The Art Teacher

by Paul Read

  ‘Feel that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Patrick lied.

  ‘Can you wiggle them for me?’

  He could not.

  ‘You’ve had major trauma. Not many people get shot in the chest and live to tell the tale.’

  Patrick jabbed at the morphine button but it wasn’t ready to release yet. He was improbably high and the whole experience was like something from a bad sketch show.

  ‘You won’t be walking for a while, I’m afraid,’ he stated. ‘But… You’re alive. Someone from Physio will come and see you later, and bring you a wheelchair so you’ll be able to get yourself about as soon as possible. Have you got any questions?’

  ‘How’s Adam?’

  ‘Who’s Adam?’

  ‘The guy I was drinking with when…’

  ‘Get some rest,’ he suggested, moving off.

  The nurse returned and gave him an anticoagulant shot in the stomach, then took his blood pressure and temperature.

  ‘Take these,’ she said, placing a cardboard thimble of pills beside him.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Vodka Martini, shaken not stirred,’ she joked, beginning to tourniquet his arm and sinking another needle in, sucking out a syringeful of blood.

  ‘Where are my belongings?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘The police have them.’

  ‘Does my wife know where I am?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  She showed him how to raise the bed so he could sit up, told him two days had passed since the shooting. He had vague memories of arriving at the hospital, drunk on the gas and air mix they kept shoving over his nose, waiting, parked in a bay for the medical team to assess him, for the X-rays to be taken. He remembered the shiny white ceilings passing overhead, the changing faces of nurses and medical staff. He remembered his underpants being cut off before he was wheeled towards the operating theatre and the smell of rubber as the anaesthetic was pressed across his face. He remembered being scared and alone, so far from his son, and wondering whether or not a religious persuasion would have made him a stronger person at that moment in time, and whether it was really too late to convert.

  A shadow at his side barred the light, its back to him, pulling at wires, switches. The curtain was drawn.

  ‘What time is it, doctor?’ he asked.

  The shadow yelped.

  ‘Sarah…?’ he asked.

  She spun round and flashed a smile. ‘You’re awake! How are you feeling?’

  He stabbed the morphine button.

  ‘That bad, huh?’

  Patrick grimaced.

  ‘I wanted to see how you were. Terrible thing. Terrible. Have they found the person who did this?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose you’d know, would you? What happened?’

  He repeated his previous answer. ‘I think I’m going to throw up.’

  Sarah rapidly handed Patrick a kidney bowl, then retreated as though having pulled the pin from a grenade, but he wasn’t able to vomit under such scrutiny and dry heaved once, twice, then placed it back on the bedside locker himself. His side ached after that, and he could feel the ribs within twisted, jarred, saw the image of them under X-ray in his mind’s eye, misaligned and cracked. Blood had seeped through the bandages and turned them brown where the bullet had entered and the surgeon had gone in to wash and clean out the wound.

  ‘Thank God you’re alright. I came as soon as I heard.’

  He vaguely recalled her dreamlike appearance outside the pub. ‘You came straight here?’

  ‘Yeah. Like I said. As soon as I heard.’

  ‘I think Adam’s dead. I saw a body bag.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was supposed to be me.’

  ‘Shh. Don’t think about it now.’

  A nurse swept through the curtain and the rigmarole of body temperature and blood pressure takings was restarted. Sarah stepped outside while he had to piss into a bottle. The urine was so dark it looked like stout, but at least the catheter was out.

  ‘You’ve got a temperature,’ she told him, wandering off.

  Sarah returned. ‘Do you need anything? Some food? Something to read? There’s a pretty good shop downstairs.’

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said again.

  She smiled, but it was defeated, worrisome. He must have looked awful.

  ‘It’s not over,’ he said. ‘They won’t stop. I was going to run away but I left it too late. They won’t stop until I’m dead.’

