The Art Teacher

by Paul Read

  He stuffed his pockets with the larger remains of the gun, pieces which couldn’t be destroyed easily or flushed into the drain like the rest of the metal particles, clips and assorted off-cuts, then packed a few days’ worth of clothes into a rucksack and tossed it over his shoulder alongside his guitar. He let himself out of his flat and locked the door.

  Patrick took the tube to Leicester Square, via a route so circuitous he couldn’t possibly have been followed, then walked straight to the spot in which he’d waited for Sarah at the start of his Christmas holiday and dropped a section of the barrel in a litter bin.

  Next, he took the short journey to the Coliseum on St Martin’s Lane, where he and Sarah had seen Madame Butterfly. He removed the bullet from his pocket and threaded it into one of the holes in a wall-mounted cigarette disposal unit outside. It made a dull clink as it nestled itself amongst ash and filter tips.

  After some searching, he found the restaurant they’d eaten in. He went in and ordered a light meal but couldn’t eat it, instead favouring the frenetic view of London out the window, the blur of legs and shopping bags. Before he left, he ducked into the toilet and dumped the gun’s trigger in the cistern.

  Afterwards, he hopped back on the tube and journeyed west, jumping off the carriage just before the door slid closed to make sure he was the last to depart. Booking himself in for one night at the Lionswater Hotel, he asked specifically for the same room he and Sarah had shared. He didn’t hang around any longer than it took to press the recoil spring, which had fused into one unbreakable lozenge in the fires of the Art department’s kiln, into the wet soil of the cyclamen.

  He walked back in the direction of The Old Ale Emporium to meet Adam, disposing of a portion of the slide, which still partially displayed the weapon’s serial number, in a recycling bank outside the police station. He cast a look around. Still, he was alone.

  Darkness gathered. In the distance, the inky night seemed to be emanating from the estate itself.

  The Old Ale Emporium wasn’t a pub Patrick frequented often. A mob of tobacco-writhed alcoholics festooned the exterior seating, their glum dogs tethered to a rotting chalkboard which proudly advertised, in writing long ago smudged by London rains, the delights of Sky Sports.

  Inside felt more salubrious, and warm. A middle-aged barman in a Doors T-shirt looked at Patrick as he approached, as though his customer were in the wrong place, an out-of-towner, and he himself barely recognised his reflection in the mirror behind the rack of spirits as he ordered a pint before settling into a windowed booth. Two men at a neighbouring table sucked down English barley and a boy and a girl, perhaps university students, lounged in a corner, skin as clear as their eyes, clothes fashionably twenty years out of date. It made sense to Patrick that youth imitated the generation before the generation before; they didn’t want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their immediate elders. The pair ignored the jukebox, which crooned something older than they were, and their eyes never left one another. They weren’t lovers, but they soon would be.

  Through misting eyes, Patrick attempted to read a broadsheet’s front page. Despite the accompanying graphics of financial markets, red lines zigzagging downwards with an almost cartoon zeal, he just couldn’t engage his brain fully enough to determine what the article was about. He began flicking through the rest of the paper, saw himself on page five, put it to one side, then drank quickly and peered at the darkness beyond the grimy window for hooded youths.

  ‘Oi! Shithead!’

  Patrick jumped, turned.

  His old frontman was recognisable only from his seventies’ rockstar fashion sense. Black leather jacket. Corduroy flares. Adam looked twenty years older than he’d been when Patrick last saw him. His mop-top was thinning at the crown and there were flecks of white in his scraggly goatee. Excess had written unflattering lines either side of his mouth and his eyes were low-lidded, kohled by irreversible tiredness. He smiled as he approached.

  ‘You look awful,’ he told Patrick.

  ‘You too.’ Patrick held up his empty glass. ‘Buy us another.’

  Once the customaries were out the way, Adam enquired about Patrick’s recent adventures and Patrick regaled him with the story, save that which would put him in prison. Very little of his tale, therefore, was accurate.

  ‘I guess you’re better off without this Sarah, huh? I mean, her daughter sounds like a right bitch.’

