by Albert Alla
My new ward looked much like my old one. The walls were painted green rather than yellow, but the patients looked just as wrinkled, and the nurses just as occupied. There was a gate at the end of the corridor, which opened silently onto the heavy grey doors of an elevator. I remembered the nurses who’d moved me: one floor, they’d said. The weight of the pad in my hand had me thinking of the old man upstairs. Pressing a few buttons, the elevator swallowed me in and spat me out. A nurse helped me through the door to my old ward: pulling was trickier than pushing.
When I came to the open room that used to be my own, I stood by the nurses’ desk, as the young man and his blue sling had done, and looked at the great window. The ward looked ordered from afar, beds symmetrically arranged, the floor uncluttered. The city’s lights broke through the distance, dimming points in the room’s reflection. I was there too, in my pale hospital robe, spotty stubble darkening my chin, my back bent forward. The sight held me for a moment.
I recognised a nurse walking by.
‘What happened to the old man who used to be in that bed?’ I pointed.
She pursed her lips.
‘The dark-skinned one,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, he’s gone.’
‘Dead?’
‘No, gone home.’
Relief mingled with disappointment. We had spent days facing each other. Days of boredom, introspection, and solitude. And somehow, despite our proximity, we’d erected a barrier we never dared break.
I took the elevator down to a cafeteria I’d seen signposted. People were scattered in clusters across the expanse of tables. Opening my sketchbook, I sat in between two groups. A greying man talking to a woman with a creased pink shirt. And an Asian family: two sons sleeping over beds made of chairs, an attentive daughter tucking her mother’s arm, a father typing away on his phone. I sat and sketched and then I had enough. I preferred walking.
As I weaved my way back, two floors below my own ward, I heard a patient grunt. The sound stopped me. A guttural burst breaking down into a howl. I peered into a room at the man’s pain, but my mind was going elsewhere. I was back inside the classroom and Jeffrey had fallen to the ground with a loud grunt. He was on the floor, leg twitching, a new grunt rising muted past his rasping breath.
My body was going rigid – I had to think of something else. Grunts and Jeffrey… My brain parsed through hundreds of mornings, afternoons and evenings I’d spent with him over the years, until, as the seconds passed and the classroom threatened its return, I remembered that Jeffrey used to grunt on the cricket field. Gentle men in floppy whites, glare reflecting off the wicket, freshly mowed grass, the images came together and the classroom was banished out of my mind.
Jeffrey used to roll his arm over and hope the ball would swing, seam and spit. He called himself a fast bowler – when I made fun of his speed, he told me he bowled a heavy ball.
‘Ask the three batsmen who couldn’t play me last week. I’m quicker than I look.’
They’d been swinging across the line with their eyes closed, and one of them had connected five times before finding a safe pair of hands on the boundary. But that hardly bothered Jeffrey.
When I told him he was slow in the nets, he’d rise to the banter and scoff back an answer. One day he’d say that he reserved his best for matches. On another, he’d tell me that I wasn’t worth the effort. This isn’t to say he fooled himself. He was well aware that he was on the slow side of medium. But he preferred to think of himself as a fast bowler. When I told him that he should take a closer look at Ashley Giles, he laughed dismissively. It would be Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar for him.
If my advice had no effect, he was willing to listen to my father. For years, we’d seen him score a hundred every third match. His quietness at the crease, the restrained backlift, his backfoot punches, we’d spent years trying to emulate him. One day, my father took Jeffrey aside and said:
‘Forget about speed. It’s all in here.’ He tapped his skull. ‘Fool me and you’ll get me out.’
Jeffrey took that to mean he should start grunting. He would start with three standard deliveries, respectable stuff on and around the off stump. On the fourth, we all expected it, he would sprint in, grunt, and bowl a slower one. The grunt would come early in his delivery stride, as if he was coiling so far that it was straining his back. He would land with a roar, release with a snarl, only for the ball to lob gently towards the batsman. Wary of losing their wicket, batsmen would generally pat the ball back, and smile at the laughing wicketkeeper.
