Hold Back the Night

by Hold Back the Night (retail) (e

  From the time we arrived at the hospital it was all a bit of a blur. The confusion, which wasn’t really confusion but actually professionalism on the part of the hospital staff, made me feel helpless, as I followed the trolley with Luke on, saying his name, wanting to do something for him but knowing that I could do nothing, that once again I was the wrong person. The feeling of isolation and helplessness I felt that night sustained itself for so long over the next few weeks and months that gradually it began to define me. It was only thanks to one person that this ever ceased to be the case.

  I don’t remember how long we stayed there, Sharon and I, in that miserable foyer, waiting for news. All I could see was a car crushed like a toy, a body, far too still, calm drops of blood dripping off the inside of a shattered windscreen. All around me in the hospital I saw other distressed people, accident victims, victims of stabbings, of bar brawls, of domestic incidents. It was like standing in a whirlwind and it was so completely awful it seemed surreal. I remembered looking at all the employees of the hospital, unable to imagine why anyone would go there every day, voluntarily, to fill their daily lives with so many images of pain. I remembered the nurses, and the doctors, and the cleaners, and the porters, how comforting they all were, how they actually did seem to help with their words, and their advice, the simple tone of their voices or their smiles as they cleared some plastic cups away or mopped the floor around us at four a.m. And then another feeling; when Sharon turned to me for support. How inadequate I felt when faced with this girl whose whole life had just been screwed up into a ball and tossed into the waste-paper basket because, as Ken Clay said, I wouldn’t leave something alone.

  I let the images pass through my head and when they were gone I felt leaden and hard, pissed off that I had been pulled back into the place I seemed to have finally started distancing myself from. I tried to shake the feeling off, telling myself to think about the present but that didn’t help because, when I thought about it, nothing in the present seemed to make any sense to me. Not this case, not my job, anything. I never seemed to make decisions, I just seemed to be constantly trying to catch up. And what was worse, it seemed to be affecting the one thing in my life that did make sense. Sorting out other people’s problems meant that I was always calling Sharon to break dates, always having to work at night when I should have been with her. And now I hadn’t called her because once again things had overtaken me. She would be fucked off. She would have waited up. And if I called her now she would probably have gone to bed and that would only make it worse. Added to this was the fact that I just really, really wanted to see her, and I couldn’t.

  It was a bad end to a long, long day, which had begun with a father in turmoil and finished with a young girl fighting for her life. I had a headache and I was frustrated and all that I could think of now was to get home, soak in the bath, then fall into bed. I opened up the Mazda and pulled out onto Highgate Hill, before driving down to Archway. There was no one about. I drove home quickly, with the feeling that somehow I was never going to get there. But I did. There was no space outside my flat, however, and the delivery bay I sometimes park in was full too. I cruised around but I couldn’t find anything, my headache slowly building like the accelerator was stuck. Eventually, I’d had enough, and I abandoned the thing in the car park of the GP surgery around the corner from my flat, which meant that I would have to get up before eight and move it if I didn’t want to get clamped. Less than six hours’ time. But I didn’t care. I locked up and walked back up the street to Exmouth Market and then down the side street to my flat. I unlocked the outside door. I closed it behind me and headed up the stairs. But when I turned the bend in the stairwell I stopped.

  There was a light beneath my door.

  I was halfway up the stairs. I held on to the handrail and didn’t move. I listened, but I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t see much light but there was definitely some, just one lamp perhaps, or the light from the kitchen. I hadn’t left any on. No way. I’d left the house when it was still light outside. Why would I have had a light on? I took a step backwards, then a few more. I put my hand on the street door and pulled it open as slowly as I could. Carefully, I twisted round and peered outside, left then right. There was no one around. No one I could see. I stepped into the street and pulled the door to without making any noise, leaving it slightly ajar.

