by Ian McGuire
Chapter 9
Zoe Cable heard about the accident while undergoing routine acupuncture at the Coketown Wellness Clinic. It was the next afternoon. The Crocodile sent her a text message. Dirck Van Camper in hit and run. ‘Serious’ in CRI. Please advise, Don. (The Crocodile was of a generation that assumed the text message was merely a more developed form of telegram.) When she read it, Zoe Cable sat straight up.
‘Well, that’s buggered up my yin and yang,’ she said. ‘Best call it a day, Chan.’
As Chan silently but a little resentfully began removing needles, Zoe rang the Coketown Royal Infirmary to enquire about Dirck’s injuries. She pretended to be his stepsister, Saskia. The nurse recited them like a shopping list:
‘Spinal contusions, whiplash, fractures. His legs aren’t moving.’
‘Vill he ever valk again?’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
Maybe, maybe not? Zoe thought. Do you have to pay extra for a bedside manner these days?
‘Zankyou very much,’ she said.
Zoe switched off the phone and pondered her options. Although she put her faith in the generative forces of the universe, she was not above a little scheming at times. Perhaps if she hung around the ward, she could manufacture a meeting with Firenze Beach – surely she was on her way (and if not the Crocodile’s secretary should call her). The timing was improbable, she thought, and the whole thing was a little ghoulish, but Zoe decided to go anyway – her morning was open and she loved hospitals. She texted the Crocodile: Gone to CRI. CU L8R Z.
Yes, Zoe Cable loved hospitals. They were so entertaining, so true to life, so pagan. And in her experience, NHS hospitals were the best by far. You never knew just what you would stumble upon: bottled organs, dead bodies, rusting iron lungs, the demented and distraught. And the smells! You couldn’t make them up.
She had not always loved hospitals, however. As a child, she had feared them. As a child, indeed, Zoe Cable had feared almost everything. Tall, timid, awkward and charmless, even her parents had at times found Zoe Cable hard to love. Her sensitivities had been so ubiquitous as to make normal domestic life all but impossible for them: she hated sunlight, she thought water was dangerous, music of any kind made her cry. She lived on Weetabix and Lucozade and refused shampoo. Then, when she was almost fourteen, she was knocked from her bicycle by a mobile fruiterer. Her unhelmeted and odorous head clashed with the trunk of a nearby elm. Her skull fractured, her brain received a severe jolting and Zoe Cable lay in a coma in Kingston General for three days. Her parents worried that she would not wake or that, if she did, she would be so upset by what had happened that she would never speak to them again.
Zoe Cable was conscious for some time before she decided to try to move an eyelid or raise a finger. She lay in the darkness of her own body, listening and thinking. She wondered why she was not afraid. She was nearly dead after all – a machine was breathing for her, she had tubes up her nose, she could feel vague flurries of pain across her thighs and torso. So why was she not afraid? She considered this as she listened to her parents talking. They were discussing whether to bring in her mole collection; they thought it might cheer her up, but were worried about the risk of losing a mole in transit (there were 228 of them after all) or even worse, perhaps, misarranging them in the hospital room. The thought of Zoe waking to the sight of a disordered or incomplete mole collection filled them both with dread.
She heard relations, nurses, auxiliary staff. They talked about her in frightened whispers; they touched her, if at all, with the wary gentleness of bomb disposal experts. Her accident, she realised, had invested her with an obscure kind of power – the power of autism and haemorrhage, the power of blood. She was living in a world they dared not enter. Even the doctors were scared, she could tell. You could hear it in their voices, the special tenor of their rudeness. There was something within her they couldn’t control. Death was scampering around inside her like a dark hamster, blind, random; she could keep it or she could let it go. When she opened an eye, her mother started howling. She closed it again before anyone else noticed. She could bring them to their knees with her little finger.
