Well, scuttling out of there. Sidling, perhaps. Peeking to see if the security guard was looking this way; seeing that he wasn’t, and slipping as fast as I could manage, as quiet as I could manage down the corridor and out of his line of sight. Simon followed me, with the empty chair; he was grinning, I was praying.
There was a process to be gone through, he said, if I insisted on discharging myself. Especially if I wouldn’t even wait to discuss it with a doctor. Papers to be signed, he said. Please? he said; and I nodded, and let him guide me to an office behind reception.
He left me there, and went to phone a taxi. I sat, with a grunt of relief, and argued with the administrator until she produced my file. I signed a release form, told her where I was going, said no, I wasn’t accompanied, but the taxi would take me straight there; and then I repeated this new method I’d discovered for resolving the irresolvable, I got up and walked out.
Simon was waiting, just outside the automatic doors. I joined him, stood for a moment soaking up the sunshine, and said, “I suppose you’d be outraged if I offered you a tip?”
“Damn right,” he agreed. “I know exactly how much you’ve got in that wallet, and it wouldn’t begin to cover it. Besides,” when I didn’t grin back, when I forced him to take me seriously, “I was just doing my job.”
“No, you weren’t. Smuggling patients out past Vernon Deverill’s security guards is no part of your job, Simon.”
“No, but I enjoyed that bit.”
“It’s not going to get you into trouble, is it?”
He shook his head positively. “I don’t work for Mr Deverill.”
“Even so, he’s got a lot of clout...”
“So’s my charge nurse. I’ll be fine. Here’s your taxi. Safe home, mate,” and he was gone.
o0o
Every road and alleyway within the hospital grounds was lined with parked cars; the main loop was slow with traffic as constant arrivals trawled for space. The taxi-driver grumbled under his breath when we came to a dead stop, queuing three behind a car that was heir-apparent to a place currently being slowly and carefully backed out of by an old Morris 1000. If I drove such a car, I thought, I too would be that careful; why take risks with a pocket heaven?
And why would someone who feels like that, I thought, whose ideal is a car more than thirty years old already, why would such a person be driving—let alone crashing at speed—an MR2?
At last the Moggy was out onto the roadway, given plenty of manoeuvring-room by us polite queuers; and in the brief pause where all was static, before its driver could select a new gear and potter forward, a car came neatly out of an alley-mouth where it had clearly been lurking, it drove twenty metres the wrong way up this one-way loop and nipped into the space the Moggy had vacated.
And it parked, and its driver got out and walked blithely away while all of us in the queue were still manipulating our startled jaws back into position; and I think, I hope that any other day, any other driver I’d have been cheering for the sheer nerve of it, once I got over my startlement.
Not this day, not this driver. I was sliding low as I could get on that back seat, almost ducking my head below window-level not to let Sue—no, Suzie, let her be Suzie—spot me as she sauntered up to the hospital’s main entrance, her arms full of gifts and packages and Adolphus.
o0o
Not much money in my purse, just a fiver and small change; but no matter for that, it was enough. Enough to get me home, at least, and I wasn’t looking any further.
Never would have done, probably, if my insouciant mother had had her way with me, if her training had held. This was how she’d always wanted me to live; it was the way she lived herself, St Matthew her guiding preceptor, though in her own translation: Tomorrow? What’s with tomorrow? This is today, my son, and it won’t last, so grab it. Unnatural parent, she cared not a jot for my career or my safe, solid prospects or my comfortably-settled love life. If I’d been visibly unhappy, I guess she might have worried; as I wasn’t—or hadn’t been, any maternal visit these last ten years—she’d cultivated blithe unconcern into an art form. She might have failed utterly in her objective, if she’d really meant to turn me out a carbon copy of her own disinterested self, but that was necessarily not a problem. I could go to hell in a handcart, so long as that was the way I’d chosen to go; her philosophy couldn’t point a finger at me.
