Читать книгу Cue the Dead Guy - H. Mel Malton - Страница 7

CAT: It’s just a scratch, young man, but don’t you see? / It’s safer to stay out of it, like me.

-The Glass Flute, Scene v

The Sikwan District Hospital admissions nurse just missed getting nominated for the Tactful-Locals Award. She didn’t bat an eyelash when the big black guy in blackface, accompanied by a blood-spattered goat, staggered up to the admissions desk after midnight, May 13. She did, however, display mild shock when she saw Rico, tagging along behind us. Rico had refused to remain at the party after Tobin offered to drive me to the hospital to have my nose looked at.

“I’m not staying in the same building as that animal,” Rico had said. He meant Shane, who had been escorted forcibly up the stairs and into the lobby by Ruth.

Rico had been crying, and his careful eye makeup was plastered all over his cheeks. His wig was askew, and one of his breasts (water balloons, I found out later) had burst, leaving a wet patch on his nice red sweater. The harsh fluorescent hospital lighting did not help. Rico looked dreadful. So did I, I realized, catching my reflection in the glass separating me from the admissions nurse.

Both hospitals in Kuskawa had been renovated in the late eighties, thanks to a burst of pre-election spending by a provincial government trying to convince us that rural healthcare was high on their list of “Important Issues”. Someone had seen fit to replace the homey, country hospital atmosphere with a design scheme that had all the ambience of a Manhattan bank. There was bullet-proof glass all around the reception area, and the nurse’s face gleamed eerily green in the light from her computer screen. As I handed my health card through the little hole at the bottom of the window, I saw my swollen schnozz outlined right before my eyes, framed by the floppy brown velvet ears of my goat-costume. I snatched off the headpiece quickly and held it by one ear at my side. Tobin snorted.

“You’re lucky you can snort, buddy,” I muttered. My voice sounded muffled, as if I had a thundering great cold, and my head ached abominably.

Luckily, there was no-one else in the waiting room, so the doctor on duty could see me right away, which meant a thirty-minute wait while the nurse paged him. I guess if I had been bleeding to death with a severed artery, the service might have been a bit faster—at least I hope so. I had been triaged, and had factored in at less than critical. When I was ushered into an examining room by a cheerful young intern with coffee breath and muffin crumbs on his tie, I tried not to feel resentful.

“Well, what have we here?” he said. I swallowed an urge to tell him that the baby was due any second and instead pointed wearily at the purple turnip in the middle of my face.

He examined my nose gently, which hurt, sent me for an x-ray (although I figured that if any splinters of bone had slipped up to lodge in my brain, I would have been blowing spit-bubbles at that point), and then he packed my nostrils with cotton, gave me a couple of pain-killers and washed his hands.

“It’s broken all right,” he said, “but we can’t put a cast on it, ha-ha-ha, and it’s not bad enough for surgery.” He seemed to be quite taken with his little nose-cast joke and I tried to smile to show my appreciation, but every time I stretched my mouth in that direction, the cotton up my nose shifted weirdly. I compromised by offering a hoof and muttering my thanks. It seemed to surprise him. I guess doctors don’t get thanked much these days.

“When the swelling goes down, you’ll find the shape has changed a bit,” he said. “Not drastically, though.”

I was resigned. I’ve never been particularly vain about my looks, which aren’t anything to write home about anyway. My nose was, before this, just a blameless blob. It might have been a bit long, perhaps, but not out of proportion with the rest of my face. I wondered what the Doc meant by “the shape will change a bit,” but I figured I’d just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I’d avoid mirrors.

The cotton stuffing in my nose felt strange, but oddly comforting. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, and I’d taken one of the painkillers as soon as they were handed to me. It worked fast, dissolving like a double scotch under my tongue. I was grimacing (the closest I could get to a grin) as I emerged from the examining room, to find Rico and Tobin sitting side-by-side in the waiting room, having what appeared to be a serious conversation about a recipe in Canadian Living.

“Hi, guys. The vet says I’ll be okay.”

Tobin looked at Rico.

“You’re okay to drive her home?”

“I don’t drive standard,” Rico said.

“I’m fine,” I said. “We’ll take the back roads route, and I’ll go slowly, don’t you worry.”

“You sure you’re fine?” Tobin gazed with concern into my face. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks, chum. Listen, I had a watery scotch about three hours ago, which has certainly worn off. The tiny pill I just took has erased my headache, but it’s not like I’m seeing kangaroos on the ceiling or anything.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. Look, we’ve got to get you back to the theatre, anyway.” Tobin had driven us to the hospital in George’s truck, because his own Neon was hemmed in by cars in the Steamboat parking lot. “I’ll drive back,” I said. “If I start weaving or nodding off, you can take the keys away and we’ll crash in the lobby.”

