Fat

by Rob Grant

  Still, she had a window. She had to get out of bed and into her wheelchair without disturbing Dad. No small order.

  She looked over at him again, and, finally, she seemed to have caught a break. He'd gone to sleep still wearing his earphones.

  The wheelchair was on the wrong side of the bed. It would have been better if it had been on the door side, so she didn't have to wheel past Dad to get out. Hayleigh cursed her lack of forethought. She wondered, briefly, if she might try lifting it over the bed and setting it down on the other side, but abandoned the notion fairly quickly. It was a heavy monstrosity, and even if she could lift it, given her current, pathetic, fairy-like weakness, the procedure would likely cause more ruckus than it prevented.

  She felt another twinge in her leg and then a twinge in her hand, as if each pain centre were vying for her attention. She looked at her right hand. The bruising was a deep purple now, verging on black, but the swelling seemed to have gone down. She tried flexing it, and made a fairly successful fist without too much agony. There was probably nothing too wrong with the hand. She knew she had some kind of blood problem, something to do with platelets, so that probably accounted for the odd colouration. She'd probably hurt it when she'd first hit the mirror and not realised because of the meds, otherwise she'd never have been able to land that second blow. See? Pain has a value, sometimes. Stops you doing stupid stuff. Even something as awful as pain has its upside.

  She pushed the wheelchair back out of her way and inched over to the side of the bed, timing her movements to coincide with each snore. When she got to the edge, she swung her good leg over the side.

  So far, so good. Unfortunately, she hadn't worked out a plan beyond this point. She had to get into the wheelchair, obviously, but she couldn't afford to let her bad leg just fall off the bed in its own good time. For a start, it would hit the ground hard enough to wake even the most comatose earphoned snorer. On top of which, it would cane like hell.

  She managed to grab on to the arms of the wheelchair from behind herself, and with slow, jerky movements, she got her bottom resting on the seat, with most of her bad leg still on the bed. From that position, she could lift up the plaster cast with both her hands and lower it onto the wheelchair leg rest.

  She was actually sweating when she'd finished.

  She looked over at the clock again. Five twenty-three. Not good. The morning shift orderlies would be brewing their demonic tea very soon.

  Still, she couldn't hurry. This would probably be her last chance before la vache came back on watch. She wheeled past Dad as gently as she could, but just as she was almost by him he jerked and yelled out and even opened his eyes and looked straight at her for a brief second. Hayleigh realised with horror that she had actually managed to run over his dangling foot in slow motion. Genius. Incredibly, though, he didn't seem to wake completely, just yelped and snorted and turned over.

  Hayleigh waited, frozen, not daring to breathe for what seemed like the length of a double maths lesson, which was longer, in terms of Relativity, than the entire Mesozoic era. When she was finally convinced he was still asleep, she rolled on.

  She needed her heavy, blunt object. She'd had time to plan what she'd use as she'd lain in her fake sleep last night. Like all the best ideas, it had been practically staring her in the face all the time. Over in the corner of the room, propped behind her locker, were a pair of as yet unused crutches. They had been there so long, you stopped even noticing them. It would be the most natural thing in the world to take them to the bathroom with her. No one would look twice. There was even a clip on her wheelchair designed to house them.

  She'd also had time, lying there, to compose her note in her head. She'd been through several versions, most of which were downright embarrassing. You do not want your final words in this world to have you blushing in the next. She'd settled on something short and slightly wistful. It did the job, and didn't make her seem foolish. But, glancing at the clock, it might well be the note was a luxury she could ill afford. Still, she scooped up her exercise book and pen anyway.

  It was five twenty-seven when she rolled quietly out of the room, crutches snug in their retainer. There was a light on to her right, down the corridor, past the payphone. The night nurse was probably there, doing her sudoku puzzles. She'd have been up all night, and Hayleigh doubted she'd be in much of a mood for patrolling, but her station was perilously close to the bathroom.

