by Lissa Evans
‘How long have you been seeing her?’
‘Just a few weeks.’
‘And what’s she like?’ Fran was accustomed to this crumb-by-crumb method of extracting personal information from her brother, but now he paused for so long that she started to wonder if he’d misheard the question. She was about to repeat it when he opened his mouth.
‘She’s…’ he began, and then stopped. A beatific expression settled across his features, like a tarpaulin over a swimming pool.
‘You’re smitten!’ said Fran, with delight.
Looking absurdly pleased with himself, he finished packing the tools and snapped the box shut. ‘Would you like to meet her?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘Are you around on Tuesday evening? We could come back here after practice.’
‘Great. I’ll cook if you want.’
‘Thanks.’ He looked suddenly worried. ‘She can’t eat cheese. Or wheat products.’
‘No problem.’
‘Or chocolate. She gets migraines.’
‘Right. What about fish?’
He hesitated. ‘I think she likes fish.’
‘Well why don’t you phone her and check?’
‘OK. Thanks, Fran.’ He hefted the toolbox cautiously, with straight back and bent knees as specified by the Practices at Work poster he had recently put up in the hall. Fran started replacing the bottles on the shelf.
‘Do you want all these?’ she called as he clumped downstairs. ‘You’ve got three different sorts of dandruff shampoo.’
‘Maybe I’ve got three different sorts of dandruff.’
She grinned; on Peter’s scale of emotions, that remark was the equivalent of turning cartwheels.
6
Apart from the regular rasp of his breath, the young man on the examination couch had made no noise since the ambulance men had plucked him off the street. A scarlet stain matted the hair above his left ear and extended in a tacky film across his cheek and temple, and he lay in the recovery position, eyes closed, head on one side, his right arm curled and his left arm dangling over the side of the couch. Spencer gave it little push and it swung back and forth.
‘I know you’re awake,’ said Spencer.
There was no change in the rhythm of the breathing. Marsha, the night sister who had started to clean up the head wound, folded her arms and tutted loudly. She had dropped the soiled dressing into a pot of antiseptic, turning the pale pink liquid a violent crimson. ‘Waste of everyone’s time,’ she said to no one in particular.
‘It’s surprisingly easy to tell when someone’s pretending to be unconscious,’ continued Spencer, conversationally. ‘For instance, the muscle tone in your eyelids is completely normal. Also, once you get under a good artificial light it becomes obvious that red gloss paint looks absolutely nothing like blood. It’s a lot more difficult to remove, for a start.’
‘A lot more difficult,’ repeated Marsha. ‘The doctor’s coat is completely ruined, I hope you realize that. Also the sheet. Also, I was on my break till they brought you in and now my toasted sandwich will have got all cold.’ She turned to Spencer. ‘Do you want a psych consult? Dr Jayaram’s already here with the aspirin OD.’
‘Might as well.’
Marsha wheeled the dressings trolley away with as much noise as possible, managing a final high-decibel collision with the door jamb which made even Spencer jump. He started to fill in the casualty card. ‘Unless you tell me your age,’ he said to the figure on the couch, ‘I’m going to put forty.’ This tactic had worked occasionally in the past, but only on women and gay men. There was no response and he put ‘30-ish’ in the space on the card. ‘I’m writing in your notes now that I can’t find anything physically wrong with you. That you appear to be fit and healthy.’
It was odd how cases turned up in clusters: no perforated ulcers for months, and then two in adjacent cubicles; a flurry of broken ankles, and then nothing but elbows for a week. This was the third feigned ailment he’d seen in as many days. The first had been a case of driving-test avoidance, subsumed into an unconvincing wrist injury, the second an embarrassingly poor stab at appendicitis, enacted by a writhing student who couldn’t face telling his parents he’d failed his re-sits. Spencer had tempered scepticism with paracetamol, and both had gone home. The current patient was more of a challenge.
There was a quiet knock, and the door opened just enough for Vincent’s narrow frame to slide in. He gave Spencer a tiny wave. ‘Hello, friend.’
‘Hello, Vincent.’