Jeffrey’s tactic worked once. A spiky-haired twelve-year-old blocked Jeffrey’s first two deliveries, cut the third for four, and then tried the same shot on Jeffrey’s slower ball, only to see the ball go over his slanted bat and dislodge a bail. Never one to miss a celebration, Jeffrey planted both feet on the ground and looked up to the sky, his arms outstretched. When he looked down, we were all around him, cheering him on. Ignoring the rest of us, he found my father and embraced him.
The image of my father and Jeffrey, arm in arm, brought up an overpowering melancholy. Drained, I made my way back to my room. The next day I told my mother I wished my father would visit more often.
‘He wants to. He does. But he’s busy, you know how it is. And he’s got to take care of James.’
There was a sadness in her voice that stopped me from asking any more questions.
***
It was a day before Hill’s last visit that my mother seemed to break the distance that had grown between us. Despite my best efforts, I could ignore it no longer. She’d never made me feel so caught up in my own silence. Whenever she entered the room, I’d pull out a novel and bury myself behind its cover. Even when she sat quietly, I dared not interrupt her for a slight furrow across her brow.
But that day, her phone clutched in her hand, she walked into my room with a smile I hadn’t seen for many years. It was the same smile she’d had when her lab received a large grant. Or when she’d ensured her favourite doctoral student was offered a fellowship.
I was sitting on a chair, my forehead glued to the window, staring at the town below. Arching my neck, I immediately felt myself drawn towards her. She was pulling up a chair next to mine, her voice carrying the warmth of fresh gossip.
‘There’s a rumour going around,’ she said, lingering over the word ‘rumour’, ‘that they’re going to replace Andrew Hill.’ On that, she leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Ah!’
‘Why? What’s he done?’
Her smile grew to include me. She tapped her phone absentmindedly.
‘It’s what he hasn’t done that people worry about. Every morning, there’s fifty journalists waiting outside his door for a coherent story, and he can’t give it to them. He has twenty officers working late into the evenings and he can’t give it to them! That’s what he’s done. That’s what he hasn’t done.’
Her enthusiasm was overpowering my confusion. I grinned as I spoke.
‘But he knows what happened. I told him.’
‘Exactly.’ She kissed my head and got up. I turned around, waiting for her to say more. She was pacing, two fingers playing with her lower lip.
‘Nate, he’s just a policeman. He doesn’t get how it works.’
As she walked around, unaware of my presence, I felt like a fool. I’d let myself hope too much, but she’d only come in so she could boast over one of her schemes. I suppressed the feeling as soon as it happened, but it had already coated my mind with a sticky dirt.
As she left the room, I tried to forget the smile she’d had when she’d walked in, and told myself to focus on practicalities. My mother was not being herself, I decided. But there was a weight on the insides of my stomach, as though I were falling, that stopped me from taking that line of thought any further. The only idea that seemed to fit was that I should take matters into my own hands. Whenever it came up, I nodded to myself and, for an instant, forgot the feeling in my gut.
***
In many ways
, Eric had been unlucky when he first arrived at Hornsbury School. He’d spent his first weeks balancing the changes occurring within his home with his desire to fit in and make friends in a new school. There were days when he would be twitching around at his desk, hoping to start a conversation with his neighbours. I still remember him taking Jeffrey’s seat next to me. Unhappy to see my friend relegated to the back, I spent the entire lesson ignoring Eric, just as he was trying to catch my eyes and smile. I feigned utter focus on my book, and when my attention wavered, I held my hand over my left eye so that our gazes wouldn’t cross.
And there were days when he would trudge in, choose an empty table, and slump back, unaware of anyone around him. The strangeness of his behaviour could have worked for him. If Tom Davies or Anna, two popular students, had talked to him on one of his good days, they might have been inclined to feel for him on one of his bad days. Perhaps they would have gone and asked him how he was, and, touched, as he was still willing to be back then, he might have told them.
