by Adam Thorpe
‘Even the children?’
‘It’s their parents’ responsibility. I’d publicly dismember their parents. With tractors instead of horses. Anyway, the problem wouldn’t come up. Two or three televised executions and litterbugs would never be heard of again. Seriously. Fear, that’s what they need. Boot on the other foot.’
‘Just like traitors, pickpockets and Highland crofters in the old days were never heard of again, Brian,’ said Phil.
‘It’s stitch in time,’ Brian went on. ‘It’s getting rid of the rotten apple. Instead, we allow ourselves to be overrun. Well, it’s your lookout. Don’t come running to me when you’re drowning in litter and woofters and bloody left-wing yobbos. Remember Enoch? He was a prophet in his own time. Spoke eleven bloody languages.’
The weird thing about Brian, Alan thought, was that he was at his most serious when he sounded most comic.
Alan sat back in the soft black leather couch, hiding his smile. Brian swayed off to the toilet yet again. Maybe he had cancer of the bladder. Their managerial colleagues were likewise spread about, unwinding on the orders of the company, talking and grinning and guffawing and draining their glasses: Alan eased into the comfortableness of it all, not minding the din. It was life. It was human. You weren’t just a number. And he was a dad. Tomorrow at this time he’d be gazing down at his little scrog, his very own and no one else’s. He shook his head, unable to believe it. He was so happy. He’d get the work-life balance sorted. He’d do his bit. Jill and he had their difficulties but he’d do his bit and they’d keep on track. He’d paint the spare room pink with a frieze of teddy bears. Noah’s ark.
A distant mobile went off.
It was his, La Traviata. He’d put the bastard in the inside pocket of his jacket because the outside one was too small, and he had to flap about a bit, finding it. He couldn’t hear a thing. He pushed his way outside, shouting into the mobile (‘Hang on a minute, just hang on’), and one of the shaven-headed lads swore nastily at him, calling him a ‘Ginger Prick’. He wasn’t ginger, he was strawberry blond.
He trotted outside, into the chill night.
It was his mother, who kept cutting out. She wanted to know why he was so out of breath.
He got rid of her and wondered whether to phone the hospital again. He could phone from the ice-cream museum’s porch. He wiped his sideburns with his handkerchief, wheezing. His heart was still hot-rodding in his chest, from the shock of the ring.
He took a turn outside, anyway, for the fresh air, his breathing tubes sticky with smoke. The toy roads were brightly lit, idiots cruising them at about five times the permitted speed. A CCTV camera on the top of a fancy wrought-iron column was moving about drunkenly. He raised his hand to it when the lens pointed down at him. It was very nippy without his coat, but the Laphroaig glowed inside him. Groups of young blokes and their floozies stood about, dressed for summer. Three of the floozies ran past him on their high heels suddenly and his bum was grabbed very near the balls – given more of a squeeze than a pinch.
‘Evenin’, gorgeous,’ the girl squealed, the others laughing.
He had frozen in surprise. She looked about sixteen with a bare midriff that had not yet seen too many chip kebabs. She and her two friends joined a group of about twenty of the security-guard types across the road and he walked on, thinking how easy it would be to get beaten up. The place she’d grabbed and squeezed glowed, it was definitely pleasurable, he could still feel the pressure of the young fingers. It must be a kind of local game. Maybe they only chose men who were beyond the pale, who were the last word in old and fat and ugly. Simon Milner was definitely beyond the pale; a nice bloke, but one didn’t quite know how he’d made his son, who was called Dominick and had something a bit wrong with him medically, no one knew the details. Certainly, Simon Milner did a lot of work for disadvantaged kids through Rotary. Alan hoped there was nothing wrong with his own kid, medically.
His own kid.
This place reminded him, at night, of Bickersteth Business Park, where the Northcott Jackson plant was now situated.
He came up to the ice-cream museum, awash with security lights. It was way past midnight. He stood in the porch and keyed in the hospital number after a few slips and Nurse Helen replied immediately, bright as a button, as if night didn’t exist in hospitals. She still sounded like a bloke, keeping her voice quieter so Alan had to press the Treo hard against his ear to hear properly – his ears were still ringing from the bar. Everything was fine, mother and baby were sleeping.
