The thudding whine of the drill … the third hole in the bone. She would not, could not faint away, and all William could wish for her was the mercy of oblivion. He was pausing too much, going too slow, his lack of dedication becoming obvious. John Smith was impatient, beginning to move about, and it occurred to William how pointless was all this deployment of skill. They were still going to tread on his hands, and he had the added, tired fear that at any moment now John would seize the drill himself, that all the careful watching was only for the purpose of establishing how it worked. He would push the dentist out of the way, activate the machine in the way he had learned through his close observation, drill through the incisors, shatter the exposed roots … or he would grab the scalpel and lace her face with wounds. That would be true disfigurement; this, so far, was not. John began to prowl, stood behind William, breathing down his neck. William’s coat was soaked with perspiration, his hair wet, his hands slippery. From the fat man, now standing at Sarah’s feet, there rose a stench of vomit.
‘I think we could do with a drink,’ John Smith said, and moved towards the door. ‘You’re playing games with me, Mr Dentist. You know that?’
‘Games?’ William screamed. ‘Games?’ He pointed at the hideous mouth. ‘Look at what you’ve made me do.’
John Smith shook his head, reached towards his top pocket for the key. ‘You wait until I start. Then no-one will want her back.’
Cannon lit the fuse.
14
The sound of an explosion always brought tears to his eyes: jubilation, of a kind, to a toddling boy; later, in his early teens, they were the tears that mourned anticlimax, a touch of regret, until finally they became tears of horror that it was now too late to stop it. Cannon’s forefingers were firmly wedged in his ears, but the blast still shook his feet, his knees, his skinny ribcage, and the tears followed through eyes squeezed shut against the flash. There was always the desire, again as a child on a piece of wasteland, to run towards the sound immediately, until he learned better the wisdom of waiting to see what the first flash did. The flash and the flame were worse on his side of the door, the sound of splintering wood lost in the settling of the debris and that sudden, wonderful silence. There would be fires; he remembered the surgery and its mostly metallic contents and tiled floor. Then he remembered wooden-framed pictures on the reception walls: he had forgotten the vulnerability of those.
The dense smoke was grey white in colour; thicker than the mist of dawn, but penetrable. There was a crackle of flame, the tinkle of glass from a window he could not see. The light-bulb central to the reception area remained intact and burning. Something else was burning, with a sickly, oily smell. Cannon stumbled towards the surgery door.
A huge, squat figure emerged, screaming, tripping into the crater left by the bomb, stumbling ankle deep into the hole, the body falling forward, saved by the hands. Then he was crawling until he was upright, arms thrashing a passage through the smoke so that Cannon could feel the draught of his progress across the room to the outer door, howling as he went, like a drunk baying for the moon. He could hear him shaking the door, the howling turning to sobbing, the door released and the flat footsteps running away. A survivor, then. A ludicrous, unbidden thought crept into Cannon’s mind about how Johnnyboy never could keep the hired help. How he might have enjoyed this.
Then he was shouting himself, standing on the threshold, avoiding the hole and the shattered door, screaming, ‘William! Sarah! William!’ The far window had gone: there was splintered wood, the lights in here still burning; the intense heat of an oven and the spotlight over the dental chair shining down the blessing of Siemens. The aspirator still gurgled.
Cannon’s brother lay at the furthest end of the room, in a straight line from the door, tidily out of the way. Cannon noted the figure on the floor, familiar even in the smoke; familiar from any angle. He looked for William, who stood like a long thin rag doll, hands loose against his side, back against the wall around the corner, his whole body numb. Cannon shook him, the response was nil, shook him again, harder, and then slapped him across the face. William prised himself away from the wall, his eyes beginning to focus on Cannon’s face, then on the rest of the room, then on Sarah. Cannon followed his roving glance. Bile rose in his throat. Both of them were covered in blood, Sarah’s mouth a wound clamped open, her lap a repository for blood. The bomb – no, the blast did not go round corners. The bomb had not done this. William had done this.
‘Christ, Jesus …’ He moved, in some instinctive attempt to block Sarah from William’s sight. William came back to life, snarling, screaming at him, ‘Get out of the way, get out of here,’ pushing Cannon away, pummelling at his chest even before he recognized him.
