Walter sat on a chair in the corridor for a while, then decided it might be better if he wasn’t there when Billy came out. He didn’t need another confrontation. There was a waiting room just around the corner, where he’d be out of sight, so he padded along there and sat on a chair in the corner. He tried reading a magazine - Big Houses again, but a more recent issue. The strapline said Properties you still can’t afford. But he couldn’t concentrate. His head began to loll forward. He would doze for a few moments, then give a sudden start when someone coughed or a trolley was pushed past outside, and find that he had drooled down one side of his face. This happened again and again, until a distressed elderly couple came in followed by a nurse with a tray and biscuits and sympathy. Walter padded back down the corridor.
He looked back into Margaret’s room, but Billy was still there, staring at her, as if he was daring her to open her eyes and confess that she’d been faking all along, that it was one of her jokes.
Missing you already.
Walter smiled to himself, then stood rather forlornly in the corridor. The seat he’d occupied before was now taken. He yawned. Perhaps that pretty young nurse had a point. What was he achieving here? What harm would a night in his own bed do? He could come back tomorrow. The shower and shave had freshened him up, but done little to resolve his underlying fatigue. Now the cumulative effect of the smell of antiseptic and the glare of the strip lighting was beginning to hurt his head. He badly needed to lie down. Yet he couldn’t go anywhere without his clothes.
Walter moved slowly along the corridor, peering into the private rooms. Six doors along he found a recently vacated and newly remade bed. He looked both ways, then slipped into the room.
Ten minutes, he promised himself. Just ten minutes.
The top cover was dominated by a large eye. He pulled it back and crawled under.
Fifteen, tops.
Walter pulled the cover back up and over his head. Hopefully nobody would notice. Not for twenty minutes at least.
Two hours later, with the visitors long gone and normality restored, a Sister on patrol happened to look into Walter’s room and saw the outline of his body beneath the sheet.
She immediately turned back to the corridor and hollered: ‘Nurse! I thought I told you to get that stiff down to the morgue!’
Six doors further along, Margaret Gilmore opened her eyes.
22
The Sleeper Awakes
Margaret Gilmore had been unconscious for three days, thanks to a slice of rogue carrot cake. She didn’t know this, of course. As far as she was concerned, she was waking from a heavy sleep filled with disturbing dreams, but, nevertheless, in her own bed, snug and secure. So, naturally, when her eyes flickered open and she found herself in a strange room, hooked up to all kinds of machines, and with a tube stuck up her nose and an IV in her arm, she screamed.
The nurses came running. They clucked around, trying to calm her down. One, trying to stop her climbing out of bed and ripping out the tubes, cried, ‘Please! We’ll call your husband!’
‘No! Get this out of my nose! Get it out of my nose!’
‘Just take it easy …’
‘Get it out!’
The house doctor arrived, quickly surveyed the situation, then stepped forward and removed the tube. It wasn’t pleasant; tears rolled down Margaret’s cheeks. Nevertheless, she rattled her wrist at him.
‘And this, and this!’
The young Indian doctor shook his head. ‘That requires to stay.’
‘It’s hurting!’
‘It still requires to stay. We will give you a painkiller. You have been very sick.’
This stopped her in her tracks. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, Margaret. You. Why do you think you are here?’
Margaret blinked at him. ‘I thought I was kidnapped by aliens and you were doing experiments with my ovaries.’
The doctor blinked back. Then quietly and efficiently he explained what had actually happened. Margaret nodded along in semi-disbelief - she remembered the projectile vomiting in Emma Cochrane’s boutique, but nothing else. The doctor said she would have to continue with the intravenous supply of fluids for another twenty-four hours at least, and that she would have a more thorough examination in the morning, together with some scans.
‘For brain damage?’ Margaret asked.
‘No,’ said the doctor.
