‘You go,’ she said. ‘That’s fine. Don’t mind me.’
And so he went, and Kit was left standing all alone.
She recognised no one at The Chequers, close to full as it was. Joe must have been and gone again. On her walk over there, Kit had been forced by a couple sharing an umbrella to edge into a bush that overhung a fence, so that her right sleeve was now sodden. She tried to shiver off the chilly drizzle that had fallen relentlessly the whole way. After a moment’s pause to take stock, she went up to the bar and bought herself a half, then sat at the only free table, small and clunky—it had three stools ranged round it in a manner to suggest that they had only just been vacated. Lucky to get a table. Joe had told her to phone him, but what if he was caught up in a—what, an incident?
She was too late: she had arrived too late. She decided to drink her drink and simply calm down for a minute. The two people nearest her, women, were catching up on news of a sister, a grandchild; news of work. One of them was a cleaner.
‘Does your mum—she still go to the bingo, then?’
‘She’s got this ulcer on her leg, so it’s been a couple of months.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Yes—she’s eighty-five.’
‘Denny still living with her?’
‘That’s right.’
A young man walked past and swiped one of Kit’s spare stools. Useless to protest, and who could say she needed it?
‘—holiday in three years. Weekends, though. September, Mary stopped in with her.’
Why did I come here, anyway? Kit thought. Why, through the rain and the cold? She pushed her wet hair back, drank fast and kept looking at the door, until a second young man asked about the remaining free stool. ‘You wanting this?’
To answer ‘no’ would constitute a— ‘Would you be wanting this?’ he repeated—sad admission, Kit felt. In reply, therefore, she stood up, attempting to look haughty, and headed for the door, and would have walked right out, except that as she reached it, one of the barmen came in from outside—blundered in, blocking her way as he said loudly, though not shouting, just loudly, ‘Man down, boss. I don’t know if you want to call—I think—might—’ Kit was already an obstacle to— ‘want to fetch—’ people who were trying to cram past her the other way, round her and the barman and out.
She unlodged herself and went in their train: what a day, what was she being caught up in now?—all of them, her included, making for the alley to the side of the pub; she, in the tail end—had been leaving anyway. The rain was worse. Kit, at the back, caught just in time a glimpse, through the upright bodies ahead of her, of a single figure dropping, smeared with blood, gobs of it, red on a white shirt, dropping defencelessly to the ground; heard, in a moment of common arrest, so it seemed, the sickeningly soft thud as it hit the wet tarmac. A second man was being dragged away backwards from the blow he had just delivered, the scarlet on his fists diluting in the rain; against his will he was being dragged back struggling and yelling, ‘Bastard’, and, ‘You fucking wait’, over the noise—Kit turned—of a van door being slid open. She watched as he was bundled in, sandwiched between the driver and another man who climbed in after him. He grinned and made a telephone sign through the windscreen to someone still on the pavement, call me—before being driven, with a gratuitous wheel screech, away.
A latecomer jostled Kit against the young man in front of her— ‘Sorry,’ she murmured—who wiped the wet off his face and remarked, ‘He’s a dog’s back leg, that one.’
‘A what?’ she said.
‘Shouldn’t have stood back up again. Should have stayed down,’ he said. ‘A total fucking cock-up, less muscles than a fart.’
Kit looked along the street and jumped—and felt a wish to protest her innocence—as she saw Joe swerve up on his bike. He flung it aside, scattering a puddle, and pushed through the small crowd to the front. The mass murmuring of interest and derision dimmed a little and then revived. How, Kit thought desperately, could it not have occurred to her, not have occurred to her, not have struck her, she had been so sure she was too late—how could she—fool, fool, and three, and four—not have seen, understood, that the young man laid out in the alley was—it was—she bent down, looked through an assembly of knees at the blood-stained figure, registered the dark, curly hair, a useless hand: Humpty.
She stood up again in slow motion, feeling old, with vomit rising in her throat, gazed blankly at the assorted watchers, and became aware of an impulse to explain to them that she belonged to this scene. Another murmur arose. In Joe’s wake swung a sinister and hideous, caramel-coloured Rover. It floated forth out of the rain, rumbling like a pleasure boat, with Donald at the helm. His off-white eyeballs swivelled as he drove the vehicle by inches down the alley, causing the crowd to swear in annoyance as it was forced to shunt those self-same inches this way and that, reforming itself into a differently shaped blot.