‘Hello, young man. Sister Leonard has been telling me about you.’ Vincent went up to the figure on the couch, and – as Spencer had done ten minutes before – gently raised one of his eyelids with a long finger. Then he bent towards the red splotch and sniffed delicately. ‘All right, I think I get the picture.’
‘I’m going to leave you with Dr Jayaram,’ said Spencer. He pointed in the direction of the office and mimed lifting a teacup. Vincent nodded and mimed two spoonfuls of sugar. Spencer mimed a biscuit. Vincent smiled beneath his moustache, shook his head and waved him away.
At the reception desk, Marsha shuffled through the cards of the waiting patients like a croupier. The department was in its 5 a.m. lull; the after-club fight victims had been X-rayed, stitched and booted out, and the sea of chairs was three-quarters empty.
With a sinking of the heart, Spencer noticed a familiar figure stretched across three of them. The night sister followed his gaze.
‘Yeah, he’s back.’
‘What’s he presenting with?’
‘Haemoptysis.’
The stench of glue projected a good ten feet around Callum Strang, and the other occupants of the waiting room had given him a wide berth. He lay on his side, hands in the pockets of his greatcoat, chest heaving in and out with a bubbling wheeze that was audible above the whine of the coffee machine. Amidst the wreck of his twenty-two-year-old face – the dirt, the premature lines, the shiny halo around the mouth and nostrils – there was still only one thing that drew the attention: the poorly executed tattoo above the eyebrows that read ‘EVOSTIK’.
‘Hello, Callum.’
His eyes opened at once, but seemed to take a while to focus. Then he smiled widely, looking genuinely pleased and revealing a wilderness of chipped and missing teeth. ‘Heyyy, Tsocter Carroll. I hoed you were on.’ The blurred words floated out on a miasma of glue, and Spencer swayed away involuntarily.
‘How have you been, Callum?’
‘Alrigh. I was alrigh. I was tsoing alrigh. I was offit an I was savin a bit. Then lars coupla tsays I been coughin blood again.’
‘Where have you been sleeping?’
‘Allover.’ He took a hand out of his pocket and flapped it around. ‘Anyfuckinwhere. Issnot cole. Sorry for swearin.’
Marsha joined them. ‘Do you want to take a look at him?’
‘Yes,’ said Spencer, depressed at the prospect.
‘I was offit and savin,’ repeated Callum.
‘Anybody else I should see right now?’
‘I carn tsake it when people stare…’
‘Nah. You take ten minutes while we clean this fella up a bit. Have a coffee. Change your coat. Eat my cold sandwich.’ She gave him a little shove towards the office, and started to haul Callum upright.
Smoking in the office had been banned for over a year, but the ceiling had not yet been repainted and was still a deep-yellow reminder of the tensions of the past. Spencer made two cups of tea and then drank one while sitting on the desk, his back to the window that overlooked the empty ambulance bay. He’d cleared a space on the desktop by dumping everything onto a chair, the ‘everything’ consisting of the nurses’ night report, Marsha’s sandwich and the pharmacology textbook and notes he’d brought with him, purportedly for studying during his 2 a.m. lunch break.
In the event he hadn’t had a lunch break, but in any case bringing the notes into work had been a desperate measure prompted by the total lassitude which ov
ercame him every time he set foot in the flat. His exams were in May and he hadn’t done any serious revision for weeks. In fact, the only things he’d managed to read with any thoroughness were the letters pages of Reptile Monthly and a surprisingly homoerotic Dick Francis novel he’d found in the hospital waiting room. Yesterday, after he’d awoken from a muddy swirl of dreams into the disorientating half day left to him before night shift, it had taken him two hours – two hours – to get washed and dressed. He’d kept stopping halfway through tasks to remember other tasks that he ought to have done yesterday and which needed to be written down if he wasn’t to forget them again today. The milk bill. Hoover bags. A box of crickets. A lettuce. A third-birthday present for Nina. Contact lens solution. Another lettuce. A mountain of trivia that had to be conquered before he could even start to think about anything remotely important, like whether he should try and get Bill to a vet or what to do about the snails.
