‘Get you a chair in a minute,’ she said brusquely to Kit. She took a long draw of breath and turned to Joe. ‘Okay, so what’s happened here?’
He stood up, and with concentrated inattentiveness, replied, ‘I gather he fell off a ladder.’
So conspicuous was the lack of any reaction to this absurdity, that he was drawn into adding, ‘Onto irregularly positioned cobble stones.’
‘This being Oxford, after all?’ Dr Curtis put a sour drag on her words.
‘Exactly.’
‘Only human in history to break his fall with his knuckles?’
‘He’s a one-off,’ said Joe, now matching the tone she had adopted.
Dr Curtis shook her head and bent to check Humpty’s hands more closely—moved his legs and arms one by one, then said, as though to herself, ‘Alcohol’—it wasn’t a question—‘plus?’
‘Plus I don’t know,’ said Joe, ‘but pretty certainly, yes. Working assumption: yes.’
Despite her demeanour, Dr Curtis was impressively gentle as she undid Humpty’s upper clothing. She looked him over, tapped his chest, listened to it with her stethoscope.
‘So,’ she said, straightening up again after getting her results, ‘he managed to fall on the left and the right of his ribcage both at once?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘See it happen?’ she asked, flinging a glance down at Kit.
Joe looked at Kit also, who shook her head.
‘No,’ said Joe.
Kit, now she was part of it, climbed to her feet.
‘He may have broken one,’ said Dr Curtis, gliding a finger along Humpty’s bruised ribs. ‘Help me get his trousers off then,’ she said.
She and Joe did this together. Kit gazed with calm curiosity at the pitifully lean white body laid out before her.
‘Managed to protect his privates anyway,’ said Dr Curtis bluntly, before pulling up the light bedding. ‘I don’t like rowdy boys,’ she murmured, but very much as though she didn’t hate them either. ‘Don’t think we’re going to get urine right now,’ she said. She unhitched Humpty’s notes from the wall; began to add notes, and to stick on little stickers. Then she took blood into a set of phials with different coloured lids.
At this, Kit felt herself sway. To her the scene wasn’t registering precisely as an examination in a bay in A&E. In her general state of faintness the light was too sparkly, even as her vision was blacking at the edges. The picture before her seemed more akin to a photograph on the move than to life—was more like an uncertain photograph showing a doctor, a battered boy and his brother; their exchanges an ungraspable caption that would be cut later, presumably, and replaced with something pithy, like, ‘Friday, First Fight of the Evening’.
‘Well,’ said Dr Curtis, once more flitting her fingers over Humpty’s bruised frame, ‘he’ll be in the queue for an X- ray. Not too bad so far,’ she checked the time on her watch. ‘Shouldn’t be that long. You all right?’ she asked Joe. He had Humpty’s blood lightly spattered across him.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Do I remember you?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Thought so. Wasn’t that long back?’
‘Not that long. July.’
‘Okay. You want to step outside here with me?’
Joe nodded grimly, then pointed Kit to the chair, before walking out. She lifted a hand to wipe the sweat from her forehead, and was about to walk round the bed and sit down, when the curtain twitched aside again and Dr Curtis stuck her head back in. She indicated the sink and the paper towel dispenser, and said, ‘You might want to clean some the blood off of his face. Use gloves.’
She disappeared again before Kit could ask anything, or protest, or simply mention that she was feeling sick.
*
The blood was remarkably difficult to lift if there was any thought of being careful. Kit took off her coat and jumper and rested them on the back of the chair. It was unbearably hot. She pulled the chair to the top of the bed and tried to do the job sitting down, but this felt as unnatural to her as sitting down to iron would have, or to wash up saucepans. After a false start, she decided to try to loosen the blood by dripping water on first, which made the mess slippy, she found, and more offensive. It smelled disturbing, and this smell mixed horribly with the bleach-type odours coming off the floor and fixtures, let alone the medicated stink of the bedding.
Her timid but persistent efforts roused Humpty so far as to attempt her name.
