Roland’s thoughts returned to the earlier part of the evening, and he remembered where he had got to with his story.
‘I visited her in the hospital; I had to lie and say I was her fiancé,
and we were to be married next year. On the first two visits in that first week of the incident, I held her hand and talked to her the whole time. On the third day of that week, she had recovered from her coma. The hospital had telephoned me early that morning, and I was in high spirits and with a bunch of flowers entered the ward and rushed to her bed. She turned towards me and frowned. ‘ You’re the person who tried to kill me.’
She pressed the emergency button and hospital staff and a policeman came running to her bedside.
‘This man – he tried to….’
‘I’m not that person, I may look like him, but I am not your assailant.’ The two hospital orderlies were holding Roland between them and he shouldered them off and advanced towards the bed.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Roland, I’ve been visiting you every day since I was allowed to by the hospital.’
‘I don’t know you, do I?’
‘Well yes, we do know each other, remember I took you to a nightclub for dinner and a dance but perhaps you don’t remember me at all. It was only for one brief evening. It was lucky that I changed my shopping habits. I decided to try out the new store that recently opened and I just happened to be in the store when you were pushed into that wall of tins and I in turn pushed that man into another pile of tins. You will be glad to know he came off worse.’
‘You did what!’
‘Well, I pushed him – what’s wrong with that?’
‘He was supposed to be my bodyguard, but I had a feeling he had received instructions to get rid of me.’
‘He probably thought he had because you went out like a light and he was standing over you and I could see under his jacket a bulge and I reckoned it was a gun, so I did the only thing that I could think of without it is looking too suspicious, I ran towards you and tripped over nothing and pushed your man sideways into another pile of tins. The icing on the cake was that a very large tin fell off a shelf and hit him on the nose. I heard the crunch of his nose as it broke, and his blood shot up in the air and sprayed everywhere.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Roland James and what’s yours?’
‘Joanna, Jo for short!’
‘What about your last name.’
‘I think it would be better if you didn’t know that just now. Just call me Jo.’
‘Okay Joanna, I mean Jo.’
Joanna looked at Roland and said ‘Are those flowers for me by any chance?’
‘Yes!’ said Roland.
Joanna said ‘Don’t worry about them now I’ll get one of the nurses to place them in a vase later.’
‘Do you want me to visit you tomorrow?’
‘Yes please!’
The bell went to signify that visiting hours were at an end and Roland kissed Joanna on her forehead and wished her better. Jo pulled on Roland’s tie towards her and she said quietly, kiss me properly Roland and he did.
‘I have been seeing Jo ever since and I thought it would be nice to share my good news with my friends.’
‘It’s about time you came back to life again. We all thought…..well we all thought that….that you were going to do something drastic by ending your own life, after losing your wife Marianne,’ said one of his guests.
Roland said he had been thinking along those lines the morning he went shopping. He had decided to give up on life after losing his wife who was expecting their first child at a time.