A Poisoned Mind

by Natasha Cooper

  David sat back, watching him and hoping he’d miss the one excellent blocking opportunity that was left. George always took for ever to make his move. David’s fingers inched towards his i-Pod, which was lying on the floor just beside him, but George usually got irritated if you didn’t give your full attention to whatever you were supposed to be doing with him.

  Just before impatience made him want to screech ‘Hurry up for fuck’s sake’, George put three tiles on the board, taking the other possible triple. Then he looked round.

  ‘What d’you think Jay’s up to?’ he said. ‘Hasn’t he been rather a long time in the bog?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘I’ll go and make sure there’s nothing wrong,’ said George, ‘while you see what you can do to claw back my enormous lead.’

  David nodded. Between them they’d left him with only a pathetic nineteen for a score, so he jumbled up his letters looking for a different word to leap out at him. George had taught him ages ago, when they first started to play together, that if you looked long enough you could nearly always find something better than your first attempt.

  He turned round the score sheet and saw he was thirty points behind Jay and eight behind George. What he needed now was to get all his letters out in one go and so win an extra fifty. That might be enough to keep him ahead till the end of the game.

  Without George to disapprove, he plugged in his i-Pod so the music could help him think, then stared down at the board till his face started to ache. He rubbed his hands over it, but that didn’t help. He couldn’t see any existing word he could extend. And his letters weren’t going to make any single word on their own, even if he could find somewhere to put it. He blinked in case that helped him see better.

  A heavy thud reached him through the beat of the music. He pulled out one earpiece to listen. There was nothing more, except the clock in the kitchen, ticking even louder than usual. He looked up. If he leaned back he could just see the clockface. It was nearly ten to seven. What could be taking so long? Jay must have been in the bathroom at least fifteen minutes now, and he never stayed that long, even when he was having a crap. David was getting to his feet when his bedroom door opened and Jay rushed out clutching his shirt in a bundle against his bare chest. There were drops of water all over him.

  Seeing David, he pulled the door shut. ‘I was sick. He’s cleaning up. I’ve got to go.’

  He was already past the fireplace and on his way to the front door.

  ‘Wait,’ David said. ‘You need a towel. And if you’ve been sick, you ought to have—’

  ‘Gotta go.’ Jay wrenched open the door and hurled himself out, pulling it back behind him with another almighty bang.

  David thought about going to help George, then decided not to. He’d only get in the way and there was nothing like someone else’s sick to make you want to upchuck yourself.

  The clock kept ticking. It was the only noise, except for the crackling of the wood in the fireplace. George was being amazingly quiet too. And he hadn’t come out to get any cloths or bleach or anything from the kitchen. David stood up again, then slumped back into the sofa. It was silly to think something could be wrong. Why would it be?

  The clock went on. The ticks were like being hit with a hammer. He couldn’t go on waiting. He walked extra quietly, as though there was something in his bedroom that mustn’t know he was coming, which was silly, so he made himself crash open the door like he usually would have.

  George was lying on the floor with blood pouring out of a slash in his arm, making his sleeve look dark brown instead of grey. His face was grainy and white, like washing powder, and he was breathing as if he had something stuffed up his nose. David plumped on his knees, reaching for his phone. Then he saw it: his old clasp knife sticking out of George’s chest in a direct line from the arm slash.

  David’s fingers slipped as he tried to press in the number for Trish’s phone. But he made himself do it. He only got her voicemail. So he rang her clerk on the chambers number. Steve said she was out at a meeting. There wasn’t time to wait and leave a message, so David clicked off, then forced 999 into the phone.

  They took ages too and they wanted his name and address and phone number, then asked which emergency service he wanted. He shouted at them that George was stabbed and bleeding. Then they had all sorts of more questions to ask and he answered them as best he could. George was looking worse and worse and more blood was leaking out round the knife all the time.