During my teenage years, while she was burdening me with freedoms I didn’t want and I was rebelling as hard as I could manage, loading myself with chains, often and often she’d say, There’s only one rule in this family, darling: don’t ever find yourself stranded, because I may not be able to come get you. Run and find out, go and have fun, any party you fancy anywhere in the world; but just you make sure you’ve got enough cash to get home with.
With licence like that, was it any wonder I never took advantage?
Well, hardly ever.
I’d been a little prig, probably: a schoolboy with savings, a teenager who refused to be a tearaway, a student who studied and wouldn’t ever play beyond his means.
And, of course, a solicitor who drove a Volvo about twenty years too soon...
Ah, what the hell. Too late for regrets. Non, je ne regrette rien, about the only one of my mother’s precepts that really had taken with me, even if in a form she thought perversely twisted; and if my whole life thus far had been designed to make sure I never had cause to regret, I could at least do myself the courtesy of not changing the standard now. Be safe, be certain had always been my battle-cry, impetuosity the thing to fear, the very stuff of later regrets.
And besides, here I was finally doing something my mother would wholeheartedly have approved of: coming home from some kind of a party a week late, with massive holes in my memory and just enough cash for the taxi-fare. Bingo. Must remember to tell her, whenever she surfaced next...
o0o
Ten minutes in the taxi, one side of town to the other: and these streets were second nature to me, every corner long since logged and charted. There was the pub, the Beamish Boy; there was the delicatessen, with its yellow paintwork and its inevitable student conclave just outside the door; there the two rival corner-shops on adjacent corners, and here at last were the street and the door that meant home to me, and had done for as long as I wanted to remember.
I handed over the fiver, with my usual embarrassed mumble that meant keep the change, if there is any; I got out of the cab, and watched it drive away; I fished my old key-wallet out of the unfamiliar pocket of these unfamiliar jeans, and waited for my fingers to find the ones that would let me in.
And of course they didn’t, because those keys weren’t there.
I’d known that, damn it, I’d seen it in the hospital. ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in’—but it was startlingly, frighteningly easy to find yourself homeless. Me, I’d just put my head down and run without thinking, to where instinct and history both said I’d find welcome and security; and here I was, and here was neither one of those, and I’d been a fool to expect them.
Still, you can’t obliterate history, and affection’s roots can run deep even when there’s little to be seen on the surface. She didn’t have to take me in, maybe, but she might yet choose to.
So I went to the door anyway, and knocked; and I’d been so hasty to run out of the hospital before Sue—Suzie, damn it, Suzie—turned up that I was still ahead of the day here, Carol hadn’t left for work yet.
Carol opened the door, and saw me; and me, I saw the effort, the tremendous effort it was for her not to slam that door in my face the moment she clocked who I was behind the scabs and the bruises.
“What the hell,” she said, who never swore, “what the fucking hell do you want here?”
Shelter from the storm, but I couldn’t ask that, she had to offer. “I want to talk,” I said, with a helpless, hopeless gesture. “I’ve got to talk to you, Carol.”
“What, now?” with an ostentatious glan
ce at her watch, some of us still go to work, Jonty.
“Well, no, but... I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Oh, really? What happened to your little ethnic friend?”
“I can’t handle her at the moment, I need...”
“Frankly, Jonty,” she said, “I don’t give a damn what you need. You’re not my problem any more. Your choice, if you remember, not mine. So now it’s my turn to choose; and no, I don’t want to talk to you, now or preferably ever. And no, you certainly can’t come and wait the day out in here, if that’s what you were suggesting. If you can’t go back to the little wife, you can camp out on some park bench for all I care. Go and play wino in a doorway, at least you look the part. Been good for you, hasn’t it, this big change thing? You really look like you’ve grown...
“But fuck off and do your growing somewhere else, not on my doorstep. I’m not going to talk to you, I’m not going to listen to you, even; and if you’re still here by the time I leave for work, I’ll call the police and get an injunction. Understood?”
And she didn’t even wait for my nod of acceptance, understood, she just did what she’d so much wanted to do before, and slammed the door in my face.