‘Helen, be a love, tell me,’ he said. ‘Does it matter if I can only make it by around teatime tomorrow? I mean, should I be worrying that I can’t make it earlier? I’m away on business, you see, and it’d be very hard for me to get off earlier, obviously. I’m very worried. I’m dying of worry, in fact.’
The whisky and the tiredness slurred his words, but Helen was as bright as ever.
‘Well, it wouldn’t do to die of worry, would it? It does no one any good, worrying.’
‘No, but listen, is there any reason for me to worry, mate?’
Ouch. He couldn’t imagine this voice as a bird’s.
‘Look, Mr Hurst, you make it when you can. If you can’t make it earlier, you can’t. We can’t always arrange things for the best, can we? They’re both in good hands.’
‘How’s my daughter doing, exactly?’
‘It’s not for me to say, Mr Hurst, because I’m not the consultant.’
‘Give me a general picture, please, my love.’
There was a pause, as if she was taking a breath before plunging. Alan didn’t take a breath at all. He thought he heard papers being shuffled. Drug charts, doctor’s reports, all that guff. Cold and medical.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘little Samantha’s quite poorly, but stable. Your wife has a suspected liver infection.’
‘Say that again, slowly.’
She did so.
‘Quite poorly,’ he repeated.
‘But stable.’
‘And a liver infection.’
He couldn’t believe this. It was like a door had opened onto Hell. He’d been walking next to Hell all day without suspecting because he was the right side of the paper-thin wall.
‘I thought you said she was doing fine?’
‘Who?’
‘My wife. Both of them, obviously.’
‘Fine, considering. The baby’s two months premature, Mr Hurst. Your wife’s liver infection will be dealt with on Monday, when the consultant comes back. But she’s in very good hands in High Dependency. It’s what we’re all here for.’
‘High Dependency? What does that mean? Is that Intensive Care?’
‘No, it’s the High Dependency Unit. It means we keep a very close eye on her, as the staff do with Samantha in the Premature Unit.’
He took as deep a breath as he could manage, five feet under in his own panic.
‘Why not before? Why can’t the consultant come before? Why can’t you deal with it now?’
‘The nursing staff haven’t got the authority to prescribe more than the basics.’
He squeezed sweat out of his eyes, blinked them clear.
‘Listen, tell my wife I was goosed. By a teenager. That’ll make her smile.’
‘Goosed?’
‘Yeah, just now, on the street. Well, not street, these little toy, these – toy – road things. No, no, leave it out. Don’t worry, mate. Just give her my love.’
He heard the faint sound of an emergency bleeper. Maybe it was Jill’s or Samantha’s. No, Samantha was somewhere else. Nurse Helen didn’t even say goodbye. Alan pressed his forehead to the glass of the ice-cream museum. The Rossi’s van was dimly lit; it looked like a faint memory of something happy.
He felt betrayed. He’d gone round the dullest museum in the universe in order to ensure his wife and daughter’s lives. It was a metaphysical deal. Only Marks and Sparks on a Sunday night could be duller. Now he felt as if he was back to where he was at lunchtime. Only
it was night, and all was blackness and loneliness and fear.
High Dependency meant highly dependent. Tubes and drips and masks. It meant that things were not very good, medically. It meant that things could slip very easily into a worse scenario. Obviously.
He hurried back to the hotel, avoiding the louts, trying to recall the exact words he – she – Helen, the bloke-sounding nurse, had used.
Poorly but stable.
Quite poorly.
Liver infection.