  They wouldn’t let David go. He said he had to phone Caro. So they wanted to know who she was. He clicked off and phoned her. While he was waiting for her to answer, he looked around his room and saw all his stuff had been chucked about all over the floor and the bed. His computer screen was hanging off the desk from its cables, and all the drawers were open.

  ‘David? Hi.’ Caro’s voice made things in his head slow down a bit. ‘How are you?’

  His eyes felt scratchy and wet, as if he was going to cry. But he couldn’t do that. His voice wouldn’t work. Caro said his name again. He pushed his throat muscles together inside and at last he managed to make a noise, but it was only a kind of gasp. Then he got some words out:

  ‘Jay’s stabbed George. He’s on the floor. I don’t know what to do. I can’t get Trish. It’s my fault. I took too long coming in. I don’t know what—’

  ‘Hold on, David.’ He could hear more in her voice now. It wasn’t panic but it wasn’t soothing either. He needed her here, not telling him what to do down the phone. ‘Listen. Are you listening, David?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The first thing is to get an ambulance. I want you to—’

  ‘I’ve done that. They’re on their way. And the police.’

  ‘Good. Well done. That’s the most important thing. Where’s Jay? Is he still with you?’

  ‘No. He ran off. Before I knew what he’d done. Or I would have stopped him; tried to stop him.’

  ‘We’ll deal with that later. Is George still breathing?’

  ‘Yeah. And bleeding. Not conscious.’

  ‘Right. Can you hear the ambulance yet?’

  He strained, but all he could hear was the kitchen clock, beating out the time while George was bleeding to death.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘OK. It shouldn’t be too long. Did you pull out the knife?’

  ‘No. I saw on telly that makes the bleeding worse, but I—’

  ‘Well done! You’ve done everything exactly right so far, David. Now, what—?’

  He stopped listening as he caught the sound in the distance: a swooping kind of wheep-beep, wheep-beep.

  ‘They’re coming. The ambulance.’

  ‘Good. Then I want you to ring off now, find out where they’re taking George and ring me back. OK? I’ll be waiting for your call. Then I’ll ring Trish, so you don’t have to worry about that. Then I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘I’m going with him in the ambulance. I’ve got to.’

  ‘Fine. But call me as soon as you know where you’re going. And don’t forget to lock up. It’s easy to stop doing ordinary things with something bad like this.’

  There was a great banging on the front door. He ran to open it and grabbed the first green-suited man who came through.

  ‘It’s this way. Come on. Quick. He’s dying.’

  Angie was rehearsing in her mind the words she would pick to ask Greg for the truth at last while she straightened out the note on which he’d written: ‘Don’t accuse me here. Save it for later and calm down. Otherwise we’ll get nothing.’

  Tempted to throw it back at him, she turned the paper over and saw it was a restaurant bill for one person, covering lobster soup and a fillet steak at a huge price. She checked the date. It was today’s.

  So the purplish scraps in his beard hadn’t been plum after all, let alone tomato as he’d claimed, but steak. He wasn’t even an honest vegetarian. The bastard! The faking bastard!

  She looked up ready to give him back the inv
oice and show him just what she thought of his lies when the receptionist who’d shown them into the room came back and whispered into Maguire’s ear.

  All the colour drained out of her face. Angie was on her feet, forgetting Greg and the fact that she’d ever hated this woman.

  ‘What is it?’

  Maguire looked at her in a daze she recognised.

  ‘George,’ she said. ‘My partner … he’s been stabbed. They think he’s … I’m sorry, I have to go. Robert, will you take over?’

  Now she’ll know what it feels like, Angie thought, not listening to the sidekick saying he thought they’d finished anyway. She wanted to say something kinder to Maguire but knew she mustn’t hold her up now. She could always write.

  The receptionist had gone on to talk to Robert Anstey. He looked across the shining table at Greg.

  ‘Apparently the police are waiting for you outside, Mr Waverly,’ he said. ‘They’re keen to talk. I’ll take you to meet them.’

  So it is true, Angie thought, as all the old terrifying magma rose in her brain.