God in heaven, the snails… He had meant to find an alternative to Fran’s suggested method of killing the eggs, but had not got around to it, with the result that the tank now held not five but one hundred and thirty-seven snails. The babies were only the size of peas, and looked rather chic with their pearly, almost iridescent shells, but he was now buying two lettuces a day and the tank was a sea of slime.
He was, to use a phrase of his grandmother’s, Letting Things Slip. The flat was starting to look neglected, if not shabby. Unanswered messages were piling up on the answerphone. And over the last four weeks he had ticked only one item off Mark’s list. He’d chosen a rainy Saturday (and what a perfect illustration of his thought processes that decision had been) to visit Madame Tussaud’s, and out of a kind of willed misery had decided to go alone. The queue had been gargantuan and fizzing with youthful hilarity and he had stood under a dripping umbrella feeling like a man out of a Magritte painting. It was nearly ninety minutes before he’d actually entered the building and joined the shuffling procession. At first he had been staggered by the sheer awfulness of the waxworks, their orange skin pitted with what looked like ants’ footprints. But with no one to nudge or exclaim to, without Mark to fake a collapse in front of Mrs Thatcher or grope Mel Gibson’s bum, the glacial slowness of the queue had soon become unbearable. The crowd was too thick to allow overtaking and, driven to desperation by the prospect of a room full of Australian soap stars, Spencer had spotted a fire door, ducked between Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, and exited into a rain-swept alley behind Baker Street tube. The door had clanged shut on a row of startled faces. He felt obscurely that he had let Mark down.
‘You’re very deep in thought,’ said Vincent, standing in the open door of the office.
‘The opposite really,’ said Spencer. ‘Just paddling around in the shallows.’
‘Is this my tea?’ He indicated the pallid cupful beside the kettle.
‘Yes. It’s not great, I’m afraid. Cheap teabags and no pot.’
‘No pot?’
‘Someone dropped it last week. Me, actually.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve tasted worse.’ Vincent took a second sip. ‘Well, maybe not. Incidentally, I’ve waved goodbye to the man with the paint on his head.’
‘Really? Already? How did you do that?’
‘I adopted a kind of Agatha Christie approach to the problem.’
‘Right. Well pretend I’m one of the less educated servants standing at the back of the library, and explain it slowly.’
Vincent folded himself onto a chair and allowed a well-judged dramatic pause before speaking. ‘Instead of asking “Why is this well-dressed and perfectly healthy adult male pretending to have a head injury?”, I altered the question and asked myself “Why would someone want this well-dressed and perfectly healthy adult male to pretend he has a head injury?” ’
‘Ingenious. Obviously, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You have to allow the explanation to unravel, Spencer. Agatha gives these things several pages.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You see, it struck me that it wasn’t a normal case of feigned unconsciousness. It’s usually a teenage strategy, it suits the melodrama of the adolescent psyche. Is your family ignoring your needs? Why not fake a brain haemorrhage and make them really pay attention?’ He took another mouthful of tea, and winced. ‘So, back to our man. He comes in unaccompanied by distraught family and friends. He has no form of identification. And the red paint could only possibly have passed for blood in the darkness of the street. So, what’s going on?’
Spencer shrugged extravagantly.
Vincent leaned forward. ‘I concluded that the whole stunt was a decoy. Our man applies the paint, phones an ambulance to report a mystery accident and then staggers into the street and collapses. An excited crowd gathers, the noise builds, the siren approaches, the drama grows – and meanwhile, somewhere in the vicinity, an accomplice is quietly carrying out a crime, unnoticed by everyone. All our man has to do is lie low, keep silent, and look for an opportunity to make an unobtrusive exit –’ Vincent walked his fingers to freedom along the edge of the desk ‘ – into the night.’
‘Very good,’ said Spencer, nodding appreciatively. ‘Very Poirot. So did you tell him all that?’
‘No, I just told him that I had to leave the room for a couple of minutes, and when I got back he’d gone.’ He stood, and tipped the rest of the tea down the sink. ‘You know, now that I think about it, it’s quite surprising there are no Asian detectives in the classic canon. There’s a guru-like quality about the best sleuths, don’t you think – all those near-mystical pronouncements? All those answers for those who thirst after truth? And who traditionally does that kind of thing best? Elderly ladies? Belgians?’ His voice was scathing.