A nurse asked if there was anyone she wanted contacted. Margaret was lucid enough now to experience the acute embarrassment that comes with realising that you don’t actually have any really close family or friends. In the end she dredged up her work colleague Maeve O’Boyle’s number, and a different nurse scurried off to contact her.
Margaret had slept for three days, but she could hardly keep her eyes open. This wasn’t a bad thing, the doctor explained; her body was just exhausted. As she drifted off to sleep again, she was almost sure that she heard one of the nurses say, ‘What about Walter?’ but then she heard another say, ‘What is the capital of Patagonia?’ and knew that she must be dreaming.
In the corridor outside, another nurse responded, ‘I’ve told you a million times, I’m crap at crosswords,’ but Margaret was already asleep.
She woke again shortly before midnight.
‘Aha - the sleeper awakes!’
She turned groggily, her eyes opening just a slither. A bush on a chair. She fought to open her eyes fully; she concentrated on focusing in.
‘What a fright you gave us,’ said Maeve, shaking her big hair.
‘I’m sorry,’ Margaret said weakly.
‘Don’t be daft! I’m just so pleased you’re back!’
Maeve poured her a glass of Lucozade, then helped her to sit up. ‘Remember how they used to do Lucozade with all that cellophane stuff round the top? Lucozade aids recovery. Remember that? Anyway, how do you feel?’ she asked.
‘Like I’ve the mother of all hangovers, without having enjoyed the night before.’ Margaret drank greedily. ‘I hope you didn’t waste a lot of time coming to see me while I was asleep.’
‘Margaret, darlin’, it was no bother.’
It was no bother because she hadn’t. Maeve came from West Belfast, where pragmatism was a requirement rather than a choice. What was the point in babysitting a vegetable? However, she was genuinely happy that Margaret was awake. She opened her handbag and fished out a somewhat crumpled quarter of Jelly Babies. As she passed them across she said, ‘You don’t see them like this any more, you know, in a paper bag, poured in and weighed by the shopkeeper himself. They’re all in presealed plastic bags these days. You miss the personal touch.’
Margaret looked at the bag, then into it. ‘Well, it might have been the personal touch that got me here in the first place. You know - the carrot cake.’
Maeve smiled. ‘Funny you should mention it. I was going to keep this for a couple of days, till you felt a bit better. But you might as well have it now.’ She delved into her bag again and produced a sheaf of stapled A4 pages. ‘Got them off the internet.’
Margaret tried to focus on the information they contained. Her eyes were still not quite right. The pages appeared to contain lists of names, dates and amounts of money, all neatly set out in columns, but she couldn’t quite make out the details.
‘I don’t follow,’ she said.
Maeve moved to sit on the edge of the bed, then pointed down. ‘It’s a list of people who’ve sued restaurants and cafes for food poisoning. These are the dates, and this is the amount of compensation they were paid. The last few pages have accounts of some of the court cases, and believe you me, yours is one of the worst examples. You’ll make a fortune out of this.’
‘Maeve, I’m not even thinking of …’
‘Well, you should. I thought you let Primark off with murder, but these guys really did nearly kill you. You have to hit them, Margaret, and you have to hit them hard.’
Sometime after midnight, a nurse brought her tea and toast.
‘Where am I?’ M
argaret asked. For a moment the nurse feared that she was slipping away again, but Margaret quickly explained. ‘I mean - what hospital? I thought there was a bed shortage in all these places, yet here I am, private room and all.’
‘Psyclops Surgeries.’
‘Psyclops? I can’t afford Psyclops.’
‘Well, someone can. We don’t do charity cases. Let me check.’ She came back five minutes later carrying a file and said, ‘Your employers are paying for it.’
‘Primark?’
