by Phil Rickman
‘How you feeling, Bobby?’
‘Strange.’ He blinked some more.
They had him in a side ward, on his own. There was always a small risk; something they might’ve missed, so Jonathan wanted to hold on to him until tomorrow, when they’d wheel him up to the men’s ward for a few days’ bedrest, observations, tests.
Andy touched her fingertips together in slightly cautious wonder. She couldn’t let him go to the men’s ward yet. Something very strange had happened here. It would never make it onto any report; the suits would see to that, but …
‘Hang on,’ Bobby said. ‘It’s Sister Andy, isn’t it?’
She went to sit on the bed. His eyes were open again.
‘Nothing wrong with the memory then, son.’
‘I can still smell cocoa.’ He smiled, all lopsided, a boxer’s smile the day after the fight.
Some fight.
He fell asleep again and the smile died on his lips.
It had looked textbook, the way he’d come out of it: a long sleep, a few words, another long sleep. The usual questions. Who’s the Prime Minister, Bobby? Neville Chamberlain, he’d said grumpily, and gone directly back to sleep. He’d seemed annoyed at being wakened. Not quite textbook.
Cold, he’d said, that first time, everybody amazed at his coming out of it enough to make a sound, let alone speak a recognizable word.
Then he’d coughed and rolled his head this way and that on the pillow, and there’d been a bit of a panic in case he was somehow choking on dust or something. He’d made small, dry spitting motions with his mouth before subsiding into an uneasy sleep.
Andy had hung around and watched and listened. Staying on for nearly two hours after her shift had finished, sitting beside his bed, talking to him softly, making notes of the things he said.
Concluding that something well outside the textbook parameters had happened to him during the minutes of his death.
Every word he’d spoken she’d written down more or less verbatim, in shorthand. Feeling it was important, somehow.
Rushing down cold tunnel.
Flushed into the street.
Everybody stuck in a smog. Don’t care. Don’t want to get out of it. Faces all squashed and smeary. Stocking masks.
Walking coma. Streets all grey and icy. People passing you either side, they don’t see you. No feeling of being here, no feeling of being…
Bus tyres sucking at the slush. Slops over the kerb onto your shoes.
February. It’s all February.
All February.
And once he’d woken up and said, quite lucidly, ‘Don’t let Riggs in.’
Shortly before midnight, Andy was finishing a cup of cocoa when Bobby Maiden appeared at the door of her office.
‘Jesus God,’ Andy said. ‘Gave me the fright of ma life.’
He stood there, shaky, in just pyjama bottoms, sweat-shine on his face and chest, eyes all over the place.
‘Let’s go back to bed, shall we, Bobby?’
‘Wha’m I doing here?’ Slurring his words, as she led him back to bed. Brain-stem damage.
‘You’re in hospital. You were in an accident.’ Telling him again because they forgot things very rapidly, head injury cases. Yesterday, he’d asked if Liz was OK, if she’d survived the accident, which ward was she on, could he go and see her? But the next time he woke up he knew well enough that they were divorced.
‘Shouldn’t be here,’ Bobby said. ‘Shouldn’t be here.’
She held back the sheets for him. ‘You can say that again, son.’
‘It’s cold,’ he said and wouldn’t get into bed. Stood there looking confused.
A warm enough night, but it was the first day of October and the autumn heating was on too, one economy the suits hadn’t got round to yet.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Can you just answer me one question?’
‘Do ma best, son.’
‘Am I fully awake?’
‘Looks that way to me,’ Andy said.
‘But you’ve got me on drugs, right? Sedatives.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Nobody. I don’t think. It just feels-’
‘It’s no true, Bobby. You’re not on any kind of medication. Last thing we’d do in your state. All you need’s sleep.’
He put a hand over his eyes. ‘Somebody say I died? I dream that?’
‘No.’ She sat on the edge of the bed, patted it for him to sit down next to her. ‘Wasnae a dream. You snuffed it, right enough. For four whole minutes. A long time. But you came back. That’s a hell of a hold on life you got there, son.’