Cannon retreated, suddenly shivery; watched. He could not go to Johnnyboy, not yet. It was not Johnnyboy he had been trying to save.
‘Get me an icepack, you cretin – now.’
‘Where?’
‘Fridge, behind me – are you blind?’
William was hovering over that dreadful mouth. There was no sound from her, the lip hanging like a foreign object belonging to no known creature. The eyes were closed. He wanted to remove the weighted clamp and the clamp that held the mouth open, close the mouth and let everything rest. No. Scissors; remove suture to free the tongue, no, leave that till last. Bring the flap back up, stitch, and, Christ, in this smoke, the place was rife with infection. Work. Don’t go too fast.
Cannon found the icepack and put it down on her lap. He moved towards the figure on the floor. The smoke was clearing efficiently through the broken window; it blurred rather than ruined his sight, and his eyes still stung. There was a distant sound of sirens. Cannon dreaded going closer. Perhaps only part of Johnny had been in line with the door, not all of him.
‘See what you’ve done, Johnny? See what you’ve done?’ Cannon said, kneeling next to him. The eyes were open, the chest heaving for breath, the clothes torn, a gash in the forehead. The tip of a key was sticking out of his bosom below the left nipple, giving the faint illusion that if it were pulled and turned, he would spring to his feet like a mechanical toy. Such a little key would not kill him. ‘Didn’t mean it, Johnny. Didn’t quite get the mix right, did I?’
The hand, which had been clawing at the groin, reached out, feeling for his own. There was a huge splinter of wood sticking out of the palm. He did not seem to see it. The sirens had grown closer, deafening in a static whine outside. ‘At least somebody noticed, didn’t they, Johnnyboy?’ Cannon said. There was the flicker of a smile.
‘We never did get round to the Houses of Parliament, did we, Johnny?’ He patted the hand ineffectually. ‘Now, don’t die on me, Johnny. Don’t do that. See, no-one else knows me like you. See, we didn’t care about fuck all, did we, Johnny? I’ll be lonely without you. There’ll never be another bastard like you …’
There was a whispered sound from the pursed mouth. Johnnyboy was still hiding his teeth.
‘You won’t want her now, will you?’
‘No, Johnny. No. No. No. I want you.’
Two mattress sutures. Enough to hold it. Stuff the mouth with xylocaine gel … No, benzedrine hydrochloride, good, topical anaesthetic and anti-inflammatory. Release the tongue; unclamp the jaw. Let the lip hold everything in place. Hope the bleeding’ll stop now. Icepack. Trust the mouth to heal. The ambulanceman coming up the stairs would treat for shock. Do everything in the right order, you fool, don’t rush. He slit the ropes with the scalpel, reset the chair to bring her upright, chafed her hands. And all to the sound of Cannon’s keening. There were shouts from the other room.
He took off his filthied jacket, folded her hands, tucked the jacket under her chin for warmth. The heat had faded fast: a damp chill filled the room, smoke drifting from behind him. He stared at her vacant face, wanting to wipe away the blood. No, not yet; too tender to touch.
Cannon’s keening was down to a steady sound, a slow howling of grief.
What to say? He did not k
now what to say; he never knew what to say. I have disgraced everything I ever stood for. Lies would be best for now. William moved to the shattered door and looked beyond. Three masked men in the room, looking like aliens. He noticed how two of them were stamping out small fires. He looked, as he always automatically looked, for Cannon’s picture on the wall, looked again. That was the one smouldering on the floor. He knew it by the remnants of the frame.
He carried her through the clearing smoke. It was dark outside: they would mistake him for a rescuer. No-one was going to admire his technique. She was in the middle of treatment when the bomb went off, that’s what he would say. He set her down on the old dental chair by the basement stairs. He kept his hand over her mouth to make sure the lip stayed closed. She breathed raggedly though her bloodfilled nose. It looked, even to his own eyes, as if he was deliberately trying to stop her from speaking.
She was never going to love him now.
15
On the feast of the conversion of St Paul, three weeks into the New Year, Pauline sat and bowed her head in prayer. The chapel was warm. No-one should be asked to conduct intimate conversations with God in the cold: life was too short for that.
