“Tunstall.” The receptionist’s head sank, reminding Tunstall of the sight of her close-cropped turfy blonde coiffure. As she peered at her computer screen she murmured “What first name?”
“Gwyneth,” Tunstall said and was compelled to add “Gwyn.”
“Gwyneth Tunstall.” The receptionist set about typing, not nearly sufficiently fast for him. When she leaned towards the monitor he had the grotesque notion that she was about to nod off, having spent too long at her repetitive job. “She’s in a block,” she appeared to tell him.
“A Block,” Tunstall had to repeat.
“Block A, that’s right.”
Her deliberateness might have been rebuking his urgency, and made him more nervous. “Where’s that again?” he yearned not to need to ask.
“Along there.” Raising her left hand just enough to indicate that corridor, she said “You’ll see the signs.”
He was lurching past the seated patients, none of whom might have stirred, when she called “Mr Tunstall…”
He swung around so violently it seemed to leave his vision behind. Once his eyes cleared he managed to distinguish her through the glass, which the glare of the overhead lights had iced almost opaque. “I was going to say,” she said, “when you get there you may have to wait to see her.”
“I already have,” Tunstall almost retorted. Surely all that mattered was being told where to find Gwyneth, and he made for the corridor as the receptionist began to page a Timmy Sawyer.
The passage was the colour of moonlit fog and nearly as featureless. A few doors bearing words he didn’t need to focus on did very little to relieve the blankness of the walls. At the end he saw a sign, apparently too far away to read. He was panting by the time he came close enough to identify the first few letters of the alphabet, as if he were rediscovering how. It was a list of the hospital blocks, and A was Intensive Care.
He couldn’t pretend not to have known as much, but mightn’t it just mean that somebody cared about Gwyneth—cared enough to keep her alive? Tunstall squeezed his raw eyes shut while he breathed a plea, and opened them at once for fear of losing his sense of where he was. The sign pointed left to all the blocks, and he hurried into a corridor he couldn’t have distinguished from the one he’d just left, except for the sight of a nurse wheeling a prone form on a trolley, receding so fast that the sheets flapped as if a wind had invaded the hospital. In another moment nurse and trolley vanished through a pair of doors at the end of the corridor, and at once he couldn’t hear them.
Her urgency had brought him close to panic. The doors led to a walkway made of thick translucent plastic, which merged the light above the grounds into a generalised radiance like the glow of a befogged moon. The chill of the night fastened on Tunstall as he blundered through the walkway into the next block. The sign that met his eyes might have been designed for if not by someone close to blindness, but he had to strain them to distinguish that the large ill-preserved letter stencilled on both walls was E, not A at all.
Perhaps there had been a more direct route, but he mustn’t think of retracing his steps; it would feel too much like giving up. He could only hasten past the side wards, glimpsing twin ranks of supine sheeted figures with a nurse on watch beyond each pair of doors, an illuminated face like a mask in some kind of shrine. He had to fend off an impression that the corridor was leading him into fog. The pallid surface in the distance was a wall, which stopped retreating once he concentrated on it, and soon he came close enough to see it wasn’t even blank. There was a list of blocks, divested of one letter. The arrow sent him left again, and he did his best to run.
His haste seemed to lodge shadowy blotches where the walls met the roof. Beyond another corridor of silent twilit wards a walkway was darkened by fallen leaves, which scraped and scuttled like beetles on the plastic. Tunstall hugged himself and rubbed his shivering arms as he dashed through the passage, which felt entirely too exposed to the wind. The double doors thumped behind him like a faltering heartbeat as he saw the letter that identified the next block. For a panicky moment he feared he’d lost more than his way, and then he realised that the letter wasn’t E again, even if the Bs on both walls looked as if a vandal had tried to erase them. What sense did the arrangement of the buildings make? He just had to believe he was heading for the right one, but he clamped a shaky hand over his lips so as not to call Gwyneth’s name.