Two young men stooped to help Joe shift Humpty’s resistless carcass onto the plasticated back seat of the car. There was wet and blood everywhere. Kit pushed forwards, opened the front passenger door and bent in. Donald, chatting on his mobile, nodded at her to take the seat beside him. ‘Ta, bye,’ he said and dropped the phone into his lap, before asking cheerily, ‘All right back there?’ checking Humpty in the rear-view mirror. ‘Got caught with the wrong girl—finally,’ he said to Kit, patting his phone. ‘She got done first, had her arm broken. Not sure about this one,’ he indicated Humpty, ‘what a fucking nutcase. I tell you what, though, she had it coming, always fooling around, trying to get blokes interested. We was at school together,’ he said.
Joe walked round the car and got into the back beside Humpty. Before he had even closed his door, Donald had begun to reverse, on a curve so that he could swing out into the street, swearing, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck’, as his rear bumper grazed a bollard. Someone, perhaps warningly, hit the front passenger window with the side of their fist. ‘Fuck!’ said Donald again, and then, ‘What?’—because Humpty was hissing, ‘Wind scream, wi-wind—’ He gathered himself, ‘Wind screen wipers,’ and then his head sagged down and his eyes drifted. Joe slung an arm across him to stop him falling off the seat.
Donald flicked on the wipers. The rain seemed even heavier once you were out of it.
‘Better?’ he said.
Joe said, ‘He gets sick if he can’t see out.’
‘You think he’s going to throw up, you shove his head out the window, all right?’ said Donald. ‘I’m telling you now. You know he took a pop at Neil yesterday? Smacked him. He’s off his head, I’m telling you.’
At last they got out clear into the street, and away.
They drove for quarter of an hour without speaking, but only when they had slipped through the Link Road junction and were cruising past the Marston Ferry Bowls Club did Kit allow herself, by a small margin, to relax.
She angled round in her seat to look back properly at Humpty. He was a wreck of blood and dirt, on his face, his jacket and shirt front, in his hair. She felt as though the opposite of the truth was true, and that she somehow meant it when the words came quietly out of her, ‘They were not unkind to the parts they liked’—his fine, bloodied face, curls soaked with blood, his eyes deranged, his white, filthy shirt front.
Donald said, ‘Anyway, whatever they done he’s probably be safer off if they did brain damage him, this one, to tell you the truth, if it shuts him up. Can’t keep his bloody mouth shut.’
He shot a glance at Kit.
‘Fair do’s,’ he said. He pulled a cassette out of the glove compartment, Andy Williams, and slotted it into the car’s ancient tape player. The music started up midway through a track, ‘Moon River’, the slushy orchestral backing making Kit want to titter.
She sobered again fast, though. Donald’s driving was extremely poor, especially given the rain, and he most certainly wasn’t sober. It occurred to her that they might be—not just Humpty, but all of them—about to die, who could say? She didn’t protest
because she didn’t feel like protesting. She slouched down, tipped her head back and allowed herself to enjoy, for the second time in as many weeks, the simple business of being in a car. Andy Williams, she found herself reflecting, was probably dead already.
‘Look,’ said Donald, jamming his left arm sideways so that his elbow brushed her nose, ‘look—’ the vision now behind them, ‘there,’ he pointed backwards, ‘bloke with a fox on a lead.’
‘Where?’
‘Back there.’
Where? Kit pulled herself straight again and looked, bewildered, out of the window.
‘Ah, there you go,’ said Donald. ‘Sharp eyes see, blind eyes see nothing.’ And he clicked his tongue softly twice.
Joe got out of the car into the rain without a word and went over to a selection of wheelchairs, misassembled like used shopping trollies under the A&E portico. The downpour was relentless, beating noisily down on the roof of the car.