  The nurse reappeared through the curtain with a frowning doctor, and asked the usual questions. He was given codeine again and he peeled off the dressing on his side, painfully ripping away the last of the hair to study for infection. He seemed happy there was no pus but ordered the nurse to take a swab. The stitches were blue and huge, numbering, in that middle area alone, about twenty-five. The ward felt intensely hot and the prodding fingers of his nurse impossibly cold.

  ‘Does this hurt?’ she asked in response to Patrick’s prehistoric language of anguish.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, warm your hands first.’

  Tiredness lay heavily upon him still. The sleep he’d managed had been anaesthetic-induced and now he was just as artificially awake. The morphine machine was beeping, not because he was eligible for a fresh injection, but because the bag obviously needed changing. The two cannulas in his wrist chafed and he barely had the energy to give the surrounding skin even the most casual of scratches.

  ‘Are you… out of the woods?’ Sarah asked him when the medics retired again.

  He took a long look at her. ‘I hope so. I came… close. How the hell did I get mixed up in this?’

  She was silent.

  ‘You know, every time I close my eyes, I still see that window shattering, hear that gunshot. I smell death all the time.’

  ‘Don’t…’ she said, horrified. She put her hand over her nose, as though the scent came back to her too. It was a small gesture, but it confirmed something within Patrick. And underneath everything, her same, disillusioned facial expression.

  ‘At least I would’ve died in the pub,’ he joked. ‘Not that horrible place where Denis ended up.’

  They looked at each other without mirth.

  ‘Red meat. Burnt hair. Shit. That’s what Denis’s body smelt like.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said.

  ‘Sarah, what were you doing when I woke up?’

  ‘Nothing. What do you mean?’

  ‘You were trying to turn off my machines. I’m afraid it’s not that simple. I’m no longer linked up to life support. Sorry. All you turned off was my morphine dispenser.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were at the pub. I saw you. Why did you tell me you came straight here?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘Why did you come? For confirmation that I was actually dead?’

  ‘Are you…?’

  ‘Your face, Sarah. I remember. You made this same face when I saw you as I was being lifted into the ambulance. You weren’t upset, you were disappointed.’

  ‘Patrick…’

  ‘It’s funny. Maybe it’s all these drugs, but I’m clear headed for the first time in ages… Sarah, your precious fucking daughter is fine. The same people who tried to kill me will protect her.’

  She spoke so quietly he could barely hear her. ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Well, it’s not guaranteed I suppose. Not while I’m alive and can tell them the truth.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘You were the only person who knew I was going to be at that pub. You tipped them off. You must have done.’

  She looked around her, more desperate now.

  ‘Patrick…’

  ‘You fucking bitch. Jenna was always protected by the gang, wasn’t she? That punch I gave Denis really was my death warrant.’

  She dragged her chair closer. Her face had bleached.

  ‘We just needed your help Patrick, that’s all
.’

  We?

  The air in the ward was replaced by something viscous and bile-tasting. ‘Oh my God… Just how long have I been duped for? You were in it all along.’

  Sarah drew even closer, her face impossibly sad.

  She whispered, so quietly it was almost imperceptible. ‘I wasn’t in it. I did it.’

  It was Patrick’s turn to be speechless as Sarah’s mouth almost touched his ear.

  ‘I think you know why I did it, don’t you?’ Her voice was cracking. ‘That… boy… had assaulted Jenna before. I came to speak to you when the… abuse began again, remember? I mean, the plan was in its early stages then but… Over Christmas, Denis assaulted her again. He… raped…’ She could hardly say the word. ‘Despite your so-called “advice” to him.’

  Patrick recalled the promises he’d made Sarah in his classroom that evening. He hadn’t done a thing.

  She couldn’t look at him. ‘Once we found out about the punch, I knew the plan couldn’t fail. Frankly, after Jenna told me about your confrontation with Denis at the front of your classroom before Christmas, it was solid enough, but that…? That was… Well, let’s just say it helped.’

  Patrick croaked, ‘When you say you did it…?’