The ability to pray was slow to arrive. It was no use talking to the Creator and expecting Him to direct what she wanted to say into the consciousness of others when more direct communication was required. She could not hold the necessary conversation with God. All she could do was hold imaginary conversations with the human beings she most needed to see and pray for the intervention of the saints to send those people to her door. Her conscience was far from happy. She seemed to have alienated her acquaintance. Sarah, beloved Sarah, who never seemed to know how much she was loved; Julie, who was maintaining the silence peculiar to those who had revealed a little too much of themselves and were ashamed of it. Julie, with her bitter words between the time Cannon had left and the others had arrived, none of them to be believed, because fear and fury made liars of them all. Pauline apologized for her lack of concentration and told the Lord it was just as well He had made her a nun and not a priest. She would never have been able to obey the ultimate strictures of the confessional.
They had been given copious quantities of wine over Christmas. Pauline seemed to have consumed the lion’s share and felt relieved that the supply was not endless. So easy to take to that kind of thing, especially if one had an obsessive disposition. In a minute, she was going to sit in the parlour and smoke a cigarette since in the hierarchy of sins it seemed entirely unimportant. She felt the bridge of her nose, still tender to the touch, the black-eyed bruises no longer more than permanent shadows. Her fine proboscis would remain tender for months. As an excuse for bad habits, it was adequate.
Forgive me, Lord, I betrayed my niece into the hands of sinners. I did it for the best of reasons, namely that she was stronger than the victim they intended to wound. She knew more about life; she was less vulnerable; she was the cleverer. Had there been a chance that they might have taken me instead, I would have gone. You know that, Lord, don’t you? But I told a silent lie, and let my own flesh and blood suffer, and I cannot see any justification for that. Or, more to the point, I do not for the life of me see how she will ever see the justification for that. I have tried to see her, Lord, and she has evaded me. Can I blame her? But I need her, Lord. I cannot carry this burden.
And give me the right words to say to this man. He has even more on his conscience than I.
William sat in the parlour, indifferent to his surroundings. He flexed his hands, extended his arms and held them rigid to see if his fingers still trembled. The tremor was improving, so that he was only noticing what was not visible to anyone else. He doubted it would ever quite go, which would not matter one way or another if the General Medical Council, at the end of their deliberations, should decide he was still fit to practise. Early indications showed a tendency to leniency; there was a shortage of dentists. Sexual misbehaviour alarmed them most, and this particular patient had lived to tell no such tale. Had not only lived but had exonerated him. It was the dentist who had lost his innocence.
Pauline glided into the room at the same time as William began to nudge himself out of his reverie and notice where he was. There were three statues of saints. Perhaps in another life he would collect icons, the better to bless his existence. He thought of the destroyed paintings, drawings and sketches that had occupied the reception-room walls and reflected without regret that the patients had noticed them as little as he had noticed these. Pauline came towards him, looking relieved to see him. Two people, sent to limbo.
‘Don’t call me the inquisitor’s apprentice, will you?’ he said. ‘It’s the kind of description which tends to stick.’
She shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ She inspected him closely, eyes examining for the details of thinning hair, requiring a comb. Longer hair than she remembered, thinner limbs, too, the face gaunt and the hands restless – a man fighting the demons of his own wretchedness. The mere presence of them made her feel stronger. God put her on this earth to do things, not to loll around in a self-indulgent mess of recriminations, and nor should he. She was not going to have it.
‘Do you smoke, William? No? Well, don’t mind if I do. Imelda will bring us some coffee in a minute. Do you know, she doesn’t grind her teeth any more? We’re all very pleased, I can tell you. You did a good job there.’
‘I doubt the connection, but thank you. I’m glad someone’s better for seeing me.’
He was not going to say, Smoking is bad for your teeth. Life was bad for the teeth. The people who smoked managed to stay alive. Cannon’s brother had scarcely smoked, William had been told, and he was the one who was dead. William was suddenly unsure of why he was here but, then, there did not need to be a particular purpose, apart from the critical need of each of them to talk to the other.
‘Are you sure she’ll make a full recovery? They say she has. They tell me things, you see. I’m her only relative so they have to, even though she doesn’t want to see me … but are you sure?’