How on earth do I come to be here? Kit thought, surprised after the fact at how events had overtaken her. She had been musing on the fate of Joe’s bicycle, abandoned at the pub; had been fretting, too, at the idea that the barman might unnecessarily have summoned an ambulance. She had also been concerned by Donald saying that he didn’t want vomit in the car, because— ‘There’s blood all over the back,’ she said to him, as though the person slumped there was gone.
But blood, it seemed, was in a different category to vomit.
‘No problem,’ said Donald. He was still gripping the steering wheel. He looked like a coin-operated driver waiting for coins. ‘This car—my mum lost a baby on the back seat once, down Cowley Shale.’
Kit had a spasmodic thought about—that she must try to be a better friend to Michaela, because—but she couldn’t stay with it: Donald was getting out, pulling his collar up against the rain, helping Joe manhandle Humpty into a rackety, collapsible wheelchair.
‘All right then, mate?’ said Donald, almost shouting.
Humpty didn’t respond. Joe began, in cumbersome fashion, to push the wheelchair single-handed, holding Humpty round the shoulders with his other arm to stop him tumbling out again. Kit stepped out into the wet herself, and followed, uselessly offering her assistance. Two paramedics walked past them, overtaking them without interest.
‘I’ll be off then,’ said Donald.
Kit turned, hand raised in acknowledgement, but found that he already had his back to them.
She ran the couple of steps to catch up with Joe, confused that he hadn’t thanked Donald for driving them there. ‘Do you think he had something to do with it?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘You don’t get,’ said Joe.
‘Get what?’
They passed over the threshold of A&E, and shook themselves, dripping into a density of warmth. They were inside.
‘Kit—’
‘What?’ she said.
‘He—’ Joe dropped his voice to a whisper, sounding more upset than she’d ever heard him—‘it’s worse than you realise.’
*
Joe dealt with reception. Kit instinctively hung back, hot and dazed—found herself staring at a door marked ‘Dirty Utility: No Unauthorised Access’. She snapped to only when Joe and Humpty were led off to a small, three-walled cubicle. She trailed after them as they made their ungainly way past a woman who, leaning at an angle against a counter, appeared to be weeping. Her dud orange hair, which hung across her face and hands, had evidently had its true colour sluiced out with peroxide. Kit hovered, then asked, ‘Are you all right?’
Through hair and hands, not to mention snot like water, the woman snarled back, ‘Yes?’
After a shortish wait a nurse arrived, or at least a man dressed in a light blue, easy-wash uniform. Kit stood a few steps outside the cubicle, feeling disengaged.
‘I’m afraid he’s a bit of a mess,’ Joe said.
The man pulled a face, as to say, ‘you’re telling me’.
A bit of a mess, thought Kit. Humpty’s a bit of a mess. He’s a bit of a mess. The hospital smell was in her throat. She put a hand out to steady herself against the corridor wall, remembered doing this at Joe’s place, realised that she must—must, if for no other—to stop herself fainting, didn’t want—
She succeeded in keeping herself present. The nurse pulled on exam gloves, latex free, dragged from a dispenser, then bent forwards to speak to Humpty. ‘Hello? I’m Saleem? Hello? Humty? Hello, good sir. I want you to answer couple of questions, okay? Do you know where you are—as of now?’
Humpty muttered unintelligibly.
‘Do you know what day it is?
Another noise, still unintelligible, but different.
‘Do you know who is prime minister, Humty?’
Kit thought: the state funeral for the prime minister’s legs.
Saleem looked up at her. He had been making notes in biro on his exam glove, in the triangle between his thumb and first finger. ‘Next question,’ he said to Kit, who steeled herself, ‘should be, “Prime minister any good?”’ After a tight, luminous smile, he reverted to his job, checking blood pressure, pulse, temperature.
‘We’ll get him a bed in a minute, okay?—have him checked. I’m not hundred per cent worried, but quite rightly to come in, okay?’
Kit tipped forwards to filch a peep at the grades of consciousness listed on the form Saleem had been completing, which went from ‘alert’, through ‘drowsy’, through ‘acutely agitated and confused’, to ‘responds only to pain’. Humpty scored as ‘drowsy’, qualified by, ‘responds to voice’. What kind of a response, though?