  Sarah’s forehead was on his. To all the world, it would have looked a tender moment. ‘Jenna arranged to meet Denis, in secret. Except… I was the one waiting there. I hid in the dark in the fur coat she sometimes borrowed off me. You must have noticed we look alike? The same physique, height…’

  ‘And you…?’

  ‘I shot him in the head.’ She said it so offhand, like it was nothing. ‘Then went back home and pretended to be asleep while you cleaned up the evidence for us. We’d brought you in, as the risk taker, but had to make sure you kept quiet. It worked better than I thought. Jenna’s bribe couldn’t really fail, could it? You even visited the flat after the murder was announced, asked us not to say anything about the grass which you’d taken great pains to show me under Jenna’s bed. In the end, the sniffer dogs found out about the drugs, but you’d already taken them off us by then. I admit I was nervous, but you kept your mouth shut. You probably weren’t going to stay silent forever though, so…’

  ‘So you gave me your body.’

  She looked away. ‘I used you, yes. And Jenna’s performance was exemplary, though much of it wasn’t an act. She felt it, poor girl, even though I was the one who pulled the trigger.’

  ‘You let her take the blame. What kind of a mother does that?’ He tried to pull himself away, but she held him by the shoulder and he lacked the strength to escape her.

  ‘I got rid of him for her. That’s the kind of mother I am,’ she cried in a voice garrotted by sorrow. ‘I knew the gangs would exact a revenge. But… but…’

  ‘But on me.’ Patrick felt redness march across his eyesight. Dizzy, he reached for water.

  She grabbed his wrist. In her eyes, he saw madness, apology, desperation. ‘Jenna said nothing at the police station, as we agreed. But Meadows suspected you. The sooner you were… killed… the better, frankly, before you ruined everything.’

  Patrick was about to vomit when he felt the single, wet tear which had crossed from her cheek to his.

  ‘It was hard to keep up the pretence, for both Jenna and myself, but I had to trust her. She didn’t want me locked away, any more than I wanted to lose her. I couldn’t lose another daughter, Patrick.’ The tear was not for him. ‘Then you started to wobble. You confronted Jenna in the estate, and were so close to working it all out, accusing her of Denis’s premeditated murder… But you seemed genuinely unstable and she was worried you would come clean in the interview room…’

  ‘I wish I had.’

  ‘We hadn’t been expecting news of you hitting Denis to leak. And, to be honest, we didn’t know if the gang would try anything after that… But Jenna put them off the scent – that was my idea – to take police pressure off you. To leave you only to the gangs… But then we were kidnapped. I admit, I thought it had all gone very wrong then. I didn’t bank on the gang having such a strong code of honour. But I carried on with the act. What else could I do?’

  Almost every part of Patrick’s body hurt. ‘Did Jenna tell them I killed Denis?’

  Her lips were trembling. ‘What do you think? By then the final piece had fallen into place: you let me know exactly where you were going to be that evening. And Jenna told the Souljas.’

  The image of Jenna’s automaton’s eyes in the exam hall came back to him. Her mother was controlling her. She obviously didn’t want to lose her mother, the sole remaining member of her family, yet neither did she want to be attacked by Denis again. He wondered how complicit Jenna really was, whether she regretted ever telling her mother about Denis in the first place, and how often their arguments, such as the one in the school playground after the press conference, threatened to derail the plot against him. Maybe she, too, had spent the last few weeks wondering how the hell she’d got involved in those dangerous games, why she’d spent so long cosying up to her attacker just so her mother could gun him down and drag her through weeks of lies and risk. Had Denis terrified her that much, to go to such extreme lengths?

  Patrick remembered the encounter in the alley, the glint of the blade pushed up against his throat, Denis’s acrid breath. Of course he had.

  His heart was thumping faster than he’d ever known.

