“No, thanks,” I said, not wanting to put her to any trouble. There was a chair like the one in the other waiting room. I could sleep in that.
“I’m waiting to see someone from Palliative Care,” she said. “They should come along soon and explain what’s going to happen.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“If you have any questions . . .” she said. “Anything at all?”
I should have had a hundred questions, but for now I couldn’t think of anything. She put the tea down on the cabinet that separated the comfy chair from Mum’s bed.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “I know that’s a silly question, sorry.”
“Hm?” I looked up at her.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. She put a hand on my arm. “These things do happen, you know—awful things. It’s hard to come to terms with sometimes.”
“I guess so.”
She was so kind; I felt tears starting. I ran a hand through my hair. My scalp felt itchy, my hair lank. “Thank you,” I said.
After that the nurse left, and it was just Mum and me.
I slept for a few minutes at a time, upright in the chair. I must have slept properly at one point because when I woke up someone had put a blanket around me. I closed my eyes again and when I opened them it was almost daylight. The blinds were drawn but there was light coming through them.
Mum hadn’t moved. I stretched and moved the blanket to one side, then eased myself up out of the chair. I felt dizzy for a moment. Then when it passed I hobbled stiffly over to the window and pulled the hanging blind to one side to look out over the parking lot in the back. There were spaces. It was a gray day, dark clouds overhead. The trees at the far end of the parking lot were moving, so it must have been windy.
I went back to the chair.
At seven o’clock I went downstairs and out through Reception into the fresh air. There was still a crowd around the smoking area. I wondered if it was the same people. My phone had just enough battery left for me to leave a message for Bill and another one for Kate. Then I went back upstairs to Mum’s room. Nothing had changed.
At about nine o’clock I went for a walk through the hospital. It was bustling now, people walking up and down the halls with a purpose. Hospital beds, people pulling relatives backward in those rear-wheel-drive wheelchairs, kids in strollers. I went to the café near the front entrance but the smell of food made me feel queasy, so I went into the shop and bought a bottle of water and a bag of hard candies. That would do.
I walked all the way down one hall, past the clinics, past X-ray, down to Oncology and the double doors at the end. Then I turned around and walked all the way back. After that I gave up and went back upstairs to the Stroke Unit.
At half past ten a woman from Palliative Care finally came to see me. She was a nurse but dressed in smart pants and a green sweater, a chunky necklace. By that time I think the news had sunk in that Mum was going to die. The sound of her breathing had changed, too. The snoring got louder and then gradually it seemed to quiet down for a while, before changing to a regular, short gasp.
“The morphine drip will make her more comfortable,” the nurse said. “She’s just in a very deep sleep right now.”
“How long will she be like this?” I asked.
“It’s difficult to say,” she said. “It might be a day or two, maybe less. But not long. Is there anyone you need to call?”
I’d forgotten about my cousin, but what would be the point of telling her now? I hadn’t spoken to her in years.
“No,” I said.
Eventually she left. Another hour and a half went by. It was technically lunchtime, so I opened the bag of sweets and had several. I was contemplating more when there was a brief, sharp knock at the door and two nurses came in, wearing aprons and gloves.
“We’re just going to change your mum,” one of them said. “Make her comfortable.”
“Oh, shall I go?”
“Might be best. We won’t be long.”
I went into the waiting room where I’d been in the middle of the night. The television was on in the corner, some lunchtime talk show I’d never seen. I sat down and watched without paying any attention at all. I was thinking about work, and the cat.
Half an hour later I went back to my mother’s room, and the nurses were gone. I went out to the nurses’ station again. This time three of them were sitting there with cups of tea.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said.
“That’s all right. Don’t worry,” said the nearest. She was the one who’d come in to sort Mum out.
“I wondered if it’s OK if I go home for a while,” I said. “I need to feed the cat . . .”
“Of course!” the nurse said. “And why don’t you have a shower, get something to eat, too? I can call you if anything happens.”
On my way out, I walked past the smokers, my head down, hoping that nobody would notice my distress. I needn’t have worried. Even though there were clearly some seriously ill people in the group, the general atmosphere among them seemed to be one of hilarity.
I was concentrating so hard on the pavement that I didn’t notice the man ahead of me until I walked into the back of him. He turned and caught me by the elbow as I went over on my ankle and half fell into the ambulance bay at the front entrance. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was—”
“Annabel?”
I looked up in surprise. For a moment I was lost and looked at him in confusion.
“Sam,” he said. “We met yesterday?”
Yesterday? It felt like years ago. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course. I’m sorry. It’s been—a long day.”
“Is everything OK?” he asked, nodding toward the hospital’s main entrance.
“My mother—she had a fall.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Is she all right?”
She’s dying, I thought. I tasted the words, like bile, couldn’t say them. “She’s unconscious,” I said. “I was just going home.” I started to turn back in the direction of the parking lot, ignoring the sharp pain in my ankle. It was fine I told myself; it wasn’t a bad twist. I just needed to walk it off. Then I remembered my manners.
