‘So what did Sarah do?’ asked Mrs Miller.
‘She was part of it. Do you understand? I’m not allowed. Cows are sacred. She wanted them to do it.’
Miss Bissett turned to Mrs Miller. ‘Are you going to let him talk to you like that, Jane?’
‘I’m sure Satish isn’t trying to be rude,’ said Mrs Miller, tilting her head to one side. ‘I think it’s all got a bit much, with the party and everything. You ate beef, Satish. It’s scarcely the crime of the century.’
‘Beef is forbidden! And it was raw!’
Miss Bissett winced, but Mr Brecon said: ‘Boys will be boys, Satish.’
‘I think you’ll survive,’ said Mr Chandler. He smiled round at the other adults. ‘And you know what?’ He leaned down to Satish’s level, dropping his voice. ‘There’s a reason boys like you get messed about by boys like them. Show them a bit of backbone. A bit less snivelling. Then they’ll leave you alone.’
Behind him, Stephen mimed vomiting. Colette was staring at Sarah. She was still staring as the three older children turned and made off down the street, away from the adults.
‘Right,’ said Mrs Miller. ‘Peter: car. Don and Ed: table. Verity, why don’t you go home and put your feet up? We’ll sort this out. Pam, I’ll get a bag for us to put that glass in.’ She gave Satish an admonishing nod and headed back to her own house.
‘Come on, out of the way,’ said Mrs Hobbes. She led Satish onto the pavement opposite and Mr Brecon started up the car. Next to them, the men righted the table. Satish could hear Mr Hobbes telling Mr Chandler:
‘You’ll always have problems with an 850. Rustbucket.’
‘You OK, Satish?’ asked Mrs Hobbes
‘No, I’m not OK! It was horrible and wrong and no one cares! I don’t know what to do.’
‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Right now.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
In his relief Satish sagged against her, put both arms round her and tucked his head under her chin. He let her stroke his hair and he didn’t care how childish he looked, or what people might think.
‘You and I are going to go back to my house.’
‘OK.’
‘We’re going to sit you down and get you a cup of something hot, maybe find you a flapjack.’
‘OK. Yes.’
‘And you’re going to calm down and get settled so that you’re ready to enjoy this lovely party.’
‘What?’
She tutted and ruffled his hair. ‘You daft h’a’porth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You silly boy. I know the Chandlers are awful.’ She said it quietly, Mr Chandler just a few feet from them. ‘They’re awful boys, but you’re tougher than that. It’s only a bit of beef.’
‘It is not!’
‘Come on, Satish. It’s time to calm down. You know what they’re like. They’ll have their fun and move on. Now, let’s get a bite to eat?’
Satish knew now that he wouldn’t go to her house or anyone else’s. Only his own. He broke out of her enclosing arms and walked away. He heard her call his name but he kept on going, away from the site of the accident, where Miss Bissett’s little blue car was inching into the driveway.
He walked back down the length of the table towards home, between a line of closed front doors and the endless repetitions of the Union Jack. The flags fluttered above him; the table beside him was a streak of red, white and blue. People would sit here and laugh together. They’d drink Ribena and Coke and eat burgers and jelly and fruitcake. That’s what the adults were preparing for. He glanced back at them: industrious and good-humoured, calling out to each other, making jokes. They had forgotten him already.
He walked and he could hear English sounds: a lawnmower in someone’s back garden, a radio station jingle from a transistor. Drawing level with Cai’s house, he was hit by the smell of smoke, of beef cooking. There was a small billow drifting over Mr Brecon’s garage, over his own, and dissipating above his garden.
Satish couldn’t go in just yet. He felt it expand around him, huge and oblivious: the street, the village, England itself. And in every street in England, the same food, the same flags, the same celebration, and none of it had anything to do with him. They couldn’t move on again. This was it: there was only England, nowhere else to go, only this village, and this street, and Satish here alone in it.
The beef taste was fading a little. When he got inside he’d scrub out his mouth. Lots of toothpaste and hot water, swill with mouthwash and try to get that oiliness out of him. He would work at it for as long as it took. He would scour it out of him for good.