As he hurried down a corridor not at all unlike the ones he was trying to leave behind, a crumbling voice followed him. It was still paging Timmy Sawyer, who was apparently needed in E Block. The address system must be overdue for maintenance; the receptionist’s voice was so splintered that the last words could almost have been the harsh cry of a night bird. Tunstall might have imagined the nurses in the wards took him to be responding to the summons. More likely they weren’t sure what he was doing, a solitary wanderer in the hospital so late at night, although the frozen glowing faces owned up to no thoughts at all.
He was more than halfway down the corridor before the wall at the end gave up its likeness to fog. His head was aching as much as his eyes by the time the sign came into focus. It was almost the same as the previous list, though in a different order, and where could the arrow have pointed except left? An uneven section of linoleum snagged his feet as he dashed around the corner, and he supported himself on the wall. He thought he felt the chilly plaster crack, but he hadn’t time to look.
The next walkway was damaged. Slits in the plastic admitted the wind, and dead leaves were crawling on the grubby floor. Grit had strayed in too, and its grinding underfoot felt like a symptom of fever. Gusts of wind sent shudders through the tunnel. They seemed more threatening than Tunstall cared to understand, so that he hurried along it fast enough to outrun his breath.
He faltered as the double doors ground shut behind him. The letter on each wall was nearly a B, though even closer to an E. Until he controlled his vision the sight put him in mind of a digital display reassembling its fragments. Identifying the letter as an F wasn’t reassuring; had whoever laid out the hospital been as confused as Tunstall felt? He had to be grateful to see somebody else in the corridor.
The woman wasn’t digging up the floor at the far end; she was nuzzling the wall with a vacuum cleaner. “Excuse me,” Tunstall called and hurried towards her, trailing sodden gritty leaves that he hoped she wouldn’t notice. “Am I right for Intensive Care?”
She turned with a finger to her lips. The gesture was more distinct than her face, which he could have imagined her holding still with the finger. She pointed left with the silent vacuum cleaner—that must be what the jerky movements meant, however much they looked like an attempt to drive a pest away. Tunstall wasn’t anxious to speak again, since his shout had brought dim heads rearing up from beneath sheets beyond the doors on either side of him, though surely not in unison. Before he had a chance to overtake the thin woman she disappeared as if the machine had towed her around the corner. When he reached it she was nowhere to be seen.
He might have concluded she didn’t want to be blamed for the state of the corridor. Perhaps the walls were stained just by his blotchy vision, and she couldn’t do much about the incompleteness of the linoleum. He mustn’t let any of this distract him; he just had to remember that Gwyneth was here in the hospital. The sign in front of him displayed another rearrangement of the letters and sent him left as usual. How often had he turned that way? Would it bring him back where he’d started from? He could only follow the arrow, not quite fast or breathlessly enough to be unable to think.
He did his best not to glance into the wards, where his glimpses of the solitary illuminated faces seemed increasingly similar. They no longer looked enshrined; they reminded him more of waxworks in a museum. The voice in the air sounded synthetic enough to belong to one if not to all. Was Timmy Sawyer needed in the hallway of E Block? Being unable to grasp the last words made Tunstall feel threatened with losing a sense. Ahead of him the double doors shook with the wind, a
nd so did the walkway beyond them. It was quaking so violently he couldn’t focus on the tunnel.
Tunstall blundered through the doors and saw there was no tunnel. Where it might have been was a cracked concrete path, enclosed by fog so thick he couldn’t see the grounds. He stumbled at a run along the path, shivering as the fog seeped into him. His breaths tasted like a fever by the time he saw a pair of doors ahead. The pallid surface framing them wasn’t fog, but the face of the figure beyond the small glass panels might have been. It was a blank white patch.
