This thing with Nat couldn’t happen. Surely she’d see that. Wouldn’t she? What if … He couldn’t think about it. Any of it. He shouldn’t have to, not now. For Christ’s sake, he was ill, wasn’t he? Probably dying. Why couldn’t he do it in peace?
‘You all right?’
‘Yes, fine.’
‘Just, you looked … Wouldn’t blame you if you was scared, mate.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I am, as it goes.’ Spicer leant towards him. ‘I’m fucking terrified.’
‘Me too.’ But, Nick thought, right now, I’m more afraid of living than of dying.
The luminous display on the clock read 02.14. Nick had had the procedure, a day later than scheduled, and the various tissues were now awaiting analysis in the lab. By the time it was finished it had been too late to send him home, so he’d been returned to the ward until the consultant could discharge him – assuming all was well – in the morning. Nick felt physically fine – surprisingly good, in fact – but he didn’t want to be discharged. He’d rather stay here, even with Spicer, who, having had his lung removed first thing yesterday, was now back in the next bed.
He didn’t want to go home. In fact, he no longer had a home to go to. Despite his efforts to dissuade her, Nat had turned up the previous evening, and so, fifteen minutes later, had Cath. The ensuing showdown, which had taken approximately three minutes and during which he had spoken no more than ten words, had resulted in Cath saying that if that was the case then Nat was welcome to him and she’d be in touch via her solicitor. Then she’d left, impervious to Nick’s pleas as he sat in bed, trapped, with Nat clinging onto his arm and Spicer lapping it up from his ringside seat.
He’d always imagined that, in the event of a situation like this one, Cath would fight tooth and nail to keep him. Now, he wondered why he’d thought that. She’d seemed almost relieved, as if he were an item that could now be crossed off one of her to-do lists. She hadn’t even paused long enough to give him an update on Josh’s situation.
Everything was conspiring to push him to the margins of his own life. Natalie’s flat was a few scruffy, boxy rented rooms above a fish and chip shop. She shared it with another twenty-something, who worked in PR and who Nick had only ever seen preparing to go out partying or nursing a hangover. He’d be living – aged 53 and with more than likely terminal cancer – a version of his children’s lives, if they could have afforded the rent. Surely Cath wouldn’t actually start divorce proceedings? After all, if he died, she wouldn’t have to sell the light-filled home they’d spent so long doing up, but if they had to split the proceeds, they’d be lucky if they could each afford something as big as Nat’s place. And what about the children? They could hardly expect Holly and Josh to share a divorce-regulation IKEA bunk bed, could they? And what about when Nat’s baby arrived? After Cath had gone, she’d kept on saying how happy she was and how it was all she’d ever wanted. He hadn’t had the heart – and certainly not the energy – to tell her that he had no money and no prospect of getting any and that the last thing he wanted was another child and as he was probably dying would she please just bugger off.
He sat up, feeling as though he were suffocating. After he’d finally got rid of Nat by making God knows what promises, Spicer had been surprisingly tactful. ‘Don’t worry, your missus’ll come round. You’re a sick man – ain’t going to leave you in the lurch, is she?’ Nick wasn’t at all sure about that. What had he been thinking of? He and Cath had been together for over twenty years. Nick remembered Spicer’s words, ‘Mind you, she’s a good-looking woman, your wife. Don’t mind my saying, she must have been a real knockout when she was that other one’s age.’ That was true. Cath had been a knockout – much better looking than Nat. Christ! Did she have someone else? Was that why she’d told Nat she was welcome to him? He hadn’t thought of that. All this time, while he’d been worrying and feeling guilty, she might have been having an affair of her own. Just because he no longer looked at her that way – or not very often – it didn’t mean … If only there was someone – a friend, a bloke – that he could talk to. As Cath had pointed out a couple of weeks ago, he didn’t have any friends any more. He’d drifted away from people he’d known since school and university because they no longer had anything in common or they’d moved abroad or got too rich or something, and – as Cath had also pointed out – having a bunch of people you kept meaning to have a drink with wasn’t the same thing.
He looked over at the curtains enclosing Spicer’s bed. They’d been like that since he’d been wheeled back at around ten o’clock. Now, there was a faint noise coming from behind them. It sounded like speech, but Nick couldn’t make out any words. Perhaps Cath was even now spending the first night in his – OK, their – house with her lover, who would move in, putting his things in Nick’s drawers and on Nick’s shelves, while his own belongings were stuffed into bin liners and left in the hallway for him to collect ‘at a convenient time’ (the locks having been changed). She couldn’t fucking do this to him! She couldn’t!