  Hayleigh rolled through the doors towards the nurse's station and risked a quick peek. Deserted! That could be good, and it could be bad. It would have been nice to know where nursey was, frankly, so there could be no nasty surprises. At least she wasn't here and practically guaranteed to hear the mirror smash, though.

  Hayleigh rolled towards the bathroom and was just about to go through the door backwards when she heard the toilet flush. Well, now we knew where nursey was.

  Hayleigh looked around frantically for a hiding place. There was a chance that the night nurse wouldn't realise Hayleigh wasn't supposed to be out on her own, but if she did -- and given the insane diligence of Mommie Dearest, everyone in the hospital had probably been issued with the ten-page list of Hayleigh's schedule -- it could mean ruination.

  There were no good prospects for concealment in the corridor, and the next bend was too far away, so Hayleigh had no option but to retreat. She headed back to the nurse's station, in the hope there might be somewhere nearby she could hide and wait till the nurse moved off to make a cuppa or something, if she ever did, but it was too late. She could hear the bathroom door opening and the clip-clop of those ugly, practical shoes the poor nurses had to wear, and the plan was now well and truly scuppered.

  But no. The shoes were clip-clopping away, down the corridor towards the kitchen. Nursey was going to make her cuppa right now. That would give Hayleigh a good five minutes at least in which to do the deed, and she was almost certain to be unheard and uninterrupted.

  She waited until the last clip had clopped, then wheeled excitedly towards the bathroom and reversed in through the door.

  Her heart was beating like one of Jonny's stupid electro dance tracks. She was actually elated.

  First things first. She rolled straight over to the bath cubicle and started running the bath. That might, again, prove to be a luxury she could not afford, but there was no harm in having the option, was there?

  She moved over to the mirror and quickly checked the fissure was still there. It would be just Hayleigh's luck if some eagle-eyed maintenance man had spotted it and replaced the mirror overnight. That would have been just absolutely bloody typical. But no. The crack was there. Ha, ha. The mirror crack'd.

  Now, would she get a better swing at it standing up? Probably not. She could probably do the job just as well from her wheelchair. Plus it would be quicker and involve less pain.

  She unhooked one of the crutches and tested the heft of it on her palms. It was surprisingly light, disappointingly. Probably aluminium or something. Still, it ought to be enough to do the business. The top bit, the bit you slip round your lower arm, was a sort of flimsy plastic three-quarters of a circle. Below that was a grip covered with leather, or, knowing the NHS, some sort of cheap leather substitute. The other end had a rubber tip on it. Which end would be best? The handle bit was probably heavier, yet, paradoxically, it was also softer.

  Hayleigh suddenly became aware of the sound of the wall clock ticking. Five forty-two. What was she wasting time for? Was some part of her deliberately making her indecisive, trying to put off the inevitable?

  She held the tip end, manoeuvred herself into optimum position and swung.

  The crutch just slid across the mirror. She swung again, much harder this time, downwards, not laterally, and to hell with the noise.

  The grip of the crutch bounced right off the mirror and flew out of her hands, crashing into the cubicle door behind her.

  Hayleigh yelped in frustration and wheeled herself over frantically to retrieve it. What the hell did they m
ake the mirrors out of in this place? Tungsten steel? The hall mirror she'd broken at home had smashed with the first blow, and had been totally obliterated in four or five. This bloody mirror could survive an impact from a speeding train. She leaned over sideways and picked up the errant crutch. It was only at that point she realised she needn't have wasted the time: she could simply have unhooked the second crutch. Was she really deliberately trying to sabotage herself? Well, whichever part of her psyche was responsible for that bit of nonsense had better buck its ideas up. This was going to happen, and that was truly final.

  She rolled back to the mirror and was surprised to see the whole thing was covered in hairline cracks. All it took was a couple of little light prods with the rubber tip and a whole segment collapsed, tinkling into the sink and onto the floor with the absolute minimum of noise. Like fairy laughter, really.

  Hayleigh wrapped some towelettes around her hand and rooted in the sink for a suitable shard -- she didn't want to accidentally cut herself before she deliberately cut herself, now, did she?

