continue without any further interruption, then perhaps I'll tell you.
'Now, then, where were we? Oh, yes, Pamela has fallen off the balcony. Well, everyone thought she was going to die, and she was rushed to hospital. Everyone went. In fact, they left in such a hurry that the doors either were left standing open or unlocked. But nobody cared about that. All they cared about was whether poor Pamela was going to make it or not.
'There were tears aplenty, let me tell you, and prayers from lips that hadn't prayed in years, and from people who really didn't believe in such things, but prayed all the same because there was nothing else they could have done.
'The news wasn't good, of course. The doctors didn't hold out any hope, and told them she wouldn't last till morning. But by daybreak she was still clinging to life, and all her friends gathered together and kept vigil.
'Theo was a gaunt wreck, let me tell you. He was a strong man in every sense, stronger than most. But he stayed by Pamela's side every minute of every day, eschewing sleep and food, believing that his will alone was all that was keeping her alive from one moment to the next. He believed that if he faltered even once that she would quietly slip away.
'Even then, the doctors told him that she was clinically dead, that it was only a matter of time before her heart finally stopped beating of its own accord, like an old clock that winds down for the very last time until it finally stops, for ever.
'But Pamela's life was a succession of minor miracles, and against all odds, she began to rally. After three days, the doctors finally got it through their heads that she wasn't going down without a good fight. And fight she did. Her back and neck were broken. They mended. She suffered massive internal injuries. But the bleeding slowed to a trickle, and then stopped altogether. And the swelling of her brain finally eased off, and she was not left a vegetable, as they believed she already was. They thought at the least that she was going to be paralysed. But she wasn't.