Instead, it became a bit of a sport to ignore him. Never something we openly discussed – we were friendly for the most part – but something jokes would refer to in passing:
‘I was struggling to stay awake, and then Eric sat next to me.’
But it could have blown over with everyone like it did with me. On one of his gloomy days, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether he could borrow my book for a second.
‘You don’t have your own?’
‘Not anymore.’
I moved to his desk so we could share. We said hello to each other in the mornings after that, and I was soon enjoying the conversations we had on his better days. With a little luck, and I’m not asking for much, the same could have happened between Eric and the rest of the class.
The first I saw of the incident, Paul Cumnor was pushing Eric back onto a railing. It happened very quickly: Paul’s head stuck into Eric’s face, his finger jabbing Eric’s cheek, and then Eric’s head striking Paul, Paul collapsing to the floor with a thud and a ‘Fuck!’, blood pouring from his nose, while Eric towered above him, a shallow cut across his forehead.
Eric told me the story later: he’d been staring in the distance, caught in his own thoughts, when he’d heard Paul calling to him. ‘Stop!’ Unsure what Paul was referring to, Eric assumed he was telling him to stop brooding over his problems. He smiled at Paul, and soon slipped back into his world. At the end of the lesson, Paul drove into him: ‘Don’t look at her!’
‘I could count the hairs on his chin,’ he told me. ‘I had to hit him.’
Fights often bring people closer: there’s something in fearing pain. But not this time: Eric was too absorbed in his own world. To those who didn’t know him, he was shifty because he was guilty. Perhaps because he’d overcome Paul, Eric never blamed him for being ostracised. To him, everything was Tom’s fault.
‘He’s fake. He’s always calculating. A smile here, a pretty speech there, and I’ll get through! You saw him yesterday. He never talks to me and then he asks me if I want to be his lab partner. He just wants my help! So why does he go laughing behind my back? Chatting up Jayvanti while I do all the work.’
Even though I always found Tom’s barbs innocuous, I would find myself agreeing with every word of Eric’s rants. And, as Eric well knew, I would bump into Tom the next day and find him just as likeable as before Eric’s outburst.
***
When my mother warned me that Hill would be coming back for a final interview, she added a note of hope:
‘It’s almost over.’
Those three words became a mantra that I started to expect whenever I saw her coming out of a fog of thoughts. Pacing around the room, she said them as she saw me looking at her. After my father called, she said them as she explained that, once again, he had too much work to come and visit me. My dinner cooling on my lap, she said them as she bid me goodnight. At first I thought she was trying to reassure me and the words annoyed me, but then I realised that she was talking to herself.
They seemed stronger as she buttoned her jacket and went to open the door.
The woman who’d conducted the last interview entered the room first. She wore the same grey suit that she had the last time I saw her, its lines still embracing her figure. My eyes lingered on her waist as she closed the door. If I still felt my throat tighten, I also knew that she’d leave as soon as I told her what she was after.
‘Gina, will you get Mrs Dillingham some tea?’ The inspector’s voice came from the door.
Gina – this is the first time I remember her name – walked to my mother’s side and whispered milk and sugar. She laid a hand on my mother’s elbow.
‘I’ll stay here,’ my mother hissed. ‘Go and get it yourself.’
Exchanging a glance with her inspector, Gina swayed towards the door and left the room. That was the last I saw of her.
Andrew Hill loomed. The black wisps crowning his haggard face; the dark eyebrows settled at the bottom of his imposing forehead; the thick square glasses framing his brown eyes. He moved into the centre of the room with a ponderous walk, his feet settling a shoulder’s length apart, his legs still as a plinth.
The inspector stood at the foot of the bed, while my mother stood to my right. A full minute elapsed from the moment he entered the room to the moment he started speaking. He removed his glasses.
‘Nate, you are an important witness. We need you to answer a few more questions. Can you do that for me?’