  Adam was sober and sensible, if not exactly erudite, and dispensed his wisdom in small aphorisms. There being ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ had never sounded better than when delivered with a Mancunian accent. But there was no avoiding the conversation. Patrick took a deep draught of beer.

  ‘Ana left me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. It’s me who should be sorry.’

  ‘I know you’d always fancied Ana.’

  It was true: her Spanish skin and Bourneville eyes had marked her out as a natural beauty but, better than that, her awkwardness always seemed strangely irreverent in rock-star-wannabe company. ‘The fact that she was your girlfriend was a problem, but…’

  ‘No kidding,’ Adam spluttered. His eyes kept sliding enviously across to Patrick’s guitar.

  ‘…I hope you don’t mind me being honest here, Adam. I adored Ana so much I think I’d have tried to steal her off anyone.’

  ‘You really don’t need to…’

  ‘I think I do. Bear with me. Neither of us felt particularly thrilled to be double-crossing someone we both cared for. Assuming you’d kill the pair of us, we found ourselves faced with two choices. We could admit everything, or cut short our affair. We decided to cut it short, but…’

  ‘The Lionswater.’

  ‘Exactly. It was supposed to be the perfect one-night-stand. I remember walking through the hotel reception the next morning, the sound of Miles Davis ringing from the bar’s speakers, and thinking to myself “I want to be with this woman for ever but…” She was yours. She was yours. I had no right. And then we saw you, slouched on the sofa by the entrance. Remember? You had about twenty fags crushed out in a large glass ashtray next to you. You looked at us totally without surprise…’

  He wore the same look, eight years later. ‘You and Ana had always flirted, and then… one day your flirting suddenly stopped. It didn’t go unnoticed.’

  ‘And then you punched me.’

  Adam smiled. ‘Words didn’t come easily to me in those days. Are you saying it was my fault, for finding out about the pair of you?’

  ‘I think I’m saying that it was no one’s fault.’

  Adam sighed, swigged. ‘Our second fucking album had only been out six days.’

  ‘I know…’

  The pair of them stared into their pints’ eyes, drummed softly on the table with forefingers, tore at sodden coasters.

  Released from Ana’s spell, the pair were free to discuss their memories of gigs, both good and bad, and the time when Adam started a brawl by launching a drumstick into a predominantly biker audience. Such conversation led, inevitably, to talk of the band’s restoration.

  Adam was enthusiastic about the idea and his teenage fervour was a tonic for Patrick. That someone could be so contented by the thought of retracing their steps was natural enough – at the heart of every mid-life crisis is the misconception that innocence can be regained by rewinding a clock – but Patrick was unsure how the band’s reunion could work, whether the old songs had aged well enough.

  ‘Well, let’s get out there and see if our crowd’s still waiting,’ Adam suggested. ‘Everybody’s reforming these days.’

  Patrick sat back in what appeared to be an old church pew. Someone had deemed it necessary to scratch ‘John’s got a big prick’ into the wood and had even provided a telephone number for, presumably, verification purposes. ‘You think they are?’

  The young couple in the corner looked like they were preparing to leave. Adam hollered to them.

  ‘Hey, you two, you’d be well chuffed to hear T
he Forsaken were gonna get back together, wouldn’t you?’

  The girl managed to frown without a single line spoiling her face. The boy asked, ‘The who?’

  ‘No, The Forsaken.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Patrick watched the young couple exit into the cold, boisterous street.

  ‘Too young,’ Adam sighed. ‘Too young.’

  ‘I think you lost them at “chuffed”, to be honest. But you’re hardly ancient. Did you really mean what you said on the phone? About being too old to die young?’

  ‘Fuck yeah. I always assumed I’d cork it at the age of rock ‘n’ roll death. I’m already way past Cobain, Morrison, Hendrix.’ Looking at him, anyone would be forgiven for thinking he still chased that particular dream. ‘Even Jesus died at thirty-three and I’m a few past that poor sod too.’

  Patrick inspected his glass. ‘Then what’s the point of getting The Forsaken back on the road? There’s no glamour in choking on your own vomit at our age.’