  This had happened to me before. Someone had broken into my flat and the subsequent events had been as unpleasant as any I could have imagined. No, more so. As quietly as I could, I stepped over to the other side of the street, which is a one-way passage with just room for a single car at the most to squeeze past those that are parked there. I crouched behind the bonnet of a black cab and looked up the multi-tagged brickwork, to the window on the third floor. Yes, there was a light on, behind the curtains that I had definitely not left closed. I moved further behind the cab, knowing that if anyone had been watching for me they would probably have seen me by now.

  I felt a tightness in my chest. Was I just going to walk into something? I thought about it. Maybe I should call my own number, see if anyone picks up the phone. I didn’t know. What about calling the police? What about just going to my office for the night? I really didn’t need to deal with anything right then. My head hurt. But then again, what if I had somehow left a light on, what if…?

  And then I had another thought. No longer bothering to hide myself I walked up alongside the row of cars to Exmouth Market, checking the models. Then I walked back down again. Right at the far end of the street I found it. I let out a sigh of relief that seemed to take everything with it. Suddenly, I was absolutely fucked. Sharon’s Fiat Uno was squeezed in between an Audi and an old Jag. I leant against the bonnet. Sharon, thank God. And not because it wasn’t some hoods out to break my legs or worse, no. Thank God because it was her. Up there, waiting for me. I looked up at the window and smiled to myself, wondering if I’d make it up the stairs. It seemed like a long way, but then I felt the last vestiges of energy within me come to life and move me up the street.

  I made it to my door and I pushed it open and then hopped up the stairs. I felt like a man running through the desert into the Red Sea. Sharon, she was the one I told about days like this one, she’s the one who took some of it off me. I felt so grateful to her for coming over. Once I’d got my hall door open I called out hi, up the stairs inside my flat. Then I pushed open the inside door at the top. Sharon was sitting cross-legged on my bed, with only the light of my desk lamp for company, leaving half of her face in shadow. She was fully clothed and she wasn’t watching the TV, or reading a book, or doing anything. She seemed very still and her stillness stopped me, though all I wanted to do was collapse on the bed beside her. I took her stillness for annoyance.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I am.’

  ‘What for?’ Her voice was too quiet for anger. I took a step forward.

  ‘Not coming over. Not phoning…’

  ‘I don’t blame you. I understand.’

  ‘Do you? How? Did Andy tell you about the girl?’

  I felt relieved that I didn’t have to explain, but Sharon hadn’t seemed to hear me. A bitter, wistful smile broke the half of her face that was visible.

  ‘I could tell that you knew,’ she said, slowly. Her voice was so distant it sounded as though she had left it for me and gone. I didn’t know what she meant. ‘I mean, how could you not? I’ve been a bitch to you recently.’

  I still didn’t understand. ‘No you haven’t,’ I said, squinting into her. ‘It’s just been tough. Your work, the course—’

  ‘Not wanting to see you. Making excuses. Christ. I knew you knew, you’re a detective for God’s sake, but I just couldn’t… That stuff about my dad’s boat. Christ, I’m not surprised you didn’t come over tonight. And I’m glad. You shouldn’t have had to go all the way over there. Which is why I came over here when I knew you weren’t coming…’

  I still hadn’t closed the door. Sharon’s voice stopped and I
turned and pushed it shut. When I turned around again she was looking at the floor. I knelt and put my hand on her shoulder but very firmly she took it and put it down on the bed.

  ‘I should look at you I know, but I can’t,’ she said. ‘And though I know you must already know by now I owe it to you to just say it, so I will. I’ve been seeing someone else, Billy.’

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  I feel comfortable in the part of London I live in. Exmouth Market. It has an urban, international quality I like. It isn’t so very English, I don’t think, and if you were suddenly planted inside it, and asked where you were, it might take you a moment or two to say Britain, let alone London. It reminds me of places on the outskirts of Paris. Of Madrid, or Milan perhaps. Even a couple of areas of New York I’ve visited. I liked it when I moved in and, surprisingly enough, I still like it. Even though it has changed.