Everything that happened afterwards – the surgeries, the rehab, the occasional epileptic fits – was a price worth paying. Once released from hospital, she started wearing black and backcombing her hair. Her make-up became thick and cadaverous. She liked, whenever possible, to describe the metal plate screwed into her skull, her tendency to foam at the mouth. Most people were disturbed by this, a few were excited – she made new friends. They would spend Saturdays together in Epsom town centre, smoking and walking around the shops. People looked askance, children pointed, store detectives asked them to leave. They were cleverer than the people around them and less squeamish – they pierced their own ears, did their own tattoos. They picked magic mushrooms and did controlled experiments with nutmeg and morning glory; they wasted no time on Rick Astley or Kajagoogoo. Zoe was the cleverest and the least squeamish of them all. She lived off lentils and Cup-a-Soup and treated her A-levels with disdain. Her teachers loved her. She could have gone to Cambridge but opted, for reasons no one could understand, for Barnstaple College.
She chose Barnstaple College because she wished to escape her friends and parents. Barnstaple had some of the worst rail connections in the country, making it almost impossible to reach at weekends. She needed to move on. She gave her old clothes to Oxfam and started wearing spandex leggings and strategically torn sweatshirts. She got highlights, drank voluminously and had a lot of sex. Zoe Cable was never beautiful. Her body was awkward and ungainly – when she danced, she seemed like a person removed from their authentic element, like a creature that had evolved beyond its means. That was her attraction. Silently, with her unabashed clumsiness and lack of symmetry, she spoke of other places, other media, more primitive and truer than our own. And in Barnstaple that was quite a draw. Men ran to her like lemmings to a cliff.
It was all very well, but after three years she decided to do a Ph.D. She finally went to Cambridge. She became older, and wore trouser suits. She became aware of her brain as a sexual organ, the power of blood transmuted into words, sense. Cambridge taught her that the border between the actual and the imagined was frail and osmotic: what she wanted she could have; what she willed could be real. She fantasised about her notoriously prim advisor Wilmot Herringham: during their first meeting he developed an unruly erection; by Easter he was offering to leave his wife. She argued violently with her flatmate, Crispin; two days later his Dr Who scarf caught on his bicycle dérailleur while crossing Bridge Street. He blacked out and woke up an hour later in Addenbrookes with wool burns and a broken arm. It made sense, she realised, to try to control this power, to shape it to her own ends. She visualised publication: Routledge accepted her dissertation. She visualised success: she was made a junior fellow. She visualised more success: she was headhunted by the Crocodile.
She never visualised Coketown, of course; that came as a surprise. Its provincialism appalled her, but it had, nonetheless, a kind of gothic charm. There was something swampish, uncooked about it, which she felt she could work with. Ever since her arrival she had been making notes, sketching proposals. On Saturday nights she would don her body suit and transparent raincoat and blend with the hordes of vertical drinkers who had come down in fragrant and barely clad busloads from the brutal banlieus of Porksby and Wetterton. She was never disappointed – on the dancefloor of the Kum Bar, in the chill-out rooms of Stiffy McGees, lived strange, mutated forms of desire unknown to sociology or cultural studies. There were couplings and animosities which she had witnessed with her own eyes but which she was still trying to decipher. There were elaborate dialects of finger and tooth which she had to admit were quite beyond her, but to which she responded nonetheless. They touched her, they moved her, these boundary failures, these moments of pure anality. Public defecation, somnophilia, GBH – it was all freely available when the pubs kicked out, when the unlicensed cabs began
to swarm; it was run-of-the-mill. Raw data, untheorised, uncharted, but for how much longer? Zoe Cable was working something up. She had a talk arranged at the ICA – it had a crossover appeal, she could pull in money from all angles.
CRI, as she had suspected, was a treasure trove of ghoulish misfortune. She paused in A&E, she made brief side trips to Oncology and the Renal Unit. Everywhere she saw people brutalised by time – their hair turned yellow, their eyes evacuated. They were propped on pillows, ga-ga in wheelchairs. They inched shambolically down the corridor with their arses hanging out. They seemed to Zoe Cable like the crude icons of an ancient pagan religion. The force of death was in them, as it had once been in her, that black hamster death. She could hear it in their scratchy breathing, see it in their tremulous hands, the oscillating wobble of their Rich Tea biscuits. These people, she thought, deserve our veneration, not pity. They require animal sacrifice, not our lukewarm shepherd’s pie.