‘All right, mister, we got you,’ said Saleem. ‘Hang in there. We’ll get you sorted soon as we can.’
‘Thanks,’ said Joe, though barely sounding as though he meant it.
It felt like a long time before they were taken, by a different nurse, in a darker uniform, to a new cubicle, which had a concertinaed front curtain, a sink and a trolley bed.
Kit stood just inside this retreat and abandoned herself to information overload: clocks, security camera warnings, LCD screen, pin boards, white boards, scribbled multicoloured acronyms, plastic phials, plastic aprons, plastic disposal bags, cardboard sick bowls, contaminated sharps incinerator buckets, pulse rates, respiratory rates, urine output, blood pressure, wrist bands, next of kin, shouting, questions, history, belongings disclaimer—in case of loss or damage—wires, electrics, blinks, beeps, laughter, vilely heated odours, alcohol wash, pink spray, disinfectant, stasis.
Joe had taken the sole chair at Humpty’s bedside. Kit, stuck on her feet, pictured herself collapsing through one of the concertina curtains opposite into somebody else’s disaster. She was still on the edge of the dizzy symptoms of brain slippage, so she moved right into the bay and sat down abruptly on the floor, back against the sink unit.
A small woman with pigtails strolled in, looked at Humpty’s notes, sized up the tableau, addressed herself to Kit, ‘Girlfriend?’
Kit felt flummoxed. It wasn’t a word she ever applied to herself.
‘I’m his brother,’ said Joe.
The woman switched all her attention his way. ‘Name?’
‘Joe,’ said Joe. ‘Oh, Humpty? Yes, sorry, he’s called Edward. Humpty, usually.’ He made a throw-away movement with his hand. ‘When he was little he was fat.’
The woman leant over Humpty’s bloodied form and shouted, ‘Humpty, how you doing?’
He emitted a fraction of a whimper.
‘Do you know what happened to you?’ she asked loudly.
No response.
‘Do you know where you are, Humpty?’
‘He isn’t really—’ Joe didn’t find the words.
The woman shone a torch into Humpty’s eyes, said, ‘One minute,’ and walked out again.
‘All the king’s horses,’ said Kit, licking the salty sweat from her upper lip.
‘And all the king’s men,’ replied Joe, not bothering to look over at her. ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s m
en. And if only they’d remembered the legless dog that’s strapped to a rollerskate. All the king’s horses, all the king’s men,’ he said bleakly, ‘and the fucking dog that’s strapped to a fucking rollerskate.’
‘You say that,’ said Kit from her place down on the floor, ‘but, realistically, the horses? Granted, the dog; but—that well-known egg-reconstruction specialist, the horse? Come on, give me a break.’
Humpty draped a hand over the side of the bed and groaned.
‘All the king’s nurses,’ said Joe.
Time sagged as they waited. ‘What about the girl?’ Kit asked, breaking their silence. She couldn’t, from her present vantage point, see anything much of Humpty, or much more of Joe than his feet.
‘Not our problem,’ said Joe’s voice.
‘Donald said her arm got broken.’
‘Yes.’
‘Might she be in here somewhere, in Minor Injuries or something?’
‘No, she’s not here.’
‘For definite?’
‘She’s been taken down to Kent.’
‘Kent?’
‘Kit—’ Joe’s disembodied voice became edgy, ‘she’s not our problem, okay? What do you want? You want the police involved? It’s not that sort of situation.’ He stopped, then added bitingly, ‘But of course, you’re party to all this now, aren’t you, assault. Perhaps you’d like to go to the police yourself?’ He paused. ‘No? Because you might want to consider,’ he did now tilt forwards in such a way as to be able to look at her, ‘if you’re worried about justice being served, here it is: served. You may find it a little unsophisticated,’ how unkind he sounded, ‘but it’s done now. As for the girl, fuck her,’ he sat back again, ‘she’s her own problem. Anything we could conceivably do would only—’ the woman with pigtails returned, ‘make things worse,’ Joe finished quietly.
‘Right,’ said the woman, ‘sorry about that. Start again. I’m Dr Curtis.’ She closed the curtain fully, so that for the first time they were cocooned in their own little pool of penetrating light.
The Twisted Heart Page 21