Chapter 30
Satish scrubs himself clean – his nails, his hands, his arms. He’s the last to arrive. They’re waiting for him in the cath lab. He can see them through the glass-panelled doors: the patient out cold and wired up, Charles attending to him. Jac Timms, the radiographer, chats to Clare Munroe. They wear, as he does, a surgical mask and bouffant cap: part robber, part dinner lady. Mediated by the mask, everything they say will be softened, muffled.
Softened and muffled. He’s finally upped his dose, and he can’t imagine why he held off for so long. The best night’s sleep he’s had in weeks, and this morning, everything seems mellow. Adrift on a diazepam sea, this ritual – the painstaking scrubbing, hands held up, water draining down his arms – anchors him.
When he enters, elbows first, Charles nods towards him. Clare is singing something in falsetto, making Jac laugh.
Dance, dance, dance …
She shimmies in her scrubs, hands held out in front of her.
‘Morning, Clare.’
She stops singing. ‘Morning,’ she says. Jac adjusts the plates of the X-ray machine.
‘So,’ says Satish. ‘We have Moustafa Saad. Pulmonary stenosis, previous valvuloplasty. Here today for a catheter study. Charles?’
‘He’s fine,’ confirms Charles.
Moustafa is seven. Satish lifts his hospital gown to prepare him for the procedure; he paints pink antiseptic onto him, to the left of his groin, then drapes him in green, exposing a window of skin.
‘It’s Mike’s wedding party on Saturday,’ Jac says. ‘His send-off.’
‘Yes,’ says Charles. ‘There was an email.’
‘A secret one. You know he’s not to be told?’
‘OK. I’ll keep schtum.’
‘Can you all keep schtum, please?’ asks Satish.
They fall silent. Satish knows they’ll exchange glances once his head’s down. He doesn’t care. He’s going to burrow through this child’s vein towards his heart. He’s going to learn what’s going on in there, the things you can’t see even on an echo: the pressures in the chambers, the balance it’s held in.
‘Clare?’ he says. ‘Covered needle, please.’
The ventilator marks time with its piston-breaths. Charles’ stool squeaks as he turns on it. Satish watches his own hands push the needle into the femoral vein.
‘You hear all that bollocks about how they started going out?’ asks Jac, eyes on the monitor.
‘The cycling thing?’ says Clare. ‘No, it’s true. I heard it from his fiancée at the Christmas do.’
‘Go on,’ says Charles. ‘I’m always out of the loop.’
Satish is having trouble with the introducer. It should fit nicely into the vein, opening a path for the guide wire, the catheter and its little passenger, the transducer, which will make its way to the heart and send back dispatches. Something’s wrong, though: it won’t slip in. He can’t work out whether it’s a problem with the vein or the equipment. Nothing’s moving the way it should.
‘So,’ says Clare. ‘She meets him at a conference. She decides she fancies him. She finds out he’s this keen cyclist, where his club is …’
‘OK.’
‘And she joins. Only, she isn’t a cyclist at all.’
‘Come on! This is classic Mike,’ says Jac.
‘Seriously,’ Clare assu
res her. ‘She’s barely even cycled to the shops. She buys all new gear: new bike, new clothes, that Lycra stuff. She distresses it in the washing machine so it looks used—’
‘Clare, could we have quiet, please?’ It comes out sharper than Satish would like, but they’re distracting him. ‘And could you move, please? You’re a little close.’
He sees Clare glancing at Jac, but she moves anyway and that was the problem, obviously, because now the introducer goes in quite smoothly, and he’s ready to start. ‘Four French,’ he says, and she comes near again, and passes him the catheter.
There’s purposeful movement in the room now, and Satish is happier with that: Charles is attending to the patient; Jac is making sure the angle of the X-ray camera is right. The catheter’s moving, too: unseen up the vein, towards the heart. He pushes it along the wet darkness, feeling the resistance and give of its progress against his fingers.
‘All right,’ he tells Jac. ‘We’ll need that X-ray on, please.’