Spicer must be awake. Nick could ask him if that was what he’d been hinting. The ward was quiet, and there didn’t seem to be anyone at the nurses’ station. Energised by the injustice of it all, Nick peeled back the bedcovers and swung his legs over the side. He felt a bit wobbly, but he was OK. He could stand all right, and walk. He let go of the bedside locker and poked his head round the end of Spicer’s curtain.
Spicer was lying on his back, his eyes open but unfocussed, spittle at the corners of his mouth.
‘It’s me. Nick,’ he whispered.
Spicer turned his head towards him. He looked confused, and Nick wondered if he remembered who he was. ‘I never meant it,’ he murmured, hoarsely.
‘I didn’t mind. You’re probably right – what you were getting at, I mean.’
‘She wasn’t meant to be there, was she?’
‘Nat? No. I told her not to come. It couldn’t believe it when she—’
‘I didn’t know she was there.’
‘I don’t understand. She was sitting on the bed, right beside me, so—’
‘I thought it was empty.’
‘What?’
‘When I went in. I didn’t think there was anyone there.’
‘Where?’
‘I’m in the middle of it when suddenly she’s standing there. I never had time to think. She was going to phone the police. I couldn’t have that, could I?’
‘What are you talking about?’
Spicer ignored the question. ‘Just get in and out as quick as I can. If it looks like trouble, I don’t want nothing to do with it – if I’d thought she was there …’
‘Who?’
‘That woman.’
‘What woman?’
‘In the paper.’
‘What? You mean yesterday? The woman they found?’
‘She wasn’t supposed to be there, was she?’
‘Wasn’t she?’
‘No. On my life … One minute I’m by myself, next minute she’s there saying she’s calling the police, and my head just went. Next thing I know, the knife’s gone in.’
‘You killed Valerie Wiseman?’
‘I never meant to. It’s like it wasn’t me. After it happened, I just scarpered, and the next thing I know I’m reading about it in the paper, aren’t I?’
‘You were turning over her flat and she surprised you and you killed her?’
‘It’s like I said, I didn’t know what I was doing, did I? I told you, when I was in the nick I asked them to give me some help, but they never. I only ever done normal burglaries, on my life. It wasn’t my fault. I told you, she wasn’t supposed to be there.’
‘So it was her fault?’ Nick felt as if his head were about to burst. He must have raised his voice, because Spicer’s eyes widened in recognition. He had the look of someone who’d been submerged and had just broken up through the surface. Nick wondered who he thought he’d been talking to – a ghost, per
haps, a dream? ‘No,’ Spicer said now, ‘but it wasn’t the real me. Just bad luck, that’s all. It wasn’t supposed to happen.’
This wasn’t supposed to happen to me, either, thought Nick, but it did. He was vibrating, now, gripped by his fury. Spicer went to lay his left hand, drip taped in place, on his arm, but he jerked it away. ‘I’m only what society’s made me,’ Spicer whined. ‘One mistake, I get fucked off to borstal, and all I learnt there was how to commit more crimes. Well, they got what they wanted, didn’t they?’
Nick stared down at the close-cropped head, the glittering eyes. ‘It happens to all of us, mate,’ continued Spicer. ‘Life. You get fucking ambushed.’
How dare you, thought Nick. You’re a murderer. I’m nothing like you. Nothing at all.
‘Women,’ said Spicer. He was wheezing badly now, clutching at breath between the words. ‘Kids. Cancer. Every fucking thing. Load of shit. I tell you, mate, it wasn’t the real me done that. It just happened before I could stop it. If they’d just give me some help when I’d asked. You know what it’s like – things get away from you.’
I don’t know, thought Nick. I’m not like you.
‘You can’t help it. Like you and your missus and that –’ Nick turned away for a moment, re-traced the two steps to his bed, then back again – ‘and before you know it, you’re fucked, aren’t you? And you never meant none of it …’
Spicer’s chest heaved as he tried to refill his remaining lung. Nat had said she wanted to call the baby Willow if it was a girl. In another burst of fury, Nick suddenly imagined the word tattooed on his own chest, the letters in slightly gothic script, curving over one nipple, as Spicer had Ashlee, complete with spelling mistake, and – Christ All Fucking Mighty – Briana.
Nick could never entirely explain it afterwards, but he always told himself – the only person who knew – that that was what had tipped him over. That that was when, as Spicer himself would have said, his head just went. Briana. ‘I’m not like you,’ he’d said to Spicer. ‘Don’t you understand? I. Am. Nothing. Like. You. At. All.’ Then, holding the pillow he’d taken from his own bed over Spicer’s face, he pressed down hard until the struggling stopped.
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