by Bateman
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘have it your—’
I spoke. Muttered.
‘What was that?’ JMJ snapped. ‘If you’re going to apologise, speak up, let everyone hear you.’
I said, a little louder, ‘Food fight.’
She screwed up her eyes and leaned a little closer. ‘What was that?’
‘I said . . . FOOD FIGHT!’
I reached down and picked up one of the pizzas. It was cold and as firm as a discus. The orderly looked from the pizza to me to JMJ and back, utterly confused and seeking direction.
JMJ began to say, ‘Put that d—’ but then had to duck as I Frisbeed it across the dining room towards her. It smeared off her left shoulder and hit the wall behind her, leaving a snail trail of cheese as it slipped to the floor.
‘C’mon!’ I yelled, urging the others to join in, ‘Food fight!’ I lunged at another pizza just as the orderly jumped at me, knocking me forwards and across the table. ‘Food fight!’ I screeched. He had me by the neck, pressing down. I screwed my head to one side and spat out: ‘C’mon, you half-wits! Food fight! This is your chance! C’mon!’
But they sat there, looking blankly at me. I managed to grab another pizza but a second orderly came rushing in and caught my hand and bent my fingers back until I let go and then they pulled me up and back and JMJ came round the table and put her face in mine and raised her hand and grabbed my cheek and pinched it between her fingers and twisted it and snarled, ‘Anything you want to say now?’
‘Yes . . . yes!’
‘Well?’
‘You don’t eat pizza with forks, you fucking witch!’
‘Pathetic!’ And she twisted my cheek even harder and it brought tears to my eyes and she smiled and said, ‘Take him to his room and lock him in, and I don’t want to see him until breakfast. You can have a long hard think about your behaviour and I expect a full and sincere apology or I swear to God . . . !’
Patrick appeared in the doorway as they began to pull me through it. He gave me a wink and I gave it to him back and then I cackled and kicked back against the orderly’s shins and one of them let go my arm just long enough for me to grab JMJ’s lizard neck and she screamed and both orderlies pounced and one chopped my hand from her throat and they pinned me to the floor and started raining blows upon me and JMJ was coughing and spluttering and everyone at the table was laughing or crying with the exception of Andy who continued to stare at the pizza and probably wasn’t even aware that I was face down and JMJ was on her hands and knees and hissing in my face that I was going upstairs to solitary and that in the morning she was going to fill me so full of electric that I wouldn’t know my own name when I woke up and I begged her please no even though inside I was laughing my head off because I was so good.
32
I was talking to Jesus and comparing scars in the palms of our hands, and He was saying that I had a persecution complex and I was saying that He had a crucifixion complex and that in any paintings or stained-glass pictures of Him I’d ever seen He seemed to have a pretty fit body and wondered if He ever played sports at all, and how I always remembered from growing up even though I despised football that Jesus Saved but Best Nets the Rebound – and He didn’t smile at all but said instead that He preferred cricket.
And then He slapped my face and I turned the other cheek but He slapped that too and then I opened my eyes and it wasn’t Jesus but Patrick looming over me and I covered my face and begged him not to kill me and he told me to wise up and that they’d given me something to calm me down and it was the early hours and it was the first chance he’d had to get up and I had to strike now if I was going to strike at all.
For a little bit I had no idea what he was talking about but slowly my form of clarity returned and I remembered that he had used his burglary and thieving expertise to steal keys from the orderlies’ desk when they went off on their circuit downstairs and he’d made it upstairs, knowing that the orderly up there did his circuit at exactly the same time but that it only took a couple of minutes for him to check all the doors and that the prisoners or patients, call them what you will, were sleeping and that if I wanted in to Monte’s cell I’d have to move now and so I did and he opened the door and we slipped along the corridor and three doors up he fumbled for the key and we heard the footsteps on the tiled floor as the guard came back our way and he found it just in time and pushed me through the door and then charged back to my cell where he rolled himself into my quilt with his face to the wall so that when the guard looked through the spy-hole he would see someone sleeping there and when he looked through Monte’s he would see that lunatic sitting at his piano still playing and not see me crouching beneath the spy-hole knowing that I had only an hour to find out what I had to find out before the sun came up and the staff arrived and we were caught and I was doomed to be lit up like a Belisha beacon, the first of which was erected in Wigan in 1935.