  When I moved into the area the bar on the near corner, Fred’s, was a Wimpy. The pubs on the street catered mostly for postal workers from the Mount Pleasant depot, and though a couple of them still do, postal workers are no longer the target clientele for the majority of outlets now found in the vicinity. The area used to be a complete backwater in the minds of fashionable people, simply a place you passed in a cab on your way up to Islington from the West End. But there are now three trendy bars here. There are four minimalist coffee shops. There is a fashionable jewellery store that is always empty, a hip tailor and a store selling magazine fashion for men. There is also a shop purveying brightly coloured ornamental items, which you hope you don’t get for Christmas, a chain Japanese noodle bar, which is like eating in a goldfish bowl, and one truly excellent restaurant.

  It has been interesting living where I live during all this. While Camden, say, gives the impression of being finished, complete in and of itself for good or bad, Exmouth Market has seemed like frontier territory; the front line in the battle for the city. The battle is still going on; the old wine shop is still not an Oddbins, there is still an Afghan grocer, and the pie and mash shop still does good trade. But most of the old places are gone and those that remain are really just pockets of resistance. Anyone can see that the war is over.

  As a resident of the market I don’t know how I feel about this. I like having nice bars to sit in. I like being able to buy sandwiches with roast peppers in. If you’ve ever been inside Moro you’ll appreciate that I like sitting at the bar and eating the tapas there. I even like the odd game of table football with Nicky. But at the same time I’m afraid that I’ll wake up one morning and they’ll have glassed the street over and I’ll realize I’m living in a shopping mall. It hasn’t happened yet, most of the big boys have been kept out, but it’s probably only a matter of time before I’ll be able to have coffee in an Aroma, buy milk from a Tesco Metro, get a plastic tasting lunch in a Dome, a drink in an All Bar One (me) and dinner in a Pizza Express. When all the people who saw potential in the street won’t be able to afford to do business there any more. I hope it never gets to that, but if you take most other ’rejuvenated’ areas as a guide I’m afraid it probably will, eventually.

  Still, while I don’t exactly own my flat, I don’t pay anything to live where I do and I could rent the place out for a small fortune if I got fed up. I could go and live in a different part of London, or a different city altogether. I could live anywhere I wanted to. I could even leave the country and never, ever come back, never have to look at or deal with the things that depress me here. But if I did that I would be leaving my brother. And he would be even more alone than he is now if that is possible, and there would be absolutely no one to go and visit him, or to talk to him, or to shave his face, or tell him how his poems had been received.

  No one, no one at all.

  They started loading the rubbish at eight. I saw them when I went out to move my car. There must have been emergency talks or something because it wasn’t soldiers who were doing it, or the long-term unemployed, but real bona fide bin men. I stood watching them move the two trucks slowly up the market, throwing the bags that hadn’t split into the back, sweeping the rest into piles. I don’t know why but what they were doing was strangely mesmerizing and I stayed watching until they’d finished. They did a good job. After half an hour or so it was as though none of the shit that had stunk the place up so much over the last two weeks had ever been there. Just a clean, empty space. When the trucks pulled off onto Rosebery Avenue I stuck my hands in my pockets and wandered round the corner to Zack’s for a cup of tea. I stayed there twenty minutes before walking back up to my flat again. I thought about driving up to my office, or calling Emma Bradley, but I couldn’t find the energy. I spent the rest of the morning looking out of the window, down across the rooftops to the dome of St Paul’s, the only curve on a horizon of hard grey lines.

  * * *

  ‘Yes,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m positive. The tests are quite clear. Just Ecstasy and alcohol. A lot of the former, not much of the latter.’

  ‘It just seems odd,’ I told him. ‘Have you seen the tape? From the tube station?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you should look at it,’ I said. I held the cassette up. ’Or at least someone should, a specialist in drugs maybe.’