What the hell did poorly mean? His grandmother used to say she was feeling poorly when she had indigestion. His grandfather had been ‘very poorly’ in the Agecare Unit three years ago which meant he was nearly dead. Was he sure that Helen didn’t say ‘rather’ rather than ‘quite’? Quite or rather poorly could mean very poorly or not very poorly; it was ambiguous, that one. What a stupid language. His loved ones weren’t doing fine at all, they were very sick; they were highly dependent; they were possibly deteriorating hour by hour and every known consultant was on his yacht or shagging his mistress because it was the weekend. He couldn’t believe it. You only had one liver, for Christ’s sake. Two kidneys, one liver. One heart. Livers were vital. She had said liver, hadn’t she? Not kidney? How could he confuse the two? They didn’t even sound the same and the taste was entirely different. And now he couldn’t even walk back a couple of hundred yards to his hotel without fearing for his life. This was England.
OK, he was in Scotland, but it was the same in England, as Brian had pointed out. This was Great Britain, then. The U of K. And Unwin had forced him to stay on and betray his loved ones. He’d kill Roger for that, if anything happened to his loved ones. A crime de passion. Shoot him dead.
His foot found a sleeping policeman where a streetlamp wasn’t working and he flew into deep shadow that stopped abruptly against his hands and body. The nearest group of shaven-heads laughed. He’d met the ground with surprising force, in fact; he had to sit there for a few moments, nursing his hands and feeling his ribs and waiting for the air to come back fully. The louts were catcalling him, now; they’d probably kick him to death if he stayed where he was. The most basic human sympathies had disappeared from the world. Even the girls were laughing. He’d have to tell them, if they went for him, that his wife had strained herself with some heavy shopping and given birth way too early. Maybe they wouldn’t care, even then.
He stood up, still winded, and wanted to yell at them. He brushed grit from his lips. A law-abiding plumber had been beaten into a vegetable coma a few months ago because he’d gently ticked off some lads for hurling obscenities at his wife: it was a small column in the Telegraph. It was always happening. It happened, and then it was forgotten. The waters swallowed it up. Anything could happen. He could lose his wife, his daughter. He could be beaten to a vegetable. He felt he’d entered a new realm of possibilities, and they were all bloody terrible.
He limped back past the Cascade Club and made it safely to the hotel, the palms of his hands and his lips stinging and various parts of him aching. Lady Luck was juggling with him, it could fall either side. Life could turn out wonderful or very, very bad. He went straight up to his room via the emergency stairs, which avoided going past the bar. The stairs were murder; he felt about ninety, his heart beating in his ears. He kept having to pause on the bare, cold landings. He thought of his dad, whose heart stopped in the post office when Alan was nine. Without warning.
The swipe card would not open his door. He was putting the card in upside-down. The green light flashed and the soft little click sounded and he entered his room.
He washed the light grazes on his palms and ran his lips under the bathroom tap, wondering about pain. There was a sharp pain on his hands and lips and a dull pain in his chest. It was a signal that all was not right: a survival mechanism. An alarm. He looked terrible in the bright mirror-light: his skin was greasier than usual and he had even more of those tiny red veins on his cheeks. There was a polite notice about towels in three languages, how if you were a selfish git and really wanted them cleaned each day you had to throw them on the floor and they’d be taken away to foul up the environment, except that it wasn’t put like that. It reminded him of Jon S. Volkman’s smile. He read it in French and German, too, understanding about three words and wishing he could cross into the Yukon Territory and light out for the endless northern snows on a decent pair of snowshoes. Life could be so clean and simple. He’d often thought that. The human instinct is to complicate. His left arm felt stiff.
He sat on the bed and leant back against its giant cushions in the darkness. He could hear the clicking of cutlery through the open window: knives against plates in the big hotel kitchens below, slicing whole bulls for the carvery. Everyone was somewhere else and far away; he wasn’t near anyone. He was completely and utterly on his tod. He’d had to open the window in the middle of the previous night, suffocating in heat and dryness and thick fabrics. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do. The eTV Interactive winked a red eye at him; he thought about surfing or retrieving emails but it was too much effort, it required such a great and ongoing effort. He wondered if his daughter could see, or whether her eyelids were still tight shut.