Five: Ra-Ra Avis
Firm, but fair. If I believed what I’d been told—and it was surely impossible not to do that now, despite my soul’s rejection—then I had to believe also what it implied, that I’d treated Carol appallingly.
I thought I’d seen her in every mood, but I’d never seen her as angry as this; and this was a couple of months after the fact, after the act, after I’d demonstrably left her. She didn’t ordinarily stew, she didn’t hold grudges any more than she used what she called cheap language. She’d see my leaving as a betrayal, of course, she’d have to; a betrayal that renewed itself with every day apart, just as what we’d had formerly had been renewed and strengthened—or so it had seemed, so we’d both affirmed—with every day together.
That must be why she was so embittered, that I’d made what seemed a waste and a deception out of all those long years of promises and trust. I’d taken the bulk of her adult life with me, when I left; and I had no way to give that back, no way to persuade her that she should believe memory rather than revelation, the way it had seemed to be rather than the way she saw it now.
That I was still nine-tenths in love with her, at least; that I was the reverse of her, that I valued what we’d lost all the more for having lost it; no, I wouldn’t, couldn’t have raised that with her even if she’d let me talk at all. I’d surrendered the right, although I couldn’t remember when or how. Indisputable now, that my hands had packed and my feet had walked away from Carol. No matter that no shadow of my doing it remained to haunt me; the thing had been done and was I thought unforgivable.
Which was probably the only thing left that Carol and I could agree on.
o0o
Took me a minute, but I did walk dutifully away from her door. Though it had been my door too, my home, and only my intellect could believe now that it wasn’t; my heart still yearned for its familiar comforts and hers also, strength of shoulder and softness of breast, tanglements of hair and her low voice like an echo of the sea, distant, potent.
But I did walk, and I’d have walked to the pub if it was open, though I barely had the cash to buy myself a pint, and what’s one pint in a crisis?
Too early, though, by far. The Boy’s doors would be locked for hours yet. Even the off-licences weren’t open, even if I’d wanted to follow Carol’s recommendation and play wino in a doorway, which I didn’t.
Instead I just carried on walking, blindly, heedlessly; and because I wasn’t thinking, my feet fell into old long-established habits and carried me through the park and down the hill towards town.
And because I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t think I can’t do this, I’m in no condition, I can’t walk forty minutes without a break; but I’d not been going long before my body reminded me, and I’d not got halfway before I had to sit down because my legs simply wouldn’t take me further.
But it had turned into a sunny morning, warmly spring; and my way to town led through parks and public gardens, so it was really no hardship to slump down onto a bench and lift my face to the restorative light. Ten minutes, I told myself firmly, just ten minutes, and I’ll get moving...
Only that I had nowhere to move to, I had been moving without purpose and having stopped, I couldn’t find the impetus to move again. It wasn’t just the soreness of flesh barely healed and the weakness of muscles barely off a bed that held me static in the sun for longer, much longer than my ten minutes’ allotment.
It’s hard to tell time, with your eyes closed and all your body, mind, spirit disorganised. Half an hour at least I sat on that bench, or it might have been an hour, maybe more. And I might have, no, I would have sat there longer still if someone else hadn’t been moved to move me.
Chance? Fate? Luke says there’s no such thing, he says that accident and coincidence are only labels we apply to the more mysterious workings of the higher powers, benign or otherwise. He would say that, of course, but sometimes I feel impelled to believe him. Other times I find it hard enough to fit my head around Luke himself; his theology, his Manichaean puppet-master vision of all people as pawns in a multiplex game that as little resembles chess as chess does hopscotch becomes altogether too much for me, and I crash through into a comforting atheism where there is neither god nor devil to disturb the workings and imaginings of men.
Which is, of course, promptly etched to nothing by acid reality, the next time I consider Luke.
o0o
Of his own kindness, then, or else prodded by some power or principality of indeterminate intent, a man who had been seemingly catching up on the sports results two benches down—though I thought in honesty he’d just been absorbing sunlight as I was, practising photosynthesis for the next life—stood up, walked over and offered me his paper.