Monte was playing that tune, and he did not look at me as I entered, or pay any attention as I slithered down beneath the spy-hole and held my breath until I heard the footsteps recede. And then I stayed where I was, and just studied him as his fingers roved along the keyboard with his eyes fixed on a point on the exposed brick, painted-white wall in front of him. He wasn’t as handsome as his newspaper photos showed, and he was badly in need of a shave, while his white linen suit was as threadbare as an impoverished missionary’s. And, as I listened to his playing without the filtering effect of floor and walls and the hubbub of mentalists, I realised that it wasn’t actually that competent; that there were bum notes and missed notes which the constant repetition should have ironed out.
I stood up and moved to the piano, leaned on it, smiled at him and said, ‘Hi,’ and there was no reaction. I introduced myself and told him that I was a private detective masquerading as an insane bookseller and that my only purpose was to get in to see him because he was about to be sent away to a really high security mental hospital for the rest of his life for a murder or murders I was convinced he had not committed. All I needed from him, I said, was a sign that he understood his predicament and some indication that he was prepared to help me be his champion, but he just kept playing that stupid tune.
I said, ‘Give me something. Anything. General knowledge. The capital of Peru or the square root of a twenty-two thousand and fifty-six? No?’
No.
I stood behind him and listened to him play. After a couple of minutes he came to the end of the piece, and his hands dropped briefly to his sides. I cautiously took hold of his left hand and raised it; he did not resist or otherwise react when I turned it and examined his fingers and palm, and then repeated this with the other hand. I let them go, and they each fell back onto the keyboard and he immediately began playing again. Up close, I could also see that there was scarring on his neck and under his chin; I had been told that there was also evidence of a recent operation in the area of his kidneys. I did not check. Although I believed him innocent, I wasn’t about to get that intimate with him in case he murdered me.
I talked to him some more, about Nurse Brenda and how wonderful she was and how she had put her whole career on the line to employ me to come in and see him, and told him how much his fellow patients downstairs really liked him even if he never did say anything and annoyed them all with his piano-playing.
I said, ‘I had you all worked out – all this piano-playing had to mean you were a concert pianist gone doo-lally or at the very least you tinkled the ivories in a hotel cabaret, and that one tune is the key to who or what you are.’ I showed him my own hands, palms down. ‘See these knuckles? The way they’re out of shape? Mother used to beat me if I didn’t play my scales right. I still can’t play for toffee, but I’m at least as good as you.’ I sighed. ‘That piece? It’s one of the Russians, isn’t it? It’s on the tip of my tongue but I just can’t get it.’
I was sure I would have known it but for the electro. JMJ had burned the knowledge out of me.
Gabriel played on. I
stood over his shoulder and peeled back his suit jacket and read the label within, hoping for something Moldovan or Slovakian that might lead me to an obscure store in a dusty backstreet of an obscure city where an old tailor would remember selling a white suit to a nice young man who thought he could play the piano and that he came from a well-to-do family who just lived up that hill, the one with the vineyard. But instead I got Blue Harbour, a label sold exclusively through Marks & Spencer. I crouched down to examine his shoes, a badly scuffed pair of black Oxfords, checking the heel for a secret compartment in case he was a spy. It was not such an outlandish idea: I had a pair of Clarks Commandos as a boy, with a compass in the heel in case you ever got lost or kidnapped by a paedophile, though of course that was before paedophiles were invented. But there was nothing within the well-worn heel.
I examined him from every angle. When I stood directly in front of him, I might as well not have been there; his eyes bore through me, to the wall and through it to infinity and beyond. I knew that look. I had seen it before, in the mirror, staring back. It was a look of fear, of trauma, of terror.