‘Yes?
‘Kid?’
‘Yes?’
‘Someby once said—’ He failed mid-sentence.
‘Somebody once said—yes? The Sandman? Who? Wee Willie Winkie, was it?’
‘Edison,’ said Humpty. He hadn’t opened his eyes.
‘Oh.’
Kit now had a map of the injuries to his face, and was steering around and between them with a clutch of sodden paper towels, creating a butcher’s archipelago of the damage. The wounds weren’t individually as extreme as Humpty’s blood loss had, to her inexperienced eye, implied; but his saturated hair she didn’t attempt to clean, and who could say what further damage lay there? She wondered whether the matted blood would suffocate his headlice. ‘Said what?’
‘What?’
‘Edison, you said—said what?’
Humpty opened his eyes a slit and then closed them again, speaking effortfully. ‘Once said—Edison, “I fear anything—”’ he groaned again and shifted a little; Kit leant in to listen because his voice was sinking— ‘you and Joe,’ he muttered, ‘“I fear anything, that works first time”.’ Without obvious emotion he began to cry, tears that, as they trickled down his temples, stained pink.
‘But—’ Kit was confused, ‘I wouldn’t exactly say, Joe and me—do we work? What does that mean? Did we work first time?’
‘Yes,’ mumbled Humpty, ‘you didn’t.’
What was he talking about? ‘Hey,’ she said, trying to push this snarl from her mind, ‘hey, Humpty, “the state funeral for the prime minister’s legs”.’
‘You can,’ he whispered.
‘What?’
‘Come.’
‘Really?’
‘Welcome.’
‘Really? You could have fooled me.’
‘Yes,’ he said, glancing at her again through slitted eyes, ‘I could.’
Kit felt an unexpected press of tears herself, pitying her own disordered lightness.
She did the best job possible with his face, then stripped the disgusting gloves off her hands and disposed of all the waste as instructions instructed. Then she sat back down and considered again the uncared-for body before her.
Some minutes passed before it came to her to wonder exactly how hard it would be to cut off Humpty’s head using a single-bladed, Spanish-style switch knife. Her resulting reverie absorbed her completely until Joe returned, looking haunted and desperate, followed by Dr Curtis, though they didn’t appear to have come together. Kit remained fixed in the chair.
‘I was just told by someone outside that you want to rule out a punctured lung?’ said Joe. ‘And any skull fractures?’
Dr Curtis stared hard at Humpty’s notes again, speaking as she read, ‘What it seems is that—yes. Although I doubt it.’ She looked up. ‘In regard to the pneumothorax—punctured lung—he’d likely be breathless and in a lot more pain; but given we don’t know what he’s been taking—’
‘Dulling his reactions?’
‘Exactly. We need to take a look, rule everything out. It’s also a reason to keep him in overnight, to be honest, get his sats back to normal. I’m sure the registrar will agree when he sees him. Give him a couple of stitches, keep him under observation. All being well, he should be in a lot better state in the morning.’
‘Right,’ said Joe.
She put the notes back. ‘So,’ she said, ‘shouldn’t be too long before an X-ray. There’s been an RTA on the ring road so there’s a bit of a queue now. Should get the green light a
fter that—bad way to put it, sorry.’ She rubbed her forehead wearily, then left.
‘Thank you.’ Joe leant back against the partition wall and stared down at his brother.
At first it had been a relief to Kit that they’d been talking only about the architecture of Humpty’s body; that he’d been being treated as possibly broken only in the straightforward sense of a cracked bottle, or a pencil snapped under heel—not that bottles and pencils could be mended. And Humpty’s bones weren’t dry but wet, Kit reflected; weren’t white but red—at the thought of which, of slick, wet, live bones, her imagination seemed to dislocate further.
‘Doesn’t he look amazing,’ she whispered, her vision still a little too bright.
Icily, Joe replied, ‘You find this interesting? It entertains you?’
‘No,’ she exclaimed. ‘No—no.’