  She found a very cruel-looking fragment indeed that would do the job nicely, thank you so very much. It curved wickedly, like an Arabian assassin's dagger. She tried a practice cut -- more of a tentative poke, really -- on the fleshy part of her left palm, just below where her fake period wound was healing nicely, and was delighted to see a thick glob of blood emerge with hardly any pressure at all. This would definitely do the trick.

  Holding the shard carefully in her toweletted right hand, she wheeled herself over to the bath cubicle. It was five forty-seven.

  FORTY-THREE

  The future's bright. The future's Slank.

  Jeremy was sitting with Anton Deleware, the CEO of the entire organisation, the biggest name in the conceptuological industry this side of the Saatchi empire, and he was talking to him not as an employee, but as a partner.

  The work on the Well Farms project had been a triumph. It had meant working virtually around the clock for two weeks solid -- a project this size would normally have a lead-in time of six months at the absolute minimum, and Jeremy had to assume that whoever had been given the assignment originally had screwed it up, somehow, and he'd been hurled into the breach at the last moment. It had been a monumental task, but the budget had been large enough, and Jeremy had been good enough.

  And it had been received with such rapture at Number Ten, it had been the making of Jeremy Slank. They were, at this very moment, on their way to meet the big man himself at the launch of the country's first Well Farm in Norfolk. They were travelling not in a limo or a roller: nothing so crass, but in a top-of-the-range Hummer, surely the coolest and classiest mode of transport ever devised by man. Jeremy himself was looking as cool and classy as humanly possible in a brand-new Armani suit. None of that Emporio garbage for the likes of him, thank you so very much. He wasn't, technically speaking, a full-blown partner of Conceptua yet, but it had been offered, and now he needed to get an accountant and a lawyer to sort out the legal niceties. They'd pretty much had to offer it to him, really. Once word got out about his work on the Well Farms project, rival companies would be head-hunting him like Congo pygmies.

  And yes, he was on his way, once again, to meet the Prime Minister, who was now practically his email pen pal. True, he'd only received the one email from the great man as yet, but, theoretically, he could now engage him in electronic correspondence any time he wanted to.

  He really wished he could have called Derrian on his cellphone right now, but it would have been too crass. Old Man Deleware notoriously didn't even own a mobile, and he was known to sneer on them as chav accessories, so Jeremy had switched his off for the duration of the journey.

  This was almost certainly one of the three greatest days of his life so far. What's more, it was the third one in as many weeks. There was, in fact, only one thing missing from his life that would make the whole thing perfect.

  That bloody woman. Try as he might, he couldn't stop thinking about her. He'd picked up his phone several times over the past few days and selected her number from his contacts, but he always wound up hitting the stop button before the dialling was complete.

  It was this Keith business. He didn't want to wind up in some tawdry menage a trois, where he started hanging around with them, going out to dinner and suchlike, with Keith eyeing him suspiciously all the time, quite rightly, and even if he did eventually manage to sleep with Jemma, there would be guilt and fallout and general unpleasantness. He'd been there before, quite frankly, and he wasn't in a hurry to go back. He really was on a hiding to nothing, and it would be better off all round if he could just put her out of his mind completely and forget about her.

  Only he couldn't.

  He'd tried dates with a couple of his other squeezes, but he'd ended up having to fake a headache, believe it or not, on both occasions, and not even the prospect of extremely dirty sex with Susie could awaken his enthusiasm.

  He was barely eating. Worse, he couldn't even bring himself to engage in DIY. He'd tried several times, but just lost interest halfway through. A night out with a few of the lads, usually a one-way ticket to oblivion and blissful forgetting, hadn't even worked. No matter how many pints he threw back, he couldn't seem to get even mildly drunk. In the end, he'd begged off that evening too, before the curry, even, to howls of ribald derision. Unheard of. What was wrong with him? Was he -- saints preserve us -- in love? This rake, this roue, this latter-day lounge lizard, this bounder, this cad? Surely not.