“Looks like you’re settled for the day there, son,”—he was American, of course; catch a Brit being so offhandedly open-handed with a stranger—“you might as well have the benefit of this, if you want it.”
As cover, he meant, as he’d been using it himself. Perhaps he meant as more literal cover, perhaps he was saying get your head down, put this over your face and have a snooze, if Americans talk about snoozing. Whatever, I took the paper with as good a smile as I could manage through my all-too-British startlement and a stammer of thanks, too late; he was five metres down the path already and didn’t bother to look around to acknowledge it, only made a vague gesture with one hand to suggest that he had heard, but that his offer was too commonplace to merit even a token gratitude.
Well, now I really didn’t have to move. Only a tabloid, but it could still take me an hour to read; and maybe some subconscious process would have made a decision for me by the time I reached the back-page cartoon, maybe I’d have figured out what to do or where to go...
I read the headline, a 40-point SLEAZE SENSATION ROCKS CABINET, then checked out the pictures on the front page: politicos scuttling down Downing St, gazing at their crabwise-shuffling feet to avoid catching the eye of the camera; and then, boxed off from that story, the picture of a great tree falling. And beside it a lesser headline, triple-stacked: COLBURNE VALLEY PROTESTORS: ‘WE’LL BE BACK!’
Which was the gift, the sending, the forefinger of fate—or angel or devil, whatever, if it wasn’t sheer coincidence or chance—nudging me when I seemed not to be quite on track.
o0o
What did I know from Colburne Valley? Fuck nothing except the one thing, I didn’t even know where it was; but that didn’t matter. I didn’t have to go there. It was a trigger, that was all, gifted or sent or whatever, and it fired me like a slow bullet—a dumdum blond, call me, soft head and all—from the tunnel of my depression as if it were the barrel of a long gun. No great speed, but a deal of distance.
Except of course that this bullet had to provide its own propellant. I was up o
n my feet already and moving as best I could, heading for town again as fast as my aching legs would carry me; but that was neither fast nor far, and nowhere near enough. And my Volvo was God alone knew where, but nowhere near me; and its substitute the MR2 must be a write-off, even if I had any sense of its possession, which I didn’t; and there wasn’t any way to get where I was going, other than by car. Well, there was, but not for me. A succession of buses I guess I could have managed, if I could only get money for the fares, but not the climb after. This current walking was almost too much, and this was downhill all the way.
Like so much else, I thought, smirking, loving the pun, like my life, suddenly... But that wasn’t true, or not necessarily true. At least I had a target now, something to shoot at; and that brought its own focus by definition, I wasn’t careering blindly any more.
More puns threatening there, more disturbing to me. If a man is a composite of his parts there were fundamentally two things that defined me, my career and Carol, and both of those were seemingly gone now.
So don’t think about it now. One foot in front of the other, think about that, it’s getting harder...
Which it was. I was sweating and breathing fast, driving against my body’s reluctance and clamping my mind against its tendency to spin. Never mind my job or my love life, I focused by necessity on my feet.
Step by step, and all too aware of each one of them, I made my way into the city centre. Found where I was aiming for, stepped up from the street, pushed the glass door open; and even as I was walking in I was thinking this was maybe not such a bright idea.
I needed a car; I’d come to a car-hire company, first I could think of. So far so good.
So here I was walking into this nice smart expensive polished shopfront, asking to hire one of their nice smart expensive polished vehicles; and me with my face all scabby and unshaven today, the skin still puffy and yellow from fading bruises and the sweat of effort like a sheen across my brow, moving strangely because it was getting harder and harder to drag the weight of my bones against the deep weariness and the deeper hurt, looking in short like I’d been living the life that Carol had recommended to me. Thank God the boozers weren’t open, or I’d have had the smell of beer hanging over me like a garnish, just to make the unlikely impossible. Even without that, I still must look like a street-stricken wino in borrowed finery, because the clothes on my back might be clean but they all too clearly didn’t fit well enough to be my own.
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