Feeling more comfortable with the process the third time around, I nodded confidently.
‘Good. Can you start by telling me about your friendship with Eric?’
As he mentioned ‘friendship with Eric’, I felt my mother tensing next to me. I composed my face, and gave her an assured nod.
‘We were friends, but I was friends with everybody.’
The inspector’s face had sallow skin lumped below his eyes. I looked closer and saw the same loose skin sagging from the lines of his jaw. Afraid to notice more, I let my eyes wander away.
‘His mother mentioned you visiting. How often did you visit him?’
‘How often?’ The question brought up a string of visits all blending into one. ‘Every now and again.’
‘Well, let me rephrase the question. About how many times did you go to his house since, say, January?’
‘Ah…’ Summer visits crowded my mind. I was seeing his tree-house and our conversations high above ground. Narrowing my focus to the winter months, I tried to think of the cold, of damp January afternoons, hoping it would bring the right visits to mind.
‘…Let me count, Nate,’ my mother was saying, ‘since I had to drive you. There was that time before James’ football training, and that was it. Before that was in December. Once, inspector.’
I felt Hill’s eyes on me as my mother spoke.
‘Once, then?’ he asked.
‘Once,’ I said.
‘Alright. And do you remember seeing anything peculiar on that visit?’
My voice trailed off as my thoughts went back to Eric’s shed. My bat was gripped in the vice on his workbench. He was bending forward and applying glue, creases spreading down his forehead. The smell of glue harrowed up my nostrils, but he didn’t seem to mind it. I was glancing around, at the piles of sawn-off wood, at a canvas thrown over a heap, at a large metal box and a saw atop it.
‘His shed was messier than usual. But not very messy either. Maybe there was something.’ I could feel my mother’s breath as she leaned closer. ‘Maybe there wasn’t. If I think about it long enough, I’m going to convince myself that there was.’
‘Nothing caught your attention?’
‘Nothing did then. But if I think about it long enough, I’ll be telling you that I saw his guns and his bullets.’
Hill’s hands rose to his head and stopped around his chin, wavering as he twirled his glasses.
‘Alright. One final question, Nate.’ Suddenly, he was looking directly into me. ‘Why
do you think Eric didn’t shoot you like he shot everybody else?’
My mind reeled for a second. Through the white, I became aware of my hand cooped in my mother’s, and I thought of my previous responses. I was ready to answer the question, even if haltingly.
‘I guess…’ I was looking at the inspector, hoping to pick up cues from his body language. He remained solemn. ‘People either froze, or went for the door. I hid behind the teacher’s desk. Thicker wood, and all that. And then I looked up, and I guess Eric was looking at me so I thought I’d go to him. He didn’t want to die alone. That explains it, doesn’t it?’
His eyes stayed fixed on mine, his mouth resolutely closed. It was when he put his glasses back on that I sensed he’d heard enough.
***
A squadron of suits was closing in on me. They were hiding behind the only column in the great cafeteria. I ran towards a slanted door, but it slipped ever further from my grasp. A blonde nurse in white bared her sharpened teeth and shook her head at me. When I asked her for help, she melted into the background. I could feel the men’s moist breath on my neck. There was nowhere to run: I turned to face them.
It took me hours to fall back to sleep. The cold outside took its hold, my ward quietened, and the hospital crackled. With every thud, I imagined someone marching towards my door. With every crack, I imagined someone climbing up a window. Dawn came and went, and the hospital awakened. I let the bustle cradle me, nestling into its babble.
***
Beth was the only one of my remaining friends who visited me at the hospital. As we waited for my mother to bring us tea, she explained it all. Of course, she’d wanted to come earlier but one thing had led to another and she hadn’t been able to. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. Of course, it was the same with John, with Josh, with Jeremy. And when she called my home, she heard I wasn’t well enough to receive a visitor yet. It was only because she’d seen my mother at a service in the morning that she’d managed to arrange a visit.