When he saw the eyes above the erased blotch Tunstall realised it was a surgical mask. The windows in the doors were so befogged that he could have thought a blurred face was forming from the mask rather than concealed by it. Before Tunstall could read any expression in the eyes, the surgeon darted out of sight. Was it the disappearance or the urgency that brought Tunstall to the edge of panic? He only knew he had to be quick. He was even repeating the word, which emerged as one gasp of fog after another. He used both hands to thump the doors, and they lumbered inwards.
The whitish light seemed to flare up, illuminating one more corridor. Leaves scrabbled along it like insects retreating into their nest. Only the letter on the wall should count, an A with its left leg crippled by a fall of plaster. The right-hand line appeared to be pointing to the nearest side ward, and why couldn’t that be an omen? As Tunstall lurched in that direction, the voice that had followed him through the hospital reiterated its message. “Timmy Sawyer E hallway—” He didn’t need to understand that—indeed, he didn’t want to—or how the light had changed as the doors staggered shut. He sprinted to the entrance to the ward as if he could outdistance the voice and peered through the nearest window.
Gwyneth was in the first bed on the left. Her face was upturned on the pillow, and she looked peacefully asleep. Wires and slim tubes led from various parts of her. In the pale foggy light they put Tunstall in mind of a cobweb, and he could imagine wisps of mist floating from them. He eased the left-hand door open and advanced into the ward.
He was trying to see only Gwyneth and above all not to blink. It didn’t have to matter that the message in the air was growing clearer. As he gazed at her luminous face he was able to believe that her peace was the only message for him. That wasn’t quite enough, and he felt his lips part as if they were yearning for a kiss. When he spoke it felt more like a gasp, a breath he couldn’t hold in any longer. “Gwyneth.”
“Charlie.”
He might have mistaken the sound for a whisper of dead leaves, except that her eyelids fluttered as well. He was struggling not to hear the other voice, which had grown less fragmented. He’d just remembered he could block his ears when the words came into focus. “Time he saw where he always goes… Time he saw where he always goes…” All the memories he’d succeeded in keeping at bay overwhelmed him, and he stumbled to reach for Gwyneth’s hand. Before he could touch her his eyes gave way to strain, and he blinked.
In a breath he saw the light again, streaming through the broken windows and holes in the roof. It illuminated the remains of the solitary bed leaning on one splintered leg, the rusty springs strewn with fallen plaster. His entire being strove to see what had been there, but once more it was too late. He trudged out of the ward and dragged the doors at the end of the corridor open on their rusty twisted hinges. The moonlit fog was still so thick he wondered if he would be able to locate his car. He found it soon enough—it was alone in the middle of the waste ground—and drove home. He knew it was useless to loiter at or even near the hospital.
The fog stayed among the fields, allowing him to drive faster along the promenade. He parked the car and let himself into the house and plodded upstairs to sit on the bed, where he brought up Gwyneth’s last text message on his phone, the goodnight she’d sent while dining with her friends. It wasn’t the same as hearing her voice. How old was the message now? Not old enough for him to forget—never that—and he held onto the phone when he lay down.
He thought he hadn’t slept when it rang. He clutched it and sat up on the bed, which felt too bare and wide by half. On the bedside table the photograph of him with Gwyneth in the sunlit mountains far away was waiting to be seen once more, and beyond it the curtains framed a solitary feeble midnight star. He rubbed his aching eyes to help them focus on the mobile as he thumbed the keypad. “Hello?” he said before he’d finished lifting the phone to his face.
“Forgive me, is this Charlie?”
Long ago he’d learned he had no option but to go through it all again. Perhaps this time Gwyneth would open her eyes—perhaps she would even see him. “Charles Tunstall,” he had to say, “yes.”
Chucky Comes to Liverpool
As Robbie watched his mother he felt ten years old, but it wasn’t unwelcome for once. She looked as she used to when they played board games together; her eyes would calm down while her face hid its lines until she seemed no older than she was, hardly twice the age he’d racked up now. She’d been happy to concentrate on just one thing, and it included him. He was buoyed up by the memory until she glanced away from the computer screen in the front room and saw him.