Zoe Cable was wearing a full-length white Italian mac; she looked vaguely, if stylishly, medical. Someone asked her for directions to Gastroenterology.
‘I’m a doctor of philosophy,’ she said. ‘Read the signs and trust your instincts.’
When Zoe reached the ICU, Dorothy was just leaving. She was wearing jeans and a man’s coat. Without her extreme make-up, she looked surprisingly young. Zoe embraced her (the kiss was long since behind them).
‘What a terrible shock,’ she said.
Dorothy gulped.
‘I can’t believe he didn’t stop. What a coward.’
‘Any forensics?’
‘There were tyre tracks on the overcoat. But the police don’t seem optimistic.’
‘GCP? They need a map to find their own arseholes.’
Dorothy smiled. One or two of the other visitors looked round. There were six beds in the ward, three on either side. High on the far wall was a television silently showing racing from Lingfield. Zoe felt strangely at home.
‘Is that Dirck in the corner?’
‘Yes, he’s dozing, but he’ll wake up soon. Actually, there’s already someone else here from the University.’
There was a man sitting by the head of the bed, three-quarters concealed by the floral curtains. Zoe could see a shoulder and the back of an orange plastic chair. She assumed it was the Crocodile or one of his minions.
Stripped of his three-piece suit and little glasses, stitched, plastered and badly bruised, Dirck van Camper resembled a tortoise that had been violently prised from its shell. He had a tube up his nose. He was snoring. Reaching the foot of the bed, Zoe Cable turned to greet the Crocodile but saw instead, to her great surprise, Morris Gutman. Morris was leaning forward with his head in his hands, his hair was tussled and dusty, he smelled like a rough pub.
‘Morris. It’s you.’
Morris looked up with a start.
‘Zoe.’
He stood up and rather solemnly shook her hand. They both looked down at Dirck. Spots of blood had oozed through the dressing on his head. Morris lifted his arm as if in a dream and touched the bandage with his finger tip.
‘Terrible,’ Zoe said.
Morris didn’t say anything.
‘I didn’t know you two were close.’
Morris looked amazed at the suggestion.
‘Well … not in an orthodox way,’ he said after a moment. And then, as if realising it was an odd thing to say, ‘I mean an incident like this, a terrible incident such as this one, brings things to the surface which might otherwise remain concealed.’
‘Oh absolutely.’ Zoe glanced again at the snoring Dirck. She wondered what on earth was going on here. Could Morris actually have an angle? Was he making some kind of play?
‘Morris, do you know if any of Dirck’s relatives are coming over? Parents? Mother?’
It seemed to take Morris a moment or two to understand the question.
‘I don’t think so. They’re in Thailand I believe, the parents. They want to bring him home in an air ambulance.’
‘Fair enough.’ (It had been a long shot.) ‘How long have you been here?’
‘An hour or so. I’ll stay until he wakes up.’
‘That could be ages. You look knackered already.’
‘I’m fine. I couldn’t sleep last night – it bothers me.’
‘Bothers you?’
‘This.’
‘Oh, when did you hear about it anyway?’
Morris looked suddenly sick.
‘Morris?’
‘Umm, I was in my office late. I saw the police and so on.’
Zoe nodded, she was remembering the odd way Morris had touched Dirck’s bandages. What was that about?
Dirck groaned and twisted. Morris jumped.
‘Morris,’ Zoe said. ‘You seem really upset. Can I help?’
It was a shameless fishing expedition. She put her hand on his forearm. He looked down at it. She left it another second then took it away. Morris squinted at her like a driver looking into the sun. Around them, the smell of antiseptic fought the odour of bed pans and hospital food. The racing was over; Countdown had just started.
‘What is the worst thing you have ever done?’ he said.
Zoe thought. She had top tens for most things. Top ten most venal acts? They almost all involved sexual betrayal. Morris was married. Was that it? Good Lord. Morris and Dirck van Camper, lovers? Why not? Why else would he be in his office late? He was waiting for Dirck. It would also explain how tongue-tied he had been when Dirck came up at lunch that time. And Dirck’s rudeness about Morris was obviously just a smokescreen.