He shut his own eyes, resting there in the darkness with a hand on his chest. He nodded off and dreamt that the world was being taken over by intelligent plants, the kind of plants you find in hotels and offices and conference rooms; that small red tongues uncurled from their flowers and spat millions of red spores against walls, that these rooted in the walls and brought them down within hours and so whole buildings – office blocks and skyscrapers and ice-cream museums – were cracking like old skin and would soon disintegrate into dust. He saw his daughter running towards him across a town square. It was empty of people. He was closing the boot of his small, plump, old-fashioned car, but the boot would not close as she ran towards him on her little legs, in her pretty black dress. His jacket was buttoned too tight over his chest, he could hardly breathe, but he didn’t have time to fiddle about. A wall on one side of the square – high and windowless and right next to her – was covered in lots of tiny cracks. It was ready to fall. The boot would not close, something was getting in the way. He kept slamming it down and up it came again, slowly on its spring.
Slam.
Slam.
Slam.
Only he and his daughter knew the secret of the clever plants. Their evil intent.
‘Hurry up,’ he called out to her. ‘Hurry up, my little peppercorn.’
And she came nearer. And the slamming went on inside him.
And she was coming nearer.
IN THE AUTHOR’S FOOTSTEPS
David’s hobby was a statement, of course; Gillian knew that. If anyone asked, Gillian would say he was a hiker, that hiking was his hobby. Really, what she wanted to say was that he was an awkward sod.
Neither of them had ever had an affair. Their marriage, to outsiders, was rock-solid. They’d both spent their lives in adult education and Gillian was a lay preacher. Devout ecologists, they knew their birds. But if David’s hobby got much worse, Gillian would have to up sticks. Or, with a bit of luck, he might get properly arrested and put away for a bit, instead of being cautioned and an embarrassment in some local rag. That would shock him out of it.
The rot started, to Gillian’s mind, when David took early retirement once the kids had flown. Ludlow was too quiet, after Bracknell. Lives of quiet desperation, as Pink Floyd had put it. Gillian played a lot of her ancient vinyl numbers while David pored over old maps in the kitchen. She wondered how she had ended up like this. Distance Learning for the Open University. No colleagues. Rain spattering the picture window and David becoming an awkward sod. She had even started smoking again, and David had banned her to the garden. One morning there was a tussle, and Gillian threw one of those books at him. It missed, but landed with a splat and a few of the pages flew out and David smacked her across the face. Or would have done, if she hadn’t ducked.
; Everything at sixes and sevens, as her mother would say.
‘Why can’t you just hike normally, like everyone else?’ she’d asked him, one day, when he was strapping on his horrible little snot-green knapsack with those chocolate stains, bound for Telford.
‘I am hiking normally. It’s the world that isn’t normal,’ he replied.
‘Change is totally normal,’ she said. ‘Look at us.’
‘I can choose to live the life I want, Gillian,’ he said.
‘Well, at this rate you’ll live it without me, soon.’
The climax came when he brought back yet another one of those books. He’d got enough of them, now, to cram three shelves. There were a couple of local second-hand bookshops nearby: one was neat and expensive with an ex-stockbroker behind the desk, the other chaotic and cheap with Mike and his one-eared cat staring at you from the shadows. If you were prepared to spend a whole morning truffling under his gaze, the cheap one could yield some treasures. Today it had yielded David’s type of treasure.
He waved it under Gillian’s nose, ever so pleased with himself. She could smell the shop off his cagoule: pipe-smoke and bodily decay.
‘Found it,’ he said. ‘At last.’
‘Don’t tell me. The Himalayan Trail, 1914. Maybe I’ll get rid of you for a few months and then you’ll fall down some post-1914 crevasse.’
‘Do you have to smoke in the kitchen?’
‘Bloody hell, David, you don’t mind filling your lungs with it in the bookshop, do you?’
He sat down, opening the book.
‘Wonderful,’ he murmured. ‘This is the crown jewel.’
‘Looks just like all the others. Old and sad.’
‘Buckinghamshire Footpaths by J. H. B. Peel, published 1949.’
‘Exactly. Just like all the others. Walking in Warwickshire, London’s Countryside, See England First—’
He took out a reddish leaf that someone had pressed between the pages.