  ‘Are you kidding? There’s plenty of glamour in it. Is this the voice of reason I hear, the voice that persuaded you it would be a great idea to become a secondary school teacher? Look how that ended up.’ Adam indicated Patrick’s rucksack, next to his guitar. ‘By the way, what’s with the bag?’

  ‘I’m leaving town.’ Patrick fished in a pocket for his keys. ‘I was going to ask a favour. In a couple of days, could you collect some stuff from my flat? I’ve got all I need in the short term but I’ll want some more clothes and bits soon…’

  ‘Where you going?’

  Patrick shrugged.

  Adam leaned back on his chair and assumed full-on crucifixion pose, spread his arms out along the backrest, straightened and crossed his legs. He really did believe he could yet outdo Christ. ‘Here’s a crazy idea…’

  Patrick knew what was coming. It might have been the beer, but even their old telepathy seemed to be returning.

  ‘…Come kip at mine for a bit. You’ve got your guitar. We’ll get some beers in and just jam, like we used to. It’ll be great. What do you think?’

  Patrick shouldn’t really have needed to give this any consideration. He wanted so desperately to time-travel with this old friend, to regroup, to escape London’s gangs, his Plan B life. Instead, he found himself contemplating Adam’s bloated, ageing appearance, and seeing the mirror of his own graceless maturation, not least in his delusional infatuations with the past. Furthermore, Adam’s lonely, single lifestyle brought to mind painful thoughts of Ana and Danny, how terribly he missed having family around, the opportunity to be the father to Danny he himself had never had. Rejoining The Forsaken might not necessarily have represented roadblocks to this, but, right now, it hardly symbolised moving forward.

  And, lest he forget, he was a wanted man.

  ‘That’s a tempting offer…, but I need to be on my own for a while. I think it’s… safer that way.’

  Adam squinted at the guitar once more. ‘So… Why’d you bring that with you? I kind of thought, you know, you were keen to… Get Back.’ He sang the words in McCartney’s voice but couldn’t disguise his hurt.

  Patrick reached for the Les Paul.

  ‘It’s for you. I can’t write any more, not really, but I expect you still can. You’re the guy who wrote “Find the Ocean”, after all.’

  Adam, for once, was speechless. ‘I thought you hated that song,’ he finally said.

  ‘So did I.’

  Adam’s eyes were watering. ‘Ah, man, I… I don’t know what to say…’

  ‘You don’t need to say anything. Just take it. It’s going to a better home.’

  As Adam reached to accept the guitar Patrick was passing, the window behind him exploded, rained to the carpet in a curtain of tiny glass beads, and two loud bangs, as though cars had collided at high speed, seemed to make Adam cry out in pain and grab his chest just below the left collarbone. There came a surge of muffled screams before both sound and sight diluted. Patrick thought he saw a kid running from the pub to dive into a black cab which powered away with a familiar urgency, and then the world was on its side as carpet fell upon him, those beads of glass razor-sharp against his cheek. Blurring hands and faces and darkness crowded for supremacy above him, and his last memory before darkness won was of sketching a guitar for his father at the age of seven and his father nodding indifferently at the drawing before suggesting he go and show it to his mother.

  FOUR

  Again, that nauseating, curdling smell – once experienced, never forgotten. Except, this time, the heavy scent of death was his own.

  The shock partly blocked the pain, just as the plastic mask hastily clipped over his mouth and nose obscured his view of the blood. Men in white. Men in blue. Voices, urgent.

  Then vision stormed into darkness.

  A pair of polyethylene fingers peeled back an eyelid and burst his brain with a sweeping torchlight. ‘Tell me your name,’ intoned the scraping, deep voice of a calm god.

  Patrick said nothing. It couldn’t have been him they were addressing. He let his head fall and saw the window of the pub was missing, save for a few glass spiders’ webs along the bottom of the frame. He made out an overturned table and chair, saturated in glass, and an idle ambulance outside, the shoal of voyeurs already gathering.

  His eyes filled with red pain.

  ‘What’ve we got?’

  ‘One dead, sir. And one injured. Sir.’

  Patrick’s senses fired awake. He looked around frantically.

  ‘Some help over here please!’ someone bellowed, very close. Above him, a bag of blood hung on a thin sliver. ‘Quick. He’s critical.’ Tubes threaded crimson liquid.