A few seconds later, the catheter reaches the right atrium. He can see it on screen, a filament of white in the dark of the chamber. On his other monitor the numbers are in rhythmic flux, rising and falling with the contractions of the heart. Right atrial pressure’s at four.
Beside him, Clare is the only one not occupied, and that stupid song is still in her brain, he’s sure, because out of the corner of his eye he can see her fingers tapping against each other. And now he’s in the right ventricle: pressure twenty-five over four.
He needs to twist the catheter round its hairpin bend, up into the pulmonary artery: there’s a knack to it, but it takes concentration and he can’t focus, not with this constant disturbance in his field of vision.
‘Clare, would you mind?’ He nods his head towards her twitching fingers and she stills them.
He turns the catheter at his end and sends a twisting ripple up its length. He watches the screen, waiting for it to arrive in the heart. Nothing for a few seconds, the transducer unmoving against the ventricle wall. Then it curls round and noses upwards into the pulmonary artery.
‘How are those pressures looking?’ says Jac.
He looks at the numbers pumping away on the screen. Pressure: twenty-three over thirteen. And the previous ones were …
‘How’s he looking, Satish?’ says Charles.
‘Hang on.’ He lines them up in his head, but it takes a moment to make sense of them. He needs to get this right.
‘His heart function’s good,’ he says eventually. ‘The pressures are stable. He won’t need another intervention.’ He begins to retract the catheter. Out of the heart and back down the femoral vein: its homeward run.
‘Distressed Lycra,’ says Charles.
‘Yes,’ says Clare. ‘She goes along but she hates it. Absolutely hates it. But she gets her man, and then she doesn’t know how to break it to him, and they’ve only been going out a few months – wet weekends up hills, stuff like that. Hold on …’
Clare stops talking and moves to Satish’s side again, ready to hand him what he needs. The catheter comes out, tracing worm-lines of blood on the drape. Nearly there. He can have a cup of tea soon, clear some paperwork.
‘I hope he’s worth it,’ says Charles.
Clare clears her throat. ‘Anyway. They book a cycling holiday in the Pyrenees, she agrees to it but is dreading it. At the last minute something big comes up here and he tells her they have to cancel. She really turns it on: oh, I’m so upset! I couldn’t wait for that holiday!, that sort of thing …’
Satish only knows there’s something wrong when he sees the blood. It’s pouring out of the catheter site, and he’s sitting there with the introducer in his hand. He’s ripped it right out of the vein, just tugged it out. He didn’t even realise it was about to exit.
He grabs a pad of gauze and presses it to the bleeding.
‘Right, that’s done then,’ he says. Clare’s still talking (he catches pouring with rain, halfway up … he proposes. Charles laughs). How much has Clare seen? There’s always some blood at the puncture site – five minutes of compression at least, the nurse handling it more often than not. But this is different; there’s blood round the edges of the gauze, red soaking up through the top layers already.
‘Might need a bit more gauze,’ he tells Clare, and when she goes to fetch it he takes a look underneath. There’s a haematoma. It’s huge, the size of his palm, and bulging under the skin. He must have nicked the femoral artery. The wound keeps bleeding. He changes pads.
‘You want me to compress?’ she asks.
‘No. I’ll do it.’
The other three have stopped talking, and now that they have, Satish wishes the gossip had continued. Because now there’s just him, and them looking his way.
‘Clare,’ says Charles. ‘I think I might give him a bit of extra analgesia. Can you pull out some rectal diclofenac for me?’
Satish can’t work out how this happened. He lost concentration for just a second, that was all it took. He was focused on it and then … Was it Clare, fidgeting and distracting him?
She goes to the drugs cupboard. ‘Just don’t ask for morphine. You’re on your own.’
Satish changes pads again, keeps the pressure on the wound, willing the blood to coagulate. He’ll send Moustafa back to the ward but that won’t be the end of it; nurses don’t miss haematomas. For now, he’d be grateful to leave this room with his mistake undetected. Ten more minutes of compressing and it’ll be all right. It will. Then he can take something to steady himself.
‘There a morphine problem?’ says Charles.