  ‘I’d be glad to’, he said, ‘if you think it would help me care for Donna.’ He shrugged, his hands deep in his pockets again. ‘But didn’t she just run off the platform? I mean, what good would it do to see it? I know what’s wrong with her, she got hit by a train. Hard.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but she didn’t just jump. It was more than that…’

  At that moment we had to step back from the desk, out of the way of a delivery trolley. It was mid-afternoon and the hospital was hot and heaving. We had to move again to let a man on crutches struggle through the mêlée, and then one of the doctor’s colleagues tapped him on the shoulder and tried to set up a squash game with him on Sunday. When the man had gone I took hold of the doctor’s elbow.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘is there somewhere we could go and watch this?’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think so. I’ll have to ask… Oh no, sod it. Follow me,’ he said.

  Just after two that afternoon, the phone had rung. I stared at it for a while but let the machine get it. After my message I heard Andy Gold announce that he was leaving the tape he’d promised me at the station, and that I could collect it any time I wanted, if I wanted. I nearly picked the phone up to thank him but didn’t bother. I didn’t trust my voice to sound normal with anyone I knew.

  Andy rang off. I sat for a while longer and Lucy Bradley came into my mind. I remembered how one minute she’d been a sassy young girl in control, walking along the street with a kick in her step, and the next it was all over for her. I almost knew how she felt. But I hadn’t been left for dead, it only felt that way. Glad of something to do I stood under the shower for a while and then stepped into some jeans. I cycled down to Calshot Street and picked the tape up before peddling straight back home again. I watched the tape three times and then got on the phone to David Fursten, the doctor from the Whittington, and he agreed to give me twenty minutes or so before his shift started.

  Fursten led me through the shifting tide of walking wounded to a personnel lift where we rode up to seven. Upstairs, the hospital didn’t look much like a hospital. The carpeting was thick and new and the furniture was a lot more expensive than that which members of the public were given to sit on. I followed Dr Fursten through an encoded security door into a warmly lit corridor that we padded along quickly. There was tasteful art on the walls and we passed a couple of stands for fresh flowers, today’s selection of which was made up mainly of lilies whose sweet scent spread like tentacles before and behind us, strong enough to resist the suction of an air conditioning unit humming quietly overhead. We turned a corner and then stopped. Dr Fursten seemed a little on edge and he looked both ways as he tapped quickly on the dark wood of an anonymous-loo
king door to our right. When he got no response he turned the handle. The door opened inward and he ushered me past him.

  ‘They don’t like us up here,’ he told me, shutting the door and locking it behind him. ‘It reminds them that there are sick people around - somewhere in the building.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Something that they try to forget,’ he added.

  We were in a large room with a long, modern conference table running down the middle, which looked to me like three thousand pounds worth of teak. The table was flanked by high-backed chairs and at the end was a wide-screen monitor with a video recorder underneath. Fursten walked down the far side of the table, flicked a few buttons and slid the cassette I’d handed him into the machine.

  ‘They bring us up here occasionally to show us how to do our job,’ he explained. ‘Which is saving money.’

  Fursten hit play and we both sat back on either side of the table, in the chairs closest to the screen. After a second or two of black space we were presented with a view of a station platform taken from a camera high up, at the near end. It was, of course, a single, locked off shot, and it showed several people, some sitting on benches, the rest either milling, leaning against the long wall or else just standing. There was no sound. Amongst the people it was possible to see Donna, wandering around, about halfway up the shot, and I used my finger to point her out to the doctor.

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  Donna was moving in a seemingly aimless fashion, first one way then the next. When a train pulled into the platform the passengers moved towards and then boarded it and when the train pulled out again there was only one person left on the screen. Donna. She hadn’t seemed to register the train’s arrival. She obviously wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. The doctor and I both watched as she walked up to the far end of the platform and sat down on the floor. She held her head in her hands, and she looked like she was crying, but it was difficult to see whether this was in fact the case.