‘More tea?’
‘I won’t, thank you.’ Vincent sat down again and yawned, and after a moment Spencer yawned too. Theirs was a night-time friendship, forged over tired conversations in the echoing canteen, their first link a shared, scabrous opinion of Mrs Spelko, their second, and strongest, something different altogether.
‘I’ve just read a detective novel,’ said Spencer. ‘Do you know it’s the first book in six months I’ve actually finished.’
‘Well done. So, who did it?’
There was a pause as Spencer tried to recall something – anything – about the plot. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said eventually, defeated. ‘I think he had a beard. Concealing an untrustworthy chin.’
Vincent smiled and reached across for the textbook on the chair. ‘And how’s the studying going? I could test you if you wanted.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘Still can’t concentrate?’ His tone was gentle.
‘It’s more…’ Spencer tried to analyse his failure ‘… it’s more that my brain keeps short-circuiting. I can’t think about anything new without ending up in the same old place.’
Vincent nodded, leafing absently through the pages. ‘I think the electrical analogy’s very good, actually; there’s definitely a neurological element to grief – some kind of re-wiring. Though it’s probably idiosyncratic.’ He closed the book and laid it aside. ‘After Anita died I could manage textbooks, but not fiction. And fiction was what I really wanted to read. I wanted the chance to go somewhere else, mentally – to escape for a while.’
‘But you couldn’t?’
He shook his head. ‘No one else’s story had the intensity of my own.’
‘But you read now, don’t you?’ asked Spencer, groping for some kind of future normality.
‘All the time,’ said Vincent, flatly. He examined a thumbnail and pushed back the cuticle. ‘All the time.’
‘You should get out more. That’s what everyone says to me.’
‘With whom?’ asked Vincent. ‘That’s what I say to them.’
They smiled at each other, a little grimly. ‘The Widowers’ Club’ Vincent had dubbed it, one night as they swapped symptoms over plates of tepid lasagne. ‘Exclusive membership.’
‘What I wanted to ask you,’ said Spencer, ‘was if there’s a point when –’ Headlights swooped across the wall, and he turned to see an ambulance rounding the corner from the main road. He groaned.
‘To be continued,’ said Vincent, getting up slowly. ‘Unless this is for me, I might try and get some sleep.’
‘All right.’
‘Spencer?’
‘Yes?’
‘You won’t forget to eat occasionally? Greens?’
The ambulance contained a man with a suspected broken ankle and Vincent went off to bed. Frank Barron’s injury was unremarkable; Spencer noted a bit of swelling, a bit of bruising and no obvious deformity. His wig, on the other hand, was spectacular, the type of wig which would have made Mark, who had regarded wig-spotting almost as a hobby, happy all day. It was beige, with a uniform shiny finish, a crisp, crinkle-cut edge, and a visible seam at the front, which rested just above Frank’s eyebrows.
‘How did you come to hurt your ankle, Mr Barron?’
‘What happened was, I was in bed with my wife. We’ve got a shop, you see, and we’ve got a flat just above it, so the bedroom’s right over the stockroom.’
‘Right.’ Spencer folded his arms and rested one buttock on the couch. He recognized instantly the symptoms of a born storyteller.
‘And we were busy. If you know what I mean.’ He gave Spencer a man-to-man wink.
‘Yup.’
‘And then Margaret said, “I can hear something, there’s someone in the shop.” ’
‘Right.’
‘I mean I couldn’t hear anything and I was all for carrying on, but you know women, once they’re distracted you might as well throw in the towel.’ He paused, and Spencer realized he was waiting for a comment.
‘Uh huh.’
‘So I put on a pair of trousers and went downstairs, and I picked up the broom on the way, just in case I had to defend myself.’
‘I see.’ He wondered when the wig had gone on. Or perhaps Frank kept it on for sex.
‘So I banged on the door with the broom handle and shouted – “I’ve got a gun,” and there was a real scuffling noise and I thought, aye aye, it is burglars, because theft of exotica’s a growing problem in the trade.’