Did she think he was spying on her through the window, the way his father had after they’d split up? Her head jerked back as if her frown had pinched her face hard, and Robbie hurried to let himself into the house. Her bicycle and rucksack had narrowed the already narrow hall. As he dumped his schoolbag on the stairs she was snatching pages from the printer, so hastily that one sailed out of her grasp. “Leave it, Robbie,” she said.
“I’m only getting it for you.”
It was a cinema poster headed CHUCK IN THE DOCK. Most of it consisted of a doll’s wickedly gleeful round young face, which was held together with stitches that looked bloody even in black and white. Whatever it was advertising would be shown over the weekend at the Merseyscreen multiplex as part of the Liberating Liverpool arts festival, which was all Robbie had time to learn before his mother reached for the sheet. “Well, now you’ve had a good look after you were told not to,” she said.
“What’s all that for?”
“Something you mustn’t see.”
“I just did.”
“That isn’t clever. That’s nothing but sly.” Once she’d finished giving him a disappointed look she said “It’s about films I don’t want you ever to watch.”
There were so many of those he’d lost count, if he was counting—any with fights or guns or knives, which could make him behave like boys did, or bombs, though mostly grownups used those, or language, which didn’t seem to leave him much. “More of them,” he said.
“I won’t have you turning into a man like your father. Too many of you think it’s your right to bully women and do a lot worse to them.” Before Robbie dared to ask what she was leaving unsaid, which was very little where his father was concerned, she added “I’m not saying you’re like that yet. Just don’t be ever.”
“Why did you print all that out? What’s it for?”
“It’s time we took more of a stand.” He guessed she meant Mothers Against Mayhem as she said “They’re evil films that should never be shown. They were supposed to be banned everywhere in Liverpool. They get inside children and make them act like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that thing,” she said and poked the pages she’d laid face down on the table. “Now that’s all. You’re bullying me.” She gazed harder at him while she said “Promise me you’ll never watch any of those films.”
“Promise.”
“Let’s see your hands.”
He felt younger again, accused of being unclean. While he hadn’t crossed his fingers behind his back, he didn’t think he had quite promised either. Eventually she said “You’d better put dinner on. We’ve a meeting at Midge’s.”
Midge was the tutor on her assertiveness course and the founder of Mothers Against Mayhem. Robbie sidled past the bicycle to the kitchen, which was even smaller than the front room, and switched on th
e oven. He still felt proud of learning to cook, though he would never have said so at school. He only wished his mother wouldn’t keep reminding him that his father was unable or unwilling even to boil an egg. He watched bubbles pop on the surface of the casserole of scouse, a spectacle that put him in mind of a monster in another sort of film he wasn’t meant to view. Gloves too fat for a killer in a film to wear helped him transfer the casserole to the stained mat the table always sported. “Mmm,” his mother said and “Yum,” despite eating less and faster than Robbie. “Enough for dinner tomorrow,” she declared. “Have you got plenty of homework?”
“A bit. A lot really.”
“Give it all you’ve got.” She was already shrugging her rucksack on. “I don’t know how late I’ll be,” she said as she wheeled her bicycle to the front door. “If I’m not here you know when to go to bed.”
He left the stagnant casserole squatting on its mat while he washed up the dinner items before making for the front room. Like the television, the computer was inhibited by all the parental locks his mother could find. He logged on to find an essay about Liverpool poets, and changed words as he copied it into his English homework book. He was altering the last paragraph when his mobile rang.
It no longer had a Star Wars ringtone since his mother decided that was about war. Robbie didn’t give peace much of a chance—he silenced the chorus before they had time to chant all they were saying. “Is that Duncan Donuts?” he said.
“If that’s Robin Banks.”
His father had named Robbie for a Liverpool footballer, but now his mother told people he was called after a singer. “My mam’s with your mam,” Duncan said. “All mams together.”
“The midge got them.”
“More like the minge did.”
This went too far for Robbie’s tastes. “What are you doing tonight?”
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