  Her hands clenched as she fought down the words she wanted to fling at him. Looking into his misaligned brown eyes in search of something to explain what he’d done, some capacity for evil, she found nothing but selfishness and surprise. Had he really thought they’d get away with it?

  His eyes fell and he shuffled away beside the impeccably dressed barrister who was acting as his jailer. He hadn’t even got the balls to apologise for the terrible human cost of what he’d done for his greedy friends.

  Chapter 21

  George had thin tubes plugged in all over him, and a wider, corrugated one like an albino elephant’s trunk over his mouth. His eyes were closed and his skin was greyish-yellow. His bed was surrounded by humming whirring machines, and the sheets were neatly folded down around his waist. Green patches were stuck to his chest, with some of the tubes sprouting out of them. And there was a long dressing covering his right arm between the elbow and the shoulder.

  There were other people in the Intensive Care Unit, sitting by the beds of more half-dead patients, who were breathing through machines, while nurses worked quietly at the bank of desks in the centre. One of them got up and walked to the bed at the far end of the unit. She made no noise as she went. At the bedside, she checked on the patient and made a note on his chart. She came towards Trish, who realised she was staring only when the woman smiled at her.

  ‘Try to talk to him,’ she said with a gentleness that didn’t hide the criticism. ‘It’s what he needs now. We think he can hear and it would help if you could stimulate his brain. Try.’

  ‘But it’s so quiet in here,’ Trish whispered. ‘I don’t want to disturb—’

  ‘You won’t. So long as you don’t shout, you won’t hurt the others. And it’s worth touching him too. Any sensory stimulus could help now.’ She moved away, as though to give Trish privacy. But there were no curtains. The staff needed to see everything that happened to all their patients.

  ‘Caro’s taken David home,’ she said laboriously to George’s unresponsive face. She laid her hand on his, taking care to avoid the drip’s needle, which had been inserted into one of the veins. ‘He did so well to get you here. I feel awful that it was so long before I knew what had happened. And when I saw him, rigid and white-faced, holding on to all his feelings until it was safe to hand over the responsibility, I could see how he blamed himself.’

  She licked her lips. This wasn’t coming out right.

  ‘He did really well,’ she said again. ‘I think you can feel very proud of his resourcefulness and calm under pressure. He made his report to me like a pro, giving the facts and none of the feelings, telling me what the doctors had said to him. Caro was standing behind him as he did it, both hands on his shoulders. And when he’d finished telling me everything, he just sagged back against her, as though all his muscles had given up the effort of holding his bones together.’

  That wasn’t right either. She couldn’t remember any anatomy. Did muscles hold the body together? Or was that tendons? Or skin? That was the biggest organ of the body, she remembered from a quiz night at David’s school. Weird to think of skin as an organ. This wasn’t helping George.

  Try again, Trish. Think of something to say, anything. They can make him breathe artificially and feed him through these tubes and deal with the body’s wastes, but they can’t make his brain keep working. You have to do that.

  She felt the first tears leak hotly on to her skin. The shock and the need to keep David going and show him how well he’d done and make sure Caro could keep him safe while she did this, had kept her from feeling anything else. Now, she looked at George and felt it all.

  There was so much she could have said if she’d been sure he would hear it. And that no one else would. She wanted to tell him about all the things she wished she’d never said in their ten years together, to apologise for all the times she’d misunderstood what he was doing and been angry with him, and for all the times she’d let him down, or not been there when he needed solace, all the clumsiness and irritability and insensitivity.

  He looked diminished. Even his hair had lost its spring and the endearing wildness he’d fought so hard to control.

  She should have phoned Selina to tell her what had happened. But that would have to wait. As would the decision about whether to alert the unknown Henry. If George were dying, his brother would surely want the chance to come and make his peace.

  That’s for later, Trish reminded herself. She was supposed to be talking to George, not shuffling through her own thoughts. It was never usually this difficult to talk; there was always something she wanted to tell him, or ask.