“What about you?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s been a really, really crazy couple of days. I’m just waiting for a taxi but I think it would have been quicker to walk.”
“I’ll give you a lift,” I said, before I could help myself. “Where are you going?”
“Just back into town,” he said. “Keats Road.”
“I don’t know where that is. You’ll have to direct me,” I said, walking back toward the parking lot.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m really glad you ran into me now.”
I was trying not to hobble.
“Are you OK? You’re limping.”
“I’m fine,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Really. I just turned my ankle a little.”
“Here,” he said, offering me his arm.
“Really, I’m fine.”
He gave me a “suit yourself” shrug and shoved his hands back into his jacket pockets. I could see the parking lot ahead, full of cars driving around slowly waiting for someone to come out of a space so they could grab it before someone else did.
I found my keys and opened the door, easing myself into the driver’s seat. It was chilly inside. I reached across and unlocked the other side. Other than my mother, nobody had sat in the passenger seat until now.
I started the engine and put the heaters on full blast to try and get the windshield cleared enough for me to drive off.
“So,” he said, “did Andrew Frost tell you what happened to me yesterday?”
“No,” I said. “What happened?”
“I had a phone call at work yesterday, just when I was about to go home. It was a woman’s voice, but she sounded odd—distant—I don’t know. Anyway, she told me there was another body, and then she gave me the address.”
�
�What did you do?”
“I checked it out.”
“And?”
“Then I called your people.”
“You found someone?”
“Yes. Well—I got to the house, had a look through the window, and then phoned the police. I’ve just spent the last three hours at the hospital trying to get information out of the mortuary team, but the person I usually speak to happens to be on vacation. So they’re understaffed in there and none of them is that interested in talking to a reporter, of course . . . So I’m none the wiser.”
“What did you see? When you looked through the window?”
“Not much. I could see what looked like a leg, sticking out from behind a chair. Actually I only realized it was a leg because it had a slipper on it. It was a funny color. The leg was I mean. The slipper was . . . dark red . . . with a kind of white snowflake pattern . . .”
“Well,” I said, “you’d make an excellent witness, anyway. I’m sure they’ll be asking you what the slipper looked like.”
Sam laughed, briefly. “I was trying not to look at the leg.”
The thought of it must have made the corners of my mouth turn up, just a little, because Sam said, “You should smile more often.”
My face dropped then. I shouldn’t be smiling at all. What was I thinking? And what did he mean, exactly? It felt as if I was being flirted with, and the not knowing—I could never tell these things—made me uncomfortable.
He must have seen my reaction, and he fell silent. The windshield was clearer now, so I turned on the lights and backed out of the parking space.
“Thank you for the lift,” he said at last. “My car’s in for its inspection. I was going to get a courtesy car but that didn’t happen, and since I was supposed to be in the office all day I didn’t think it would matter. I got a taxi down here.”
I wasn’t really listening to him. We were at the traffic lights, waiting to turn onto the main road back to town.
“What’s the matter?”
“Hm? Nothing.”
“You seem distracted.”
“I’m just tired. I’ve been at the hospital all night.”
“It sounds serious.”
“Yes, I think it is. I’m just going home to feed the cat and get a change of clothes. Then I’ll be coming back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Annabel. You know, you really don’t need to bother with the lift. I can always wait for the taxi . . .”
“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
“Having contacts makes such a difference,” he said. “I’ve got some really good friends now through this job, you know. It’s not all about getting the story; it’s about building relationships with people so they trust you. People are suspicious when they find out you’re a reporter; if you’re nice to them they think you’re only doing it because you want to print intimate details about their lives. I don’t know what sort of newspaper they think the Chronicle is, for heaven’s sake . . .”
The town center was busy, the lunchtime rush. A gray autumn day. The lights seemed to be taking forever to change.
“But I don’t work like that. I mean it’s nice if people do tell me things, but they don’t get that the information I need is usually something really specific. Even if they give me a quote, the chances are I’m only ever going to use a few words of it. It’s just a job, after all, like any other job . . .”
The traffic moved again and I drove through the town center and out the other side, heading for the development where all the roads were named after poets, my mind on other things.
“It all gets easier when you’ve got proper contacts, though—people who know you and trust that you’re not going to make them look like an idiot in print. I just like talking to people, making new friends . . . You probably noticed . . .”
We drove along the main road, the side streets one after the other named after people I’d learned about at school about a hundred years ago. Longfellow Drive. Wordsworth Avenue. Keats Road . . .
“It’s this next one,” he said.
I turned left. We drove along a wide road: semidetached houses, big bay windows, neat front yards edged with low brick walls. It was starting to rain.
“Just after this blue car,” he said. “This one.”