‘How did you get over it?’ Morris continued.
There was a pause, Zoe Cable was temporarily speechless.
‘I favour confession,’ he said.
‘Morris,’ Zoe said slowly in reply. ‘Could you be a little more specific?’
Morris’s skin was blotchy and damp, his face was two-toned.
‘This is all my fault,’ he said.
‘God no, Morris. It’s bonkers to blame yourself. I mean really, what could you have done?’
She imagined Morris high up in his shared office hotly waiting for Dirck. Probably he had rearranged the furniture already, closed the blinds, prepared himself. How long before he heard the sirens and realised what had befallen them? For a man like Morris (a man with a wife, a family and several Godawful articles on Arthur Alderley) it must have seemed, she imagined, crushingly literal: a swift and targeted riposte to his libidinal waywardness. Hence, she supposed, the guilt. Hence, she supposed again, the quite irrational claim of personal responsibility.
‘I should have looked in the mirror,’ he said.
The mirror, Zoe thought, what an astonishing suggestion. The mirror? As though self-examination would have cooled his lust.
‘Riiight.’ She paused. ‘And what do you think you would have seen in the mirror, Morris?’ OK, it was facile, but honestly she was floundering. Dirck and Morris! Normally she could scent adultery from a hundred yards.
‘Dirck of course.’
Morris looked at her quizzically, as though this deeply peculiar answer would have been obvious to anyone at all.
Christ, Zoe thought, he must really have been besotted. How else to explain this extraordinary suggestion? Dirck. To look in the mirror and see not your own face but the face of your lover – Zoe was glad to say she had never been that far gone. There had been that time with José in Guadalajara, when she had looked at her own reflection in the fish tank and seen some kind of dog-lady, but that had been the peyote. This was drug-free. It was also truly fascinating and – although she couldn’t yet see all the angles – potentially usable.
‘What are you going to do next?’ She was genuinely curious.
‘I’m going to confess,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the police.’
‘The police?’ Zoe squealed. ‘This is the twenty-first century, Morris. You were consenting adults.’
Morris looked shocked.
‘You think he consented?’
>
This, Zoe thought, is getting weirder all the time. Had there been some kind of role-play involved? Was this an S&M thing?
‘Are you saying you forced yourself on him, Morris?’
‘God no! It wasn’t deliberate. It just happened. It was beyond my control.’
‘Of course it was. So what is there to confess?’
‘You don’t think I’m culpable at all?’
‘Absolutely not. You can’t legislate desire.’
‘Desire?’
Morris looked suddenly offended. Zoe wondered whether she had gone too far. She reached out and touched his forearm again. It felt as thin and shaky as a dowsing rod.
‘You think,’ Morris continued, ‘that I really wanted …’ His words trailed off but his glance drifted on, past the nurses’ station and the roll-top drug trolley, to Dirck’s bent and bandaged body.
Morris had buggered Dirck van Camper, and Dirck van Camper was now quite plainly buggered. The link between these two events was metaphorical at best, but Morris, being a literary critic, took metaphors rather more seriously than he should have. It was ludicrous, of course, but also, Zoe thought, sort of charming when looked at the right way.
‘I understand how you feel, Morris,’ she said, ‘but these lines are there to be crossed. I’ve done similar things myself.’
Morris stared. His red-rimmed eyes were a ruckus of hope and disbelief.
‘You have?’ he said. ‘You’ve done similar things?’
‘Of course.’ Zoe smiled. His naivety was sweet if, in a man of his age, a little alarming. ‘Did you really think you were breaking new ground?’
‘Well I suppose not,’ Morris hesitated, ‘but still.’
‘You’d be amazed what people get up to in their free time.’
‘I’ve got a child,’ he blurted suddenly, as though in answer to an unspoken question.
‘Oscar Wilde had two.’
‘Is that relevant?’
‘Let’s just say, Morris, that I’m good with secrets.’ Zoe smiled again. ‘By the way, have you had much contact with Dirck’s family?’