‘Everything I did was deliberately done to cause minimum long-term damage. The capacity of the mouth for recovery is miraculous. You see, what I did was—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Pauline interrupted. ‘Quite.’ She had considered the detail and did not want it rehearsed.
Silence fell for a minute, until they both began talking at once, both wanting to avoid contemplating the pain. Pauline had knelt in prayer, trying to assume that pain to herself, offering her own injury as inadequate compensation. The problem with prayer was the rarity of seeing the result.
‘Cannon? What about Cannon?’ Her voice prevailed over his, but he had the better information.
‘In his brother’s house, with Julie, for lack of anywhere else. Unhappy – how could he be otherwise? – even though there are compensations. The child – he thinks of the child. He’s on police bail for the explosion, doesn’t know what will happen any more than they do themselves until they’ve done with enquiring. But they found the fat man, you know. Not found, as such. He found them.’
‘Don’t tell me what he said.’
She drew on the cigarette, looked round for the priest’s ashtray. Why them and not her? Imelda whisked into the room with a tray of coffee. Weak and milky, the way William hated it. She dumped it down with a crash, smiled at him warmly, scowled at Pauline and left.
‘We’re a little bored, that’s the truth of it,’ Pauline said. ‘After all the excitement. And Cannon, now. He’ll be relatively rich, I suppose. The brother’s will …’
‘There wasn’t one. He inherits anyway. There’s noone else. He offered to pay for the surgery. I said no.’
She clicked her tongue, stifling the unworthy thought, And perhaps he’d like to make a contribution here, too, a thought that had no place in this conversation but was second nature to anyone like herself, whatever the situation. She had spent her religious life begging shamelessly for things. What she wanted to ask w
as, Do you think she will ever forgive us? and what she asked was, ‘And your surgery? Is that coming along?’
‘Yes. It’s workable. Not beautiful, but workable. Buildings can mend very fast. Like the mouth, given money. I don’t want to work. I desperately don’t want to work. But I have to. I’ve got faithful patients. I don’t want to send them to anyone else and they don’t want to go.’
‘That’s entirely right, William. Couldn’t be more right. That’s exactly what you have to do. Work. And the damage … what about the damage?’
‘Not as bad as it seemed. As Cannon said, he’s good with a bomb.’
‘Not so good. The effect was the last he intended.’
‘Was it?’
There was another lengthy pause, devoted to the sipping of boiling coffee that tasted of nothing, offset, in William’s case, by a sweet digestive biscuit that stuck to his teeth. They were failing to comfort one another; a little awkward.
‘I wonder if she knows how much we love her,’ Pauline said. ‘She never felt able to believe that anyone would or could love her, which is probably why she believes in the safety of numbers and being needed. And fun, of course. Never could believe in being loved after that unfaithful husband of hers … and that sadist and … Never mind. She’ll come round and bounce back. She always does. She’s got a long memory but a great talent for forgiveness.’ She seemed to find that reflection infinitely reassuring.
‘I didn’t know anything much about her history,’ William said wonderingly. ‘I didn’t know much about her at all.’
Pauline glared at him, suddenly changing from the concerned confidante with an equally troubled confessor into a matriarch approached disrespectfully by an unsuitable suitor for the favours of a daughter. ‘Well, you’d better find out, hadn’t you? Go and find her.’
Cannon had thrown everything out of the living room into the back garden. Everything. Julie had not tried to stop him. They would not be here if it were not for her condition: he would have stayed anywhere rather than here, but this last of Johnnyboy’s houses, the one currently occupied, would be free of rot and awash with creature comforts. He had always done that: gutted the bathroom and installed something new, new kitchen, new carpets, for the pleasure of becoming bored with them and moving on to install the same kind of thing all over again. Cannon hated the stultifying warmth of it: he could feel the smell of Johnny in his nostrils, oozing from the pores of his skin; he did not know if he wanted to eradicate it or preserve it. Windows open, both of them used to the cold. Not a stick of furniture left in the room and not a picture either. Julie remained quiet throughout this exercise, helping as help was requested whenever he forgot his constant instructions to her not to exert herself. He would regret this later. Perhaps.
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