  She looked at him with the same nervously calculating eyes she’d looked at him with after their aborted Lionswater encounter, as though begging herself for the confidence to carry out her plan to its end, then cupped the back of his head, stroked his cheek. There was something lovingly final about it, as there might be moments before the bloodletting in the abattoir.

  ‘Forgive me for coming on strong at the parents’ evening, but after your midnight Dear John I needed to… keep you on the hook. And, I admit, I was startled by a face outside my window that night after the press conference, but sleeping with you was…’

  ‘Collateral damage,’ he rasped.

  ‘Oh, Patrick…’ She tried to smile but it was one of utter desolation. ‘You thought I was falling for the great rock star?’

  He laughed without mirth. ‘You make it all sound so easy.’

  She put her mouth up to his ear. Her breath was warm, sweet.

  ‘Believe me, it wasn’t. It isn’t.’

  Their eyes met, though in truth they could barely see each other through the swelling tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  Then, before he knew what she was doing, Sarah whipped out the pillow from beneath his head and, in one fluid move, pressed it over his face.

  He couldn’t move his legs, couldn’t kick out. She seemed to be bearing down on him in several places. His head. His wound. He was weak and, by degrees, could feel his breath failing as she ebbed the panicked squall from his chest, filled his mouth with NHS cotton. His silent words bubbled like blood. Harder and harder the pillow pressed and deeper and deeper he felt the pull of a sleep which he knew would be his last. All that separated his quiet murder from the trained staff who might save him was a thin, drawn lilac curtain.

  Finally, it seemed, his lungs burst.

  A terrifying scream, dredged from hell, pierced his remaining senses and he tasted and then gulped at syrupy air as the pillow relaxed. With some difficulty, Patrick shook the pillow to the floor and saw Ana with her hands round Sarah’s middle, as though performing a particularly violent Heimlich. The words which shrieked from both women were guttural and inaudible, more so when Sarah clawed a long scratch along Ana’s right arm, drawing blood, and forced the release. Sarah spun round and, like a woman possessed, lunged for Ana’s throat as ward staff sprang through the curtain and attempted to pull the scrabbling pair apart.

  Wide-eyed faces of curious patients peered through the curtains. Finally, Sarah was peeled from Ana. Giant wracking heaves sobbed out of her as she was bundled back and her arms pressed roughly behind her back.
She screamed in pure, vivid anguish and the ward almost shook with the force of it.

  ‘Even look at my husband and I’ll break your neck, bitch,’ Ana spat.

  ‘Call the police,’ Patrick gasped.

  The young nurse saw his distress, ran to his side.

  Patrick massaged his exploding chest, winced. ‘She tried to kill me.’

  ‘Which one?’

  When Patrick nodded at Sarah, Ana was released.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Patrick told everyone, with a slight smile. ‘This is my wife.’

  Ana rushed towards him.

  ‘I told you I didn’t trust her.’

  ‘You were right not to. She murdered Denis,’ Patrick told her. ‘Don’t let her get away,’ he called after security as they escorted Sarah out.

  If she was looking at him as she was led into the corridor, Patrick never saw. He was watching the gauzed sky change to onyx outside, the creeping shadows chasing dusk across the hospital roof. What looked like a murmuration of starlings swept across the rooftops, but it might also have been the codeine casting spectral stains across his tired retinae.

  ‘Visiting hours are over,’ the nurse told Ana.

  She sat next to her husband and croaked out a laugh. It was the first time they’d shared a bed in roughly a year and it was the first time she’d laughed in one in even longer.

  ‘Where’s Danny?’ Patrick asked her.

  She took his hand and squeezed it. ‘At your mother’s. I didn’t want him seeing you like this.’

  ‘Adam’s dead. I’m sorry.’

  He looked into her eyes, waiting for the information to bed itself in.

  ‘I know.’

  They remained there in silence for some time. The medical staff repaired the damage to his small section of the ward, checked him over, plumped up the pillow he’d almost been suffocated by. The morphine machine restarted its shrill beeping.

  ‘You scared me, on the phone.’