He seemed to find this momentarily amusing.
Andy said, ‘Tell me, would you … Did you have any distinct kind of dreams?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Like … lights? You see anything like that, Bobby? Bright lights at the end of a tunnel?’
‘Not that I can remember.’
‘Colours?’
‘Too dark. Too cold for colours. Have I been to another hospital?’
‘You havenae been anywhere, Bobby. As such.’
‘Then why were they rushing me back?’
‘That would be the night they brought you in? You remember that?’
‘No, this was daytime. Thick fog, but it wasn’t quite night. Frozen, mucky slush. Like February.’
‘You said that soon after you came round. Maybe it was in your head when … whatever it was happened. You don’t remember being anywhere … you know … warm?’
‘No.’ He looked puzzled.
This is not right.
‘Bobby. Can you think back for me? What’s the first thing you can remember when … I mean, do you remember the accident?’
‘No.’ Too quickly, but she decided not to push it.
‘What do you remember before this slushy streets episode?’
His eyes flickered.
‘Can you tell me, Bobby?’
He bit his bottom lip. ‘Fear.’
‘Did you say fear?’
‘And cold. Cold fear.’
‘What were you afraid of?’
He thought about it for a few seconds, like the fear was an entity in itself, didn’t have to be because of anything.
Finally, he said, ‘I think, not waking up. Never getting out.’
‘Out of what?’ Andy said gently. ‘What were you in that you were scared of not getting out of? Was it, like … a claustrophobia type of feeling?’
She saw he was shivering. He put his hands to his eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Bobby. Get into bed. I’ll bring you some cocoa.’
But by the time she was back with the cocoa, he was asleep.
In the deep of the night, he awoke again and they sat side by side on the edge of the bed, with the bulb of the Anglepoise turned to the wall, and they drank cocoa, like old times.
She asked him if there was any pain. Only a kind of numbness, he said. Down the left side.
‘Do I have a fractured skull, anything like that?’
‘You’ll have to see a neurologist to get it hard and fast. Might be a hairline, but I don’t think so. There’s some brain-stem damage.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Neural. It’s what causes the numbness, the way your voice is slurring. And why you won’t be walking a straight line for a wee while. They’ll repair themselves, the nerves, in time. Meantime, you’ll keep forgetting things and you won’t be able to think as fast as you’d like or do things as efficiently. So take a breath before you jump in and — no offence, I tell this to everybody — you need to watch your temper. Meantime, relax. You were luckier than I can tell you. You were gone a good long time. According to the rulebook, you shouldnae be back at all, no way, know what I’m saying?’
‘I died?’ He’d have forgotten their earlier chat; this was normal.
‘Aye, you did. You were gone … quite a while. Lucky man, eh?’
‘You think so?’ Not sounding too convinced. Oh, this is all w
rong, Andy thought. This is perversely wrong.
‘How long am I going to be banged up in here?’
‘Way you’re coming along, you could be out in a week. Long as there’s no complications. But we do need to watch you. All you have to do, Bobby, is rest, rest and rest. Anybody to look after you at home? Girlfriend? Mother?’
‘Died when I was a little kid. Got knocked down in our lane.’
‘Oh.’
‘Runs in the family,’ Bobby said. ‘Getting knocked down.’
‘I’m sorry. You … you still don’t remember what happened to you?’
Bobby shook his head, with a wisp of a smile, then he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a long moment. Something she’d seen him do several times before.
‘Why you keep doing that with your hands?’
‘It’s …’ He hesitated. Then talked about there being a kind of thick glass screen, between him and everything he perceived. ‘A sense of … separateness. ‘
‘Like you’re not part of what’s going on?’
Bobby Maiden looked at her out of his red white and blue eye. She was feeling her way here, going with the instincts, but she had his attention.