The nurse’s brow furrowed. ‘No. Says here, … Emma Cochrane Ltd.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Margaret had presumed that her display of projectile vomiting and subsequent collapse in the trendy boutique on the Lisburn Road would automatically have spelled the end of her briefly promising career in fashion design. But if Emma Cochrane was paying for her treatment … My God, they must have been really impressed. After a moment of elation she remembered that she hadn’t even shown Emma or her fashion buyer Louise the designs, only the dresses she’d bought in Primark and passed off as her own. It was a fraud. It was all based on a fraud. Margaret slumped down in her bed. But where were her own designs? She’d intended to show them to Emma, but then had a last-minute change of heart and put them in her jacket pocket.
When a different nurse came in to remove her tray she asked where her personal effects were.
‘Not sure there were any, love.’
‘I had a leather jacket.’
‘Oh, your clothes - they stank of boke. They’re in the laundry. I can have them picked up in the morning.’
‘Was there an envelope in the inside pocket?’
‘Anything like that, be in your locker there.’
Margaret checked her locker. It was bare.
‘So,’ said the nurse, plumping her pillows as Margaret leaned forward. ‘Where’s he got to then?’
‘Where’s who got to?’
The nurse smiled. ‘Here all day every day, all night - like a devoted puppy, he was.’
Margaret rolled her eyes. ‘My husband doesn’t normally like hospitals.’
‘Not him, silly. Walter.’
‘Walter?’
23
The King of the Underworld
Even in private hospitals, patients occasionally die. They just do it more discreetly. In normal hospitals - that is, those establishments that still hang on by their cracked fingernails to the crumbling cliff-face of the National Health Service - the recently departed are normally heaved down a maintenance chute then transported by shopping trolley to await pick-up by a prune-faced man in a black suit. At Psyclops Surgeries the dead are treated with a little more respect. After all, they are still paying for it.
The climate-controlled basement mortuary was known throughout the hospital as the Upstairs Room. It was known as this because bereavement counsellors, of whom there were half a dozen on the payroll, preferred not to refer to recently departed loved ones as having died, but as having just ‘popped upstairs’.
It was not a huge room, because there was not much daily traffic. Barney was the Chief Mortuary Technician. It was a grand title for someone who did little more than wash the bodies down and prepare them for collection by an undertaker. But it sounded a lot better than saying, ‘I wash dead bodies.’ He had difficulty enough keeping girls when he said he was Chief Mortuary Technician.
Barney mostly worked nights, starting at 9 p.m. and continuing until dawn. It was a simple fact that most people died in the early hours of the morning, and it was best, like wills and pizza, not to leave them lying around. The secret was to whip them out of their beds and get them down to the Upstairs Room as quickly as possible. Once they were on the slab he could work at his own pace, although of course rigor mortis did not recognise flexitime.
Tonight, however, was a bit of a shocker. It was rare for him to have more than two bodies to work on in the course of his shift. This night there were four. And then a nurse came hurrying down pushing another on a bed, complaining that she’d been chewed out by the Sister for forgetting about him when really, it wasn’t her responsibility.
She shared a cigarette with Barney. He made her coffee. She quite liked him, but had twice refused to go out with him. Like all of the others, she had difficulty getting past what he did for a living. She never put it into so many words, but Barney knew. He could have responded with, ‘You clean up old people’s poo all day and it’s not a problem for me.’ But the comment was never made, the response was not required, and a romance that might have been incredible withered and died before it even began.
Nurse Rachel, lighting another fag, and nodding around the room, said, ‘Busy tonight.’
‘Yeah, there’s a lot of it going around.’
There was a body on a slab before her. It was an elderly woman. She was completely naked. Her eyes were open. She had an ash tray on her chest. Nurse Rachel wasn’t altogether comfortable about using it, but this was the only room in the entire hospital where you could enjoy a fag without setting off the smoke alarms - it was something to do with the climate control - so she had to bide by Barney’s rules if she was to enjoy her fix of nicotine.
Behind her, a low rumble issued from one of the bodies, and Rachel jumped. Barney laughed.
‘God,’ said Rachel, pressing her hand to her chest. ‘I never get used to that.’
‘Ach, you do, you do. There’s that much gas in some of them, they’re fartin’ all night.’