“I’d rather be set on fire,” Rico muttered, but I ignored him.

The party was still going on when we got back. The music was still blaring out into the parking lot, and through the windows of the old boathouse, you could see the outlines of people dancing, like Balinese shadow-puppets. It would apparently take more than a little accident on the shop stairs to dampen the partying instinct of a bunch of theatre people.

I pulled up to the front door to let Tobin out.

“Do we see you at rehearsal tomorrow?” he asked. “Juliet will probably understand if you can’t make it.”

“I’ll probably be in better shape than most of the cast,” I said. “At least I’ll get some sleep.”

“And no hangover,” Tobin said. “Maybe Juliet will take pity on everybody and show the video first, although I seem to remember Jason saying something about a music rehearsal. God help the actors if that’s the case.”

“We can only hope it’s the video,” I said. The Glass Flute is sort of like a ballet, in that all the puppet manipulation is precisely choreographed to music. Juliet liked to make her actors study the old videotapes of past productions in order to get the hang of how it was supposed to look. Most performers really hated this method, as it left absolutely no room for original interpretation. (“No, no, sweetheart. It’s always been done like this . . .”). However, I would be willing to bet that nobody would complain about sitting quietly in a darkened room nursing a cup of coffee the morning after a party that had still been rocking at two a.m.

On the way out of town, I discovered that I was out of smokes. There was an all-night convenience store on the corner just before the Old Rock Cut Road, which was our route back home, and as we neared it, I tried to decide whether or not I was up to the embarrassment of letting Lori Pinkerton, the night cashier, see me like this.

Lori and I had attended Laingford High together, and we had been rivals of sorts. She had been one of the fluffy, cheerleader types with perfect clothes who dated grade twelve boys. Everybody wanted to be seen with her and to be her friend. I, on the other hand, had been a charter member of the “out-crowd”, a browner who got high marks, spazzed out in gym class and listened to classical music on purpose. I also didn’t sprout breasts until I was sixteen. Bad move. I had been the butt of most of her clique’s jokes, an object to be pitied, and in Grade Nine, I would gladly have murdered her.

Of course, getting over my adolescent hatred of Lori was made easier by the fact that she was the night clerk in a convenience store and the mother of several small, smelly, squealing humans, but she still had the power to make me feel inadequate. I knew that showing up in her store at two-fifteen a.m. with a broken nose stuffed with cotton, while wearing a blood-stained goat costume, might possibly draw comment. Still, I had a nicotine habit to cater to, and I couldn’t send poor Rico in there to do my dirty work.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and left the engine running. Lori was not as tactful as the admissions nurse had been. She burst out laughing.

“What the hell happened to you?” she said, reaching automatically for my tobacco brand of choice. I grabbed a chocolate bar from the rack in front of the counter and tried to smile. It hurt.

“I got mugged,” I said.

“No kidding. Somebody tried to milk you, eh?” She was referring to my udder. I blushed, feeling a lot of blood rushing to my battered nose. We must suffer for our vices. I was overwhelmed by the need to explain. Lori always made me feel like that.

“Actually, I fell down some stairs at a costume party, Lori. Broke my nose. It feels like hell.”

“Hey, that’s too bad, eh? Sorry for laughing, Polly, but you do look sorta weird.”

“I know. It’ll pass.” I paid and went out, almost bumping into a tall figure in blue who was coming in.

“Polly?”

Oh, God. “Hi, Mark.” Mark Becker, police officer, looked me up and down and whistled. It was not an admiring whistle—not the kind you get on a sunny summer day when you’re wearing shorts and a tank top and you walk by a construction site. This was the kind of whistle people make when they’ve just been told that you, an upstanding member of the community, have been hauled away to the loony bin after running down the street bare-ass naked singing a Bobby Gimby song.

I felt very angry suddenly, seeing the next few weeks stretch ahead of me in a never-ending stream of questions, explanations and pitying shakes of the head.

“I was at a party, okay?” I said, belligerently. “I fell down the stairs and hit my nose on the bannister. It’s broken. My nose, I mean. It’ll probably be crooked forever. I’m wearing this because it was a costume party, and I bled all over it, and I’ll probably never get the stains out. Lori was just laughing at me. If you say one word about my udder, I’ll kill you.” Then I burst into tears.