‘A controlled medicines problem.’ Clare passes the diclofenac to him. ‘Sheila’s pure raging about it.’
‘It’ll be cock-up, not conspiracy,’ says Jac. ‘It’s always cock-up.’
Satish makes himself hold still. It might not be that. It might not be him.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asks, watching the gauze soak red.
‘I don’t know,’ says Clare. ‘Sheila thinks something’s gone missing. There’s a memo.’ (‘There’s always a bloody memo,’ mutters Jac.) ‘Anyway, we’ve got to follow strict protocol.’
‘It was rife at my last place,’ puts in Charles.
Satish’s face, his body, his hands. They are all giving him away. He is a sign advertising his own guilt. They can all see it. He doesn’t want to move, to attract attention. And then he tells himself: no, keep moving or they’ll notice. Get the job done. He reaches for another pad.
‘What does she think’s gone missing?’ he says.
‘I don’t know. She’s going to do a stock-take later this week. Then there’ll be another memo …’
Jac is moving the arms of the X-ray machine back from the patient, preparing to leave.
‘Why does she think there’s something missing?’
‘Dunno,’ Clare tells him.
But Satish knows. He imagines an envelope on Sheila’s desk, a note inside. A hint, a nudge in the right direction.
‘I’m off,’ says Jac.
Did the note name him? Surely not. What good would that do? But if he backs out of the reunion, will there be another one, pointing the finger right at him?
‘This one’s taking a while,’ he tells Clare. ‘More gauze?’ He sees Charles look at the blood, the catheter, him.
‘Strict bloody protocol,’ mutters Clare.
‘Yeah, and mind you obey it,’ says Jac, on her way out. ‘Or I’ll tell on you.’
Satish looks up. There’s something …
‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Clare. ‘If you think you’re hard enough.’
Satish’s mouth opens, involuntarily. It’s come to him like a gift, unlooked-for. He knows who his blackmailer is.
Chapter 31
The last time the Chandlers took him, he didn’t even care. It was quick: Satish sitting on his back step, tongue roaming his mint-bleached mouth, checking the crevices for anything he’d missed. They came in the open back gate, not even checking for Satish�
�s parents first.
Paul grabbed a handful of Satish’s hair and pulled him across his driveway into Cai’s garden. No Cai there. Satish felt the scorch of the barbecue across his side and face; the air around it was solid with heat.
‘We’re going to show you what we do to fucking snitches,’ said Stephen, and he pulled back his fist.
Satish looked at him. ‘Go on, then,’ he said.
Stephen faltered. He looked around him, and his gaze came to rest on the barbecue. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘Is that what you want? Hold him, Paulie.’
Satish searched Cai’s window: blank. But next to it, in Colette’s room, he saw a face. Colette was transfixed, hovering behind the glass, her mouth open. Go, thought Satish. Go and play. I don’t want you to see what happens next.
Paul pushed him up against the fence and moved his hand round to change his hold on Satish. He used his thumb to push up Satish’s T-shirt sleeve. Stephen came towards them with something that flashed silver …
And then the sound turns off in Satish’s memory and he’s twisting in Paul’s grasp, and he knows he’s shouting but the noise of it is blocked out by the wall of pain in his arm. His body folds up, he pukes on the grass and the Chandlers step away from him. He’s on his knees because he can’t stand up. The hot tongs fall. There’s a smell: it’s him, the smell of barbecue coming off him. His arm is huge; it’s all pain. When sound fades in again he hears himself too, the formless crying-out.
Satish looked up and Cai was there, coming towards him.
‘Get out of my fucking garden!’ he shouted, and then he stopped.
He looked at Satish down on the ground, at the puddle of sick next to him. He looked at the Chandlers. Satish pushed himself to his feet, cast round for something that might help and found himself looking at Mr Brecon.
He was looking out of the French windows at the back, just a few steps away from Satish. Reflected in the glass, Satish saw the Chandlers watching, saw Cai turn and notice his father. Mr Brecon stood as if braced for a fight: arms at his sides, fists clenched. He could see what was happening but he made no move to stop it.
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