Rachel smiled. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be smoking then. One spark, an’ this whole place could go up. Explain that to your boss!’
She was funny, Barney thought, and pretty, but he wasn’t going to risk a third round of humiliation. If she was interested - and flirting away like this he was quite sure she was - she could do the asking.
The ominous rumble sounded again.
Rachel, glancing across, was astonished to see the body move slightly under its cover.
‘Jesus! … Did you see that?! It moved!’ She stepped closer to Barney, put a hand on his arm. ‘Is that normal?’
Barney didn’t even look round. ‘Relax,’ he said.
‘I don’t like it,’ shuddered Rachel. ‘Gives me the creeps.’
‘Ah, you get used to it.’ He put his fag out in the ash tray on the old woman’s chest. ‘Secret is, you give them a good telling-off, they don’t do it again.’ He winked at her, then moved towards the third of the waiting trolleys.
Rachel, aware that he was going to do something, instinctively said, ‘Don’t!’
‘Shhh,’ said Barney. He took hold of the top end of the sheet covering the body, then suddenly whipped it back and wagged an admonishing finger down at the corpse. ‘Would you ever quit it with all the bloody farting!’
The corpse opened its eyes.
Barney’s mouth dropped open.
The corpse sat up.
Rachel screamed, then hurtled across the room and out of the door.
‘Please, … don’t,’ Barney whispered, terrified but frozen to the spot.
Walter North, the corpse in question, still half-asleep, rubbed at his eyes. ‘It’s bloody freezing in here,’ he mumbled.
As he began to climb out of bed, Barney fortuitously discovered the power of his legs and staggered backwards.
‘Any chance of a cup of—’ Walter began.
Barney gave him one more terrified look, then charged out of the room. Walter yawned, stretched, blinked against the strip lighting, then took his first proper look at his surroundings. The three other beds, with dead feet sticking out of the bottom. And the naked woman on the bed with a half-full ash tray on her chest.
‘Oh, holy crap,’ said Walter, then shuffled his slippers quickly towards the door.
Walter knew one thing: he had to get out of the hospital. It was one thing hanging around Margaret. Or sneaking into an empty room for a sleep. It was something entirely different to wake up in a morgue with only corpses for company. To wake up dead. What if they’d tried to drain him of bodi
ly fluids? Or harvest his organs? Or have him stuffed and mounted on casters? Or what if he’d slept through it all and somehow woken up in a coffin? He could have been buried alive! Or cremated!
Walter hurried along a labyrinth of basement corridors, trying door after door until he found a back way into the car park. His car was still there, but it had been clamped and plastered with prosecution warnings. Someone - Billy, in all probability - had added Speccy to the Fruit that had previously been scratched into the paintwork. Even if it hadn’t been clamped, he didn’t have the keys anyway; they were with his wallet and jacket in a locker that nice nurse had organised for him while the rest of his clothes were put through the laundry. But there was no way he was going back in for them. The morgue attendant had probably recovered his senses by now and would have alerted hospital security. How could he explain it away? I was visiting a friend, but I decided to stay for three days, and then I pretended to be a patient, and then I decided to go sleep with the corpses. They would cart him off to the mental wing. And how would it go down at work? And what would Margaret make of it?
Margaret.
What was it about her?
He was normally so boring. He was, after all, a Civil Servant.
And now here he was, standing on the Malone Road, in his Psyclops Surgeries pyjamas, dressing-gown and fluffy slippers, vainly trying to wave down a taxi.
Margaret definitely had a lot to answer for.
24
Big Foot
Margaret was making remarkable progress. She had, according to the young Indian house doctor, been at death’s door. Or if not exactly at its door, then just along the hall from it. Waiting on the landing. It was one of the most serious cases of food poisoning he had ever seen, and that was saying something, coming from the land of the Delhi belly. Now, apart from extreme fatigue, it was almost as if the past three days hadn’t happened.
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