‘Because, you know what I think?’ he said, his voice ragged, ‘I think this is boring. I think it’s extremely boring. This,’ he pointed at Humpty, ‘this is violence, Kit. This is what it looks like. And it doesn’t entertain me at all. I’m exceptionally, profoundly and terminally bored by it.’
He stared towards her with exhausted eyes, and she saw that he, as she was, was tensed as for a blow.
‘To real life,’ she said, lofting an imaginary glass.
‘My cup overfloweth,’ he replied, very slightly tipping a glass of his own.
There was a fraught silence between them when in walked the registrar talking crisply of CT scans, chest X-rays, head trauma, intracranial bleeds—Kit, staring round dumbly at the man, couldn’t take yet more visceral chit chat, couldn’t stand it. She picked up her things and edged out of their bay, out of Majors, out down the corridor and away, any residual sense that she belonged to what had happened unravelling with every step.
She found a waiting room in a side area next to reception, and for the next twenty minutes sat there, as people do, and simply waited.
Then, with her dizziness adequately quelled, she stood up and left.
Kit hesitated under the A&E portico, staring round until she made out a bus stand beyond the car park, whereupon she took a deep, cold breath and walked out into the rain, over the black, twinkling tarmac, to the long rank of shelters. There were various timetables. She found the right one, read it, perched on a fold-out seat. She had just missed the buses that must have scooped up everyone else, but she found it pleasant to be out there alone in the night, only notionally in transit. The cold was a relief. Pretty quickly it made her feel a lot better, and it sharpened up her thoughts, too. She began in her mind to try to put together, out of all his bruised parts, not Humpty, but Joe.
What had he said going in? ‘It’s worse than you realise.’ But he hadn’t explained. Was she supposed to understand this now? He had looked so terribly lonely.
How long she attempted to think Joe through, she couldn’t have said. It felt like a long time. But it was perhaps not so many minutes later that he appeared beside her, like a wraith.
‘I’ve been sent away,’ he said.
Kit mumbled a noise of sympathy.
‘The registrar doesn’t seem that worried, after all,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘They’re going to keep him in, though.’ He folded out the seat next to Kit’s, and they sat there like that, silently, in the night.
In the end, a bus did come, but the driver turned the engine off. ‘Five minutes,’ he said, getting out to have a cigarette. He let them climb on board, the air inside in an instant disgustingly hot again. They sat near the back.
‘If I hadn’t found you, would you just have left on this bus without telling me?’ Joe asked.
Kit looked down and shrugged. ‘I gather you’re leaving town,’ she said. ‘Were you just going to do that without telling me?’
Angrily, he asked, ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘Michaela.’
‘Christ, I hate Oxford,’ he said. ‘I hate this place.’
‘So it’s true, is it?’ She looked round at him. ‘Is it? Since when did you know?’
‘Kit—Christ,’ he said. She looked back down again. ‘Christ, woman. You’re asking the wrong question. You know that? What you should be asking is, “Joe, how come you’ve delayed deciding all this time, despite ever- thing?”’ He gave a short, wincing laugh. ‘You, of all people.’
At a loss, she said, ‘You haven’t decided, then?’
‘Not officially,’ he replied, almost spitting. ‘No. But since we’re on the subject, allow me to inform you that I have to give them my answer by Monday.’
‘Oh,’ she said, her voice very small indeed.
A couple more people got on, followed by the driver. Joe went up and bought tickets. The bus pulled out and sped downhill. Kit stared at the spent raindrops as the wind propelled them sideways along the window panes. She felt light-headed and incapable. ‘Was this what you wanted to talk about?’ she asked. ‘This was it?’
‘I wanted to talk to you about Humpty.’
‘Then, please do,’ she said, ‘anything. I’m listening.’
Joe spread his hands out over his knees. ‘I don’t know that there’s much point.’
‘No, please,’ she said, ‘please.’
‘Kit,’ he turned to her, turned away again, struggled with himself.
Hand hidden, Kit crossed her fingers. She continued to think, please, please, please, in silence.
