It's a long way down to the bottom of the river (Josie)
Josie woke up gasping for air.
There was none to gasp for - only water - and her body convulsed in the effort to expel it from her lungs, but each time she coughed she gasped in again afterwards - and more of the water, ice cold, rushed in.
The second time it was the pain that woke her. Vicious. It came from everywhere, the screaming of the muscles in her arm indistinguishable from the sick pain in her back and the burning cold of every bit of her skin. Worst were her lungs - all her fear and adrenaline was focused on her lungs as she rasped in air - and more water - and coughed and coughed till she passed out again from the pain.
A third time she woke up, only aware of the cold and the pain, and it took a while before she realised that she was no longer being dragged under and upside down and head over heels; that though she had to fight for breath she could tell which way was up, because her head was up, because it was half above the surface of the water.
Her arm had tangled in a mass of plastic netting, which was tangled around the wooden support of a jetty, so the current was struggling to free her body from the little island of trash. Josie groped for purchase with her other hand and pulled herself another couple of inches out of the water, her face resting against something solid and dark. It didn't matter if it was trash, it was solid, and she could breathe, and for another few long moments as she coughed and coughed - inhaled rain - coughed some more - threw up - and kept coughing - the fact that whatever she was gripping was solid was all that mattered.
She was so terribly cold. Josie lifted her head to look up, at the wood rising out of the water in front of her, at the concrete wall of the Thames, and almost gave up immediately because there was no way she still had the strength to climb out. She couldn't even think how she'd start to go about it... free her wrist from the tangle and then, what? Bodily pull herself out of the water using what as a handhold?
But she turned her wrist anyway, twisting it to get it free, and felt a wild jolt of victory as she did - and immediately lost her grip with her other hand and despair crashed over her as the water took her, again. She thrashed, twisted, realised that the southern legs of the jetty were in front of her only a second before she hit them, and managed to cling desperately on.
She was so fucking scared, all of a sudden. But there was strength to be found in her panic and she clamped her fingers hard around the thick rope, solid with salt, that was twisted around the pole.
Her body was ice, her lungs full of water. She'd clung on and thrown up, she'd held on so hard her hands screamed in pain. This was worse than crocodile infested waters. This was worse than anything she could image.
She reached one stiff arm high out of the water until her fingers found something else to hold onto, her muscles screamed in pain so loudly she did, too. And then her other arm came up and her back hurt unbelievably, it was only the fear of falling back into the water that drew her up, till her torso was out.
She hung there like a tortured limpet for several long moments before she managed to summon her wings. It was the hardest flight she'd ever attempted, just to get herself the rest of the way out of the water and up, over the wall, before collapsing in a sodden pile on the solid ground. The pain of her cold body hitting the cold round had her sob out loud, and it took a long time to convince her body that getting back to her feet (and risking falling again) was the next essential step in survival.
She would have simply called an ambulance and lain there on the ground waiting for someone to come and pick her up, but her phone was worse off than she was. Of course it hadn't survived.
Unbearable slowly, Josie pulled herself to her feet, using the wall, and put one foot in front of the other, beginning her walk back upstream. Moving hurt every part of her body, and Josie was crying, partially because of the pain but mostly from relief, that she could move, that she wasn't fighting the river any longer.
For a long time - she had no idea how long, each step was excruciatingly - she walked and walked and walked, trying to make her way back to the point she'd entered the river, because there was Stephie and Matt and an ambulance and in the ambulance a stretcher. It didn't occur to her that they would all be long gone, she was too cold and too sore for such thoughts.
She just walked, too cold to even think about how she had failed.