  ‘The meeting I was in when David tried to get me,’ she said, pulling the information out from behind her terror, ‘was about settling the CWWM case. You don’t know about that yet. But we found the people who caused the explosion. When I told Angie about the sabotage, she first looked stricken; then when I told her who the saboteurs were and who’d paid them, she was transfigured. I didn’t think of it at the time; now I’m wondering if she thought it could’ve been her son who did it.’

  This was stream-of-consciousness stuff. Trish hadn’t formulated the idea about Adam Fortwell; it had come out of nowhere. It was as though her mind was making links and connections everywhere to weave a kind of safety net between her fears and reality.

  ‘Anyway, whether it was that or not, she’s agreed to withdraw the claim. It’s rough on Don Bates that he won’t get any of his costs back, but it does mean he avoids having to pay damages. Which, given Rylands v. Fletcher, is more than he could’ve expected at the beginning.’

  This is so boring, she thought. How can I expect to spur George’s brain into wanting to go on living with this sort of work stuff? Maybe I should talk about Henry. No, because he didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to be back in his 8-year-old self, fighting for survival. His brain and body need everything they’ve got to fight this battle, not remember the old one. Better just tell him the truth.

  ‘George. I need you. David needs you.’ She felt the trail of tears all the way to her chin and wiped the back of her hand under it to catch them. ’Antony said to me the other day that taking the sabbatical ten years ago made me human; it wasn’t the sabbatical. It was meeting you. I know things weren’t always easy for you either. I was spiky too.

  ’There were times when I felt you were bullying me; then others when I thought you hated me, when I couldn’t understand why you kept coming to the flat when everything I did seemed to torment you, and I tried never to do today the thing you’d hated yesterday, but the thing always changed.

  ‘I tried to be what you wanted; it was ages before I realised you wanted me, the real me, not the me who would fit into the pattern you seemed to be telling me was the only one you could bear. It wasn’t till I stopped lopping off bits of myself to fit what I thought you wanted that everything started to work. We wasted so much time making each other u
nhappy; but it’s been so good these last few years. Don’t run out on me now.’

  The words dried up. Unlike her tears. She couldn’t see anything now except the wet fog between her and the world. A hand touched her.

  ‘Sorry. Mustn’t stop talking.’ She swallowed hard and began again, trying to be tougher, more optimistic. ‘So, what I thought we’d do when you’re convalescing is rent a house somewhere quiet and gorgeous. Maybe by the sea in England; maybe somewhere warmer. We always talked about seeing Sicily. Maybe we should get somewhere there. It sounds—’

  The hand gripped more tightly. She turned. It was the nurse.

  ‘We’ve got to change his drip,’ she said. ‘And then we’re going to close the ward for the night. You ought to go home and get something to eat. I know we told you to talk, but it won’t help him if you exhaust yourself. Can you stand?’

  Of course I can, Trish thought, then found herself staggering. Pins and needles made her legs useless. The nurse put a strong hand under her elbow until she was steady again.

  Trish walked stiffly away. She knew she couldn’t eat, but if they needed the ward emptied of visitors, she’d do her part. She’d do whatever it took to help George hang on.

  When she reached the alcohol-gel dispenser near the doors, she pumped out an extra-big pool and rubbed it over and between each finger, under her rings, around her cuticles; everywhere bacteria might lurk.

  ‘Trish,’ said a voice she knew.

  ‘Antony?’ She looked away from her fingers and saw him sitting in a wheelchair near the double doors. There was heavy shadow in his corner, but she’d have known him anywhere.

  ‘I heard what had happened to George and came down.’

  ‘But you had an embolism. You’re—’

  ‘Not dying this time either.’ He laughed a little, with a strange, tense teetering sound unlike anything she’d heard ever from him. ‘They caught it before it did anything too awful to my brain or heart. But I’m not supposed to walk yet. They agreed to get a porter to bring me down here to see if I could help George.’