‘What you don’t understand,’ he burst out, then moderated the volume at which he was speaking, ‘what you don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is that he’s not the same person he used to be.’ There was another long pause before he could make himself continue. ‘You know he read history here at Oxford?’
‘Really? That’s—’
‘Until he got thrown out.’
‘Okay.’
‘Look, I’m explaining to you, all right? I’m explaining.’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine. He was thrown out, wandered around a bit, found himself a job as a kitchen porter at Christ Church for a while, eventually wound up in rehab in a place outside Chipping Norton, skimming over the details.’
‘As a kitchen porter? That’s pretty funny.’
‘I know. He was a kitchen porter, then he lived on the scrounge for a while, had a job delivering the Yellow Pages. He knew where he could get food, a free bath, places to sleep. Anyway, after rehab the question was, what was he going to do now? We grew up outside Devizes. My father was an auctioneer, but in the end he got himself, in effect, blacklisted, so he claims, and was forced to quit.’
‘By?’
‘The Masons.’
‘You’re kidding. They can do that?’
‘I don’t know. That’s his story, because he refused to join. Probably just an excuse. You may have deduced that I don’t get on with my father. Anyway, after Devizes, Dad went in on an antiques dealership in a place outside York. So that’s where they live now, my parents. But there was no way Humpty was going to agree to go up and live in Yorkshire. Meanwhile, I’d just got a job here, and it all seemed to make sense when Dad set up the flat as a property investment. Humpty started on a furniture-making course at the college in Headington; his choice, furniture, a brand-new start and so on, putting the past behind him; but also therapeutic in a way, you can imagine the rationale behind it.’
‘Okay,’ said Kit, not wanting Joe to stop.
‘And, lo and behold, now my father had me and Humpty living together, putting me in a position where I was forced to look after him. But that’s another story,’ he said, sounding bitter. ‘Anyway, the furniture: it transpired he had a gift for it—has,’ said Joe, militantly. ‘I mean, we grew up around antiques, right? He’d been tinkering with that kind of work since he was a boy, so a lot of what he needed to know was second nature to him from the off, especially making the legs look right. My father has this saying that if you know what you’re looking at, the wrong legs on a piece of furniture comes over just as wrong as badly sha
ped legs on a woman. So, yes, Humpty studied restoration techniques, went on, you know, got qualified over time, more qualified and then hyper-qualified—but then just hyper, because, while all this was happening, he fell in with this gang of lads he met initially through college and—it was okay at first, or at least, I didn’t see how it was playing out. He got work. He became part of their thing, their set-up, and he was in work. But he also started getting back into drugs again, as was inevitable, you might say; Christ knows what, recreationally and all under control, he said, weekends, whatever came his way. But I had this sense after a while that they were actually encouraging him. That’s what I couldn’t understand, Kit. It even seemed that his boss was supplying him. Why, though? It didn’t make sense. How good was his work going to be if he was out of it half the time? Anyway, three or four months ago he started sleeping in the workshop most nights, not apparently eating. I haven’t really been able to get through to him for a while now, haven’t known who to turn to. I arranged minimally to meet him on Fridays, for fuck’s sake, so I’d have some sense of how he was, and then I—’
Because Joe didn’t continue, Kit said, ‘You—?’
‘You wanted me to explain?’ he said, angry again. ‘I’m explaining, okay? You want me to explain?’
‘Yes. Sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry. Forgive me.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It’s not you. I don’t suppose you know anything about the antiques trade?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘The thing is,’ he put a hand to his forehead, ‘at the bottom end of it, the very lowest of the low, there are these scum who target old people, usually, the vulnerable, knock on their front doors, talk their way in, then con them into parting with their valuables for a fraction of what they’re worth. They’re known in the trade as “knockers”.’ Joe shook his head despairingly. ‘Most antiques is a bit shady. I’d say ninety-nine per cent of it is lightweight fraud at a minimum.’
The Twisted Heart Page 22