  He'd certainly been acting like a lovelorn schoolboy. He'd even Googled her, for crying out loud, and had actually come across her online blog.

  Naturally, most of her blog entries were rants about the shortcomings of epidemiology and such -- Jeremy doubted, now, they'd been monitored at the Well Farm; all anybody had to do to assess Jemma's convictions was check out her blog -- but there was some personal stuff in there, too. She even mentioned him, obliquely, in one or two of them. He'd found out stuff about her background and her family, and generally felt he was getting to know her better. And the more he knew, the worse it got.

  There was a picture gallery, and he'd spent more time gazing at that than was healthy. She took a good picture. There was one that had shocked him, the first time he'd laid eyes on it. It looked like a picture of her on holiday, kissing her dad. But it wasn't her dad, of course, it was that bastard Keith. He was practically bald, and his beard was greying at the edges, as were the remnants of his Friar Tuck hairstyle. Which implied, of course, that the cradle-robbing bastard probably had a surfeit of testosterone, which was a hideous thought. On the bright side, though, it also implied he was heading for an early grave. Well, he couldn't head there fast enough for Jeremy's liking.

  But a couple of things had happened recently that had interesting implications. First, in her latest blog, she'd mentioned that she'd been having Relationship Troubles (her capitalisation) and kept going on about how all men were bastards, which, he hoped, didn't include himself.

  Old Man Deleware did not go in for small talk, thank God -- that would have made the journey a terrible slog. He spent most of his time reading, with funny little quarter-lens glasses perched on the end of his elegant nose, or dictating stuff to his personal assistant. Occasionally, he would pass a document or file over for Jeremy to peruse, and now and then he asked for his opinion on artwork or copy, so the journey passed pleasantly enough.

  They arrived at the Norfolk Well Farm in good time. The place had a much more finished look about it than when Jeremy had first been there, almost three weeks ago, now, so someone had been working very hard. There was quite a high level of security at the gates, including some armoured police visibly sporting some serious-looking machine guns. Jeremy imagined they were not there to hunt down any of the enrolees who chickened out and tried to make a bolt for it, but rather to ensure the Prime Minister's safety.

  They were waved through quite quickly and headed for the stadium, where several TV crews were in fairly advanced st
ages of setting up. There was a VIP hospitality marquee, and the Hummer's driver set them down there. As Jeremy was crouching to get out, Old Man Deleware tapped him on the elbow.

  'Here you go, Jeremy,' he said, offering him an ornate silver box, like a trinket box, or a decorative business card case. 'Enjoy yourself, lad. Have a care with that, it's pure.'

  'Thank you, Anton.' Jeremy slipped the case into his pocket.

  Deleware nodded slightly. 'You've earned it.'

  Jeremy stepped out of the Hummer. He was hoping it was just a business card box. Some kind of valuable antique in recognition of his achievement. It was unlikely, surely, that the distinguished Anton Deleware, pillar of the Establishment and on the very brink of knighthood, would be slipping him some drugs, in full view of armed policemen. Surely.

  He didn't have chance to think about it. They were whisked into the tent by a couple of exceptionally beautiful hostesses wearing very fetching little black dresses and plied immediately with champagne.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The bath was filling up nicely. Hayleigh swooshed the water around with her left hand, to check the temperature. It was slightly too hot, not that it mattered an awful lot when you thought about it, but she turned on the cold tap anyway. It would have been nice to have some bubble bath, but there was none, just some stinky NHS soap you could scrub with all your life and never work up a lather. It was probably for the best, really. The soapy bubbles would probably get into the cuts and that might hurt.

  The bath was designed for disabled access, but the design assumed there would be some kind of able-bodied assistance. Hayleigh rested the assassin's dagger on the rim by the taps, unravelled the towelette glove, then wheeled herself back and locked the cubicle door. There could be no interruptions now. There was a big gap below the door, though quite what it was there for was a bit of a mystery. Still, no orderlies were likely to crawl on their hands and knees to peer in, were they? And even if they did, all they'd be able to see was a girl lying peacefully in a bath. No, she was safe enough.