I pulled in. It was a normal-looking house, bigger than mine, with a porch. For a moment I thought it was quite big and maybe journalists earned more than I thought they did, and then I realized he probably still lived with his parents, like lots of young people these days who couldn’t get a foot on the housing ladder.
“Look,” he said. “You want to come in for a coffee? You look as if you could do with one. I could make you some lunch?”
“Thanks, but I really need to go home.”
He made no signs of undoing his seat belt or leaving my car. For a moment I had a sudden spark of fear, and wondered if he’d invited me in for something more than coffee. I was so bad at reading situations like this: my default position was always that nobody found me sexually attractive and therefore anyone who showed an interest in me was probably dangerous.
He half turned in his seat toward me. I shrank back a little toward the door.
“Look,” he said. “Can I give you a call later? Just to see how you’re doing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My battery’s nearly out.”
“Oh, right,” he said, looking at me as if he wanted to ask if I’d ever heard of magic things called chargers. At last he unhooked his seat belt and opened the door. “See you soon, then,” he said, leaning in. “And thanks for the lift.”
“Bye.”
As soon as he slammed the door shut I pulled away from the curb.
There was nowhere to park, of course, anywhere near the house. I walked back from Howard Street, head down, thinking about my mother. It was all I could think about now. Whatever he’d said—Sam—it had failed to register.
I could see the cat standing at the corner. Her tail flashing from side to side—in greeting or petulance—it was hard to tell. When I got closer she stood and waited for me as though she’d reached the edge of her known universe and to cross the road was beyond her, sliding her body affectionately against the greasy metal pole of the streetlight, territory marked by a hundred dogs before her.
“Hello, puss-puss,” I said quietly, and she meowed in response, rubbing against my ankle as soon as she could and then running in front of me, rolling on the ground and running again, showing me the way home. As we got through the door she scampered joyously toward the kitchen.
But it turned out she’d gotten takeout: a dead mouse, neatly dissected with the most succulent innards, tail and feet left for me to enjoy.
I woke up completely disorientated. I was on my bed, fully dressed, and the cat was asleep in the crook of my knees. It was ten past three and the daylight was fading already. I sat up quickly and checked my cell phone, which I’d left charging by my bed. There were no missed calls.
I called the hospital from my cell, and when I finally got through to someone on the Stroke Unit they couldn’t tell me very much beyond that my mother was “comfortable”; there was “no change.” I said I would come in as soon as I could, and the nurse—or whoever she was—told me to take my time.
I asked again if they would call me if anything happened. Even though she claimed to have my cell phone number on file, I gave it to her again and she repeated it back slowly enough to be writing it down.
After that I sat still for a moment, wondering what was coming next. The central heat had gone off and the air felt chilly, a little damp. It was as though the house didn’t want me to be here either, was pushing me toward the door, a phantom hand on my back trying to restore order to an environment where there was none.
Downstairs, the cat was in the hall, meowing at the kitchen door and pulling at the carpet with her claws. I creaked my way down the stairs, yawning, and when I opened the door the cat shot in ahead of me, mewli
ng at me over her shoulder as though she hadn’t eaten in weeks. For a treat I squeezed a packet of expensive wet cat food into her clean bowl even though it wasn’t technically anywhere near her usual feeding time, and boiled the kettle while she went at it delicately, licking at the gravy and then picking the morsels off one by one.
While I was waiting for the kettle I called work, using Kate’s direct line to bypass the switchboard.
“Intel, Kate speaking.”
There was an official Media Services–sanctioned greeting to use when answering the phone, but neither of us could ever remember it when put under the pressure of a ringing phone. More often than not I was so distracted when I picked up a call that I would just say “Hello?” and hope it wasn’t someone too official on the other end of the phone.
“It’s me,” I said. “Annabel.” In case she’d forgotten who I was.
“Are you OK? How’s your mum?”
“She’s still unconscious.”
“Do you need me to talk to Bill?”
“No, I need to get on with stuff. They said they’d call me if—you know, if there was any change.”
“Frosty was looking for you earlier.”
“Oh?”
“Wouldn’t tell me what it was about. Said could you go and see him as soon as you get in. Want me to tell him you won’t be in for a while?”
“No, I should be in . . . um . . . soon. I’ll let you know.” I didn’t want her to think I was slacking. I didn’t want to give her any cause to complain about my work ethic, or for that matter to start taking over any of my responsibilities.
“Something’s definitely going on with your rotting corpses, you know. There’s been people coming in and out all day looking for you.”
“Really?”
“They don’t tell me anything.”
I had a sudden memory of the reporter—Sam—telling me about a phone call he’d received, and I was about to blurt it out to Kate when I realized I wasn’t supposed to have been talking to a reporter, never mind giving him a lift home. What was it he’d said? Some woman had phoned him. “Have they found another body?”
“Well, there’s one on the Chief’s Summary this morning. Shall I get Frosty to call you?”
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