I was not aware of footsteps or what must have been the very subtle turn of the key in the door, and in fact only realised that Patrick had returned when I found him standing beside me.
‘Well? Did you get what you want?’
‘I need more time. I told you I needed at least an hour.’
‘You’ve had an hour. And we don’t have more time. It’s coming up to the end of their shift. The new staff will be coming on, they’ll be doing breakfast and we’ll be trapped. If we’re going to get going, we need to get going now.’
‘I can’t. I haven’t been able to . . . I can’t get my head around it . . . I just need to be able to . . .’
‘No! We have to go! You promised! My book!’
I had in fact promised that if he broke me in to see Gabriel, and then broke me out of the hospital, that I would be able to save his book, and more than that, get it read by one of the most respected authors of our times, one Brendan Coyle, who was sure to recognise its genius.
‘I will still do your book, Patrick. Just give me half an hour, there’s something I’m just on the verge of—’
He grabbed my lapels and stuck his face up close to mine. ‘No, we have to go now.’
‘Let me go, Patrick. You have the skill to get me out anytime, later today, tonight, tomorrow. Just give me fifteen minutes more.’
‘No! We need to get out of this hospital before JMJ arrives!’
‘What’re you talking about – we – Patrick?’
‘I’m going with you!’
‘Patrick . . .’
‘I have to go! There’s no point in my book being out there if I’m not with it!’
My grand plan did not include him coming with me. Apart from the fact that I’d no idea if his book was salvageable from the broken memory stick, I had no wish to associate myself with him outside of the confines of a secure mental institution.
‘That’s not we agreed, Patrick. You can’t go changing—’
‘I have to go. I left a note for JMJ when I broke into her office. I called her all the names of the day.’
‘You were angry – she’ll understand.’
‘I also had a dump on her desk, and in her top drawer. She will have me fried alive. You know she will. I have to get out now.’
I looked at Gabriel, playing away, not paying any attention to us at all, and knew that I had not even scratched his surface, and that in a matter of hours, or perhaps minutes, he would be spirited away to somewhere I would never have any access to him and where he might spend the rest of his life drugged up in a padded room or be torn asunder by lunatics as soon as he arrived. I had no doubt at all that I could solve the case, but it was the time that was killing me.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘then he’s coming with us.’
33
We made it through the swing doors onto the stairs with moments to spare. The orderly passed above us. If he had glanced through the glass he would have seen us pressed against the wall, but he did not, and continued on to his desk at the head of the corridor. We waited a few more seconds until he was settled, then I nodded at Patrick and he gently peeled Gabriel away from the paintwork and guided him on down the stairs. We were then in the hands of fate. If the orderly on the floor below was keeping to his schedule as well as his colleague above and had returned to his desk, then we would be too late to make it through the security doors and out into the wider hospital and freedom.
We arrived at the doors at the bottom of the stairs. Patrick peered through the glass at the nurses’ station where the night orderly usually sat: the desk was empty. He nodded to me, and pushed through, pulling Gabriel after him. The ward was quiet, with the only light coming from a reading lamp on the desk. We approached the security doors. Patrick reached into his back pocket and removed the card he had liberated from JMJ’s desk and swiped it through the security panel, which immediately lit up. He then punched in the code. It immediately flashed up: Code Error.
‘Shit,’ Patrick whispered. He tried the numbers again.
Code Error.
‘What’s up?’
‘What do you think?!’ He shook his head and tried them for a third time. ‘This doesn’t make sense. I’ve watched her – she always writes the numbers down on a pad. I memorised them, these have to be right.’
‘Go back and check.’ He remained staring at the panel. ‘Patrick, go and check, you might have got them wrong.’
‘I didn’t! These are correct. They have to be.’
Close at hand, a toilet flushed. Someone was whistling. The orderly was on his way. Patrick keyed in the numbers again.
‘It’s not going to change its mind,’ I hissed. ‘Hide – we have to hide until . . .’