‘And there’s something you think you ought to be able to get through to? Because you have a feeling you could before? Don’t look so surprised, Bobby. I’ve been in this game a good long time.’
‘It’s normal?’
‘It’s no exactly normal. I’ve known it before with patients who …’
‘You had many like this? People who died and came back?’
‘Aye. And people who came close to it and then came back. Most of them …’ She looked into his eyes. ‘… most of them said it was the most wonderful thing ever happened to them.’
Thinking back to some of the patients she’d had who’d died, or almost, on the table and come back. Nothing as dramatic as Bobby, no more than a few seconds most of them. But, aye, the same story with a few variations. Maybe seeing themselves lying on the operating table. Then, often, a bright light, more glorious than anything they’d ever seen or imagined. Sometimes green fields and lovely gardens with fountains. And the famous long tunnel, the umbilicus, one end in this life, the other in …
Chemicals. Most neurologists were agreed that this was brain chemicals, the more optimistic of them suggesting there was obviously some shutdown mechanism in the brain that was triggered by the death process. The brain turning on the soft lights and sweet music. Departure lounge stuff.
And when they came out of it, the world could seem, for a short while, a hard, bright and fairly brutal place — maybe Bobby’s slushy, February streets had covered that aspect.
And yet, for almost all of them, there was this lingering memory of the glorious light, something they’d hold on to the rest of their lives. More than a hope … a certainty. That everything, in the end, would be very much OK.
While this guy, who’d had more opportunity than any of them to bask in the paradise vision …
‘Bobby, are you religious at all?’
‘Well …’ He thought about it. ‘Kind of knocks it out of you, being in the Job.’
‘Was it ever there?’
He did it again with his hands, palms squashed into the eyes. Must surely hurt him to do that. Maybe that was what he wanted.
Pulling his hands away, he looked like a child waking up in the middle of the night and finding itself not in its cosy room but on some bare hillside.
‘I was never that scared of death. Scared of dying, maybe. But that’s how most people are I suppose.’
‘Dying’s usually no that bad, these days,’ Andy said. ‘Any nurse’ll tell you that.’
‘I am now.’
‘What?’
‘Scared. Shit-scared. Don’t know where the hell you go, but I’m buggered if I’m going back. I mean, OK, I realize one day, but … Oh, shit. ‘
The tremble was so prolonged it was like his skin rippled.
‘Bobby, let me get this right …’
Andy felt cold just looking at him. Got the feeling it was only the separateness, caused by the slight brain damage, that was stopping him from turning into a basket case.
‘… this has left you with a fear of death?’
His face was so white, his bad eye was like a target in the snow.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I don’t even want to think about it.’
VI
Marcus couldn’t face going back to the Castle, breaking the news to Mrs Willis, so he walked. Walking the rage out of his system, each step grinding Falconer’s smug face into the tarmac, all the way to Ewyas Harold, damn near six miles.
Mrs Willis wouldn’t be worried when he didn’t turn up for breakfast. Used to his ways. Perhaps she’d go back to bed. Hope so.
On the way back, fatigue dragged Marcus into a field and he sat down under a tree, wiping the rain and sweat from his nose and his glasses, watching the clouds leak.
Malcolm wandered around, picking up the ghost trails of rabbits and foxes and badgers. Marcus leaned his head against the tree trunk. Nobody would understand what it would mean to him, not being able to walk to the Knoll, along that very obvious ley line from the Castle, to watch the sun rise over the distant Malverns. Feeling there a sense of home that he’d never experienced before, throughout his career as an English teacher in four different schools, Hartlepool to Truro. All through his marriage.
Not that there’d been anything wrong with that. Only wished there’d been more of it. But Celia had died not three years after Sally, following a bloody hysterectomy, and nobody would convince Marcus that one death hadn’t led directly to the other. It should not have been fucking incurable.
Bloody doctors.
And bloody priests. And bloody politicians and professional academics. And bloody lawyers and judges and television pundits and all would-be shapers and organizers of other people’s bloody lives.