  Paramedics obscured Patrick’s view. Pain too.

  An outline of a body in white tape next to the jukebox. A black body bag. Blood soaking up the glass. Glass soaking up the blood.

  ‘Looks like a drive-by,’ someone announced, as Patrick caught a gust of cheap aftershave.

  ‘Hospital. Now.’ Another god.

  Strong hands held him. ‘This may hurt,’ a voice warned. But he felt nothing as he was lifted and powered into the night past a bloodied guitar, his backpack, half-drunk pints of ale.

  The darkness swept him as faces parted in the crowd. And a familiar woman running towards him. ‘Patrick!’ she shouted. ‘Patrick!’

  Sarah.

  His body split by agony, he couldn’t be sure if anything was real. A silent, throbbing scream greeted Sarah’s haunting expression of… was it disappointment? No, it was surely grief and shock. Patrick tried to speak but his lungs weren’t behind the effort, and he could only fold back into a hazy world of agony as the bright, white belly of the ambulance claimed him.

  ‘Mate, I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies but they still mess with my head.’

  ‘Same.’

  There was a jolt as the ambulance turned. The lights burned through Patrick’s closed lids. He felt light, peaceful.

  ‘Sometimes it’s like they even speak. You know, the body’s last gasps for air and that? Like a discharge of… I don’t know. Memories? It’s bloody sinister. To tell the truth, I don’t like to get too close to them.’

  ‘I know what you mean. In case they somehow infect you with their… oblivion. Silly isn’t it? You never get used to it.’

  Someone zipped something closed.

  ‘Poor bugger. At least he would’ve died pretty much instantly.’

  Even through the painkillers, Patrick brought sounds forth from his chest that weren’t human. They took another corner. The siren tore the night.

  ‘This one’s going into cardiac arrest,’ one of the gods said, panic raising the timbre of his voice, rendering him mortal.

  And then, smiling faces. Christmas morning. Danny not even crawling yet, dressed in an elf Babygro. Ana under the mistletoe. His mother, her first Christmas without her husband, holding her grandson on her lap as they both slept peacefully. Peacefully.

  And then nothi
ng.

  When Patrick woke some time later it was with the curious sense that he’d already woken a dozen times without ever regaining consciousness. He was in no physical pain, but couldn’t move the lower half of his body and his mouth was parched and glued.

  He was in a ward with three other beds, all exposed save for one in the far corner whose lilac curtain was pulled closed but couldn’t mask the sound of coughing from within. The man to his immediate left was only visible because he was sitting out in his chair, wincing in a red dressing down, his dark but clumpy hair matted from sleeping in his own sweat. He stared ahead of him as though barely awake. The man opposite was unshaven, the hair on his head grown out into a tight brush. He was sour-faced but strangely resigned, contemptuous of everyone and everything, as though he’d been in the hospital some time.

  Cold light screamed through the large window to Patrick’s right but the view was only of the roof of another part of the hospital, the large grey fans of air conditioning units spinning disconsolately. The sky was as white as a bandage and a few birds wheeled underneath it.

  The morphine machine next to Patrick shrilled, to alert him to the fact that he could self-administer, and he stabbed at the button near his right hand and released a fresh shot.

  A female nurse hurried over from an unseen work station.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ She looked barely fifteen and her hair was back, her uniform so white it showed up a long, stray dark hair on her chest. She unhoused his stats from a clipboard mounted at the foot of the bed and pored over the notes without waiting for a reply. It had been, of course, a plainly ridiculous question.

  ‘Can you pass me some water?’

  She did so and Patrick drank a deep draught of room-temperature liquid, then threw up over himself. The curtain was pulled closed and his clothes and bedding changed, his body inert and embarrassed under her professional hands.

  Afterwards, the surgeon paid him a visit and told him how lucky he was. He was accompanied by another two doctors and they peeled off the bandages from his side, then very painfully removed the plasters from the wound to check whether it had healed properly. Patrick self-administered another morphine shot as he was informed about the risks of infection, and the possibility of blood clots. The surgeon scratched at Patrick’s toes.