I caught Gabriel by the arm and began to turn with him, but my way was suddenly blocked and I let out an involuntary shout. But it wasn’t the orderly, it was poor dumb Andy wandering in the darkness, and I whispered the name of the Lord and followed it with a sorry and went to move past him, but as I did Andy put his hand to my chest to stop me. And then he raised his other hand and deliberately picked out four numbers on the security panel and the locks shifted and the door opened just as wide as my mouth did and Andy smiled and said, ‘Audio books, good idea,’ and gave me the thumbs-up and I was so surprised that I just stood there grinning until Patrick grabbed my arm and pulled me through the doors and I still had a grip on Gabriel and he got dragged along with me, and before I could say anything to Andy we were racing down the flights of stairs to freedom.
Or, at least, the reception area downstairs. It was still very early, but day staff had begun to arrive, the lifts were going up and down and the main desk was now manned by white-collar staff rather than security. I sat Patrick and Gabriel by a small refreshment kiosk close to the doors which was not yet open. None of us looked like staff, but I hoped we would be mistaken for voluntary patients, perhaps just waiting for our fix of non-NHS coffee. Meanwhile I searched for and located a pay-phone and made a reverse charges call to someone I knew I could depend on in my time of need.
‘Whhhaaat?’
‘It’s me,’ I said.
‘Whhhaaat?’
‘Jeff. It’s me. Your employer. I need you to get up. I need you to come and get me.’
‘Whhhaaat?’
‘JEFF! Wake up!’
I glanced around me; I smiled at a nurse. My eyes wandered to the hospital entrance. JMJ was just coming through the doors. Her path would take her straight past Patrick and Gabriel.
Jeff said, ‘Who . . . what . . . what time is it?’
Patrick saw her. His mouth dropped open.
She walked straight past him. I turned my back and bent into the phone.
‘Hello? What the fuh . . .?’ Jeff moaned.
She went past me too, and joined a small group waiting for the lift. I allowed myself to breathe again and said, ‘Don’t curse at me, Jeff, I’m you
r boss.’
‘You’re . . . what? Wait – who is . . .?’
‘Jeff, get a grip. Is your mum’s car outside?’
‘Wha . . .? Mum’s? The . . . yes, it’s outside. Why? What are you . . .?’
‘I’m at the hospital. I need you to come and pick me up. I’ve been released.’
‘Now? It’s only – Jesus – six in the morning.’
‘Jeff, just do it.’
‘Can Alison not—’
‘Jeff.’
‘She didn’t say anything about—’
‘Jeff. Come now. If you’re not here in fifteen minutes, you’re fired.’
I hung up. The elevator was gone, and JMJ with it. In a matter of seconds she would reach her floor. She might stop to chat to the night staff or her colleagues, but she would very definitely go to her office within the next couple of minutes. She might not notice that Patrick was gone, that I was gone, or that the double murder suspect in the White Suit was gone, but she would very definitely notice that someone had taken a dump on her desk. And very soon after that, our absence.
I rejoined my fellow escapees. Patrick’s knee was going ninety to the dozen. Gabriel sat placidly. The kiosk was open now, and the aroma of fresh coffee was beginning to waft across. I never drink coffee apart from Starbucks, but the smell was getting to me. I glanced at Patrick: his eyes were glued to the girl serving in the kiosk.
I said, ‘Our ride is on its way. We’ll be out of here in a minute.’
He said, ‘I could kill a double espresso.’
‘Where we’re going, there’s a Starbucks just across the road. It’s wonderful.’
‘That smell is killing me. I haven’t had a double espresso in months.’
‘Soon enough,’ I said.
Nurse Brenda entered reception from the car park. She saw us immediately and her eyes fixed on Gabriel and she got that panicky look again. She didn’t know whether to stop or walk on, and she hesitated where she was just inside the doors, and someone bumped into her from behind and she flushed and said sorry and looked to me for guidance and I shook my head and she nodded and walked on.