And teachers? Yes, all right, bloody teachers too. When they’d offered early retirement, he’d snatched the money and run with it. Run away. Ending up, faintly bewildered, in Herefordshire, where he was born. Thinking there was still, in theory, time to do something, to push back the boundaries of life.
And yet depressingly aware that his life had actually shrunk.
After no more than a month, this melancholic and aimless existence in a rented cottage had been interrupted by news of the sudden death of the latest proprietor of The Phenomenologist. Putting the venerable periodical once more on the market.
Seemed like a sign. God knows, he needed one.
Been a contributor to The Phenomenologist for years. Smudgy, ill-printed rag, following him around the country, arriving four times a year, familiar hand-addressed buff envelope, like pornography. Editorial pages entirely self-generating, with unpaid correspondents submitting garbled accounts of mystical and paranormal events in their particular towns and villages. Appallingly written, most of them; but after thirty years as an English teacher, he’d sort that out.
Envisaging a new Phenomenologist. Better layout. Certain literary style. On sale in newsagents and bookshops.
Only after he’d bought the century-old title for a suspiciously reasonable four thousand seven hundred quid had Marcus discovered that contributors and subscribers were, broadly speaking, the same people. If you rejected or even rewrote some piece of crap, its author would immediately cancel his or her subscription.
Bloody nightmare. Only way to keep it going was to print every blasted thing and never ask questions. Very little of it bore serious scrutiny. You would never, for instance, have imagined so many elderly English spinsters manifesting stigmata.
And the circulation dropped as they died off.
But struggling with the magazine had, for a time, given him a purpose. Also a solid excuse to indulge his long-suppressed passion for the Unexplained. If he heard of a poltergeist-infested house or the sighting of baffling lights in the sky, he could wander along and investigate, presenting his cred
entials. No-one had ever heard of The Phenomenologist, of course, but it did sound rather impressive and few people would shut their doors in your face.
Marcus Bacton: crusader for the curious, defender of the irrational.
And Annie Davies had been his Bernadette, his Joan of Arc, Marcus realizing, from his own researches, that the circumstances of Annie’s vision were remarkably similar to those of several famous sightings of the Virgin, notably at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 and Medjugorje in Yugoslavia, as recently as the 1980s.
He also subscribed to the theory that many so-called burial chambers, oriented as they were to the midsummer or midwinter sunrise, were not only Neolithic calendars but initiation chambers for the priests and shamans. They’d spend the night in meditation inside the chamber … and then dawn’s first rays would enter like molten gold through a slit in the carefully positioned portal-stones. Out of the darkness, into the light. A supremely transcendent experience.
A time for visions. A time for miracles.
Should’ve been Saint Annie.
It was an obsession. And when the decrepit Castle Farm, the old home of Annie Davies, arrived on the market, it seemed like another sign. To buy it, Marcus Bacton had cleaned out his bank account and sold his car. At least it had a little cottage attached, which he could let out for holidays, enabling him to afford a series of cleaners, who had found him so exasperating that none lasted more than six months. Until, just over two years ago, the one who became a live-in housekeeper: the extraordinary Mrs Willis.
All a bit hand-to-mouth. But he’d always known that one day he’d raise the money to buy the Knoll, and he’d have a display case behind glass so that visitors would be able to read the story of Annie Davies and the vision which the Church denied.
Fucking Falconer.
Marcus smacked a fist into the ground and badly grazed a knuckle on a protruding tree root. His eyes watered. He bound the hand with his handkerchief, called Malcolm and trudged back to the Castle through the thickening rain.
The grey-pink ruins were draped around the farmhouse, which was built on the edge of the original motte. Half of a tower stood next to the house, like a smashed grain silo.
Most of the castles in the area were reduced to this. No great kudos to owning one, unless you were an outrageous self-publicist like Falconer. The Listed Buildings people were always on your back … and the tourists, idiots who simply couldn’t believe that there could be medieval castle ruins not open to the public.
